The main thing Jeff Griggs remembers from his first visit to Del Close’s apartment is the overpowering stench. “Cat feces and rotting food permeated the air,” Griggs writes in his new memoir, Guru: My Days With Del Close. “The odor of garbage that had been piling up in and around the trash receptacle became the dominating fragrance.” And underneath it all was a funkier smell he couldn’t quite identify at first. He later found out Close had an aversion to flushing the toilet after urinating.
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Halpern drove to the theater and publicly chewed Griggs out. “This is my business!” she shouted. “I need you to answer the phones!” Griggs promised to do better next time.
A few hours later Halpern stopped in again to check on things. Griggs decided to mess with her, pretending to have misplaced an urgent message from Andy Dick. When Halpern figured out he was joking, she was impressed. She offered him the job with Close a couple days later. “Charna told me if I was brave enough to antagonize her, I’d be able to handle Del,” says Griggs.
Griggs remembers sitting with Close one afternoon at the end of an errand when Close told him, “You know, I really enjoy these trips we do every week. It’s just nice to spend a couple of hours talking to someone.” Griggs replied, “Yeah, Del, I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.”
Griggs didn’t tell anyone besides close friends that he was working on a book until it was done. He didn’t tell Halpern about it until December. She asked to see the manuscript. “I was nervous about it,” she says. “There are so many myths about Del. I’m always very careful to make sure information is right.” She corrected a few things before the book went to print. For example, she says, there was a scene in which Close cried to Griggs about being lonely. “I don’t know about that,” she says. “I have seen Del cry, but that’s when he was crashing from drugs. I can’t believe Del cried to Jeff, but I wasn’t there. Maybe he was high.” After talking with Halpern, Griggs kept that scene in the book but deleted the tears.
