The Mud, Part 7

Tales of the City in the early 80's

Loose: The Stooges

I was not really a fashionable dresser but I had my own style: the aforementioned Aloha shirts, dashikis, my “DRUGS” Army shirt, jungle boots, and black Lee straight-leg jeans. Eventually, Nicole got clued in on her own that the prep school clothes did not cut it in NYC. And for me being from Detroit was a badge of honor. I never believed for a second I was some sort of backwater hayseed. I had already travelled to many places in both the U.S. and Europe. So yes I was a Detroiter, East Side by the Grace of God, we liked to say, but I had travelled more than any other kid in my neighborhood.

Her father had instructed her to “play the field” and not get involved in a relationship with any single guy. I had no marching orders of any kind from my family. In fact, my parents and I had never discussed sex or romantic relationships. But once I discovered sex, a bit like Columbus “discovered” America, since sex had actually existed before me, I was finding it was great. We had sex all of the time: in the morning, between classes, at night, in the middle of the night. I was making up for lost time and sex was the best thing since sex. In my life, first there was rock n roll, and then there were drugs and now sex had been added. The new Holy Trinity.

Our relationship was tempestuous. It seemed at times that Nicky could not live without me, and, at other times, she seemed to have the upper hand and I was smitten with her. It was all pretty volatile and very emotional. I was now spending less time being high but still somewhat distracted from school, which I really liked and was interested in, because I was caught up with being in love. We would periodically “break up” and I would use that opportunity to sleep with her friends or whoever else I could sleep with. It seemed that she was doing the same. Yes, the joys of first love.

I felt like I loved her dearly and passionately but never felt truly jealous, not even about her sleeping with other people. And her high school boyfriend had gone to Columbia. He was a tall, slender good-looking guy from the tony Detroit suburb of Birmingham who was also an excellent musician. But I never gave him a second thought, except for the time he told me that he had visited China with his rich dad, and as they drove around in a limousine and he saw all of the poor Chinese people outside, he knew which side of the limousine he wanted to be on. Then, I thought he was a dick, but at least he knew what he wanted. I wanted to write poems, which even then seemed somewhat unrealistic. Someone insisted to me later that if you’re not jealous then you’re not really in love. But I didn’t find that to be true. I loved Nicole, in a way that was special with a first real love, but I never felt jealous, and I suppose, knowing that she was sometimes sleeping with other people made me feel less remorse about my activities.

Her best friend from prep school was Rebecca Miller, the daughter of the famous playwright Arthur Miller. Sometimes Rebecca would visit Nicole, and I would be included in their activities, and once we went up to Yale, where she was in school, to visit. Rebecca was obligated to be fairly nice to me since I was her good friend’s boyfriend. Of course, she was sizing me up, to see if I was as wonderful as she had been told. I did not think I was passing muster. Rebecca seemed pretty remote and to live in an almost magical fairy tale world. She was tall, long legged, with long curly blond hair and could possibly have passed for a fairy tale princess. I am sure that she thought so. But her life was very different than mine and Nicky also jealously guarded her.

Another friend of Nicky’s from prep school, a good guy named Brent from a wealthy family in Pacific Palisades, California, would hang around with us because he was completely smitten with Rebecca. As an outside observer, I calculated a low percentage chance of Brent and Rebecca advancing beyond the good friends stage but who knows? Love is fickle. Hope springs eternal when you have that sort of crush and no pain, no gain, in love sometimes. In fact, Rebecca eventually married and settled down with the Hall of Fame, possibly greatest actor of his generation, Daniel Day-Lewis. Both of their fathers were famous literary men.

Rebecca did come to a party of ours on 121st Street and took a liking to my roommate, Rob, who was actually from a modest background in Long Island, and a nice guy. Well, not so nice that he did not end up with Nicole sleeping in his bed after one of our parties, but I imagined Nicole had been the aggressor on that issue and again I was not that jealous. And I doubted Rob would have had sex with her, he was extremely decent and had a quiet nobility. Also, I might have been on acid during most of that party. One time while Rebecca visited, it so happened that Nicole, Rebecca and I all shared a bed because there were three of us and just one bed. I thought the best place for me would be in the middle, but sadly, Nicky directed me to her side, and she remained in the middle, Lucky Pierre style.

One time Nicky and I visited Rebecca up at Yale where she was in school. It was Halloween and we all attended a student party there. The room was filled with highly clever, often conceptual, costumes. Not a witch or devil in sight. Jodi Foster was in school there and at the party. She was dressed as a left boob while her friend was a right boob. I felt like a bit of a right clod and also not costumed at all, let alone cleverly.

Since then I have seen loads of brilliant Halloween costumes here in NYC and not just from Ivy League students. The Village Halloween parade, for instance, is a marvel. But that was the first time. I can say that in my lifetime adult Halloween costumes have improved for the better, stepped up their game. A small achievement perhaps but nevertheless something. The date stays the same but the holiday changes.

Rebecca invited Rob and me, along with Nicky, up to her family farm in Connecticut. Arthur Miller and his wife, the photographer Inge Morath, were not there, which was possibly for the best even though part of me wished to meet the great man. But another part of me, at that time, rather opinionated, did not believe him to be such a great writer. He was no Samuel Beckett! Who knows what I would have said? Miller was going through a tough period then. His new plays would open and get regularly trashed by the Times theater critic, Frank Rich. He did better in London. But clearly Arthur Miller was a great writer and I never had the chance to insult him to his face, alas.

We went to a county fair and went skinny dipping in the pond that was on the farm and Rob and I slept in a sort of nicely refurbished barn that was lined with multiple copies of his books. It was only at this time that Rob realized who Rebecca’s dad was. No one was supposed to tell Rob that she was Arthur Miller’s daughter, and I didn’t, though I am not sure why. It seemed a bit silly. I suppose we could have been staying at the home of Arthur Miller’s biggest fan. In any event, it did not work out for Rob and Rebecca and she had a date with destiny named Daniel Day-Lewis. As for Brent, he and I remained friends after college, despite him moving back to LA for about 20 years before returning to NYC. And he found a fine woman who he is now happily married to. Sometimes it takes a while but Cupid eventually gets it right.

Folk Tale: Ornette Coleman

Nicky’s mom lived on Roosevelt Island, an island in the East River. At that time, you could only get there from a tram that left on 59^th and 1^st Avenue or via a bridge from Long Island City. Later, they put a subway stop there. It had various, recently-built apartment housing developments, some subsidized for lower income people. Nicky’s mother, who disturbingly looked very much like an older version of Nicky, and tweenaged sister, Elise, lived there. Nicky and I usually took the 1 train to Columbus Circle and walked across town, past the hotels on Central Park South, Bloomingdale’s and the then-very trendy Fiorucci store, a place where young cool and fashionable people congregated. Fiorucci was not really our scene but it was fun to look around inside. You felt a little bit connected to something new and hip, even if it was just a store. There was a Blarney Stone too. We would stop in there sometimes. That was neither new nor hip but I felt more comfortable there.

Once, as we walked back along 59^th Street/ Central Park South, a beat-up station wagon pulled up along the curb and offered us a ride. Were we at a bus stop? I am not sure how it all occurred but inside the car were two older, sort of cool looking, dashiki-generation Black dudes. For some reason I said yes and Nicky agreed and we got into their car. I think I did not want to feel or communicate like I was afraid of Black people, not a racist. Hey, I was “down.” I was from Detroit, so why not accept a ride? It was not well thought out, getting into a car with two strangers. We started going uptown along the east side of Manhattan.

The entire trip the two guys were talking to us about race relations, about racism, being Black. It seemed like they were intent on educating two young white college students. It was hard to say what they were doing, their “agenda,” aside from somewhat oddly offering us this ride uptown. It was strange but I talked a little about being from Detroit and the racism I had seen there. Mostly we just listened. It was more of a lecture than a dialogue. They kept using the expression “word up,” like they were affirming the truth of what they had just said. That was the first time I heard anyone use that expression though I heard it a lot afterwards.

I started to panic when we kept going north on the east side, past 96^th Street and even 110^th Street. They should have cut through the park at 97^th or at turned west on 110^th to get over to Broadway and up to Columbia. We drove through Harlem which was then very rundown. We went down some of the streets just east of Morningside Park that were full of boarded-up and emptied-out brownstones. I wondered why we were taking this route and thought how foolish I was to go into a car with my girlfriend and two strangers. Still, I did not let on any fear or distrust. That seemed like an unwise move and maybe even the point of our trip together: to see if we were afraid or would freak out.

In retrospect, perhaps it was simply the better route to go up to 125^th because if you approached from below 116^th you would have to make a U turn and as Black drivers I can see their wariness about such a maneuver near Columbia, even if they could turn around legally up there with Broadway’s boulevard with a little island between design. Eventually we made it up to 125^th and started west. The guys were actually giving us a ride home along with a sort of consciousness-raising talk. Any sort of nefarious plan I had imagined was not happening. I suppose their offer was all about this strange seminar on race relations. Two white people at a time. It was like the song “the ride” where the young, hitchhiking musician was picked up by the ghost of Hank Williams who taught him about the real spirit of country music. Sort of.

They pulled in front of the entrance to Barnard on 116^th and Broadway but we sat in the back continuing our intense conversation. We were not in a hurry to get out. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. Two NYPD officers were demanding we open up. They had spotted us seated in the back, two young white kids with these two older, streetwise looking Black dudes. They questioned the Black guys, what were they doing? Why did they have us in their car? The whole scene was suspicious enough that the cops were compelled to intervene. I spoke up and said we were alright; these guys were friends of ours and we were just talking. The police left. We got out of the car. I don’t remember ever talking with Nicole, or anyone else, about that experience. We just acted like it was completely normal. Still, that was our first and last ride with strangers in NYC.

Blank Generation: Richard Hell and the Voidoids

As college went on I began taking intellectual pursuits more seriously. I knew that it was a privilege to be at an Ivy League college and in New York City. I was lucky. And, despite doing drugs and spending too much time with my girlfriend, I was still getting good grades. I thought maybe I could be a professor since I liked studying literature and, perhaps more importantly, had no desire to go out in the real world and work. In fact, my real interest was poetry. I submitted some poems that I had written and was selected to be in a yearlong seminar class with the poet and professor Kenneth Koch. I had discovered the so-called New York School of poets and loved the poetry of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan and James Schuyler. Koch liked my poems. I am sure that it helped that one of the poems I submitted for admission to the class was in his style which he noticed. “Is this written in my style?” he asked. “Thank you.” It was called “Where to Write Your Poetry” and was indebted to a group of poems he had written that were more or less instructions for living.

In college, myself and some of my friends were very concerned with pretentiousness. People would say, so and so is SO pretentious. I was the guy wearing an old army shirt with “DRUGS” and a peace sign written on the back or wearing a dashiki and carrying my books in a Macy’s shopping bag but concerned about other people’s pretentiousness. But there was a fair amount of that and not just from me. We were a group of young people in NYC studying art and literature so perhaps it was inevitable. People were trying to figure themselves out and having to explore different roles or poses. Without contraries is no progression, William Blake said. A roommate reported that the guy who edited the college literary magazine had said, “We are all post-modern now.” That is so pretentious, my roommate said. I wasn’t sure if it was pretentious and not sure what it meant really. But he was right; we all were post-modern. How had I not noticed?

In the small poetry seminar, I would sit smoking cigarettes, perhaps wearing a daring Hawaiian shirt cardigan sweater combination. The poem’s author would be anonymous and the other students and the professor would discuss the poems and mine generally earned strong reviews and comments. Koch was very encouraging about my poems. Yes, he had an ideal gig, poetry professor at an Ivy league school in Manhattan. But that led me to believe I had some talent for poetry, and again, who wanted to get a real job? Poet was the best job going, and while the pay seemed problematic, perhaps I could be a poet-professor like Kenneth Koch. He wore ascots.

I was “worried” about student pretentiousness but with the professor sporting an ascot it was really game over. In fact, it wasn’t long before I found an old 60’s-era ascot at a flea market on Canal Street, but I did not really feel comfortable wearing it. A sign of pretentiousness too far I guess.

I didn’t think too much about the practical aspects of life because who cared? Après college le déluge. Everything was so dense and rich at that time. My lack of ambition though was something that Nicole was certainly noting and aware of, and I suppose it made her think we were not a good long term match. In truth, she was more practical minded than I was, but I was in love with a girl and with poetry and New York City and practical was not in the picture.

Stupid Anyway: Les Rita Mitsouko

The city in the late 70’s and early 80’s definitely seemed less wealthy than it is today, though there was plenty of rich people then. It was culturally rich but economically diverse and far more interesting. Yes, there was crime and on the streets and in the subway there was an air of chaos and crazy shit going on almost all of the time. It was, as everyone seems to say now, “gritty.” I found it thrilling but at the same time was always trying to keep my wits about me and not be a mark for any mugger. People said there were so many mentally ill people on the streets because they had deinstitutionalized the mental health facilities, which had been shockingly bad but out on the streets folks seemed lost and without necessary support. As in Detroit, the people with money had largely decamped for the suburbs and largely said, fuck the city.

My friend from Greenwich Village whom I met when I first went to a college mixer, Michelle, had advised me early on to act crazy if a threatening person approached me on the subway. My method was usually just to talk to the person directly, or agree with them, a lot, and that mostly managed to avoid danger. I imagine I looked both young and fairly odd-looking myself. Many people I knew were mugged at that time and our apartment on 121st Street had the “police lock,” a slanted steel pole that propped against the front door, and several other locks.

Toward the end of college, I was mugged on the subway after I had come from a job interview. I had gone to the Macmillan publishing building, a green art deco gem, in the west Times Square area. The woman who interviewed me asked me who my favorite author was, and I said James Joyce. She said she liked Henry James and I told her I did not care for him. I did not get the job. It was the beginning of a long streak of being overly candid on job interviews, treating them more like therapy sessions rather than strategic answering exercises.

On the way home, I was dressed in a suit and tie and wearing my vintage gray army overcoat and ushanka or Russian fur trapper hat, that had formerly belonged to my roommate who had departed for Oxford. He had visited Russia, or the Soviet Union, and got it there. For some reason he left it in my room and I never made any effort to return it before he moved out. I loved hats in general and this one in particular and it was right around the time of the movie REDS, though my ushanka-wearing predated the movie. At one point, in my weirdness and whimsy, I sent a photo booth picture of myself wearing that hat to Kim Fowley, a music hero of mine at the time, and told him I was ready to go to Hollywood and make records. I received no answer.

I was wearing that hat, standing at the end of the subway car during rush hour returning from my unsuccessful job interview. A group of four teenagers were walking by, heading into the area between cars where people sometimes hung out in those days before the police cracked down on walking and riding in between cars. As they walked by, one of the guys grabbed my fur hat and stuffed it down his shirt. Then they just stopped in between the cars, just a few feet away from me, the brazen fucks. Well, he had good taste. I opened the door and demanded my hat back, one against four. The guy with my hat said no and I said something about being from Detroit. I believed I was bad because I was from Detroit. As weird as this was, it worked somewhat and one of the other guys said to his friend, “give it back to him, he has brown eyes.”

That was equally weird, like that made me a soul brother or something, but I was glad to see some chinks in the four-against-one alliance. The guy with my hat asked me for some money for the hat and I gave him the few bills I had on me. Now all the other guys were saying he should give me the hat back, but still he refused so I reached down his shirt and grabbed the hat. Chaos ensued.

Rollin and Tumblin: Muddy Waters

Suddenly the two of us were caroming around the subway car wrestling over possession of the hat, which I had already heard tear, and pinballing into people in the seats. They shouted at us to leave them alone. They thought we were a couple of kids fooling around. The subway had stopped at 96th Street, and the kid said to me, “No one is gonna care about your white ass after this stop.” I realized he was kind of right because at that time ALL of the white people got off at 96th Street rather than continue on the express up to 125th and Lenox. I also realized that as we grappled and bounced around the subway car, traveling all the way from the end toward the middle, no one intervened. They had no idea what was going on and weren’t interested in getting involved and their only response was “hey get away from me” as we occasionally made contact with someone in their seat.

In desperation I tackled the kid down to the subway car floor and put him in a headlock, my end-the-fight move from my childhood fighting days, slowly increasing pressure around his throat as my body weight pinned him to the subway floor and saying, “let go of the hat” (which he still had retained possession of). His friends, who had thus far not intervened, started to get very concerned. “Hey, he is turning purple,” one said, and “leave him go,” another. Again, no others on the subway intervened in any way and I started to feel bad that I was possibly choking this kid to death over a hat that I had kind of stolen from my roommate. So I let him go.

And he got up and ran out at 125th Street along with his friends. I stood there stunned, looking at the others in the car who looked back at me, the lone white person. I got off and headed to the downtown platform. It meant exiting and re-entering and I just said fuck it and hopped over the turnstile. Easy come, easy go. I later bought another ushanka on Canal Street when I moved back to NYC in 1989 for $25 and I still have it, though my cat later chewed the ties for the earflaps leaving them forever hanging down.

How Sweet I Roamed from Field to Field: The Fugs (William Blake)

Despite my limited budget, I managed to explore some of the city, mostly seeing music shows, my true passion, or the occasional movie, particularly at the many classic film movie theaters that were scattered throughout NYC in those days, places like the Thalia which was not far from Columbia. I enjoyed walking around the city, playing basketball in the park, and getting high and doing all of the previously-mentioned things. Getting high and sipping beer through a straw from a paper bag while walking around the city, and later, while listening to my cassette tapes on a Walkman, was the best low budget entertainment for me. I had various jobs in college, working in both the Art and Architecture library (I stole their copy of “The Dada Painters and Poets” by Robert Motherwell) and the music library where I worked with a graduate student in music who suffered from some of the worst dandruff I had seen since I had stopped being instructed by priests.

I had a job early in the morning before classes at Harry Vlachos’ Wholesale Flowers on 26th Street in the flower district. That job was not meant to last because it meant getting up at 4:00 a.m. and taking the subway downtown for the shop’s opening at 5:00 a.m., where I would unload the trucks full of boxes of flowers that had arrived from Holland that another coworker had picked up at Kennedy Airport. Then we took the orders on hand trucks to the vans of the individual retail florists who arrived or to other shops in the area. I did it for long enough to impress myself. I would return to school around 8:30 or 9 a.m. and have breakfast after working that early morning shift.

One of the other workers used to give me a hard time because I carried books with me that I read on the subway. “Do you think you’re an intellectual?” he asked. Because I knew it would piss him off, I answered “Yes,” and added “and I read books.” Eventually, the job had to go when I was up all night on acid listening to the Talking Heads “More Songs About Buildings and Food” and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Certain Blacks” and reported to work sleep deprived and foggy headed. I just said fuck it and went home. Had I been more worldly wise, I would have simply called in sick but I think I was just sick of the job.

The second summer of college I had a job selling fresh fruit and then fresh-squeezed orange juice from a cart in NYC. I imagined other kids found real jobs in the summertime, perhaps through their parents or other connections. I took bottom-of- the-barrel stuff that I found in the Voice Classifieds. I picked up the cart and fruit from a store front on 10th Avenue near 50th Street that the boss guy, an immigrant, supplied me with. Then it was a real challenge finding a place where I could operate my cart. The other sidewalk vendors had claimed spots and did not welcome new people. They would run you off if you were in “their spot” or even close by. I was also the only young white person among them and I am not sure if any of the others were between summers at an Ivy League college. Eventually though I found a place outside the Citicorp Building, 53rd and Lex. The other vendors there were hostile toward me too, but I was tired of being pushed around (me and my pushcart) and that became my spot for the summer.

It was not easy walking from the far West Side to the East Side, pushing my large cart full of fruit in the street with all of the crosstown traffic. But that is how I spent one summer. I felt I had sort of arrived when one of the rival cart guys sold me a shirt for 50 cents saying, “this is a fruit seller’s shirt.” It was short sleeved and yellow with stripes. Vintage. I bought a similar shirt at a Salvation Army store in Utica, Michigan for $3, but that was 36 years later so still a fair price, and it was on sale. Just recently I bought a Salvation Army shirt for $6.99 in Omaha and several Detroit friends looked at me with pity and said I got taken.

Certain Blacks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago

I also had a sort of job visiting an elderly Black woman, Elizabeth, at a nursing home near school on Amsterdam and 112th across from St. John the Divine, where around that time Phillipe Petit had walked a tightwire across the avenue to promote the new church tower they were building. Still unfinished, I think. Elizabeth’s son was a doctor, a Black man, whom I met several times. She was on a floor of the nursing home full of people in advanced stages of dementia. I would arrive and the attendants, Black or Latina women, would wheel Elizabeth from her room to the shared common room, a medium-sized room where most of the residents sat around a large conference table. It was very One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The assorted lunatics were screaming, moaning and muttering in a cacophonous logic known only to them.

They were also all either Black or Latino. I was the only white person I saw around there or maybe the whites were on a separate floor watching “All in the Family” re-runs. Elizabeth started telling the others that I was her son and making racist remarks about Black people. She insisted that she was not a person of color like the others, see, there I was proof of her whiteness. This struck me as profoundly weird and sad but that was the kind of cracked world we had created. I sat there and smiled awkwardly, not knowing what to say.

I worked as a foot messenger for a while one college summer. That was another job that you would find listed in the Voice and which absolutely anyone could be hired for. While I was a young white college kid, wearing my Nietzsche t-shirt to deliver documents at Wall Street firms, the others were older, past retirement age or youngish Black guys who looked like they could have been recently released from jail. I gathered it was not a highly sought-after position, but I liked it fine since it involved exploring lower Manhattan mostly and getting to know the inside of various Wall Street offices, a part of town I had not really explored. At that time I was deeply involved in all of the Henry Miller books, reading them all. I thought of his own adventures in “Tropic of Capricorn” as a young man in New York in the 1920’s working for the Cosmo-Demonic Telegraph Company, although he was a manager and I was delivering. Years later when I returned to that area, first working for the white shoe law firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft (the Cads!) the self-proclaimed oldest law firm in America, and then in various Legal Aid offices, I was glad that I had seen the neighborhood a few years earlier, since like all of NYC, it was always changing.

Camembert Electrique: Gong