With my island friends I kept a lot of my past hidden. Everything was long ago and did not seem relevant here. I had suppressed or forgotten a lot. Stories involving names that people here would know seemed like boasting and showing off. They were buried in stacks of old magazines, and I was trying hard to live in now and ever after. Yet, on the beach, I walked with my derelict memories and lightening flashes of those who were gone returned to me. I had put those days out of mind, but the sirocco winds brought them back, often hard.

I did not tell Raven until one evening at Sandy Bottoms, that I, too, had been sort of a model. When I was twenty-one and sitting on a gold chair in the lobby of the St. Regis hotel, waiting for my college friend Leslie Dorn to come down from her family’s suite, I saw a man with a brocade vest, gold-headed walking stick, and giant winged rhinocerferal mustaches approaching.

Every eye in the lobby was on him and quite a few people were pointing. He moved like some large undulant sea creature, a mutant, his pomaded hair glowing like strips of patent leather, his mustache waxed straight up and quivering like feelers, his eyes burning—a whole kind of radioactive aura surrounding him. This entire terrifying apparition was heading straight towards me, perched there with a giant cascade of false hair applied to my head, and my heart knocking about because, of course, I knew who this creature was.

He was coming at me, but I was in front of the elevators and I hoped he was going to them.

He stopped right in front of me, swallowed by the gilt chair, my legs dangling a few inches above the floor, all four-foot-eleven-inches of me.

“Bonjour. Are you a model?” Salvador Dali asked me in French with a Spanish accent. He had a bass voice with boom, a voice full of command and assurance, rather like Richard Nixon speaking French with a Catalan accent. It was a ridiculous question.

Later, I would come to know how much the Divine Dali loved to shock, and how he loved perversity and paradox. Surely it was a paradox that I, who had gotten everything in my life thus far because of my brain, was now being noticed because of the way I looked.

I spoke fairly good French, one result of my misspent youth, I told Dali, “Non, Monsieur.”

He got in the elevator and five minutes later returned holding out his open palm. There were two gold wrapped chocolate spiders that he gave me. And thus we began a friendship that lasted for years. At first, I was “La Sphinx.” I never knew quite why, but he would attempt to bring this vision of me to fruition. And then later I became “L’Arbredor,” the name “Baumgold” in French and always pronounced “L’Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrbredor” and often punctuated with a thump of the stick so that, wherever we were, everyone would look up and stare even more.

Soon enough, he asked me to pose for him. I think that had always been in his mind, and I went up to his studio in the St. Regis—I remember it very dark with something like a stage and a curtain. I was supposed to go behind the curtain and take off my clothes.

“All my clothes?” This was a question he did not bother to answer.

I was, and I am, about as physically modest a person as it is possible to conceive. Through years of school locker rooms, miserable years of camp bunk summers, later love affairs and marriages, I always held a towel or something to my body, or turned my back, or went into another room.

Also, I was a virgin then and, though Dali carefully explained to me more than once that he was completely impotent and a voyeur, I was terrified that he might be overcome with reawakened lust. I was, after all, quite young.

He sat across the room with a sketchpad and maybe charcoal. I took off all my clothes and then I tried to cover the three places with my two hands. I crouched. I just could not do it. Dali made a few strokes with the charcoal (or it might have been a pencil) and then, mercifully, he ended my torment. He crumpled his paper and threw it into a wastebasket and thereafter he was always protective and paternal with me. That had been my birth, I was then, his child.

He was gentle, he was playful, he was distinguished. I was a poet then and he quoted his friend Garcia Lorca to me. We always spoke in French. I called him “Maitre” as did the rest of his court of acolytes. He threw buttered English muffins at me in the dining room of the St. Regis and I threw them back. (The St. Regis waiters, long accustomed to the antics of divinity, knew Dali was a very good tipper.) Though he did not like jokes ( “The jokes create a tremendous indifference in my life.”), he did like pranks.

“You are my butterflyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” he would say.

He would talk about cryogenics, his ultra rhinocerontic mustache ( “The mustache is the constant tragical feature on the face”), anteaters or flies or farting or the sexual practices of gypsy girls. Often he made no sense at all, which was just the point. He had his own Dalian language with twists and words—“uranic”– never heard before or since. He was very interested in holograms then and tried to explain them to me. He truly enjoyed causing a stir and would give himself a little smile at his own performance. Within his certified “madness” dwelt guile. Being with Dali as a silent mirror was the very best training for my life as a journalist.

He visited me in my parents’ home barely looking at any of the paintings including the Magrittes. I helped him find a young man who looked like Michelangelo’s David to pose for him. He did not, however, give up on the idea of having me pose.

A few years later, when we had seen each other every week when he was in New York, had countless lunches and dinners at long tables filled with the children of the night, people who appealed to him because of the way they looked and dressed and always for their youth, he tried again. At these tables in the King Cole Bar or at Trader Vic’s in the dark green air of the basement of the Plaza Hotel, at tables full of resplendent creatures trailing chiffons and tie-dye and beads—people with gardenias from the Mai-Tais tucked into their wild hair like some lost tropical tribe, beauties like the models Donyale Luna and Veroushka and Jon Stevens who looked like no one else on earth, babbling in many languages and often speaking in tongues–I sat there stolid, bourgeois, the least peculiar person at the table. It was good practice for being out of place—this feeling that came to me when I arrived at the island. Somehow, then, I did not feel out of place. I was young, I belonged, he had chosen me and seen something special hidden within my very ordinariness. In fact, it might just have been my ordinariness that he wanted to transform like the artist he was.

One year, on the wall of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I would read of this “’Court of Miracles’ at the St. Regis attended by models, transvestites, actors and drug addicts.”

“I was there,” I said to the girl standing next to me “I was none of the above.”

Dali had a picture of a blond male model taped to his wall at the St. Regis. He was wild and fierce, with a long leonine mane flowing onto his bare chest, but there was something sort of familiar about his model-ish scowl. Soon enough, I learned that he was Jon Stevens, né Johnny Abrams, my classmate in grade school. And Ultra Violet was Isabelle Collin-Dufresne, a once quite proper French girl. Dali, like Andy Warhol, transformed a few of us in his bestiary into suitably extraordinary beings. Those already extraterrestrials, he fed and watered and enjoyed as his audience. Warhol was downtown where Dali would never go– we were the midtown court with our own antic king.

Among all of us, in our various decorative guises and rehearsed costumes, he was, without effort, the strangest. Sitting at the head of the table (while, occasionally, Gala, his grouchy, but adored, muse and wife, snapped our little gifts into her purses), always picking up the check, he had an inner perversity, an originality of thought, and a dimension that none of his acolytes could ever match.

Every moment since then, when I hear someone describe something as “surreal,” I have to smile because I knew, and I lived “surreal” with the last living surrealist.

I was to pose with the model Verouschka. Dali had rented a studio in Carnegie Hall for the shoot. Franco Rubartelli, Verouschka’s boyfriend was doing the photographs, but Dali was directing. Again, he wanted me nude but I had come equipped this time with a pink leotard. He pulled it down off my shoulders and he and Verouschka began painting my face and chest gold. A woman in a Fifties party dress was playing the cello. Dali threw “popscorn” as he liked to call it.

Verouschka, exquisite and stark naked, reclined a la Naked Maja. I was to lean over her in profile like a little Jewish sphinx. There was a ladder involved. In an act of sanity and self-preservation, I have blotted the rest of that photo shoot from my memory. I have never seen the pictures.

Dali grew old and stopped coming to New York. He abandoned the St. Regis and the Meurice in Paris and returned to Cadaques to live in his house by the sea. His mustache thinned and drooped. Gala died, there was a fire, he locked himself in his palace, and his end was gruesome.

I moved on, but those years with Dali, my strange savior, had given me a confidence to get through the rest of my life. I had been tapped, I had been chosen by chance and perhaps for the wrong reason, at a time when it mattered most. With Dali, I first learned that I could step out of one life and into another, that things did not have to be predictable, that, like the watches of his paintings, time could melt like a Camembert, and, as he told me, there were jewels in the sand. A razor could shave off the layers of the past and find the hidden treasure. I had been formed by the hand of an artist and I would be forever transformed.