Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women
5th Street between First and Second Avenue is often used as a backdrop for films. Very close to the red house is New York’s most famous police station, Precinct 9, which has been filmed very often. “Our façade is often in the camera’s view, or camera people climb up the fire ladder in order to shoot from up above. Then I get 200 dollars.”
Linda Geiser laughs playfully. “And it was not just a house that was passed on to me; without this special find I would not have met my current life partner. I was 43 and he was 20. John managed the bar on the first floor in my house. He taught me to play pool with the police officers stationed next door. He showed me pool tricks – and one night he didn’t go home. He stayed. My friends, women and men, warned me: This relationship will not go anywhere!”
You bet! “John is still here and has been with me for thirty years now. In the meantime he is fifty. A few times I kicked him out and called his mother that she ought to take him back. His mother is two years younger than I am. But he came back. He is from Brooklyn, a world that is totally different from mine and in the evening he smokes his marijuana joint. This is not for me. I tried mescaline once – which was strange. Marijuana does not agree with me and in 1968 I stopped smoking altogether, also regular cigarettes. Many of my friends at that time experimented with LSD and had anxiety attacks. And then it was I who stayed with them through all their panic taking care of them for hours and even days. Smoking, drugs, and alcohol are part of the theater world, but not for me. I can’t even drink much. My father says this is to do with our genes – as Anabaptists neither smoked nor drank.”