Karl Bissinger: A Village Friendship

By Phyllis Eckhaus

This is not what Karl wanted me to write.

My West Village friend (1914-2008), photographer turned anti-war activist, bragged he was “the most modest man” I would ever meet. But I’m convinced he sought to enlist me to write about and burnish his legacy of anti-war work, especially on behalf of Vietnam draft resisters.

Only after Karl died did I realize he had masterminded a forgery ring and vast international underground. One of his volunteers at the Greenwich Village Peace Center during the Vietnam War recalled how Karl had casually warned the typists not to get their fingerprints on their work—which apparently were fake ID documents for the countless soldiers fleeing the jungle for the likes of Sweden and Canada. When amnesty became available after the war, Karl led a reverse operation, tracking folks down to help them return.

My friend Russ once told me what happened when his draft deferment was kaput and the Vietnam war raged. The Upper East Side doyen who had rented Russ a room sent him to a draft counselor, her friend Karl Bissinger. “Tell them you’re gay!” Karl had growled at heterosexual Russ, with Karl procuring a confirmation letter from a willing shrink. At the induction center, full of naked men and intimate info shouted at high decibel, Russ got a hushed “Is this true?” from army brass – surely no one would falsely volunteer something they believed to be so vile.

When Karl was called up to serve in World War II, he was asked which he liked better, girls or boys. Small “c” catholic in his loves, Karl claimed that he had never previously pondered a preference.

Missing Karl once he was gone, I obsessively cast my Google net upon the Internet seas, finding random treasures. Among them was Bernard Perlin’s 1937 sketch of Karl at 23 when they were friends at the Art Students League — Karl having arrived from Cincinnati on scholarship — with Karl, canvas and paintbrushes in hand, looking sensitive and intense.

Another find was a Village Voice article on a 1962 demonstration against renewed nuclear testing. Karl intended to take photos, but when the police beat up his friend Julian Beck, co-director of the Living Theater, Karl handed the reporter his Rolleiflex camera, and went up to a cop, saying “arrest me.” The police obliged, first beating Karl senseless.

Karl was 84, twice my age and impishly personable, when he first impressed himself upon my consciousness. I was at the War Resisters League offices on Lafayette Street, attending my first meeting of the fundraising committee and planning a book party. When Karl suggested that the League publish a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites, I sputtered that WRL had in fact just published a review, which I had written—and of which I was perhaps inordinately proud. I launched into an account of it.

Karl was so deadpan, it was only the intensity of his attention that gave him away and stopped me cold, as I suddenly realized he knew damn well I had written that review. Mortified, I blushed scarlet. Days later, when he again baited me by feigning ignorance, I laughed, “Oh no, you can only do that to me once!”

He later said he pulled the trick to flatter me. It’s true he liked my writing and that’s probably why he sought me out. But his stunt was so subtle, the likelihood was that I would just assume he was a dotty old man.

I think Karl entertained himself by baiting tempting human targets and watching them twitch – like the fictional Guy Grand, the bonhomie-exuding wealthy protagonist of one of my favorite books, Terry Southern’s satire, The Magic Christian. Grand relished “making it hot” for people, before whom he would dangle money in order to watch them contort and humiliate themselves to claim it. Karl was a somewhat gentler provocateur, less sadistic and prepared to let folks think he was doddering.

Weeks after the WRL meeting, Karl and I crossed paths in the Village and as we walked together he referenced a Moroccan vacation with bygone friends, the writers Jane and Paul Bowles. A series of lunches followed that made me realize I really liked Karl, so much so that the prospect of becoming good friends seemed like deliberately setting forth on a beeline journey over the edge of the Grand Canyon. How could I bear to get close to someone I liked so much whom I would surely lose?

I negotiated with myself. Karl would be my penance for my recently departed Aunt Fay. A brash, Belarus-born Brooklynite who’d overcome poverty and a seventh grade education to own her own fancy dress shop in Flatbush, and to fashion a life that included a tattooed sailor boyfriend who adored her, my vivacious, life-of-the-party aunt had ultimately been crushed by blindness.

“It will be alright,” she’d claim in a voice so tragic that I’d phone her on Fridays in order to have the entire weekend to recuperate. When I visited her, I would walk the full five miles home, hoping to metabolize and rid myself of her pain. At her end, she’d expressed regret she’d had no kids, convinced they would not have hurt her as I did, every time I drew away.

I resolved I would be there for Karl.

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This concludes part 1 of a 3-part series, which picks up in our October issue.