Interview: Edgar Oliver - No place like home

AS WE enter the despairing, old tenement building in which he's lived for more than 30 years, Edgar Oliver whispers: "I sometimes think of this house as a ship, a sinking ship since it's very, very leaky. On dark and stormy nights it feels as if you are at sea in a shuddering schooner.

"But then I am reading Moby Dick at present and I've also begun imagining that the house is a whale. Herman Melville is always talking about how big the whale is, so I'm thinking it's probably the size of my house."

Call me Ishmael, but entering this creepy abode in New York's East Village is more like being on the set of a Hammer horror movie, given that Oliver's home is the embodiment of the classic haunted house. Indeed, his neighbours whisper that it is haunted, but he insists that it's only by his memories.

Nonetheless, the number 104 might have been etched in blood and the peeling paint on the front door of the house on East 10th Street – the title of the one-man show that Oliver, the Edgar Allan Poe of downtown New York, brings to the Fringe – crackles with age and neglect.

Oliver, 52, has written volumes of poetry, a dozen plays, including The Drowning Pages, starring Debbie Harry, and appeared in several indie movies (most recently Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess's comedy Gentlemen Broncos). And yet, for all the success the avant-garde actor and writer has enjoyed, decay still drips down the crumbling walls of this abandoned apartment building where the eccentric aesthete lives with his tiny black cat Alma Louise, who keeps the rodent population in check. On the ground floor all the rooms are boarded up. As you climb a perilous, winding staircase, littered with the dusty corpses of dead insects, the 35 shadowy steps creak eerily beneath your feet.

You pass more locked rooms – God only knows what lies within – up to the top floor where Oliver lives in two rooms filled with tottering piles of books and manuscripts, an assortment of bizarre bric-a-brac, and strange, surreal paintings by his late mother and elder sister Helen.

There is no kitchen. He washes his dishes in the bathroom, a room over which I shall draw a veil. He cooks his evening meal of vegetables and tofu on a single hot plate.

"What may I get you?" he asks hospitably, offering me his best chair, an explosion of stuffing, which like all his other "furnishings" was liberated from a dumpster (skip), he reveals.

Picture the charming love child of Blanche Dubois and Quentin Crisp, who was, inevitably, a dear friend and you have a portrait of Oliver, who exudes an exquisite, fading southern gentility. He and Helen were born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, by their aristocratic, wildly bohemian mother, a childhood that is the very stuff of a Tennessee Williams play or a Truman Capote novel. But he's transmuted it into the sweet, sinister memoir, East 10th Street, which he also performs. It has, of course, a cult following in New York, where Oliver is an iconic performance artist.

In the show, he tells how, in the early 1970s, he and Helen ran away to Paris. "Ostensibly to get away from Mother," he drawls in his peculiarly affected, distinctive voice (which the New York Times critic described as "dipping like a bat on the wing"). Others have compared his lingering pronunciation to the accent and tone of Bela Lugosi, or even Peter Lorre crossed with Peter Cushing, though that may be due more to his hollow eyes and pale, spidery fingers, which adds to the cryptic air of a crypt.

The siblings wanted to become artists and bohemians. "Although you couldn't get more bohemian than Mother. Oh Gaaa-aaa-haad!" he exclaims, displaying his famed ability to stretch syllables into infinity. Mother, a recluse, never let anyone into their isolated home, claiming that their father had died of a heart attack when Oliver was 18 months old. When he was 16, Mother revealed the secret of his father's death: an addict, he'd died from a morphine overdose about two months before Edgar was born. "We gleefully accused Mother of having driven our father to suicide. Becoming bohemians was therefore an inescapable destiny for Helen and I, ingrained in us by Mother. I've come to realise, though, that my greatest ambition now is to be like Mother, who died in a rooming house in Washington DC 25 years ago."

From Paris, Oliver moved to London, where he spent a year in a "weird" hotel, a run-down Georgian mansion in Earl's Court Square – "another abandoned, ruinous rooming house".

"Oh, yaaah, it was even stranger than East 10th Street. I never paid any rent; the proprietor's only interest was the defunct British Poetry Society, which he ran from the basement. The dah-aaah-kness! The drunken poets!" he exclaims.

In 1977, he moved to New York to study at Columbia University. Wandering along East 10th Street, he discovered a beautiful block, lined with many trees. He looked up and saw "a gnarled hand" reach through the Venetian blinds and tape an old, beat-up paper bag to the inside of the parlour-floor window. Written on the bag, "in a kind of horror handwriting," was "Room for rent."

He rented it immediately for $16 – about 8 at the time – a week. The building superintendent – Mister Supter – complained bitterly about the many ghosts who would collect on the parlour-floor every night. He said they would lie down and stare up at him fixedly. He claimed that there were so many ghosts lying across the floor that it would take ages, stepping over them very carefully, one by one, to make his way to his cot at the back of the house.

Driven out of Paris by giant sewer rats crawling into her apartment, Helen joined her brother at number 104. Slowly they enlarged their domain as one by one various other roomers were carted off to insane asylums or old-age homes – "strapped to stretchers, struggling to break free and make it back to their rooms. No-one left willingly."

Why would they? It must have been a riot. On the second floor, in a tiny room, with a tiny door at the turn of the stairs lived an ancient little lady, Frances Aine, who had been the landlord's wet nurse. She spent her days washing rags with large cakes of soap, "the Lady Macbeth of rags". During her obsessive laundering she was often terrorised by one Donald Milburn, "the retired mulatto postman," who drank vodka with milk for his ulcers. He would spray Frances with roach killer, while laughing maniacally. Sharing the top floor with Oliver and his sister were two different lunatics: a rotund, elderly German, Edward Lindner – "Helen and I were convinced he was a Nazi in hiding," reveals Oliver who never went to the bathroom – and in the back room was Freddie Feldman, midget cabalist.

"Freddie tried to kill us on a daily basis, He would steal our empty wine bottles from the trash – of which there were many as we liked to entertain – and he would plant them one by one, lying on their sides on various steps, hoping that Helen and I on our many trips to the bathroom would step on an empty bottle and it would roll out from under our feet, causing us to plunge down the stairs and break our necks," Oliver explains. "It was quite amazing that Freddie was able to plant his booby traps without making a sound, because the stairs creaked horribly."

So how did he do it? "First, he would remove his clothes. Then he would walk up the stairs very carefully on tiptoe, balancing on the very outer edge of each step with his whole body pressed against the wall, then he'd walk up the wall like a fly would. To see Freddie – naked, walking up the wall – was truly to witness the most dread and awe-inspiring of acts," replies Oliver.

"None of it fazed either Helen or I, given our hermetic, cocooned childhood in Savannah, where we were brought up in a sort of myth world. I think that's why I sound the way I do because we had a secret language. We heard only Mother's voice so we learned to speak without any outside influence. By the way, Helen sounds exactly like me. Oh yaaah!"

As well as tales of the roomers – pronounced "roooooooomers" – East 10th Street tells of Oliver's hopeless infatuation with a beautiful young actor and his long, solitary walks through desolate stretches of New York City, a flaneur in a long coat that flaps behind him like wings.

Twelve years ago Helen got married. She still paints and sculpts, dividing her time between homes in Italy and West Virginia. Since the landlord has died, Oliver has no idea how much longer he'll be able to stay. Recently, three men from a realty company let themselves into the house. "They went from cellar to roof, photographing every crumbling step, all the holes in the ceilings, every crack in the walls.

"I got a very bad feeling that maybe they were going to condemn the house," he confides. "As they left, one of them said, with a rueful smile, 'if you need any repairs give us a call'.

"People ask if I'm afraid all alone in my house and I always say no, I love my house and my house loves me. Of course they also ask about ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night, but it's just occurred to me that one day people will say that the shade of Edgar Oliver haunts the house on East 10th Street. Oh yaaaah, I've been so happy here."

• East 10th Street: Self Portrait With Empty House is at the Traverse, Edinburgh, tomorrow until 16 August, various times, with a preview performance today at 11:15am.