1.

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EARLY PLASTIC
by BILL REED

Cellar Door Books, LosAngeles

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@ 2000 by Bill Reed

All rights reserved
Second edition, First Printing October 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for
inclusion of brief quotations in a review or article, without permission of the publisher.
Published by: Cellar Door Press
Los Angeles, CA90035
e-mail: drchilledair@yahoo.com

4.

TO: David Ehrenstein

and
The Memory of Charles Walters & Kuro

For reading my "life" line by line---infinitely more slowly than I lived it---much
appreciation to Recinda Jeannine. Gratitude to Wil Haygood whose book, The Haygoods
of Columbus, inspired me to pick up and complete an abandoned manuscript. And to David
Ehrenstein, with whom I share my life, thanks for more useful suggestions than there are
pages here.

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"When you come to a fork in the road. . .take it."

Yogi Berra

6.
Contents
PROLOGUE............................................................................................. 7
1.Beans and Kool-Aid............................................................................. .9
2. Kancer Kapital of the World................................................................ 18
3. It's the Cathode Ray Tube Show.......................................................... 34
4. Confessions of a Voluntary Negro....................................................... 41
5. Randy and the Romilars.......................................................................49
6. With No Mother to Guide Him............................................................58
7.Carnal Interface.....................................................................................77
8. "The Beast of Everything"...................................................................83
9. Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes..............................................................................91
10. Public Displays of Rhythm................................................................97
11. The Lower (East) Side Depths............................................................106
12. The Eighth Street Follies....................................................................116
13. Warning! I Brake for Hallucinations..................................................130
14. The City and the Pillow Biter.............................................................135
15. Fire Island, Island of Romance..........................................................150
16. (Not So) Gone With the Draft............................................................157
17. Freak F1ags at Half Staff....................................................................162
18. Lemons in the Gutter..........................................................................174
19. Woodshuck.........................................................................................191
20. The Big Sledgehammer of 1969.........................................................200
21. Life in the Off-Ramp..........................................................................206
22. Sex!.....................................................................................................219
23. You Can Go Home Again, But. . . ..................................................227
24. That's Where We Came In...................................................................246
AFTERWORD..........................................................................................248

7.
PROLOGUE
Recent years have seen the publication of a wide variety of memoirs in the form of
everything from self-help manuals to 12-step recovery sagas; standard show biz bios like
Lauren Bacall's, to the writings of disgruntled ex-mates of the rich and famous, etc. Early
Plastic isn't like any of these. I have no "raised consciousness" axe to grind and there is not
one ounce of self-pity or trendy disfunctionalese contained herein; still, if the odds stacked
against me in childhood had toppled over, you could have heard the crash from here to
Zaire. I lost my father when I was four, my mother had a serious drinking problem, I was
sadistically beaten up by my much older brother on a fairly regular basis, and I could barely
pass a test in school. I was poor and for the better part of my life have managed to stay that
way. (Ah! la vie de la Boheme.) Before biting the reality bullet in my mid-thirties, my life
was out of control; I was even reduced to sleeping in my car on occasion. But with the
exception of a couple of bad drug episodes, I have pretty much remained my usual sunny
Candide incarnate.
As to why I sat down to write this book? There's no simple answer. My life hasn't been
all that exceptional, but it's been far from ordinary. The thing that did occur to me as I
began trying to put the pieces of it together on paper is that, either by accident or design of
the fates, I've been witness to some of the most interesting social phenomena of the last
half-century: particularly the 1950s, growing up, and the 1960s, during which I reached
adulthood.
One reason increasing numbers are writing and reading memoirs nowadays is
because the official histories of certain periods and events are so inadequate and
misleading. I find this especially true of the Fifties and Sixties in which fads, fashions and
important social movements tend to be collapsed into one another to form a kind of
nostalgic stew. As if liking the Beatles and opposing the war in Vietnam were exactly the

8.
same thing. The end of the so-called "Summer of Love" and the rise of Charles Manson
were not as radically opposed to one another as some of us might have been led to believe.
I was there from beginning to end, and the Sixties weren't the way they've usually been
represented in print up to now. It was much less romantic, far scarier and not nearly as
ingenuous as some are prone to remember.
Nearly three decades ago an urban morality fable appeared in the New York Times about
a woman awaiting her turn on free appraisal day at Sotheby's. Ahead of her stood dozens of
others also queued up and clutching the requisite mooseheads, kitschy paintings and antique
snuff cans, etc. from grandma's attic. Unlike most of the others' would-be treasures,
however, hers was a small one in the form of an unassuming piece of jewelry. Upon
reaching the front of the linewhich stretched out the door and part of the way down New
York's Fifth A venue she proffered the item to the auction house official seated at the
table in front of her. He examined it for a second or two, then gasped, "But madame, this is
plastic!" Without missing so much as a beat (and as if any further proof were needed that
hope does indeed spring eternal in the human breast) the undaunted woman immediately,
ingenuously, and hopefully replied:
"Early plastic?"
I know the feeling.

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CHAPTER ONE: Beans and Kool-Aid
My father, Tom Reed, traveled out of the state of West Virginia only twice in his life:
once during a brief stint in the service in World War I, and a few years later to Staunton,
Virginia. Reading my parents' love letters sent back and forth in 1918, when he was a
student at West Virginia University and she was enrolled at Mary Baldwin Seminary, the
pent-up passions between the lines makes it clear they couldn't wait any longer. So when
she was sixteen and he twenty-two, my dad hopped a bus to Staunton, where the pricey
girls' school was located, and they eloped. The next night found them blissfully back in
West Virginia standing before a Justice of the Peace in whose chambers they wed in a
double ceremony along with another couple. But the next normative step, settled
domesticity, was a long time coming. My parents did pretty much everything they could as
members of the local fast set to avoid the reality principle, including commission of the Big
Three No-No's: partying, drinking and smoking (in public yet!), with a possible fourth
social transgression, my mother's bobbed hair. These Scott and Zeldas of the Hills were
probably as responsible as anyone for what little of the Roaring Twenties that made its way
to the medium-sized Bible Belt city of Charleston, West Virginia, where they set up
housekeeping. Their unconventional behavior continued on well past the early 1920s with
the birth of their first child, my oldest sister Ruth Dolores, and didn't stop with the arrival, a
few years later, of my only brother, Tom, Jr.
When I came along in 1941, more than twenty years down the line, it was an
unexpected and apparently painful birth for a woman entering her forties. Later my mother
appeared to revel in telling what seemed like rooms full of strangers how my breach birth
had nearly killed her. I squirmed and felt guilty (and later angry) but eventually decided, in
fashionable dysfunctionalese, to "forgive" this overwhelmed and overworked woman. My
mother would end up having minors in her charge for forty years plus: four kids whose

10.
births were evenly spaced out over slightly more than a twenty- year period. I find it a chore
to care for a child more than a few hours at a stretch.
As people once put such things, my mother, Mary Shelton, came "from money," but
thanks to a combination of the Depression, thieving relatives, bad marriages, and terrible
investments, by the time I came along the family's oil and gas empire had all but vanished.
Anyone on my mother's side who had barely escaped "relief"-as welfare was once calledwas considered fortunate. One of my mother's brothers, John, hacked and hewed away in
area coal mines all his adult life only to expire poor of black lung in the early 1960s. During
the summer, I would sometimes stay with John and his two sons, Joe and Sonny, at the
shotgun shack they lived in at the nearby coal fields. There was a company store where you
paid for goods with funny money known as scrip. At the time I remember thinking there
was something quite fascinating about food and staples being bought with this "other" kind
of money-almost as if one were living in a parallel universe. This was, I later learned, a
classic example of peonage that kept American workers in their place with no possibility of
looking for more advantageous employment elsewhere (vide the song "Sixteen Tons" and
the narrator who "owes my soul to the company store"). I also remember my uncle had the
thickest, bushiest eyebrows I'd ever seen, like twin canopies perfect for keeping coal dust
out of the eyes and an homage to the equally hirsute miners' crusading champion, union
leader John L. Lewis.
Unlike many of my generation I was spared the usual Depression tales of hard luck and
having to eat the family dog. With my father's bohemian sails somewhat trimmed by the
late 1920s, he found himself steadily employed as a bookkeeper for a concrete supply outfit
where he remained for the next two decades. As a result, our immediate family managed to
move fairly smoothly through the Great Crash and its aftermath. Tom Reed, in the parlance
of the times, was "a good provider" for his wife and eventual four kids-in addition to Ruth

11.
and Tom, my sister, Nancy, was born in '30. I came along a few months before the start of
World War II. About the only thing I remember were ration stamps which adults in the
house had to keep away from me; if they didn't keep a sharp look out I would paste them
allover everything in sight. I also dimly recall those gaudy, gold-stitched silk pillow covers
with a painting of Mt. Fujiyama (and the like) my sailor brother, Tommy, brought home
from the war. One other thing leaps to mind, that long ago precursor to eco-recycling, WW
II Paper Drives.
We weren't poor, we weren't rich, but whatever we were was a far cry from the affluence
in which my mother had been raised. Around the turn of the century my maternal
grandmother, Dora Downey, had married my prosperous grandfather, Richard Shelton. She
was still in her teens and he was more than twice her age. Six children came along in fairly
rapid order before he died of an eye infection in North Carolina sometime around 1915fully a quarter century before my own birth. I still receive three and four checks every once
in a while from oil and gas deals my grandfather made nearly a century ago. Not exactly
like Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies but enough to warrant the comparison, when my
grandmother was in her sixties she still had four of her six aging children (unmarried,
widowed or divorced) along with several of their offspring still living under her roof. At
one time, the matriarchal menagerie included my mother, my sister and I, when we stayed
with her for a time in the late 1940s. Also on an itinerant or regular basis were my coal
miner Uncle John and his two sons, Joe and Sonny, my Uncle Richard, a state government
functionary, and my Aunt Ruth, a stereotypical old maid who loved and doted on her
surrogate son, me (perhaps even more than my mother did). Years later as she lay on her
hospital bed wracked with cancer, my prim and demure aunt looked up at me and dazedly
let fly with a volley of four letter words when I hypocritically insisted she was going to be
"just fine." I was astonished. It was probably the first time Ruth Shelton had ever uttered

12.
any such epithets in her life. Leaving her hospital room, the doctor assured me of my aunt's
suspicions: she was not going to leave the hospital alive. But she did! The Cursing Cure had
apparently saved her. The next five years she lived were probably her best. I have a packet
of letters from her to that effect: "I'm reading Mary. Queen of Scots, also The Persian Boy. I
just finished reading Nicholas and Alexandra. I thought it was very good. I read an awful
lot but there isn't much else to do." All this has caused me to have a slightly queasy feeling
regarding euthanasia.
A half century earlier as a spoiled and pampered young wife and mother, Dora Downey
had acquired the habit of leaving her six children in the charge of governesses while she--and this was the word employed by nearly everyone in the family to describe her
peregrinations---"gallivanted" about the state of West Virginia" spending money as fast as
her husband earned it." And so it was that forty years later, living in a house now overrun
with her children's children, the only things she could "cook" were beans, Kool-Aid, and
Jello. Well into the late 1940s my eccentric grandmother still had an old-fashioned icebox
in her kitchen the kind that called for the iceman to cometh on a regular basis. Because she
preferred it over one of those new electric or gas jobs, I was sure this automatically meant it
was a more efficient and economic method of preserving food. Maybe it is.
Having had parents as well as a grandmother with roots solidly sunk in the soil of an
earlier time, I regard myself as more a child of the 19th than the 20th century. I bought my
current auto 25 years ago, always say Sir and M'am, call an increasingly dwindling supply
of elders by their last name, and am often the last to pick up on the latest technological
advances. What do I need with one of those fancy high speed modems?; the one I have is
plenty fast enough for me.
While we were living with my mother's mother, one of her sons had some fairly stiff
child molestation charges leveled at him. Mama (as everyone called her) stood proudly by

13.
him during the entire front-page ordeal. I recall her much more upset over being described
by reporters as "elderly" than by the social embarrassment attendant to the proceedings. My
uncle eventually got off thanks to a character witness from no less than the governor of the
state; in all likelihood an imprimatur engineered by my grandmother who clearly retained
leftover clout from earlier times. I remember this uncle as being completely inattentive to
me. I worried a lot over being excluded from his favors and attention. When I found out he
was molesting other little boys, and not me, it wreaked havoc with my self-esteem. Now I
understand that I simply wasn't his pedophilic type; a Little League baseball coach, he liked
boys who were butch and lean. Generally, however, I was too busy at that young age
putting on puppet shows and playing house with the neighborhood girlsno!, not that kind
of playing houseto try and conceptualize too much about the who, why and what of sex.
No matter how good or bad a parent she finally was to her own children, my
grandmothera tough old birdwas my strongest childhood influence and I loved her
dearly. But the pragmatic suspicion and cynicism I found so compelling in Mama weren't
enough to protect her in the long run. After my grandfather died she married a rounder who,
family legend has it, was responsible for draining off the last dregs of the estate left her by
husband number one-a man so Highly connected in regional politics that even long years
after his death my grandmother still had the goods on just about everyone in state
government. Ironically the house she lived in during her final years was located directly
across from the West Virginia State Capitol Building. As the various offending parties came
and went, she sat in her sitting rocking chair, to one side an old Maxwell House coffee can
serving as a snuff spittoon, on the other a radio pumping out non-stop soap operas she
called her "stories" as in "it's time for my stories." She kept up an ongoing narrative to
her captive audience of pre-adolescent me, grumbling, "See that one going there? Whyyyy,
when his daddy was governor I used to change that boy's diapers, now he's nothing but a

14.
good for nothing horse thief." Even with six kids of her own she probably had never
changed one diaper in all her life. It didn't take an unwanted Sixties war to fuel my distrust
of the government; my grandmother got the job done quite nicely.
In the early 1960s two of her children, now old themselves and still living with her,
heard a noise downstairs one night. Investigating they looked out the front door to see
Mama in her night clothes running down the middle of the street clobbering a would-be
house robber over the head with an improvised cudgel-doorbell chimes ripped off the
hallway wall. This when she was well into her eighties.
I am my grandmother's son not only for reasons of temperament but also because her
house was usually where I ended up staying when my mother's drinking got totally out of
control. Nearly a half-century later the digits of that emergency phone number I dialed so
often24-873are still engraved in my brain pan. After a day or two at my grandmother's
house I'd call home20-658and if I heard my mother's sober voice on the other end of
the line I'd extract the usual empty promise from her that she'd never "take another drink as
long as I live." I'd kiss Dora goodbye, hop on the bus and return home. If I was lucky I
might even get taken back home by my uncle Richard in his car. One time I bore witness at
my grandmother's house to a neo-Luddite upheaval that occurred when she ceased her usual
routine of snuff, soap, and censure long enough to make a phone inquiry about a water bill.
The first words out of her mouth, when the call was completed, consisted of a string of
curses, then she ripped the phone out of the wall and hurled it across the room. Her inquiry,
she said, had been answered by a "record player." I rang up the number myself to see what
she was ranting about and on the other end got a mid-1950s prototype of the answering
machine, one that must have filled half a room. Used to being bowed and scraped to all her
life, Dora Downey Shelton Smith was simply not equipped to handle such
impersonalization. No wonder I was the last one on my block (more that twenty years after

15.
they had become commonplace) to get one of these newfangled contraptions.
Throughout my childhood I had automatically assumed that this non-conformist
grandparent's position on the subject of race ran counter to the prevailing bigotry of the
times. Disabuse of the notion came to me only shortly before her death. One night after
supper I offhandedly mentioned to her that I had a date with a girl later that evening whom
she knew to be African-American (back in the fifties they didn't call blacks anything nearly
that respectful, with the most liberal appellation being "colored"). When I told my
grandmother of my plans she began behaving like she had in response to the water
company's answering machine, and between gasps exhorting a variant on the Jeremiad
usually reserved by her for crooked politicians, "Why, I wouldn't trust a nigger any farther
than I could throw one, and that's not very far." Then she flipped over backwards in her
rocking chair, knocking over the omnipresent snuff can in the process, and nearly fainted.
My grandmother had barely recovered when I left for the evening. A few months later she
was dead; hopefully, her passing not hastened by my exposing her to the newfangled
concept of minority inclusiveness. They don't make 'em like my grandmother anymore and
considering her position on race maybe that's just as well. In all fairness, given the customs
of the time and place, Christ incarnate would probably have been a raving racist. Everyone
else was. Bigotry in the rest of my family tends to run cooler than Mama's, but,
unfortunately, just as deep. When a nephew doing some genealogical research recently
came across a Native American forebearer some generations back (not really that close in
time), the clan's response was one of classic denial and the closing of ranks. Relatives
insisted, "Well, that just couldn't be." And why not?, my calm voice of reason inquired.
"Well, it. . . it . . it just couldn'tthat's all." That the family's apparently otherwise lilywhite European lineage might be tainted by so much as a drop of Indian blood was simply
too much to bear. At last the riddle of my grandmother's over-the-top racism was solved, at

16.
least, to my satisfaction: it was her defense against the dead Indian hanging from the family
tree. And so, more than a hundred years after its official dismantling, the legacy of "the
peculiar institution" lived on in my family ("Well, that just couldn't be. . . ").
My grandmother had an extreme mistrust of doctors. According to the custom of an
earlier time all of her children had been born at home. She was proud of the fact that never
once had she been a hospital patient. In her eighties and fading fast from the usual old age
combination of a broken hip and pneumonia, the inevitable could no longer be avoided and
an ambulance was summoned. When it arrived, though, she fought off the driver and the
attendant with such force they refused to transport her and departed. A half-hour later, my
grandmother's strength now ebbed even more, an ambulance was summoned again, and this
time they were able to take her away. An hour later found her in a hospital bed with one of
her sons by her side. Looking at him with an expression that used up every last bit of anger
that was hers to muster up, she said, "This would never have happened if you hadn't
brought me here." And she expired. My grandmother had always had the last word all her
life and she was not about to stop now!
My mother had attended one of the most exclusive schools for aristocratic young ladies
in the country; an institution then known as Mary Baldwin Seminary-now Mary Baldwin
College-in Staunton, Virginia. It was an academy so protective of its delicate flowers of
young womanhood that in the winter the girls traversed the campus on sidewalks inlaid
with heated pipes for melting the snow. I can still hear the way my mother, an otherwise
unaffected woman, aristocratically pronounced S~ton. . .fifty years after she last laid eyes
on the place. Even when nearly everything else around her had collapsed to rack and ruin,
she clung to the memory of Mary Baldwin like a drowning man to a life raft. During later
years of faded family glory, all that finally mattered to her was that one day when I finally
reached my majority I would somehow manage to revive former Sheltonian renown.

17.
Nearly all my maternal grandmother's children were stunted emotionally; including my
mother with her chronic alcoholism. My dad could drink her under the table but mostly I
remember him sober. Respective childhood photos find us looking remarkably unalike; now
that I've reached middle age, later mutual portraits reveal an almost uncanny resemblance.
As the years wear on our ears, struck by gravity, keep getting larger and larger, and the
expressions on our faces increasingly dour.
Like most married couples of their time, my mother was saddled with domestic
responsibilities, while the majority of his duties lay in the job sector. When my mother
wanted to have our own family home built after more than twenty years spent renting, my
father's usual low-key response was to the point, "Why Mary, you know we don't have that
kind of money." In reply, she reached in a cookie jar and pulled from it thousands of dollars
she had been secretly saving over the years for just such an eventuality. The incident
became a linchpin of her personal mythology with friends and family continuing to talk
about it long after she was dead. Construction on our very own two-story, modest family
manse thus got under way in short order; its completion coinciding almost exactly with my
birth. Located at the fringes of a then just-beginning-to-expand residential neighborhood,
there were still muddy ponds to slop around in and woods in which to play for a while after
I came along.
I retain only a handful of vivid memories of my father, the strongest being from the
winter of 1945, when I was closing in on five and the two of us were playing in the front
yard building a snow man. The next thing I knew, right in front of me, he fell on the ground
insensate and uncomprehending. The scene was soon enveloped in chaos and he was taken
away on a stretcher. The next day I was told about a vague "long trip" my father had gone
on, and I might not be able to see him for a while. I was being lied to, I knew, and fell to the
floor screaming,

18.
"You're lying, he's dead." I sobbed till I was out of tears and breath while the circle of
adults huddled around me looking down, their faces covered with now-what-do-we-tellhim? expressions. How I had managed to gain such a precocious purchase on
eschatological finality? They surely wondered.
And for years to come I too was puzzled. Then one day in my mid forties, the memory
of a stem lecture I had received from my father four decades earlier visited me on a
conscious level for the first time! I was four and had come home one day at the height of
summer to proudly inform him about the way my other pre-pubescent pals and I had been
putting tadpoles in jars and leaving them out in the sun, with the result that they soon
ceased to function. It seemed as if we weren't doing anything wrong, with cruelty being the
last thing on our minds. It was mere magic. But my dad wasn't impressed at all and
proceeded to give me a stem lecture about the basic sanctity of all sentient existence. It was
from this, then, that I had precociously extrapolated the certainty and finality of his
mortality. Gone off on a long trip indeed! When a parent drops dead in front of a child it's
the most natural thing in the world for the child to think he or she caused it. After all, I had
been lobbing snowballs at my dad when he collapsed. But if I ever felt this way, I'm not
aware of it (Freud 101). I later learned he had lingered on, comatose from a massive
cerebral hemorrhage, for several days.
Born near the turn of the century, Tom Reed's 1916 High school yearbook depicts a
sophomore Renaissance man; in addition to drawing all the caricatures in the publication,
he was also involved in chorus, the literary society, Latin and drama clubs-even sports-and
was the president of his class of twenty. After High school he attended West Virginia
University for a year, then volunteered for the service during what turned out to be the final
days of World War One. For years after his death my mother received a service pension
based on his few weeks spent in the military. My father's father, William Rosencranz Reed,

19.
had at one time been a sheriff of Clay County, West Virginia, the place where almost
everyone you've read about up until now comes from. This grandfather managed the tragic
feat of outliving his son by a few years.
The only memory I have of my grandad is after his death when, one day I looked up and
saw a steamboat bearing his name on its side floating down Charleston's Elk River. At age
nine I thought that mighty impressive and wonder if even now it might be still plying its
way up and down one of my hometown's two waterways.
My dad was in his early forties when I was born and my nearly-unexpected birth
brought about middle age renewal in him. I can still recall his carrying me down the street
on his shoulders, holding me aloft, displaying me almost like a trophy. All the long way
down Matthews Avenue to Pendle's drug store, on West Washington Street across from
where I eventually went to High school. Even though I was not quite five when he died,
other things I remember about him include a liking of historical non-fiction of the Lawrence
of Arabia variety, a passion for rose gardening and an overweening fondness for strong
drink. Tom Reed was a good provider" who "never took a day's vacation" in all his twenty
years with Pfaff and Smith Sand and Gravel. Not because of extreme dedication to his job;
he held an inconsequential bookkeeping position that must have required his working
extremely long hours in order to maintain a family of six and a new, fairly expensive house.
It isn't surprising that he checked out so young, almost certainly from overwork, or that he
left behind so little economic buffer for his wife and two remaining children at home (my
sister, Nancy, and myself) when he died. In snapshots of him taken a few weeks before he
passed, he looks tired and woebegone, verging on angry. Most likely he had just finished
another hard day at the office.
CHAPTER TWO: Kancer Kapital of the World
Mixing booster-ism and solid economic sense, in 1898, slightly more than forty years

20.
before I was born, my journalist great grandfather Clayburn Pierson, wrote, "[With] great
natural resources and natural facilities, it [Charleston, West Virginia] ought to have
surpassed any other town in the state. [Instead] all depended on local trade and none with the
courage to risk an Almighty Dollar in an effort to start any on~ of the numerous industries
that would have made Charleston today the richest and most prosperous city in the land."
When the political boat listed to the right, Pierson, to judge from his surviving
newspaper articles, moved his seat compensatorily to the left, and in more radical times
vice versa. At one juncture or another he was, contradictorily, a member of the isolationist
Know Nothing Party, a fervent socialist, at some point in time, a supporter of isolationist
Millard Filmore, and, 180 degrees away from that enthusiasm, a devotee of utopian writer
Edward Bellamy. Clearly he was wildly at war with himself politically and economically.
My great grandfather on my dad's side had earned the right. Born in 1825 in Clay County,
West Virginia, Clayburn Pierson was but the latest addition to a long line of illegitimacy
stretching back four generations to his great grandmother, Charlotte McKee, an indentured
servant in the service of the plantation-owning McKee's of Virginia. She was the issue of an
affair between "Massa" McKee and a woman whose genealogical identity has fallen
through the cracks of time. Inasmuch as Virginia law considered mulattoes born of
couplings between master and slave to be exactly what my great-great-great grandmother,
Charlotte, was-an indentured servant-she was as likely as not to've been half-black. Which
only goes to demonstrate James Baldwin's contention that anyone born in America, to one
degree or another, has some African blood flowing in their veins. Practically everyone in
Faulkner does, why should I be any different? In all of my great grandfather's voluminous
writings, no mention of his personal background is ever made, nor did he mention
forebearers. This resulted in a family assumption that Clayburn was a runaway forced to
take adult responsibility for himself at an early age. Margaret Pierson gave birth to

21.
Clayburn under her maiden name, but little more is known about this daring woman, not
even the name of my great- great grandfather. Best theories point to his being of the King,
James or Summers families who, according to my second cousin, Richard Pierson, "had
boys running around in the neighborhood when Margaret was young." According to her
death certificate, she spent her final days in Clayburn's home, so the estrangement between
the two wasn't total. Part and parcel of the Clayburn's early years was his rudimentary
education. And yet, despite spotty studies, he managed, in 1847 at age 22, to become a
school teacher. Later he was a land surveyor, a lawyer, a superintendent of county schools, a
clerk of the circuit court beginning in 1877, a hotel owner, and a newspaper publisher of the
weekly "Clay County Star." This is where some of his Bret Harte-like pieces such as "One
Thousand Feet Under Droop Mountain," "The Devil's Den," and "A Bear Hunt of Sixty
Years Ago," first appeared. I've managed to amass a fairly impressive Clayburn Pierson
collection. Reading them, I'm amazed that someone born a century-and-three-quarters ago
under such circumstances could obtain to such clean, lucid, grammatically correct, perfectly
punctuated prose. I should be so lucky OR self-educated as t~is last of the red hot
autodidacts. He was also a walking advertisement against inbreeding; having married his
first cousin, Charlotte King, his sons, William and Benton were deaf mutes and a daughter,
Mary, was blind.
My great grandfather's solution for economic rescue of my isolationist home town was
on target. A handful of years after he wrote those prescriptive words in his newspaper
column, the light of chemical capitalism began burning brightly in a region containing
theretofore untapped bounteous natural resources-located propitiously at the intersection of
two rivers, the Elk and the Kanawha. Chemical monoliths such as Du Pont (pronounced in
Appalachianese, "Dew Point"), Food Machinery Corporation, Union Carbide and several
other major operations all set up shop in or nearby Charleston, and the area was off and

22.
running financially. Almost as if my great grandfather Pierson had willed it with the power
of his journalist's pen, from World War I onward, Charleston rose from the muck of preindustrialism to attain, by the early 195Os, the Highest per capita income in the nation.
Such an extraordinary and accomplished character for a grandfather! When I was young
and asked my elders about our family tree, they could only shuffle their feet and look in the
other direction. It's true they'd come from a pre-info storage generation that tended not to
know about their ancestry, but the lineage of unmarried woman preceding Clayburn must
also have contributed to the silence. It was a pluperfect example of the old cliche, throwing
the baby out with the bathwater. I'm sorry that I was never told about my remarkable great
grandfather. That's the kind of inspiration I needed when I'm was floundering around in my
teens-to invoke that old parental cri de coeur - not "applying" myself. Beating me to the
punch, The Clay County Historical Society recently published a collection of his writings.
***
In the early 1950s Charleston had the Highest per capita income in the country. Anyone
with a preconceived notion of a deprived and backward Appalachia might find this factoid
hard to believe, but the proof can still be seen today in the large houses and mansions left
over from an earlier era: plantation-style affairs that overshadow all but the most expansive
estates in Beverly Hills. However, after Dad's death, my mother, sister and I found
ourselves out of economic step with the prosperous town in which we lived. The slow
downward economic arc that had begun for my mother with the death of her father three
decades earlier was in free fall. She would never be able to adapt.
In the 1940s the road signs one saw upon entering Charleston proudly informed, "You
are now entering the Chemical Capitol of the World" -which was true. If my great
grandfather had only lived long enough, he would have seen money from the chemical
industry start to flow like so much butyl hydroxide. Alas, there was a tradeoff to be had for

23.
all this prosperity. Today just the merest whiff of burning rubber and I'm transported back in
time-madeline-fashion- to the odoriferous fifties of my childhood when hundreds of smoke
stacks up and down the Kanawha Valley (wherein Charleston lies nestled) belched out
various chemical wastes. Some mornings might find you awakening to the paint on your
car having slid off onto the ground overnight.
"Mommy, Mommy! Why does little Tommy have three ears?"
"That's just the way things are, honey; the price we pay for living high on the hog."
This was an era when the rest of the nation was equally oblivious to ecological concerns;
a time when a full page ad on the back of the Sunday New York Times once boasted, "Did
you know that we had to cut down an entire forest just to bring you the issue of the
newspaper you're holding in your hands?" As a result, my early years were spent living at
what seemed to me like the bottom of a nail polish remover bottle; even then I knew there
was something offbase about the Times' boast.
One night in Charleston, in 1970, protestors activated by newlyheightened
environmental consciousnesses, went around under cover of darkness ripping out the
"Chemical Capitol" signs and replacing them with ones reading "Cancer Capitol of the
World." With its Highest lung cancer rate on the planet, living there was more or less akin
to smoking twenty packs of cigarettes a day.
Ever since labor organizers had come into the area the previous decade and, after much
local deprivation and strife, had successfully unionized the coal mines (a necessary
capitalist partner in crime to the chemical plants), West Virginians had fallen in love with
the phrase "outside agitators." Most locals simply couldn't imagine why anyone would want
to kill the chemical cash cow. The perpetrators of the replaced roadway signage were
widely believed to be the wanton pinko spawn of the previous generation's coal camp
rabblerousers. With the possible exception of these retrograde anti-communists, however, I

24.
never saw much in the way of the inbred hillbilly stereotypes so commonly associated with
the Appalachia. Bottom feeders did exist back in the hills and hollers (as "hollows" is
commonly pronounced), including snake handling religionists at establishments like-my
personal favorite-the Scrabble Creek Church of All Nations. But I heerd tell of 'em.
Out and about in the world I've met people from allover the place, but never from West
Virginia, the only state in the nation to have consistently lost population (myself included)
in recent times. One wonders, then, where did all the state's natives, those "Mountaineers"
(Montani Semper Liberi), go? Alien abduction might be one possible explanation, but most
likely it has to do with reticence to own up to one's roots. After all, who wants to go through
life unfairly typecast as being from a large, inbred hillbilly family-all with suspiciously low
foreheads and even lower IQ's, afraid to tell people where you're from for fear they'll shove
a banjo in your hand and ask you to pluck out the theme from Deliverance.
Or maybe the state's wandering sons and daughters are just tired of dealing with the
geographically-challenged.
"Oh, you mean you're from the Western part of Virginia?"
"No! The state of West Virginia."
"Show it to me on the map."
I heard a lot of that when I went to New York and Chicago in my 8th and 9th grade
class trips.
Thanks to its chem industry-based wealth (and contrary to what some might think)
Charleston, when I was growing up, was-and continues to be-a relatively sophisticated
locale abundant with the cultural niceties commonly associated with much larger cities:
colleges, well-stocked libraries and even a symphony. Urban legend persists that, in the
mid1940s, when a search committee was deputized to find a new conductor for the
Charleston Symphony Orchestra, they rejected a candidate not only because he was Jewish,

25.
but also-even worse-due to the pluperfect Semitic name he bore. They might have hired him
were it not for the latter, but is it any wonder they finalIy chose someone with the
preposterously urbane moniker of Geoffrey Hobday over. . . Leonard Bernstein? Imagine
the de trop ring of the Maestro's name minus the five decades of glamour and great artistry
we have come to associate with it. Geoffrey Hobday indeed! "Sophisticated". . .except when
it came to Jews AND what was once known as "The Race Question." Then, my earliest
memories are of a community breathtakingly backward and somewhat Southernodd in
light of the fact West Virginia lies north of the Mason-Dixon line and broke away from
Virginia to go with the Union during the Civil War. The bearded and wizened copout of
"separate-but-equal" tended to be as liberal as most folks got. Mercifully, unlike the deep
south, there didn't exist such quaint and repulsive traditions as separate drinking fountains
and segregated public transportation (at least not in my home town that I recall), but blacks
and whites did go to segregated schools. Thus, it came as a surprise to me when the
Supreme Court's Brown v. the Board of Education ruling came to pass in 1954 and caused
no noticeable rent in the local social fabric. Charleston and environs blessedly went along
with the overturning of nearly a hundred years of separatist tradition with barely a whimper.
The main complaint was that the Court should have implemented a less sweeping ruling,
preferably a platformed plan that allowed for integration initially in the first grade, one
year; the second grade, the next; and so forth (or "pragmatic" variations on that
unprogressive notion). Since then it has seemed to me that the real lynch pin of racism must
be economic insecurity; the generally High level of affluence in the town I lived in
apparently went a long way toward, if not exactly healing, at least, offsetting the wounds of
unfortunate racial history. Whites in Charleston burned not so much as a single cross or
picketed any schools in retaliation against integration. In fact, the only public racial incident
of any consequence I recall happened a year or so before the landmark ruling: a black sit-in

26.
I stumbled upon one Saturday afternoon at the segregated lunch counter of a local
department store, The Diamond; there were no prohibiting signs as such but, nonetheless
"no coloreds allowed" was understood. Too young to comprehend exactly what was going
on, I had just sat down amongst the black protestors when a backwoods woman with a bad
attitude and a worse hillbilly accent grabbed me by the collar.
"Little boy, you come away there rat now. What would your momma say if she saw you
a-sittin' with them niggers?"
Motivated more out of defiance at being grabbed by a stranger than by any sudden
attack of social consciousness, I shook myself free and sat rat back down, this time to the
sound of applause from the fifteen or so assembled black protestors.
This wasn't the first time I had become aware of limitations on the public comings and
goings of African-Americans. Some West Virginia towns-those without a movie theater
reserved expressly for blacksonly allowed "coloreds" to sit in segregated balconies. I
learned about this when I was six while visiting my sister, Ruth Dolores, and her husband in
nearby Clarksburg. They dropped me off at the local bijou where I proceeded to spend the
rest of Saturday afternoon in what (I later learned) blacks themselves termed "nigger
heaven," i.e. the balcony, innocently unaware that I was the lone white ensconced there.
After the movie was over, I walked down the stairs from the balcony only to be met by my
panicked sister along with the theater manager. My mother nearly fainted when she found
out, but later the incident became a "cute" story my family liked to tell about me.
The only serious racial ruckuses in my home state had occurred in several cities
in191O, when black boxer Jack Johnson defeated "the Great White Hope," Jim Jeffries, in
a match for the heavyweight championship at Reno, Nevada. In Clarksburg, the same town
where I'd inadvertently sat in the black movie balcony forty years later, "a posse of a
thousand white men. . .drove all the Negroes off the streets. One was being led with a rope

27.
around his neck when police interfered," according to the Charleston Gazette. When I was
growing up, that paper was a progressive force for civil rights; reading its coverage of the
Johnson riots, I was stunned by sentences such as "Twenty niggers were beaten up."
Somewhat surprisingly, the coverage alternated that racial epithet with (captial N)
"Negroes." Was this indicative of a war between liberal and conservative factions at the
paper, a harbinger of the Gazette's liberalism to come, or merely "good" Thesaurian
journalism?
Perhaps African-Americans should add to their long and diverse list of innovations
/inventions/accomplishmentswhich includes the cell phone, jazz, traffic lights and open
heart surgeryand . . . the phenomenon of the mall. For in Charleston, blacks didn't sit in
the balcony at downtown "picture shows"; or anywhere else in the white theaters for that
matter. Instead they had their own movie house located in a complex off to one side of the
main business district; a shopping center of sorts that also contained the 72-room Ferguson
Hotel; a restaurant, barbershop, haberdashery, ballroom, record store, and smoke shop.
Catering exclusively to the needs of traveling African-Americans, the Ferguson's guests, at
one time or another during its forty years of operation, included Duke Ellington, Joe Louis,
Cab CaIloway, Buddy Johnson and Earl Hines. The night spot in the complex was known as
the "The Alhambra Club," in keeping with the fact that nearly every U.S. city of noticeable
size possessed a black night club with that name. The entire area was known as "The
Block," which, like "Alahambra," was nomenclature commonly employed by AfricanAmericans throughout the U.S. to denote commercial ground zero for blacks in cities of
significant size. Another example of this is the fact that most blacks, and whites, knew that
in newspaper church listings "The Reverend" so-and-so denoted a black congregation,
while "Reverend" without "The" meant a white church.
According to the rites and customs of the country, by the time at age six when I had sat

28.
in the Clarksburg theater's Buzzard Roost (yet another and somewhat more polite term for
the black balcony in a white theater), I should have been taking on the early traits of the
species Racistus Americanus. But my parents had screwed up; leftover traces of the Roaring
Twenties in their systems, Tom and Mary continued to engage in weekend fun and games.
Sometimes they dropped me off to be looked after by a nice, reliable black family that lived
near my father's office. It was one thing to be taken care of by a black "mammy" in your
own home, quite another to be cared for by her in her own home. The peculiar form of
proselytization known as Separate-But-Equal was a concept next to impossible for any sixyear-old to grasp, especially if they've spent time in the home of loving black people.
If you grew up during a certain period, especially in the south, you knew about Dinah
Shore's tragic mulatto status the same way you knew about polio. Poor Dinah could never
open her mouth to sing on TV without someone in the room drowning her out with words to
the effect they knew someone who knew someone else who had a friend in Tennessee,
where the singer was from, who just knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that America's
Singing Sweetheart was part black, but hadn't known it until she gave birth to a baby of a
tell-tale color, and secretly had to give it up for adoption. More than realpolitik debates over
school integration was this racial idee fixe that had hung in the air for as long as I could
remember.
***
After my father died, my mother, sister and I moved out of the house my parents had
built and, after staying with Mama Smith, my grandmother, for a while, moved into a
housing project: Washington Manor (universally pronounced by those who lived there,
"May-nor") is a place I remember most especially for its racial lunacy. The apartment
windows where whites lived faced out on the black section and, conversely, windows in the
black section exclusively looked out on the outside white world. In the five years that my

29.
mother, sister and I lived there, I never saw a single black face except from my window.
The idea was to reinforce racism. On me it had just the opposite effect. I became deeply
wrapped up in the notion of the "other." Making matters stranger was the official
management policy of immediate expulsion from the projects at the merest hint of racial
fraternization. One night when I could countenance the madness no longer, I awoke at two
in the morning, slipped out of my pajamas and into my jeans, climbed over the fence
dividing the two halves and defiantly stood, quaking, in the black part of the projects for
several minutes before scurrying back home. The next day I spent half-waiting for some
sort of axe to fall over my furtive symbolic gesture, but nothing ever came of my
somnambulist experiment in, quite literally, crossing the color line. Washington Manor was
a utilitarian, bunker-style affair where even the floors and walls of the apartment interiors
were made of concrete. I can still recall lying on the floor, my cheek pressed against the
cold hard blood red enamel that covered the floors and chipping off little flecks of the
disgusting looking stuff with my fingernails. I thought if I hacked and hewed away long
enough I'd hit hardwood. Wall-to-wall carpeting was strictly forbidden but if you were well
enough off, like we were, rolldown rugs were permissible.
More than housing project racial segregation, separatism of a different kind held even
greater sway over me: Mother insisted I attend Lincoln Elementary, on the good side of the
tracks. Now I not only had to lie to others about her drinking, but also where I livedsupposedly nearby the school with my brother and his wife. Talk about a schema for
developing anti-socialization skills! I couldn't walk home from school with classmates or
invite them to visit for fear of giving away my secret. If only my mother had let me go to
the less desirable Fruth School, I could now brag that I once shared playground space with
Charles Manson, a student there in the late 1940s, and whose path I managed to cross
twenty years down the line during the time of California's "Big Evil" (about which more to

30.
come in a later chapter). Who knew? Before attending superior Lincoln Elementary across
town, I did go to Fruth briefly in the second grade, but not while Good Time Charley was
there. Just about all I remember of my brief time there was when Chinese twins, touted as
world champs, came around to demonstrate their facility with Duncan yo-yos. There was
also one lunch period I recall, signaled by girl's hysterical shrieks and boy's cawing and
pointing fingers, a guy living in a flophouse across from Fruth threw open his second-floor
window and exposed himself. We were hurriedly ushered back into the school by nervous
teachers where we spent the remainder of a hungry lunch hour. It was almost like the
famous A-Bomb film, Duck and Cover, except that we didn't have to hide under our desks.
Never once did any of the teachers admit that we had seen what we had clearly seen. Not
that it really mattered where I went to school; I was a less than enthusiastic student who
viewed his twelve years of public education as a form of penal servitude. I was a rotten
student. . .the worst. I learned to read in almost record time in grade one, and was doing so
at an adult level by the fourth grade. But after that I threw in the towel: no math for me, no
science, no history, no geography, etc. I hardly did a lick of work in all my twelve years of
public schooling. I couldn't even diagram a simple sentence and only began to acquire
writing and grammar skills by osmosis as I entered adulthood. In my early twenties I
perceived Europe as someplace far off that was five times the size the of U.S., instead of the
opposite. After all, I reasoned, you had your France, your Germany, your Austria; etc. I got
out of public school alive by stealth and guile. Once, upon receiving a failing grade in
chemistry for the quarter, I cried so hard the teacher consented to raise it to barely passing.
My fingers probably still retain electron-microscopic traces of the ink mark crib notes I
relied upon for passing tests. If there is such a thing as Attention Deficit Disorder, I had it,
but the naming of such things didn't exist back then. I just couldn't concentrate. Thinking
that it would encourage me to "work harder," a family member with access to school

31.
records once told me I had a rather High IQ-remember them?-but I only goofed off more. If
I'm such a freaking genius, my reasoning was, what do I need school for anyhow? Most of
my teachers liked and (elt sorry for me and let me slide. Or maybe they were scared of me?
I only cared for two things: TV and phonograph records, and learned to read from the latter.
"What words are these, Dickie?" (my name back then, and an uncle still calls me that) my
mom or dad would say. Then they'd hold up some 78 rpm disc for four-year-old me to
decipher. I'd look at it for a few seconds, then stammer.
"Andrew Sis...Sisters...Ruh-Ruh-Rum and...and Coca Cola" (a popular song of the
WWII era).
"Only four years old and already he can read!"
Then it was on to the next disc. I can still hear the scraping of the
old 78 rpm shellac records as one was whisked off the top of the pile and the next one was
displayed. I loved playing this little game and the attention it brought me. Some have the
first dollar they ever earned. I have my first phonograph records-a set of Al Jolson 78s.
Thanks to the popularity of his film biography at the time, this faded twenties superstar was
experiencing a career renaissance. I loved him and was so distraught the day he died, I had
to be sent home from school. It has always struck me as slightly ironic that, before the real
black genuine article came into my life, the music I first responded to was its pale white
simulacrum, AI Jolson. Which leads to an Edenic side of living in the projects: music from
the black block parties right outside my window. Strange, new (to me) sounds-radically
different from any played on white radio in the south or near south up until that timeblaring out of the loudspeakers so deafeningly it rattled the pictures on the walls. This got
me weaned off of Jolson in no time and onto the real thing. I sometimes think I must have
been the first white person, except for the record producers, to have ever heard the likes of
"One Mint Julep" and "Your Cash Ain't Nothin' But Trash." I became an aficionado of this

32.
new music from, if not exactly another planet, another world; to the extent that I began
patronizing Race Records-actually called that-located in the black Ferguson Hotel. What a
figure I must have cut in the early 1950s; a not quite teenaged white kid in a black record
shop, earnings from his paper route clutched in his hand, humming songs to an
accommodating African-American clerk who spun the various 78's until we found the one I
was looking for.
Before the greenhouse effect kicked in big time, my home town was regularly hit by
massive snow storms, which meant that school was often closed for fifteen or twenty days a
season. That's why to this day the sight of snow, in fact the very mention of the stuff-with
its association with freedom and retention of control-makes my eyes light up. Teachers kept
encouraging me to get with the program, but nothing or no one could persuade me toin
the parlance of the times"apply yourself." It didn't help matters when, put in a group of
gifted children in the 8th grade, in a class known as "8-0," I mis-perceived it as one
intended for slow learners. Again, more separatism. The others looked and pointed at us as
if we had the plague. Again, more confusion. The experience of 8-0 was just like when I
was in the first grade. Picked to narrate the Christmas pageant, I thought it was because I
wasn't one of "the smart kids" who got to move angels/wise men et al silhouetted on a
sheet. Only when I broke down crying was it explained to me that reading the Nativity story
was a singular honor and that any dummy could wield a cardboard cutout on a stick.
The only vaguely interesting thing I recall learning in school was the concept of oneworldism; subtly imparted by several civics and history teachers. This was the time of
United Nations fever but, as I seem to recall, these instructor's fervor went far beyond the
idea of a U.N. to embrace belief in a world without nation states. This appealed to me.
Even in the third grade it seemed like a rational notion and nearly fifty years later it still
does. No doubt, these long ago proselytizers were unmarried, closeted pinko-commie

33.
scum.
Despite all the mattress fires, enforced separations while my mother was hospitalized
drying out, and her sometimes week-long blackouts while I shifted for myself, I felt
centered and secure. However, the futuramic, optimistic take on the 1950s as perpetuated in
TV, the movies and the press had a lot to answer for. Others in my age group read comic
books, but I used to lurk off to the library and read Consumer Reports: "This toothpaste
turns your teeth green, that car's a lemon, these poppin' fresh biskits taste like cement." I
was fascinated by its muckraking, iconoclastic view of the world. It was a lot like the cold
eye cast on the passing parade by my grandmother. When Mad Magazine came into being
in 1953 it seemed the perfect counterpart to the skepticism that Consumer Reports had
stoked in me. Nominally a comic book, Mad, in addition to it hereticism, had a literary
quality that linked it up with the great nonsense tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and
the verbal riffs of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers. For many of my generation, the truly
sophisticated Mad had a cultural impact much greater than the primitive stuff we saw on
TV in its dawning stages. I wish I had a hundred dollars for every time a secreted copy of
Mad was taken away from me by a teacher in the classroom. One time I glanced up a few
minutes later to see the instructor flipping through its confiscated pages and laughing. Had I
single-handedly been responsible for introducing Miss Thompson to the the wonderful
world of Mad? Or was she merely a fellow traveler who hadn't yet acquired her copy of the
latest issue? Thirty years later, at my High school reunion, I reminded her of the incident.
She stared at me uncomprehendingly, turned around and shuffled off.
My sister Nancy, nearly an adult by the time I was still protoplasm in Buster Brown
Shoes, watched over and took care of me, and was less like a sister and more like a mother.
I never doubted that Mom really loved me. When Nancy reached adulthood, instead of
washing her hands of the situation and leaving me to shift for myself, she took a job as a

34.
secretary and stayed on at home where she always returned at the end of her work day with,
tucked under her arm or in her purse, some simple gift for me-a toy, a comic book, candy,
or . . .something. Around the time I turned eleven, Nancy felt that mother and I could now
take care of ourselves and each other. Somewhat in haste, she left home and married a
decent man who nonetheless had problems with drink every bit as serious as our mother's.
Nancy gone and me alone with my mother, I often had to shift for myself, sometimes for
days on end until such time as she managed her way back from Blotto City and back on her
feet. The length of her periods of sobriety were unpredictable; occasionally they lasted
upwards of a month, and I was convinced this was it-she had finally quit drinking for good.
Then the cycle would start all over again without warning, with hospitals, Alcoholics
Anonymous, psychologists, school authorities, intervening family members and friends all
helpless in the face of the extreme form of alcoholism from which my mother suffered; one
which found her passing out cold after only one or two drinks. The warning bell was her
launching into "Danny Boy," alternating its choruses with lamentations about how,
according to her voice teacher at Mary Baldwin Seminary, she could have been a great opera
singer. Then before you knew it, she was out like a light, usually remaining that way for
days on end with the merest topping off of her buzz necessary only every few hours. It
wasn't unusual for her to just lie there insensate for days at a time. If it all sounds so very
Southern Gothic, that's because it was. If my mother hadn't existed, Tennessee Williams
would have had to invent her and, in fact, he did; calling her "Miss Amanda" in The Glass
Menagerie.
My mother force fed me vegetables and cod liver oil with a vengeance . . . especially to
fortify me before checking out on a binge. The oft-resisted veggies were accompanied by
the maternal exhortation, "think of the poor starving children in India who would give
anything to have just one bite of those carrots." How could I resist replying, as I often did,

35.
"Well, wrap it up and send it to 'em"; or, "Name two!" When I wouldn't eat my vegetables
my mother would insist, "Well, you can't be Tom Reed's son if you don't like tomatoes." I
would take her at face value and wonder, "Whose son am I then?" Wherever or whatever
she is now, my mother can finally rest in peace. "Some day you'll thank me for making you
eat this stuff," she would insist. She was right. I've hardly been sick a day in my life since
then.
Ethical values were instilled by her insistence that I go about the neighborhood after
school knocking on doors of the old and infirm in the housing project, inquiring if there
were any chores or errands that needed to be done. And under NO circumstances was I to
accept payment for my services. I resented these altruistic rounds, but after a while I kind
of got into the part of the Littlest Saint. I felt proud of my good deeds. Plus, it kept me out
of trouble, the potential for which was abundant in our low rent surroundings. It wasn't
mother's intent, but is it any wonder I've ended up such a screaming socialist. Mary Reed
was a clever, ethically, and nutritionally efficient woman. I still think of my mother every
day and always positively. She tried the best that she could to save both her own skin and
mine but just couldn't stop or much curb her need to drink.
If there is such a thing as a gene that determines resilience in childhood, I possessed it.
***
Polio-and fear of it-was a fact of life that clouded the mid-20th century existence of nearly
every child and the parents who loved them. I'm sure I'm not the only child of the fifties
who, each time he or she developed a slight fever, the doctor was called for. Ma!, it's only
a cold," I would try and reassure my mother while she paced the floor, late at night, waiting
for the doctor to arrive (in the before time when nearly every doctor made house calls).
Beset and obsessed with a slight limp due to one of her legs being micrometrically shorter
than the other, my mother was certain that as a child she had suffered from undiagnosed

36.
polio, which only added to her hysteria. To anyone who would listen she would genteelly
hike up her skirt, stretch out her legs, and invite them to "Look, look!" It was a litany of
hers that even outstripped in frequency the one about my breach birth.
Doctor Hambrick, the physician who had attended the birth of all my mother's
children, invariably arrived late at night, gave me a thorough going over. He then turned to
my mother, whom he had grown up with in Clay County forty years earlier, and launched
into his diagnosis, "Maaaa-ryyyy. . .." I can still recall the way he lovingly stretched out her
name. Then, without making her feel foolish or hysterical, and lauding her for being a
caring, concerned mother, he reassured her it was just a garden variety common cold and
nothing more, not the dreaded poliomyelitis.
That there was such a thing as the now-eradicated scourge like polio, OR that house
calls were the norm as recently as the 1950s, demonstrates just how rapidly the world has
changed, for the better AND worse, over the past four decades. The disease, with its freight
load of parental hysteria, finally became a reality when a nephew of mine contracted it in
1955 and had to spend several months in the most terrifying, dimly-lit back ward
imaginable-like something out of the 19th century instead of the mid-2Oth-which I had the
misfortune to visit on several occasions. What he finally had to show for the experience was
not only a slight limp, but a personality of astonishingly withdrawn proportions-which
continues to this day.
First among the four of us to endure my parent's drinking, my sister Ruth Dolores, as
soon as she was of age, married a prosperous business man and became as removed from
the inner workings of the family as polite society allowed. I think she would have preferred
fleeing town, changing her name, and-like an African-American of the era passing for
white-never looking back. Because of this, in family circles she has earned a reputation as
being cold, selfish, and aloof. Because she was old enough to be my mother, and had her

37.
"own family" to take care of, Ruth Dolores was nearly a stranger to me for many years. I
now understand her better, and we are fairly close. I may be the only person, aside from her
husband, to have ever seen her cry, which happens when she talks to me about being left
nearly alone for days at a time by our parents, with only the companionship of her younger
brother Tom and the care of a slightly older uncle. She has long since achieved
compassionate understanding and forgiveness about our parent's "problem." "It's a disease,
you know," she unequivocally says to anyone who'll listen. Recently her husband
underwent heart bypass surgery. The only question she asked about the qualifications of the
surgeon was, "Where was he raised?" That's exactly the kind of question you might expect
from the Eisenhower era wife of an Air Force major who's spent most of the 1950s
alternately baking cookies for the kids and playing bridge with the girls at the post. At least
she had the decency not to ask, "Where was he born?"
Amazing Mama Smith died in 1969, and even though my whereabouts were known
to the family, no one even bothered to let me know. I didn't find out till months afterward. If
I'm bitter about anything my brother and sisters ever did to me, it's this. In a similar vein,
Tom, Nancy and Ruth Dolores lived within a few blocks of each other for years but often
didn't make contact for long months at a time. In the early 1970s, I returned to Charleston
after not having seen my only brother for several years. He offhandedly said hello, then
repaired to the basement to finish his football game on TV. It was this kind of behavior that
led a Jewish friend of mine to observe that such familial coldness was so alien to him, it
was as if my relatives and I had all come from what he chose to call the Planet of the
Goyim where "They don't even touch each other, not even in anger?!"
I wasn't the butchest little boy on the block. In efforts to turn me all boy, the men in my
family did everything short of tying me up and throwing me from a moving car onto a Little
League baseball field. Finally, like most of the other males-uncles, brothers-in-law, et al, the

38.
moment it was clear to my brother that I might be an irreversible "sissy" (the operative word
of the day) he worked overtime trying to place as much emotional and physical distance
between us as possible. The only one of the four of us to succumb to heavy drinking, he'd
tried on two occasions to kill himself, once with pills and another time by driving his car
into the river. Both times my Mother was still alive. She rushed into the breach. He was also
a wife/child beater and philanderer who tore into me badly physically on several occasions
when he was in his late twenties and I was still an adolescent. In his early sixties and with
cancer, Tom died in 1985. His widow, Juanita, phoned to tell me the news. Another of those
adults who helped keep me on track when I was a kid, I grasped at straws trying to find
something nice to say about her husband, my brother. All I could seriously come up with
was, "He was really a good driver." Tom's heavy drinking may have been inherited from our
parents. The violence definitely wasn't.
CHAPTER THREE: Hello! Hello! It's the Cathode Ray Tube Show!
Alcohol had been a weekend hobby for my Mom; after Dad died she elevated it to
the level of an art form. Instead of getting her mind off his death by going out and
finding a job, she took the money from the sale of our house-"the upkeep is too much
responsibility for a widow"
bundled it with Social Security and pension money, and that's what we lived on. It wasn't
much, but we got by. The littlest enabler, I spent a lot of my early years covering for her
drinking, a skill at which I was fairly adept; I learned later that even my closest school
friends "had no idea. " Most thought of my mother as a sweet little old gray-haired
teetotaler wiling away the hours baking cookies and playing bridge-which was partly true.
The rest of the time, though, especially after my sister left home for good, I was reduced to
flying by the seat of my pants, trying to decode adult routines like buying food, making
doctors' appointments for myself, forging notes to school from home, and in general,

39.
moving through life from square A to square B. I even learned to forge my mother's name
on checks and school excuses, imitating her near-indecipherable scrawl by writing with my
left hand. Given half a chance I could have become a great check kiting artist. Arranging for
transportation, rehearsing what I was going to say when I got to wherever it was I was
going, making up excuses for my mother's absence, etc., I would per-live each action step
by step. Premature responsibility instilled such a sense of caution in me that, until recently,
I could barely travel off my block without prolonged advance preparation and a map. At my
25th High school reunion, a former chum recounted far worse childhood horror stories:
"One time my mother fell down drunk on a furnace grate," she recalled. "We picked her
up and her entire face peeled away onto the hot metal. It took years of plastic surgery before
she looked right again."
"But I thought you came from such a NICE family," I replied ingenuously. (BTW,
thanks for sharing.)
Ares Phil and Oprah, Ie deluge! Just about all anyone wanted to talk about at my High
school reunion were the skeletons of alcoholic parents rattling around in family closets.
Certain that I was the only one in my entire school shouldering such responsibilities, I'd
been dead wrong.
I was least alienated from, most connected to, classmates on out-of-own school trips,
which freed me from having to make up lies about where I lived and conditions at home.
One such excursion to New York City in the seventh grade, I gained the others' admiration
by leading them on a midnight blitz of Times Square, stalking celebrities. Just about ready
to give up for the night, at last we scored. Glancing in the window of the bar located in the
old Hotel Picadilly, I spotted prey:
"Look, gang," I yelled. "Charles Laughton!"
I turned around to face a sea of uncomprehending blank stares.

40.
"You know. . .the guy who reads the Bible on Ed Sullivan? Trust
me," I assured them, "he's famous."
And with that, I pushed open the door and the dozen-or-so of us descended upon the
great actor. Laughton held a drink in one hand, leaned on the bar with the other. His back to
us, and as we began tugging and nattering at him, he surely must have known the fear felt
by Tennessee Williams' "Sebastian" in Suddenly Last Summer. But, unlike Sebastian,
Laughton fought back. What seemed like all seven feet and thousand pounds of him slowly
turned. Like an ocean liner bearing down on tug boats in a harbor, he glared down at us and
after a frightening pause, bellowed in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the place:
"What do you think I am . . . a goddamned wholesale house?" Everyone stopped what
they were doing to look, while we leapt back in unison. Surprisingly, Laughton began moreor-less to graciously scrawl his signature on various scraps of paper thrust at him by my
motley crew-one or two of whom may still possess and even treasure their Laughton
scribble, while mine is missing in action. Aside from these school excursions, though, I was
pretty much a classic loner of a kid-devoid of friends of any race, creed or color. TV, radio,
the movies, and records filled the void. When I was four, my mother found me taking off
the back of the radio looking for the little people I was sure were living in there. That's the
closest I came to having "imaginary friends"; unlike my (now) friend, Sharon, who swears
she can recall, as a little girl,the avuncular-looking bewigged man on the front of the
Quaker Oats box coming to her house on a regular basis to have breakfast with her. Her
niece, CeCe, possessed, of all things, a morbid childhood terror of artificial flowers, while
one of my pre-adolescent fears was of the popular Ink Spots song, "I Don't Want to Set the
World on Fire." I ran crying to my parents for reassurance whenever it came on the radio. I
literally thought the world was going to be set on fire. A song with a similar effect was the
1945 ditty, "Till the End of Time" which I took at absolute eschatological face value as

41.
meaning that one day soon the world would just ontologically cease to be. All of which
goes to show just how rich, strange and recherche the inscapes of most children truly are.
My fear of certain songs on the radio notwithstanding, I was a big fan of the medium. There
was a time when no one with access to the airwaves (professional or otherwise) spoke
anything other than seemingly grammatically perfect English, entirely devoid of slang and
the now-omnipresent double negative. On national and local broadcasts the white bread,
clear-as-a-bell Mid-Atlantic accent ruled (to the exclusion of all regional sounds). In those
less pseudo-egalitarian times, one could twiddle the TV and radio tuning dials long and hard
without encountering the sound of the indigenous West Virginia accent, which, contrary to
common belief has very little in common with the lilt of the true Southern accent. Instead,
Appalachianese is ofttimes difficult-to-decipher and tends toward an elided clacking, nasal
sound. "Did you eat?" becomes "Djweet?", wash=worsh, right here=rat cheer, and so forth.
It seemed to me, at an early age, that the faceless, nonetheless larger-than-life people from
out there somewhere in radioland were role models to emulate. This resulted in my being
struck with the conscious, intellectual decision - -before I had even begun public schoolingto try and divest myself of every last trace of my hillbilly accent. It was a skill at which I
proved astonishingly adept. Almost overnight I began to sound just like a testosteronechallenged version of the popular radio newsman Lowell ("Ladies and gentlemen, a good
evening to you!") Thomas. In the first grade, on the way to school, a friend turned to me
once and said to me:
"Being with you is just like walking down the street with a radio." In fact when I was
ten, I had my own radio show on a local station"Little Dickie's Kiddie's Karnival"on
which I did intros for the childrens records I spun. I was on for one entire summer before
LDKK sank without a trace, leaving me a show business has-been at eleven.
Like a lot of other kids in the fifties, I was badly bent out of shape by THE BOMB. The

42.
aforementioned Lowell Thomas laughingly signed off his program one April 1950 evening
with a story about a group, the Zoomites who, in an Atomic augury of Ruby Ridge and
Waco, were planning to burrow into the earth over the next two years, and set off an ABomb that would decimate the surface of the planet Not only did I not get the "joke" of
Thomas'-in the parlance of the radio trade-kicker, I was scared out of my wits. No simple
childhood fear of artificial flowers for me. I couldn't confide in friends, a minister, or even
a family member. To my literal, logical child's mind, they were all helpless in the face of a
group possessing such power. For the next couple of years, I lived in abject terror of the
forthcoming Zoomite apocalypse till, finally, the big day arrived. Goldbricking, I stayed
home from school. Nothing happened. I feigned sleeplessness, watching TV long into the
night. Still, nothing. Just my luck, the show on TV as midnight neared was a delayed
kinescope airing of a game show featuring-of all things! . . . a ticking countdown clock. A
clear sign. Finally, when 12:01 a.m. came, without an A-bomb blast, I swooned in my
mother's arms and slept like a baby. It was good training for the forthcoming Cuban Missile
Crisis
Years after the dawning of the new medium television, Jason Robards recalled
appearing on early broadcasts of live drama in New York City, circa the late 1940s, and the
first Mrs. Robardsno, not Lauren Bacalldashing about Greenwich Village, eyes
skyward, searching for that rare house with a TV antennae on its roof. Spying one, this
phantom video interloper would brazenly knock on the door, wangle her way in uninvited,
and catch hubby Jason's one-time-only-then-its-gone-forever video turn.
As a nation, we couldn't have waited much longer: America had been promised the new
medium a decade earlier; post-Depression floor model radios were often sold with hopeful
little switches labeled "Television," but which contained no actual TV receiver. I recall a
pre-WW II console with a tilt-up mirror lid and a template for installing a TV when they

43.
were soon to come on the market. But the coitus interruptus of World War II forestalled that
golden day for almost a decade. In fact, in the 1946 film Ziegfeld Follies, the sketch Red
Skelton performed, known in later years as "Guzzler's Gin," was called "When Television
Comes." TV finally materialized after the war, and it did so with a vengeance, arriving in
my home town in the late 1940s during the first phase of the medium's rapid expansion. A
year or so before Charleston's first station went on the air, the father of a first grade
classmate had bought a set. He invited his son's friends over to sit huddled around the 7inch screen for the viewing experience of wisps of sight and sound that survived the
perilous electronic journey over more than 200 miles of mountainous terrain from
Cincinnati: "Look, there's something". . ."Shhh, I think I heard something," etc. The tiny
screen had a magnifying glass over it, which the youngest of us, as part of our second class
citizenship, had to view from a distorted angle while the adults got to look head-on. TV
seemed like a miracle.
The first Charleston station (actually in nearby Huntington) went on the air in 1948 and
was the 35th commercial station to go on line. I can still remember the enormous numbers
who congregated in front of the Goodyear store on East Washington Street watching
flickering, jumpy, snowy images broadcast from more than 50 miles away ,which were,
nevertheless, an improvement over the Cincinnati signal. The store was closed up tight for
the night and the owners didn't even have the decency to place a discreet loudspeaker on the
street. Obviously a depth-involving ploy to get potential buyers to come in the store the
next day. The experience of early TV for those gathered on the street was a lot like the early
days of silent film, and one of the last communal experiences of which they would ever
partake: "Boy howdy, Mama! Moom pitchers through the air. We'll never have to leave
home again."
I can still recall the wood grain of the sensually curved cabinet, the shape of the dials,

44.
and the nearly rounded picture tube of our first family TV. It was a floor model Motorola
mother had purchased at my unyielding insistence in '52. I watched this immediate and
friendly substitute for the almost total lack of comradeship and social interaction denied me
in the real world so much of the time; it's a miracle I wasn't lulled into a permanent alpha
state of critical insensateness, like the character in Thomas Pynchon's V, with a sensor
attached to his arm that turns the set off and on with the coming and going of wakefulness.
Voila! The perfect cyborg. (In the 1970s, a study determined that of 200-or-so people who
had just watched the evening news on one of the three networks, less than half could
remember a single story that had been reported. )
Before they bought sets of their own, nearly everyone in my grandmother's family went
to her house Saturday nights to watch Your Show of Shows. Here was the equivalent of a
Broadway revue coming into your home once a week for free and, by crackies, they were
going to watch, even though they could barely tolerate the great Sid Caesar's comedy. Far
too self-indulgent they thought. They liked Imogine Coca, the Billy Williams Quartet,
Patrice Munsel and even the dance team of Mata and Hari better than Sid. But what choice
did they have in our one-channel, one-horse town?
No doubt it was TV series, like Glamor Girl, a 1950s show I was hooked on, that
caused a founding father of TV, inventor Lee DeForrest, to write:
"The nation has no soap, but soap opera without end or sense floods each household
daily. . . This child of mine has been resolutely kept to the average intelligence of thirteen
years."
Glamor Girl, hosted by Harry Babbitt, a sloe-eyed, former big band singer, was a fivetimes-a-week daytime show featuring a twist on the premises of two other programs on the
air at the time, Queen for a Day and Strike it Rich, that offered prizes of one sort or another
to the best hard-luck story of the day. On each episode of Glamor Girl, three haggard, Ma

45.
Kettle-types told why they needed a makeover, and the studio audience would vote with
their applause as to which one most deserved to be bottom-to-top cosmeticized. Plus ca
change. . .forty years later such gimmicks are still a staple on daytime TV.
Glamor Girl ended each day with the would-be Galatea from the day before reappearing
after the various stylists, couturiers, furriers, and poise experts had wrought their
miraculous transformation. To ten-year-old me, it came off like a Grimm's Fairy Tale-only
in this case the frog turned into a princess instead of prince. Glamor Girl was on during
school hours. If I happened to catch it while I was home malingering with some feigned
mild illness, I would watch it, get hooked, and then had to stay home the next day to see
what the woman from the day before looked like after her transformation. And the next and
the next and the next. . .. Film critic Roger Ebert tells a similar story about his childhood;
only, in a truly perverse twist, he was hooked on the radio version of the show. Thank god
the TV version was canceled after only a few months, otherwise I might have been trapped
in Glamor Girl-land forever. Besides, I should have been outside doing something butch
and constructive, such as learning to throw a ball like a boy instead of a girl. One can see
why shows like this-the kind that lend mediocrity a bad name-drove DeForrest to write the
letter to the National Association of Broadcasters, declining an award for his pioneering
scientific work in the television field. All the same, I thought Glamor Girl was just swell.
From the vantage point of today, GG notwithstanding, the early fifties was a golden era
for TV. From the radio-like charm of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, to the pathblazing comedy of
Caesar, Coca, Morris and Reiner, compared to what came afterward, early TV was a
veritable Moscow Art Theatre. It was an era when broadcast executives struggled with the
kind of guilt that motivated movie studio heads of a slightly earlier time to cough up
productions of exceptional quality to offset their schlock product. The first holiday season
(somewhere in the early sixties) that TV management nixed the traditional yule showing of

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Giancarlo Menotti's classic, "Ahmal and the Night Visitors," crafted especially for the new
medium in 1952, was probably the year that America finally lost its grip on quality control
across the board.
It's a sad and embarrassing admission, but if I came across a surviving model of my
family's old '52 Motorola TV set today, I'd probably break into tears the way one does upon
meeting a long lost friend or lover. I would probably then catch myself up short, be done
with the sentimentalism, and take an axe to it for the role TV has played (along with rock
music) in the soul destroying, anti-dialectical context of no context---to employ George
W.S. Trow's phrasethat has descended upon American society, post Viet Nam. But in the
"before time" of the early 1950s. . .who knew? Back then TV seemed magical and harmless.
Especially to the eyes of an eleven-year-old. I remember a fifties Sunday morning religious
show, Lamp Unto My Feet. One episode consisted of a large chunk of Samuel Beckett's
Endgame, followed by a discussion between priest, rabbi and minister. When the play was
over, the moderator began to poll them as to whether Beckett's dustbin drama had
contemporary "moral relevance." But the actors had performed the play so slowly that time
had nearly run out. The members of the grave-looking panel succinctly said, "I think not,"
"No," "Very little, if any," and the credits rolled a mile-a-minute. The End. Even at age nine,
I found this hilarious.
There were such Sunday gems as Camera Three, Dave Garroway's Wide, Wide World
and Robert Herrick Presents---before the Sabbath was overrun by large pituitary cases
roaring down an oblong field, smashing into one another. One time Lillian Hellman
appeared on Omnibus, another of these mainstays of the intellectual ghetto of Sunday
afternoon TV. The subject raised before Hellman and the rest of the distinguished (this time
secular) panel was the relationship between commerce and the Broadway theater. Talk of
dollars and sense flew back and forth between the others, with very little mention of art, for

47.
several minutes. Meanwhile, Hellman just sat there furiously puffing on an ever-present
cigarette. I couldn't take my eyes off of her. Finally, she could take no more. Leaping to her
feet, hacking and coughing, the enraged playwright made an impassioned speech about the
immorality of Broadway power brokers and stormed off the show (this was "live" TV). It
was an unforgettable moral lesson about sticking to your guns and about personal code that
I've never forgotten. With TV like this---before it became Newton Minnow's vast
wasteland---who needed the church or school?
CHAPTER FOUR: Confessions of a Voluntary Negro
In high school I became more of an aficionado of black music than ever when I began
attending the monthly "Sippi Presents" concert-dances at Charleston's Municipal
Auditorium. The talent was all-black: Joe Turner, Ray Charles, the Clovers, Drifters, et al,
and so, too, with the exception of myself and a handful of others, was the audience. Blacks
at those Sippi shows hardly ever batted an eyelash at my underage presence in the
auditorium's balcony where, in a reparational twist on the tradition of the "buzzard roost"
for blacks, whites had to sit in a kind of Honky Heaven, segregated from the main action
down below. However, I didn't always manage to stay aloft. With everyone else on stage far
too busy dancing to even notice my white bread presence, I once spent the entire night
sitting, literally, at Ray Charles' feet while he played and sang non-stop for more than three
hours. The show, which included a very young Betty Carter, was so exhilarating, that
afterward I followed the Charles troupe several hundred miles all the way to Columbus for
the next night's performance. There, sadly, in a letdown from the previous night, Brother
Ray was so heavily stoned he nodded out right in the middle of the show. Someone in the
crowd yelled out, "Wake up!" and a startled Brother Ray yelled right back, "Shut the fuck
up!"-in front of several thousand people.
One hot summer afternoon in 1959 at Gordon's, a local drugstore hangout on

48.
Charleston's West Washington Street, a singular looking African-American woman in a
white fur coat swept in, bought something, and just as suddenly vanished. It wasn't a local,
that's for sure. She left in her wake customers and clerks scratching their heads in confusion
over the sight of a mink-clad black woman in the middle of the day, at the height of
summer. She was, in fact, Tina Turner; then still only a hot regional act in tandem with
husband Ike. I recognized Tina Turner from her photos, but had never actually heard her
sing before. Later that night at the Ike Turner Revue, in town for "One Performance Only!"
at the Municipal Auditorium, I gained my first exposure to her rasp 'n raunch vocal stylings.
Even then her ability to mount a stage and overwhelm the universe was apparent.
By the mid-1950s large numbers of white teenagers were getting turned on to the new
sounds of black music, which was beginning to be purveyed by white players as well. But
what really sounded the revolution was not the oft-noted Bill Haley, with the hokey spit
curl in the middle of his forehead, and a nonetheless catchy amalgam of swing, country and
western and r 'n b. Instead, it was Elvis Presley who shot right up not only record sales
charts but the spines of teenage white female America as well. Presley and Haley were
musical pathfinders who spawned countless bad imitators, especially Elvis, before flaming
out artistically (eg. Elvis' immortal "Do the Clam"). You can't escape the heavy-handed
irony that the first dee-jay to ever play Elvis on the air assumed that he was black and
implied the same to his listeners.
Late at night found many of us in Charleston listening not to local radio stations, still
continuing to pump out our parents' retrograde faves like "April in Portugal" and "Lisbon
Antigua", but to the 50,000 watt clear channel station out of Nashville, WLAC, featuring
deejays Gene Nobles and John R. Enacted after hours and away from parental scrutiny,
auditing WLAC was so clandestine and forbidden, that it operated like a vicarious trial run
for sex-something that few teens in the 50s had partaken. Not in my set, anyway. In

49.
between their pitches for mail order rhythm and blues packages from Randy's Record Shop
in Gallatin, Tennessee and salacious paeans to the lubricating properties of White Rose
Petroleum Jelly, this powerhouse outlet blanketed almost the entire country with the real
deal in black music instead of the pale white simulacrum coming to be known as rock and
roll. Randy's was owned by Randy Wood, also the proprietor of the Dot record label whose
number one star was Caucasian r 'n' b arriviste Pat Boone. But I can never recall the WLAC
deejays ever playing any of the inauthentic "cover versions" of black artists, e.g. "Tutti
Fruitti," "Long Tall Sally," etc. of White Buck (!) Kid, Pat Boone.
Years later I learned that the jockeys on "LAC" ("a service of the Tennessee Life and
Casualty Company") weren't actually black, but only "sounded that way." And I wasn't the
only who got misled. Legend has it that no less than the Godfather of Soul himself, James
Brown, showed up at the station late one summer evening with his first recording tucked
under his arm hoping to get a break from men whom he had presumed for years were
"Negro," until being led into the studio and learning otherwise. When the secret history of
rock and roll is writ large, it will probably be made apparent that it wasn't really Dick Clark
who turned on teenage America to black music, but instead, this seldom acknowledged
radio phenomenon out of the heartland of America---WLAC.
In the late 1950s the audiences for rhythm and blues shows in my home town began to
consist of a sprinkling of whites. There was one concert I recall where Lavern Baker did a
bump and grind so raunchy, rubbing the area around her crotch when she sang the lyrics
"Lookee, Lookee, Look at that Sugar Plum," from her hit "Jim Dandy", that High school
girls got up en masse and fled in sheer terror. Us guys stood lingering for several beats
longer, staring in amazement, until finally being dragged away by our girlfriends.
Some of my forbearers, the owners of a Boston slave firm, Shelton and Sons, had been
directly involved in the brokering of slaves responsible for the historic Amistad slave ship

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rebellion back in 1839; a piece of information about which I still don't know whether to be
ashamed of or perversely proud. More than a hundred years after that (and nearly as long
after the Emancipation Proclamation) in classic sins-of-the-father fashion, the emotional
byproducts of slavery were still being visited upon the minds of white American teenagers
in the 1950s. My mother had begun doing everything in her power to disabuse me of what
she correctly perceived, based on my music tastes, were my growing pro-black sympathies.
This included on one occasion telling me that my sister had been beaten up by some black
thugs from the other side of the projects where we lived. It was a total fabrication. In the
1950s if there had been deprogrammers for white teens who approved of integration, Mom
would've given them her business. Come to think of it there was such an outfit, called the
KKK. There was an upside, howeverat least where I was concerned-for as Texas
columnist Molly Ivins has written, "Once you figure out they are lying to you about race,
you start to question everything."
In my early teens I also began to find myself increasingly hostile to the underpinnings
of organized religion, with its averted gaze away from-and shoring up of-racism and
segregation. I was packed off, invariably alone, to church, and often just walked through the
woods kicking up leaves for a couple of hours. The times I actually attended usually found
me answering roll call in a surly manner, with the shortest verse from the Bible: "Jesus
Wept." This was always met with giggles from the others. One time I sneaked into an empty
Sunday School classroom and drew crossed eyes on Jesus' portrait, resulting in a minor
scandal. For weeks I waited on a lightning bolt from on High to smite me low, but I never
copped!
Then one Sunday, a year or so before Brown v. Board of Ed was passed, something
happened that changed my attitude toward going to church-at least for a while. One of my
Methodist Sunday School classmates asked the teacher, Mrs. Morrison:

51.
"What will we do when we have to go to school with niggers next
year?"
Without missing so much as a beat, the teacher replied:
"Well, Susie, what would you do if you were blind and had no way of telling whether
the person sitting next to you was colored OR white? What would you do then?"
From the look that crossed over the young faces in the room, you would have sworn
Mrs. Morrison, with her simplistic analogy, had cracked the very riddle of existence. Here
was true Christianity in action I decided and she became my personal hero. I was doubly
impressed because she was from one of the "better" families in town. I began going to
church a little more regularly, hoping to encounter other similarly profound moral
teachings. But I never did.
In 1955, when I was in the tenth grade, the day finally arrived that little Susie dreaded
so; schools in Charleston, West Virginia, and everywhere else in America were finally
integrated. On the very first day of the new school year, more out of sheer outrageousness
than social consciousness, several like-minded pals and myself made it a point to
systematically and self-consciously annex a black friend- "Ooooh, that one looks nice, let's
get her." Little did we realize how close we were to the plantation mentality of our parents.
Despite my offensively proprietary approach toward secure a black friend, the object of that
quest for communitas, Cynthia, remains a friend of mine more than forty years later.
The atmosphere at Stonewall Jackson High-named after the famed southern general, of
all people-was certainly not at all like Little Rock and other hot spots around the country.
My black and white classmates were uncomfortable and embarrassed during the first few
weeks of the new school year. Then, at the first student talent assembly, three black girls
calling themselves the Debonaires came out and did a letter perfect reproduction of the
then-popular Quintones' "Down the Aisle of Love" and the entire student body went

52.
absolutely wild. After that, the tension began to ease considerably.
"Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies!," counsels poet Frank O'Hara in his
salute to the golden age of movie going, "Ave Maria." And go to them we did in droves in
the 1950s, whether our parents knew we were at the "picture shows" or not. . .and not
always with whom. Shortly after The Debonairs poured elixir of soul on troubled waters at
that High school assembly, a daringly integrated bunch of us went to see the movie Island
in the Sun together. We cheered when Harry Belafonte touched Joan Fontaine's hand, but
finally booed when they copped out and didn't lock lips. The rumor was that they kissed-a
movie first-and we were mightily ticked off when they didn't.
We saw the disappointing Island in the Sun at the Kearse; one of three big movie houses
in town. The Kearse showed Twentieth-Century-Fox "product," along with Buena VistaDisney; the Virginian exhibited Warner Bros., Paramount and Universal; and the Capital
had a lock on MGM and RKO. One other downtown theater, the Rialto, located in an office
building, exhibited fare that no one else wanted to show (or see for that matter). It was there
that I viewed such oddities and major studio castoffs as The 5000 Fingers of Doctor T, a
theme double bill (both were about floods in rural communities and both starred Jo Van
Fleet) consisting of This Angry Age (featuring Silvana Mangano) and Elia Kazan's Wild
River; Russ Meyer's The Immoral Mister Teas, and somewhat harder later on (although not
X), films like Suburbia Confidential. I saw it several times, not so much for the sex as for
its inadvertent surrealist content, which included scenes of a reflexively heterosexual man
romping around in his wife's undergarments, only to get caught in the act by a surprisingly
sympathetic mate, and another wild swing 'n' swap pair who get off sexually by pouring
(shades of Anita Bryant) containers of orange juice over one another. In later years, Ed
(Plan Nine) Wood scholars have denied the director's participation in this soft core
messterpiece; but if not by the master himself, it was certainly "school of Wood." It was

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also at the Rialto that I witnessed a strange little number about a walking, talking TV set,
The Twonky, directed by Arch Oboler, and starring Hans Conreid. I recently came across an
article about this "Lost Rarity of Film and TV From Decades Past," in which its producer, a
chap by the name of Sidney Pink, declares the film a "$300,000 mess." Many years later,
however, I continue to remember The Twonky (which its producer claims almost
singlehandedly managed to kill off the Sci-Fi film genre) as being. . . swell.
In addition to the Rialto, there were approximately twenty other smaller, second-run,
double-feature neighborhood theaters in Charleston, including twothe Greenbriar and
Lyricon infamous Summers Street, which were parentally off limits to all but trashiest of
local youth due to their regional resemblance to Bowery grind houses. What it was we were
supposed to be avoiding was never exactly spelled out to us by our parents, but had
something to do with rats nibbling on your toes and about winos (perhaps nibbling on other
parts of your anatomy). The Greenbriar was where they played producer Kroger Babb's
cycle of films like Mom and Dad"separate showings for men and women and a nurse in
attendance at all times"---which seemed to come around every six months or so.
Occasionally, the Greenbriar even got religion when local church groups "four-walled" the
place for showings of regionally-filmed, cheesy bible pageants featuring cross-eyed Jesuses
and hillbilly Marys. These were a genre unto themselves.
TV was still a novelty and the big movie houses in town were open seven days a week
from noon to midnight, with the noon weekday shows (adults, fifty cents; children, a
quarter) occupied by a handful of straying housewives and perhaps a couple of kids, like
myself, playing hooky. I can still vividly recall the way the sound bounced off the walls
during these sparsely occupied times as the images were thrown on the screen non-stop- the
lights never came up. The Lyric was top heavy on westerns, and when the bus from the coal
mine camps pulled up in front of it on weekends, nearly all the passengers would empty out

54.
into it in an ant-like trail. In his essay on the movies, "The Devil Finds Work," James
Baldwin observed that people did not go to see Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, but Sam
Spade as Humphrey Bogart. If that's true, then who were these obscure (to me) Vera Hruba
Ralstons and Jane Frazees advertised on the one-sheets outside the sub-respectable Lyric
and Greenbriar where Monogram and Republic films had their local premieres? Who were
these Weaver Brothers and Elviry, and the Three Mesquiteers? I was destined never to find
out. Only when the original Godzilla premiered at the Greenbriar---and I was fairly along in
my teens---did I dare enter its dreaded inner sanctum. In the final analysis, my upcoming
loss of virginity proved easier than my belated first visit to this long-maligned movie house.
A childhood's worth of parental bad press accorded the Greenbriar died hard while my heart
beat like a hammer as I skulked my way into the place and found a seat. I felt rejected when
the movie was over and I had not been advanced upon by a single one among the Raincoat
Brigade's number. For as long as I could remember, authority figures kept warning me
about a dangerous strangers at the Greenbriar, Lyric and elsewhere, but none ever
materialized.
There was also a foreign film house in town, the Best Art, but since it was an hour and
two bus transfers away from where I lived, I never went there much (besides. . . who were
these Alec Guinesses and Jean Cocteaus anyway?). The Best was the theater of choice of
professors from the two local colleges, and chemical plant executives from out of state
(who tended to be Unitarians). It was also the haunt of Randal High, eventually one of the
few friends I had in High school who proved to be more than just someone to hang out,
listen to rock and roll, and chew gum with.
A few years after I saw Godzilla at the Greenbriar, I finally succumbed to the lure of the
Lyric when a triple bill of Joy House (Lola Albright and Alain Delon!),Who's Been Sleeping
in My Bed (Dean Martin and Carol Burnett!), and Lady in a Cage (Olivia De Havilland and

55.
James Caan!), whose scandalous reputation preceded it (but which no other theater in town
would exhibit) proved too much for me to resist. A tribute to castrating mothers the world
over, this tale of a nasty, rich woman trapped in her private elevator while a gang of street
trash stage a murderous orgy in her house-right before her eyes-may well have been the last
non-porno film to incite rampant controversy. A kind of Oedipus in Tarzana, "Cagey Lady"
was totally minus any redeeming social value, with all the characters looking like they had
stopped off to visit the film on the way from one genre to another: "Why are they showing
these people on the screen?" reviewers cried out. The experience proved well worth all the
rats scampering over my feet and the gum stuck to my shoe soles it cost me to view this
Citizen Kane of sleeze during my maiden foray to Charleston's notorious Lyric; which
fittingly, not long after, became the first theater in town to go "Triple X." It wasn't until
years later at New York revival houses that I saw films in the sub-Technicolor process, TruColor (films in it were shown almost exclusively at the Lyric and Greenbriar), and realized
what I had been missing all those years; blues and greens and reds you could eat with a
spoon like Joan Crawford's lips in Johnny Guitar, which seemed to float twenty feet in
front of the screen. No one laid a hand on me at the Lyric either. It wouldn't have counted
anyway; by that time, I was almost "legal. I still hadn't completely figured out sex, but I
craved acceptance, no matter what form it came in.
CHAPTER FIVE: Randy and the Romilars
Looking like the answer to a riddle that was perhaps left unasked, Randal High could
often be spotted loping about 1950s Charleston always alone, dressed in black, shapeless,
neo-existential attire, eating cottage cheese from the container, and chainsmoking cigarettes.
The French would have called him louche, Americans would say "a local character." He was
a year older than I, and even though we had both gone to the same schools and lived in
Charleston nearly all our lives, we had never spoken. Randal was far too formidable a

56.
presence for me to consider approaching; he didn't even know I existed. But his flamboyant
presence was nearly impossible for me, or anyone else for that matter, not to notice. I was
later to learn that, during these perambulations he was probably on his way to or from the
Best Theater, Charleston's lone movie "art house," where classy foreign films with trashy
new English titles were unspooled, e.g., Ingmar Bergman's Summer With Monika became
hot damn! the Story of a Bad Girl, and the perfectly innocent Summer Interlude (also
Bergman) was retitled Illicit Interlude, thanks to a skinny dipping scene that would barely
raise an eyebrow today. But Randal also hung out at the redneck pool room, The Strand,
where he liked to taunt and tease the locals. It's a fact that most of the "better" downtown
establishments my mother aspired to do business with---Woodrum's Furniture; the Diamond
Department Store, a gigantic operation half the size of New York's Macy's; Frankenburger's
Men's Shop, etc.---have long since left this earth for chapter eleven heaven. But the last time
I looked, The Strand just kept rolling along, significantly unchanged from forty years ago.
Randal was nearly as visible and omnipresent on downtown streets as local idiot
savant, Lightning. Called that, not in irony due to his sluggish gait, but because of an
astonishing and unfathomable ability to instantaneously solve complex mathematical
problems.
"How many bricks on the north side of that building, Lightning?"
"100, 422!"
He was invariably correct, with his gifts extending far beyond of simple math into the
realms of algebra and geometry. Lightning brought glory to Charleston one time by
appearing in Ripley's popular "Believe or Not" newspaper strip.
In the 12th grade Randal stopped being such a loner and formed a salon of sorts
modeled after the kind of thing he'd been reading about in Evelyn Waugh. All male, of
course. I was one year behind Randal in school when I was taken to meet him by Tom

57.
Meeker, a mutual friend. Tom, who was straight, found Randal's gay-as-a-box-of-birds
attitude a perfect antidote to Rhoda, the inflexible grandmother mainly responsible for
raising him and his brother, Jim. Slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun, Rhodey was never
the same after JFK's pivotal Democratic primary/"Papal Conspiracy" win in West Virginia.
As Tom and I made our way up the walk to the house Randal lived in with his parents,
he warned me not to be too taken aback by what I was about to see. Reaching the door of
the modest two-story house, we rang the bell, waited, rang again, and waited some more.
Then, just as Tom and I were about to give up and walk away, the door opened slightly. A
bloodshot eye peered out and from within there came a voice in stilted British tones, "I'm
not receiving this evening." The door slammed closed, and there was little doubt in my
mind to whom the voice and inflamed eye belonged. I learned later that Randal had been in
bed indulging himself in a nightly regimen of terpan hydrate and codeine when we rang and
he didn't want to be disturbed. These were the final days of network radio, and Randal liked
to wile away the hours getting lit on codeine, turning off all the lights, pulling the covers up
over his head and listening to murder mysteries.
"If it rains, I'm in heaven. I only do about an ounce a night, but it gets the job done. "
Randal's Friday-Saturday night scene consisted of as many taboo and quasi-adult
activities (short of sex) as could be crammed into one tight little back room; smoking
cigarettes (only recherche brands like Fatima and Helmar would do), and listening to the
latest jazz. Occasionally he would punctuate the goings on by tripping into the living room
and tearing into the handful of Bach preludes and fugues he'd solely practiced over and over
again since he was old enough to reach the keyboard. Tom Meeker's brother, Jim, also
heterosexually inclined, but similarly amused by Randal's outre ways, was also often
present for the revels; today he is the music director for a local Pentacostal church, but
remains tolerant and approachable whenever I go home for visits. Years ahead of his time,

58.
Randal High was a 6' 3" radically effeminate proto-Cockette, who looked like Bette Davis,
pop eyes and all, and possessed an outlook on life much like Quentin Crisp. He wore dark
horn rimmed glasses and was (his description) "thin-thin-thin." He affected eye makeup
most of the time ("Lucky Tiger Butch Eye Liner," he quipped) and deemed his overall style,
"The Future Look" In fact, he wasn't far off; when David Bowie surfaced in the early
sixties, Randal could have sued. He smoked cigarettes openly from a very early age, which
in that day and age, especially in the south, was practically tantamount to shooting heroin.
The drag name he gave himself was Mildred, his mother's actual name (his father's was
Henry). Somewhere in the familial mix was a slightly older sister, Sandy, whom I never
met, but was said to be as straight as Randal was bent. She loathed her over-the-top brother.
If Randal was living out an Evelyn Waugh novel, his mother was trapped in Mother
Knows Best-ville. She occasionally made stabs at enacting her motherly duties. Poking her
head in the doorway of Randal's teenage den of iniquity, she chirped:
"I've just baked up a fresh batch of. . ." "Out!," Randal bellowed.
". . .oatmeal cookies."
"Out! O-U-T. OUT!," Randal would continue to imperiously insist in his best Charles
Laughton tones until she skittishly scurried off, only to return every hour or so for a
reenactment of this sado-masochistic mother-and-son ritual:
"Let me know if you boys need anything. . ."
She obviously thought, all the wrongness might go away if she kept behaving like
Harriet Nelson long enough. Where and how, in the 1950s, this "p.k." (preacher's kid) from
Appalachia learned to deport himself in such a haute flaming manner I never quite figured
out. Was it simply a case of too many Clifton Webb movies at the Camden Theatre in
Weston, West Virginia, where Randal spent his earliest years? Whatever the reason, it never
failed to amaze me that this singular creature was the son of a conservative Methodist

59.
minister and his wife who, to their eternal credit, stood by their son and supported him even
as he went out into the world to become something of a major embarrassment to them and,
by extension, the church. How did a ninth grader (that's how old Randal was when he first
got hooked) with a serious codeine habit manage to maintain it for several years without
anyone getting any the wiser? Before prescriptions were required for the stuff, he would
take buses to various parts of town and score at different drug stores. Then, after the law was
passed controlling such substances in the late-1950s, he would sign fake names on registers
that pharmacists were required to keep. Charleston isn't so large a town that he could keep
this up forever. He then switched to over-the-counter Romilar cough syrup, which at one
time packed much more of a wallop than the denatured stuff sold under that brand name
today. Here is incontrovertible truth that when you're young, anything's possible: Despite the
codeine, cigarettes, six-packs, mascara, and late school nights spent at the local art cinema,
Randal still managed to become his High school class valedictorian. The following autumn
he began his first year at Duke University on a full scholarship, all the while I was slogging
through my final year in High school with barely passing marks. During school vacations
Randal came home and and we'd hang out together. Once I visited him at Duke but the
scene there, usually consisting of gangs of freshmen fags piling into cars and driving into
town to "wreck" the locals ten years in advance of Stonewall-"Yoo Hoo! Sailor!"-was far
too rich for my teenage blood. Once we even took our "act" on the road, driving to Virginia
Beach, Virginia to hear Jimmy Rushing at a jazz festival. It was more than worth the
somewhat lengthy car journey. At one point, "Mister Five by Five" locked himself into
shouting the riff "We're gonna rock this joint tonight" over and over again for what seemed
like several minutes until the outdoor audience of ten-thousand seemed on the verge of
levitating. Never, since then, have I doubted the power and the glory of the blues. I had
entertained misgivings about fanning this far out into the world with Highly unpredictable

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Randal, but we made it all the way through the festival proper without incident.
On the way home we decided to stop for a drink at a roadside bar where Randal
proceded to drop coins into an all-hillbilly juke box. The redneck atmosphere was soon
cleaved by the sound of-the one fatal exception to the jukebox's all c'n'w repertoire-a
recording by jazz singer, Gloria Lynne intoning some standard; the title of which I have
long since forgotten. This was followed by another play and another play and another, ad
infinitum. The good-ole-boy-tears-in-your-beer music crowd began to get restless as the
selection spun over and over again. This was back when you still got twenty spins for a
buck. How the disc managed its anomalous way onto the Rock-Ola model 1428 in such
hostile and alien territory is anyone's guess, but around the tenth spin the bar maid could
keep her council no more:
"Who played that crappy thing?"
The bar became stock still silent, all eyes turned toward her. But no
answer was immediately forthcoming. No doubt you've guessed the culprit by now.
"I SAID. . . who played that crappy thing?"
Randal took one final puff of his cig, slammed his beer down on the
bar, sloshing most of it out of the glass, and in his very best Tallulah voice bellowed:
"Shut your crappy mouth!"
The air was at once filled with the sound of chairs and barstoolsscraping across the
floor; everyone in the place jumping to their feet to protect the honor of their beloved
beverage server. And I found myself in the midst of what promised to turn into a very ugly
barroom brawl. Managing a dash to the exit, we made our getaway in my tiny little Renault
4 CV. All that was missing from the picture was a carload of good ole boys following in hot
pursuit, firing hot lead into our departing tails.
After we'd driven a safe distance I asked him:

61.
"Why did go and pull a crazy stunt like that for?"
"You know how much I adore Gloria Lynne. Besides. . . they looked
bored. "
***
David Shay was a member of Randal's set by default; he lived next door to the
Highs. He also happened to be an "obvious" and classic example of the bespectacled,
overweight teenage sissyboy. The kind that oh-so butch classmates loved to taunt, goose,
grab at his crotch, and make life a living hell. There were also the rude witticisms: "Hey,
Shay! Did anyone ever tell you that you walk like you're trying to hold a nickel between
your knees?" No self-respecting male-myself included I must confess-dared not crack up.
Perhaps they protested a bit too much. Today Shay would perhaps only be thought of as
geeky. But sadly and tragically, not long after college had begun for most of us, he
committed suicide by attaching a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car---after which nearly all
of us in Randal's circle received personalized suicide notes. In most all of them---including
mine---he lamented his inability to deal with his repressed homosexuality. Suicidal, but
nonetheless perceptive, our stocky redheaded friend had more of an inkling about where
most of our true sexual loyalties lay than we ourselves did. In all likelihood none of us had
had sex with another male yet, much less admitted to ourselves that we might be gay. Not
myself; not even Randal. But David Shay knew.
In those clouded times, so naive were we about matters concerning "the third sex" that
when a potboiler about it, "The Sixth Man," raced to the top of the non-fiction bestseller list
in 1960, one among us was deputized to lurk about Charleston's only book store and
furtively snap up a copy. The deed done, we clandestinely passed it amongst ourselves,
certain-who knew from Krafft and Ebing?-this was literally the only book ever to be
published on the subject.

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***
The mutual adolescent insult humor constantly bantered back and forth between Lynn--aside from Randal, my one other true friend in High school---and myself was really a way
of masking teen sexual tension. Supposedly she was fat and possessed a big nose. In fact,
she was an attractive Teri Garr lookalike. In exchange, Lynn alluded to my beady eyes as
looking like "two slits with wallpaper showing through," and the color of my lank, drab hair
as being "protestant brown rat fur." How could I help but be drawn to anyone possessing
such flip verbal dexterity?: Protestant Brown Rat Fur! Clowning around, I once put two
lighted cigarettes between my lips. Without missing a beat, Lynn said: "You look like an
elephant with his tusks on fire." Not exactly Shavian, but close enough for jazz. Lynn,
however, wasn't all that sophisticated. There were black holes of ignorance that took your
breath away. I discovered one of them in the tenth grade when I used the word "prostitute"
in her presence. She'd never heard the word before! I told her the meaning, and she began to
cry, pummeling me, screaming: "There's no such thing! There's no such thing!" I thought
she was joking. But Lynn's mother was known about town as a "loose" woman, and my
"prostitute" concept had struck a chord.
After High school Lynn moved away from Charleston. Not too long afterward, hearing
a car pull up in front of my house, I looked out the living room window to spy her seated
behind the wheel of a brand new Cadillac convertible and looking absolutely smashing. We
went for a spin. Finally I could contain my curiosity no longer:
"But how can you afford. . .I mean. . .."
"Remember the thing you told me about in High school that I didn't believe? About
women who got paid for having sex? Well, you were right! That's what I do now. That's how
I paid for this car."
It was as if a ten-ton Acme Brand weight had just fallen on me. With the possible

63.
exception of losing my dad when I was five, I had never felt more pole-axed in all my life.
Remaining silent until she pulled up in front of my house, I got out of the car, slammed the
door with all my might, and saying not a word or looking back, I went inside. I wondered
for the next several days about what it was Lynn had wanted from me in exchange for the
inappropriately casual revelation. Approval? Sex? I couldn't decide. Was there an outside
chance she might have been making a joke? During the next few weeks, I learned from
others that Lynn had been deadly serious; she was now living in Florida with her mother in
a town nearby booming Cape Canaveral where she had set up shop. Argggh! A dagger to
the heart. Hard enough as it was for me to deal with this reality, shortly afterward I received
the terrible news that, only weeks after our car ride together, back in Florida, Lynn had
killed herself with a bullet through her head. She had also taken the life of her half-term
baby. Clearly she had come to me to make a clean breast of things and to ask me to marry
her. Now Lynn's death---as well as my sense of guilt---was a part of me nearly every
waking moment: "If only I had let her finish what she had to say," I remonstrated against
myself endlessly. It was my first strong inkling, in my teens, that life as an adult might not
be all clear skies and green lights. Then one day, a few months later, I came across the
following poem, "The Ruined Maid," by Thomas Hardy
"O' Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperity?
O didn't you know I'd been ruined?, said she. "
I got that far, then had to put down the book, unable to finish Hardy's poem. The next
day I picked the poem up again and finished reading it It held eerily subjective resonance:
"You left us in tatters without shoes or socks
Tired of digging potatoes and speeding up clocks

64.
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three
Yes, that's how we dress when we're ruined said she."
The poem helped me understand that the choice ultimately made by Thomas Hardy's
maid, and by Lynn, was self-directed. I began to divest myself of some of the emotional
mayhem brought on by what I felt was the part I had played in her death. I'd not put the gun
to her head. This was the first time I was to experience the potential for healing in art. But it
was far from the last time I thought of Lynn; almost daily, four decades later, I still think of
her.
As for Randal High, eventually he was thrown out of Duke, after which he enrolled at
(where else but) the Sorbonne, where he flunked out as well. Home from Europe, he
attempted suicide (about which, more later), got cancer, and despite his massive beer and
cigarette intake, finally cured himself of the disease homeopathically. He now subsists on
"remittance" money from home, and roams about the south, still playing the part of classic
local town "character," passing himself off as a self-styled "writer" in places like Asheville
and Louisville. Just about he only piece of work he ever published, though, with the
exception of a couple of things in obscure rock mags, was a diary-type affair, "Confessions
of Randal High," that I included in my one-shot little magazine, Soon, issued in 1974.
Here's my favorite passage:
"This morning Bill the Hippie came over to tell me that he had mono and had to go
home to Philly:
Home to Philly (1947) Richard Conte and Teresa Wright. A bitter girl tries to save her
marriage for the sake of the babies. They live in a white house with four rooms. In the
mornings they catch the bus, he to the factory, she to the millinery shop. On Saturdays they
go to the park. It rains, but what matter? A summer shower really. The light fades. She takes
his hand with her left, her right hand pushing the pram (twins!). The End."

65.
Randall didn't actually write "Confessions," it was something I cobbled together from
the pounds and pounds of letters I had received from him over the years. "Confessions"
also contained portions of some of the hundreds of crank letters he fired off in the late
sixties and early seventies to the likes of: Paulene Kael ("Why don't you take on a bigger
target than movies-like the survival of the planet or the salvation of the human spirit? Why
be so. . . popcorn?"); Philip Morris Tobacco Co. ("Why keep advertising a dead brand like
Parliment? The filter that works like a cigarette holder bullshit. That mouthpiece is an
annoyance at best and collapsible wet cardboard that pulls skin off your lips at worst. ");
and Brendan Gill ("Surely this [Gill's bio of Tallulah B.] could have been done without
publicly battering a once-noble dead woman. If this is the case it has been done with better
skill-see Styron's Lie Down in Darkness").
Soon also contained pioneer rock crit Richard Meltzer's meditation on the comic strip
form: "It All Started With Pud", an essay on the various screen versions of Frankenstein by
film critic David Ehrenstein (about whom much more later), and a dialogue between Randal
and me, writing under the pseudonyms Georgie Brocade and Michael Drink (me), on the
subject of our favorite rock band at the time: "The Beach Boys: Their Big Change-Over to
Heavy Kid Music and What It Really Means. " I think I can truthfully say in all modesty
that Soon 1 is the finest little mag-Ever-that sold no copies. . .except for one that ended up
in the Library of Congress!
As for myself, without mastering much of anything beyond simple math, reading, and
bas-relief salt maps, I barely managed to graduate High school-"escape" might be a better
word-which I managed to do through a combination of cheating, cajolery, Classics
Illustrated comics, and throwing myself on the mercy of sympathetic teachers ("Pleeeeese
give me a 'C'!"). What to do next in life after High school was a total mystery to me,
especially after I heard the results of an aptitude test I'd taken in my senior year. It was

66.
interpreted for me by my minister:
"Now, this doesn't mean that-ahem-that. . .you have to understand these are merely
technical terms. . .it doesn't mean that you are a. . .you have, it seems, a great many more of
what are called feminine traits than masculine ones. But that doesn't mean that you're
a . . .." I laughed so hard that he never even got a chance to utter the dreaded word,
"homosexual."
Finally he cut to the verb:
"Bill, after analyzing the results it seems that the thing you're best cut out to be in life is
a. . .a. ..a. . . ."
"Yes? Reverend Bennett! Yes?"
. . . .a forest ranger.
All those years of adolescent isolation were finally starting to pay off.
CHAPTER SIX: With No Mother to Guide Him
"I'm tired of taking care of you. You look after yourself this time! You cook and feed
yourself! You turn on the heat when it gets cold! I'm the child or at least I was until
recently you're supposed to take care of me. I'm sick of this."
My mother only snored and rolled over in bed. I don't even think she heard me.
My hopes had never been higher and I had never been angrier: during the early part of
my freshman year in college, my mother had maintained sobriety for more than a month-a
record-but finally couldn't take it anymore. Gilbey's Gin, dreams, fears, anxieties and
parental responsibilities in tow, she had taken to bed for one of her extended stupors.
Another record of sorts was also set: during her drunks I usually stayed away from home
only for a night, mostly with my grandmother, this time I was gone for three days. When I
returned I found her body ice cold and lifeless where I had left her three days earlier-in bed.
No one felt the need for an autopsy; Mary Reed had drunk herself to death was the general

67.
consensus. I knew differently. Depriving her of the care and attention she relied upon from
me when drinking heavily-making sure that she was covered up, bringing her food-I had
committed murder. Plain and simple. I'm not sure if that's the way I felt at the time, but
eventually I did. And it took years for an army of mental health professionals to disabuse me
of the notion; to convince me it wasn't my intention to do away with my mother, but to
punish like a parent does a child. I should never have had to give my childhood over to
taking care of both my mother and myself for as long as I could remember. Now, conflating
my roles of both son and caretaker, I'd finally snapped. Symbolically, as a parent, I sent her
to her room without food, then stormed out of the house like the teenager I still was.
Abandoning my mother the way I did that day, I was acting badly and irrationally; but that's
what teenagers do sometimes. But I loved my mother no matter what, and I'm still sorry I
wasn't able to exactly fulfill her final wish. Only weeks before her death my mom had told
me that when she died she wanted her body, like in the old days back in Clay county, kept at
home until the time of the funeral. (It was an ominous presentiment.) But my brother and
sisters would have none of this, and a compromise was effected. Reluctantly, I was allowed
to sleep on a couch beside the casket at the funeral home. And while no phosphoric specters
appeared that night, I awoke the next morning with tiny little icicles hanging from my nose.
I made up my mind, then and there, this would be the last time I ever again did anything
nice for a dead person. . . . as long as I lived. Why hadn't someone warned me? The second
night my mother was on her own in the funeral home, while I stayed with my older sister,
Ruth Dolores. The day before the funeral I wanted to be alone at the movies but the general
consensus was, "What would the neighbors say if they saw you at the picture show?" I
became hysterical, was force-fed sedatives by my brother (the drug salesman), and locked in
a bedroom till the funeral.
Friends belonging to groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Adult Children of

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Alcoholics have tried whipping me into a frenzy of resentment over my early years, but it
simply will not come. My mother's multiple failures as a parent notwithstanding, most
notably her drinking, I felt loved by her. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Sober, she
was a doting parent who made me feel I was the center of the universe; she told me I was
special and capable of great things. The problem was, she never gave a clue as to how I
might go about achieving such marvelousness. A common and forgivable parental error.
Starting in grade school on up through high school I had always worked. First in the AllAmerican capacity as a paper boy, and later on as a clerk in a grocery store. But I 'd never
before had a gun at my head and a wolf at the door. My mother always provided, but she
left no will or inheritance. What she did leave behind was every receipt for every bill she
had paid in her adult life, going all the way to the mid-teens-all neatly organized by month
and year. It was emblematic of how, while in some ways she may have played fast and
loose, in others she conducted her affairs close to the belt. Now I needed money, and fast!
In high school I had worked part time at an FM classical radio station, WKNA, which
possessed a signal barely strong enough to make it down the block and around the comer.
And it had no bathroom! Thanks to the mercifully lengthy movements of the long hair
music, however, I could jump in the car, make it home, take care of business---all the while
keeping my fingers crossed that the disc didn't get stuck, (Go to your A and P and Pee and
Pee. . .) and usually make it back to the station before the needle hit the spiral-in at the end
of a side.
After my mother's death I was able to succeed sideways, in local media, to a job as a dj
at another radio station; this time, one that cranked out a steady diet of country and
western music. C n' W was just beginning to throw off its hillbilly image and heading (in
the vernacular of its p.r. apologists) "uptown." But country wasn't the main source of the
station's (and my) economic survival. Every weekday morning for a couple of hours after

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sign-on and nearly all weekend, the shows on WRDS consisted almost entirely of paid live
religious programming. Each succeeding half hour found me herding Elmer Gantry-types,
along with their flocks, into and out of the studio. . .all within the space of a minute-long
station break. So moved by the SPIRIT might preacher number one become, lying there on
the floor of the radio studio, foaming at the mouth and talking in tongues, that he failed to
grasp his radio time was up. Whenever this happened the next man of god in line for air
time (of a subtly distinct and opposing school of religious thought) as likely as not became
provoked, often to violence: "Take THAT, you snakehandling tub of shit!" Pow! I had to
referee these Revs. Skeens vs. Skaggs contretemps, causing me to long for the simpler
times of "Little Dickie's Kiddie Karnival"---my first radio show, at age eleven.
There were other problems as well: one particular faith healer, although he had been
warned repeatedly not to exhort listeners to touch their radio and get healed (a serious
violation of FCC rules), stilI managed to try and sneak it in. I kept my hand on the panic
switch the entire time he was on the air. Playing nursemaid to a bunch of religious
charlatans, plus the country music I also had to spin, along with the on-air name I went by,
Bouncin' Bill Reed (ulp!), are things I still can't look back on with much in the way of
humor. When I could take it no longer, late one night, after a long day of religious
programming, I played Miles Davis' "Four" just to see what would happen. The transmitter
didn't explode; the phone didn't ring! The moral being-simply-the station had no listeners.
***
It was always expected of me that, upon graduation from high school, I would then go on
to college. Due to my wretched academic showing the previous twelve years, however,
there was only one school that would accept me---West Virginia State College. Located in
the nearby town of Institute, during its glory years (along with schools such as
Wilberforce, Spelman, Tuskegee, and Morehouse), "State" had been one of the country's

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most famous "historically black" schools of higher education. Founded in 1891, over the
years its faculty has included the likes of historian Carter Woodson and musician Clarence
Cameron White. At one time or another, nearly all of this century's most famous AfricanAmerican achievers-including Roland Hayes, Langston Hughes, the Fisk Jubilee Singers,
W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson-have appeared on its campus as visitors,
guest lecturers or teachers. Indeed, there was a time when being a graduate of "State" was
the African-American equivalent of being a Harvard or Yale man. However, because West
Virginia State was a public accommodation, the advent of the Supreme Court's Brown v.
the Board of Education ruling in 1954 found the school legally forced to become an
integrated institution. The next few years saw WVS becoming transformed into an
undistinguished port in the storm for (mostly) commuting whites too poor and/or too
academically undistinguished to gain admission elsewhere. Such as myself -on both
counts. If you could match numbers and letters, you were admitted. Thanks to an unbroken
line of black school presidents, however, "State" has been able to hold on to a sense of its
black history despite the 1950s mass invasion by myself and thousands of underachieved
Caucasians.
"State" found me no more committed to my studies than I had been in high school;
however, thanks to the historical reverberations around me, I began to develop an interest in
African-American history and culture. And I started writing for the school paper, "The
Yellow Jacket. " My first contribution, entitled the "Misanthrope," and strongly reflecting
the healthy doses of skepticism received at my grandmother's knee, was devoted to a
skewering of the then highly-influential right wing Moral Rearmament movement and its
propaganda-laden ensemble of touring, freshly-scrubbed (down to the third layer of skin),
relentlessly optimistic teenage performers known as "Up With People." Even though I had
never before put pen to paper to compose so much as a grocery list---essays and such were

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never required of me before in public school---I must have compensated for my failure by
being an adept critical reader: I wrote this first column in fifteen minutes. I described the
flag-waving group as "Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians with acne." I noted one
repellently simplistic tableaux about racial tolerance wherein a little boy ponders the color
of God's skin, which his father tells him is "White, Red, Yellow, Brown and Black."
Conversely, in my "Misanthrope" column, I observed, "A riddle might go like this:
Question: "What has White, Red, Yellow, Brown and Black skin?" Answer: "God!" "Why,"
I continued, "was there no jazz? Why, no classical music? Cellists are patriotic just like you
nt me. What is so unpatriotic about being anything other than puerile and banal? What is so
uplifting about watered down folk music and thirties Broadway?"
I closed my review on the following note:
"For those rankled by the sundry pap, there was just revenge.
Shortly after the second act began, the auditorium was invaded by a gang of Hell's Angels
who roared through the crowd of 7,000 riding their Harleys through the assemblage
throwing fire-bombs, spilling blood, pillaging (even plundering a little), and making off
with fifteen of the more nubile participants. The carnage amounted to 175 dead, 400
injured. "
All fairly harmless (and jejune) stuff, granted; but a bit rough for a college newspaper in
the near-south.
I continued with "The Misanthrope" on a bi-weekly basis-even though I had subtitled
the first one "A One-Shot Column"---and it began to attract attention outside the campus,
even managing to win a couple of national student journalism competitions. It was thrilling
to receive my first hate mail after the Moral Rearmament column. . .consisting of exactly
one letter. But it was a phone call I received from L.T. Anderson, city editor and columnist
of the newspaper, the "Charleston Gazette," that meant the most to me and had the greatest

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impact. A left-of-liberal light shining in a bad old world, Anderson had begun his
journalistic crusade to bring a modicum of enlightenment to West Virginia in the mid-l940s.
I'd been reading him almost from the time I was old enough to sound consonants and
vowels. He had rung up to congratulate me on my skills as a satirist. It was quite a
compliment from someone who knew what he was talking about.
In his column, "Anderson in Reverse," the West Virginia native's Swiftian targets
included, among other socio-political phenomena: double think, newspeak, public
hypocrisy, but especially my grandmother's old bete noir: crooked, nepotistic, ineffectual
and/or do-nothing politicians. In general, Anderson used the power of the written word to
drag West Virginia kicking and screaming out of the primeval ooze of fundamentalist
superstition into the age of Civil Libertarianism. The opinions expressed in his daily
column played a major role in helping the region move through the post-integration era
with so little upheaval. Anderson also campaigned always in a tone of amused, detached
skepticism, against racism, organized religion, and West Virginia's (at one time) Calvinist
liquor laws. And through it all rang out the implicit call to soak the rich and tax the church.
The closest L.T. Anderson ever came to gaining wide attention outside of West Virginia
(something in which he apparently has little interest) was during what came to be known
nationally as the Kanawha County Text Book Wars-a censorship flap of major proportions
played out in Charleston and environs in the mid-1970s when the "futurist/secular
humanist/relativist" content of certain textbooks stuck in the craw of local fundamental
religionists. The fallout included: up to 1,000 protesters forcing schools to close for days at a
time, absenteeism running at 50 to 90 per cent in schools most affected, wildcat strikes by up
to 10,000 coal miners in apparent sympathy with the protest, resignations by the school
board president and the superintendent of schools, two dynamite blasts, fire bombings of
schools, one shooting and one car blown up. Included on the index of undesirable selections

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in the various textbooks were writings by Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, Gwendolyn Brooks,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Curiously-or not so-nearly all the banned writers
were either black or Jewish.
As the factions squared off against one another, beginning in the fall of 1974 and
continuing on into the next year, Anderson's was by far the most prominent voice raised in
opposition to the book banners. As a result of his journalistic participation in the text book
crusade, both as a columnist and as a city editor choreographing the "Gazette" coverage,
Calvin Trillan, in his "U.S. Journal" in the "New Yorker," described Anderson as a
"columnist who does as much as a man can do to keep the spirit of Mencken alive in West
Virginia." In one column LT A likened the protesters to "the crazed nuns of Loudon," going
on to trenchantly observe:
"Analysts may sincerely perceive at a distance that what was happening here is a
heartwarming class struggle, but I am a hillbilly born and bred, a veteran of many a gospel
meeting. I have looked upon thousands of cruel pious faces. I recognize plain and simple
religious mania when I see it. It is good to pity the sufferers, but it is mischief to encourage
them with illusions to their social frustrations. They have always been welcome at council
meetings. They preferred the excitement of revivals." He then flogged "Bawl-and-stomp
preachers, who must feel something like nymphomaniacs at the Legion convention, and
cannot conceal their pleasure at being sought out and questioned for television audiences by
men wearing neckties.
In retrospect, the text book debacle can be seen as a dry run for today's slick, wellfunded right wing protests whose primary supporters are those that Anderson described so
well in his column.
In my first column for "The Yellow Jacket" I had written something that was clearly an
homage, albeit unconscious, to this widely-praised local gadfly. After all, how better, than a

74.
la Anderson, to skewer the noxious jingoism of "Up With People." In the phone call I
received from Anderson, not only was I complimented on my "Up With People" roasting,
he also offered me a job at the Gazette. This, after my having written exactly one piece of
journalism in all of my nineteen years. I accepted his gracious offer on the spot, but I'll
probably never know whether it was my "School of Anderson" approach to writing, or else
L.T.A's sensing potential writerly talent, based on the slimmest of evidence, that caused him
to hire me.
Showing up for work a few days later, in classic newspaper fashion, I was set to work
rewriting obituaries. Almost immediately, however, things began to go south when it
became apparent that my "Up With People" column was a fluke: I couldn't write my way
out of a paper bag. The second week, Anderson called me over to his desk to get to the
bottom of things.
"For a journalism major, you sure do make a lot of errors," he said. "But I'm not a
journalism major."
"Oh well, just come to see me every day after we put the paper to bed and I'll teach you
everything you need to know about writing for a newspaper in no time."
If he was worried about his impulsive act of hiring me, it didn't show.
That afternoon, after the paper was put to bed, the thirty-or-so of us in the city room
looked on, grinned and rolled our eyes heavenward as Anderson leapt up on his desk and
launched into his regulation, old-fashioned, practical neo-Marxian oratory on the folly and
illusion of private property. Thrusting his index finger downward, and in the style of the
Bible Belt preachers he otherwise abhorred, he inveighed:
"Who or what gives you or anyone else the right to say that you and you alone OWN the
land under your very feet. . .?" And so on and so forth. He proceeded to lead the assembled
faithful in singing the old Protestant hymn, "Bringing in the Sheaves." He was in earnest,

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but trying to come off like too much of an unreconstructed Commie via the injection of his
strong stock-in-trade-humor. It was a masterful performance. Then, true to his word, he
leapt down off his desk, ripped a length of copy paper out of the typewriter, seated himself,
and called out my name:
"Young Reed! It's time for your lesson. Beginning with the golden mean of journalism,
the inverted triangle. Always start your most important information and then arrange the
remainder of your paragraphs in descending order of importance so that the editor always
knows to cut from the bottom if the piece needs to be sheared away at for space."
With that, he commenced upon a several-months-long daily seminar on the not-sointricacies of newspaper writing.
Part of the legend about Anderson is that over the years he has repeatedly resisted
attempts to turn him into a nationally syndicated columnist along the lines of another Art
Buchwald; mainly because he fears the transformation would result in a kind of de facto
defanging, forcing him to turn away from addressing regional community concerns. Not
long ago, I wrote to him about the possibility of a "Best of L.T. Anderson"-type book (I
tend to think of news writing as merely lining the birdcages of history). This is the reply I
received: "I'm afraid I'm too old to undertake a book. I've never had a real interest in such
an undertaking, anyway, and the thought of flogging my own work in some mall bookstore
repels me."
In reply to my query in the same letter as to why he had suddenly ceased employment
with the "Gazette" after so many years to go work for the rival afternoon newspaper, he
only peremptorily and cryptically answered:
"As to your question regarding my present part-time employment at the Daily Mail: The
Gazette kicked me in the balls.
L.T. Anderson and his wife, Jean, who have been married since the end World War II,

76.
have two children, both of whom Anderson describes officially in his bio as "Not world
beaters, perhaps, but they never cheated"
The medium size city of Charleston, West Virginia-pop. 100,000 or so---is [this was
written in 1999] one of only thirteen U.S. cities remaining with more than one daily
newspaper. As for Anderson's abrupt departure from the Gazette, I learned later that it had
to do with the failure of the paper's powers-that-be to make good on a long-implicit promise
to hand over the position of editor-in-chief to him at a certain point in time.
Two weeks after his "retirement" from the Charleston Gazette, Anderson was operated
on for cancer. "Because of radiation," he notes in his bio, "I lost 55 pounds and taste for gin.
Then, regained 25 pounds and resumed martini consumption."
As of 1999 L.T. Anderson continues to write columns, now for the Daily Mail, that
continue to be laced with the sort of wit and common sense that first captured my attention
nearly a half-century ago. You only have to read him on the subject of Madonna to know
that he is still adept at not seeing the emperor's new clothes:
"Talent has nothing to do with it. There is general agreement that she can't act, can't
sing, can't dance, and can't quite make it as a modem day Venus because she has no waist.
So how come she has 600 billion dollars in her checking account?
Well, she has had plenty of help from reviewers who probably would like to laugh out
loud but are fearful of being thought unhip. I can't think of anything else."
Not bad for a man who seemed---to invoke a phenomenon endemic to youth---80 years
of age to my 20 when he hired me.
There was a time not so long ago when figures such as Los Angeles' Jack Smith, San
Francisco's Herb Caen, and Chicago's Mike Royko had equal parity with their nationally
known opposite numbers, the likes of Art Buchwald and Walter Lippmann. Sadly, that era
has practically come to an end with the deaths, all within a relatively short period of time,

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of the first three men; but in his heyday, no regional columnist ever held more sway---they
call the Charleston Gazette "The State Newspaper"---than L.T. Anderson. His writing has
had an uncommon impact on West Virginia for more than fifty years. Were it not for him,
one shudders to think how politically and socially retrograde the place might still continue
to be. Probably the nicest thing you can do for this longtime city editor-daily columnistsocial crusader is not to contain him between the covers of a book, but simply to call him a
"working newspaperman."
CHAPTER SEVEN: Carnal Interface
In the first year of grade school, I found myself strangely attracted to classmate Paul
Lanham, a squinty-eyed lad bearing a remarkable resemblance to Robert Mitchum, and who
sat nearby me in Miss Alabaugh's class. So much for the "absent father" theory of gayness;
my dad was barely cold in his grave. If this had been the sixth grade Paul most likely would
have punched me out: "What are YOU looking at?" But at age six he hadn't a clue, nor did
I; ah sweet mystery of latency. Whenever Paul saw me gazing at him, he merely smiled
back, then returned to coloring within the lines.
On the playground I threw a ball "just like a girl," and was thought of as, well, sensitive.
In the third grade talent show, I sang "The Old Piano Roll Blues" in blackface drag---a
performance best passed over in silence. Come the 11th grade I developed another "crush,"
this time on John Rogers, who I worked with at Kroger's supermarket. In his early twenties,
John was a strapping redhead with a deep sonorous voice who could wield a literary
allusion with as much facility as he could a cleaver in the meat department. I was drawn to
him strictly for platonic, fraternal reasons, and because of his good old-fashioned I. F. Stone
autodidacticism---or was there something more involved?
My attempts to capture John's attention and turn him into a surrogate older brother were
in vain. It was like running alongside a moving train, throwing pebbles at the window

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trying to gain the attention of the person inside but to no avail. Gradually, then, he began to
come around; but before we could become friends, he felt I should master some of the fine
points of drinking, smoking, and an appreciation of jazz. Under his tutelage I learned
quickly; he was a regular bop Henry Higgins. Our friendship really started to take off with
the opening of an after-hours bar in town, the Shalimar, owned by former Count Basie
vocalist Ann Baker. Just like in the movies there really was a peep-hole, and you had to be
known by the management in order to gain entree. Located in one of the funkier byways in
town, Patrick Street, once inside you were treated to a late night club scene that swung
especially hard due to the owner's musical connections; cohorts from the old days stopped
by to pay homage and jam if they happened to be within a hundred miles of the place: Sir
Charles Thompson and Basie's Freddy Green are two I remember. And Ann would sing.
Here I was, then, knocking back drinks in this soignee environment long before I was old
enough to do it in a legal establishment; which the Shalimar decidedly wasn't-liquor over
the bar was not legal in West Virginia but was sold by the bottle in state-operated liquor
stores. I wore shades, pulled a hat down over my eyes, lowered my voice, and swaggered
upon entry-all of which fooled no one. But the gesture was appreciated. The Shalimar was
integrated to a degree unheard of in that neck of the woods; a swinging, old-fashioned black
and tan club, with a clientele flocking to it from hundreds of miles around-especially blacks
from places like Columbus and Cincinnati.
Afterwards, John and I would repair to his house for a few more drinks and the latest
Stan Getz or Dave Brubeck sides. All manly-man behavior, with no apparent sexual
tension. One night, however, out of the blue John made a bold suggestion:
"Merely as a kind of test, mind you, let's get into bed together with all our clothes off
just to see what happens. To see if we get erections or not."
When I recovered from whiplash, I consented to take part in John's, uh, experiment. I

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had finally managed to capture not only his older-brotherly soul but his body as well. I've
little doubt it was his first time in bed with a man, and I know it was my first with a person
of either sex. What happened when we hit the sheets involved no mutual exchange of
bodily fluids, only thrashing about and mutual masturbation. But it was more than enough
to get my heart started. We fell asleep in one another's arms. The next morning, immediately
upon awakening, John confessed:
"Well, that certainly is a relief. I always thought there was a chance I might be a
homosexual, now I know I'm not."
"Hey, well, yeah, me, me too."
Then we thrashed and bumped around a bit more. And that was that.
Except that, with one homo encounter, it all became clear to me like a Blast of Light
From the East: Like Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, I went "gay all of a sudden." Almost
overnight I adopted a classic Double Life: by day a mild-mannered reporter for a mediumsized metropolitan newspaper, but by night, Superfag, cruising downtown streets, getting
sentimental over someone I had yet to meet. There was never a question of coming out to
anyone in my family; with my parents dead and my brother and sisters married, there was
no one left to come out to. I was gay and there was nobody to give a damn one way or the
other. Being parentless, and incommunicado with my siblings by the time I was in my
twenties, is it any wonder that for so many years I fantasized about the up side of being part
of a family unit? I always thought that Ozzie and Harriet got a bum rap: four people living
under one roof, getting along with one another and having trans-generational fun. I'm told
by reliable persons that the reality of the familial experience is far different. I wouldn't
know. Having lost my dad when I was four, I would even have settled for a father, like
"Ozzie," home all the time and breathing down my neck.
There really was a lot of nighttime street action, especially on the deserted-at-night main

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drag of Capital Street: lone male drivers moving along slow as molasses with no other cars
in sight, the blinking headlights, the same cars driving endlessly around the same block. I
was surprised that I'd never noticed it all before. One night I was caught by the local cops
in flagrente in a car with the brother of a girl I'd dated in high school. Names were taken,
but nothing happened: the cops-including the notorious head of the local vice squad
himself, Sgt. Frank Riddle-let us go. It was cold comfort in-as-much as I was scheduled to
interview Riddle for the "Gazette" the very next day. I went through with it! But if the good
sergeant was aware of having met me 24 hours earlier under decidedly different
circumstances, he didn't show it. Pheww!! Career-destroying coincidences like this were an
everyday fact of life in small town gay America of the period, but I had lucked out. Riddle
didn't so much as arch a knowing eyebrow in my direction.
The "QD" was a bar in the basement of Charleston's Quarrier Diner. Most folks assumed
the "Q" stood for Quarrier; but habitues knew better. The "Q" stood for "queer": the dim
boite, just a few steps down from an otherwise straight family-type restaurant, was
Charleston's lone gay bar. The "QD catered to the rest of Charleston's outsider element as
well: hookers, hairdressers, wet brain alcoholics, along with more vaguely-configured types
like Harley-an oily, tattooed, handsome, slack-jawed ex-con recently sprung from the
nearby penitentiary in Moundsville who had no idea what he wanted sexually. One of the
regulars eventually bagged Harley, who quaintly shouted at the point of orgasm: "I'm a
fixin' to cum, I'm a fixin' to cum!" It became a catchphrase around the place for the next
few months. The clientele also included a pre-Twister devotee of lightning storms who
thought nothing of driving hundreds of miles to check out post-storm devastation: "C'mon,
Bill! Go with me. . .pleeeese!" There was a speed freak so paranoid he once drove for fifty
miles in the middle of the night to bury one!-count 'em-one! amphetamine tablet in an
abandoned graveyard near where he had grown up. And the would-be jazz pianist who had

81.
blown his promising classical career by unconsciously breaking into boogie in the middle
of his college graduation Mozart recital;. He was brought out of his rubato reverie by the
gasps in the audience. Most nights the QD crew also consisted of at least one or two
representatives from the local deaf set; attracted to this port in the storm, I assumed,
because of others similarly outcast like themselves. It was a hypothesis which my convict
buddy, Harley, soon disabused me of:
"They're mostly all queer. On account of always havin' to concentrate on the lower part
of their body picking up vibrations through their feet, their balls are always gettin'
stimulated. They'll fuck any thin' that moves."
It was a novel theory to say the least.
Perhaps most fascinating of all was one slightly worn but worldly
looking woman, whose face still haunts me and who seemed like a refugee from a French
art film. Said to be a prostitute, still no one in the QD had actually ever seen her scoring
with a trick. And in all the time I patronized this one-size-fits-all drinking establishment, no
one in the place ever talked with her. For hours on end she only looked off into the distance
and nursed and swizzled her drink. In many ways, Verna Bloom in Martin Scorsese's After
Hours evokes this woman: melancholy, sexy, distingue, enigmatic. For a teenager like
myself, yearning for glamor, glitz and glory, this was, in the words of L.T. Anderson, Boffo
Stuff.
My own sexual explorations led me to the discovery that a self-proclaimed straight
hairdresser who frequented the QD, Larry Lively (we called him Linda Lovely behind his
back), wasn't that heterosexual: I tricked with him. The next morning, his wife, "Big Barb,"
a strapping, blonde, country gal, came home unexpectedly, caught Buddy and me in the
sack, and went on a rampage like Allison Hayes (a Charleston native by the way) in The
Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman. It was not a pretty picture.

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A few months at the "Gazette" and, under
Anderson's guidance, I was good enough to be sent out on assignments. Also I was
appointed the paper's Civil Rights Editor. But the moribund and incestuous gay social scene
in my home town was starting to close in on me. Overseen by a half-dozen older queens
who always seemed to know who was doing what in bed, with whom and when. If you
were going to be gay in the early 1960s in America, this was not the best place to be doing
it. At least not for me. I had just turned 19, and like hundreds of thousands of suffocating,
stagnating gays from Smallville, USA, who had gone before me, I began thinking about
moving to New York City.
There was a time when it seemed like every other movie opened with a shot of the
Manhattan skyline, taken from somewhere in the middle of the Hudson River; the image
usually accompanied by the hopeful, upbeat, yet sensuous, sound of Alfred Newman's
"Street Scene" (or its rival studio equivalent) to establish just the right mood of youthful
yearning. These were films devoted to reinforcing the notion of Manhattan as the center of
the known universe; vide The Best of Everything, How to Marry a Millionaire and dozens
more-especially from 20th Century-Fox. There were also literary gems like the ambitioussmall-town-girl-migrating-to-Manhattan novels of Dawn Powell. The impact on the kulchur
was enormous; scratch a seemingly contented mid-westerner, you were bound to find
someone just dying to kick over the bucolic traces and remake themselves in the image of a
glamorous Manhattanite. West Coast mythologies of buffed babes, MaIibu shores and
Beverly Hills 90210 were still a long way off into the future. While many were called,
relatively few were chosen: someone had to stay behind to make certain the trains kept
running on time. But that someone wasn't going to be me. Strengthening my resolve to split
the hometown scene was the knowledge that after only a few months on the local homo
circuit, word of my erotic exploits had somehow gotten back to my fuck buddy, John.

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Summoning me to his house, he begged me to forgive him for "what I've done to you" and
to turn away from my new way of life. He had tears in his eyes, but I could only laugh: my
hip mentor had turned suddenly and terribly "square."
CHAPTER EIGHT: "The Beast of Everything"
The Empire State Building looming in the distance, I parked and looked around. But
New York wasn't at all the way I remembered it from my seventh grade class trip -the time
we'd cornered Charles Laughton at the Hotel Picadilly Bar. Now it was dirty, grimy and
mostly garages.
"Which way to Times Square?," I asked a passerby.
"Well, first you'll have to go over the bridge to Manhattan."
Thanks to my general rotten sense of indirection, I was not in NY C,
but in the killing fields of industrial Jersey: I had arrived in the Big City with "Rube"
stamped smack in the middle of my forehead. Hopping back in the car, I drove the final ten
miles of my journey, and parked in the vicinity of Times Square. Again I asked directions,
this time to the nearest Horn and Hardardt Automat. For those too young or regional to
recall, this was an east coast chain of restaurants. Each was a cavernous, tile and marble,
high-ceilinged space full of square white tables, and most of its walls lined with little
windows on hinges, behind each of which was food on a plate. One dropped in the required
amount of nickels into a slot and that released a catch so that the hinged window would pop
open and the tasty victuals removed. The nearest H&H, was located in Times Square. But it
was lunch time and few seats were available. Approaching a table with a lone occupant and
room to spare, I asked politely in my best Southern gentleman fashion, "Do you mind if I sit
here?" The surly cosmopolite replied, "I don't give a damn where you sit!" I fled him like
the frightened country mouse that I was. At last I found a table, secured it, and with two
fistfuls of nickels, I began to "play" the Automat. By the time I left that day, I was hooked.

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Yippee! The food was great, the price right, and for as long as these food-o-mats existed
while I was in New York (until the mid-1970s for both of us), I took a great proportion of
my meals away from home at these chromium and tile palaces. The gimmick had been
invented in Germany and imported to America. Sometimes if you leaned your head against
the wall you could sometimes spot a window that stuck out a little because its latch had not
re-engaged and it was possible to reach in and take the food for free. I'd heard about and
seen depictions of Automats, especially in the movies (in the 30s and 408 surely every film
studio had a standing Automat set), and always thought that putting money into a slot in the
wall and getting food out was a swell idea. One popular Automat joke went like this: "At
Horn and Hardardt the other day I put in a slug and guess what came out?" The manager!"
In the 1959 movie, The Best of Everything, the film's protagonist, played by Miss
Hope Lange, gives her energetic all to make it as a "Big Time" Manhattan career girl. But
by then, due to the unprecedented affluence of the 1950s, that Horatia Alger-ish screen
image was a bit old hat. And a mere two filmic years later found Audrey Hepburn as "Holly
Golightly" in Breakfast at Tiffany's, unlike her cinema sisters of yore, arriving in New York
to not make it to the top, to not succeed. The drive for autonomy and power is still there,
but, unlike dozens of movie heros and heroines who came before her, she isn't so much
seeking a career as she is out for a good time. Like Holly, the idea of "career" was the
farthest thing from my mind as I checked into the 63rd Street branch of the YMCA that first
day in Manhattan.
***
Most of my friends in high school and college had stayed mired in the muck of rock and
roll, while I had become a jazz buff. When my pals complained about the absence of a beat,
I'd mutter snottily back to them: nOh, the beat is implied" ---something I picked up from
clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre in a Downbeat magazine article- but they continued to embrace

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Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis anywat. Sitting in my cramped quarters at the "Y", I couldn't
wait till the sun went down; I was making a pilgrimage to the famous Bowery jazz club, the
Five Spot. That night, I witnessed Roland Kirk pull off his stunt of playing three horns at
once-all the jazz rage that season, even though I learned later that African-American
arrangerinstrumentalist Wilbur Sweatman had achieved a similar degree of public notice
doing exactly the same thing a half-century earlier. Sharing the bill with Kirk was a singer
whose name I no longer recall, but I was surprised to discover that, unlike night clubs in the
movies, her performance didn't consist of just one song, but a number of them strung
together to comprise an act. Like I said. . .R-U-B-E stamped in bright red letters for all the
world to see.
Driving home from the Five Spot I lost my way for the second time that day, this time
ending up at the southern-most fringe of subtly arc-ed Riverside Drive, the lights of its high
rise apartment buildings sparkling in the Hudson River. I could practically hear the Alfred
Newman movie fiddles pounding away in my brain. Nearly forty years later, it still ranks
one of the most beautiful and majestic man-made sights I have ever seen.
I was soon to discover adjoining Riverside Park with its al fresco sex; an erotic
fairyland marked at its southern point, 89th Street, by the famed Soldiers and Sailors
Memorial, which those in the know tended to refer to as "The Tomb of the Unknown Blow
Job." Starting around 10 p.m., the park, with its sloping lawns and lush forests, burst forth
with night-blooming sodomites. The action extended all the way up to approximately 122nd
Street, where Grant's Tomb, another renowned place of assignation, was located. I also
discovered a venue that I'd never dreamed of, even in my wildest sexual imaginings: The
Baths. Especially the Everard on West 28th Street, rumored to be owned by the New York
Police Pension Fund, and the Continental, which Bette Midler made a household name
when she appeared there then joked about it on Johnny Carson. But the baths couldn't hold

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a candle to the sexual possibilities held out by the "Y (a few years later it was accorded
Midler-like treatment by the disco group The Village People). The rooms at the YMCA
were not only larger and cheaper than the tubs, but you could also live there. One could sort
of do that at the baths too, but that's another story. My second day staying at the "Y" I made
my first New York friend. Charged with tax evasion, he was laying low at the "yo employed
as a room clerk under an assumed name. A few days later Clay/Bill invited me to his
apartment in lower Manhattan's Little Italy where, on his coffee table, he displayed ancient
Hollywood pool party photos of himself with Lana Turner. Characters drawn from the pen
of Nelson Algren had nothing on this former Gene Krupa vocalist.
Almost at once, through radio connections in Charleston, I got a job as an apprentice
engineer at Empire Sound, during its heyday the top studio in New York, but now reduced
to recording things like stenography instruction tapes, remakes of the Farting Contest
novelty record, and the occasional commercial for its one big remaining account, Robert
Hall Clothes. One day I heard a loud commotion emanating from the reception area. It
turned out to be Rudy Vallee, furious over our teen receptionist not knowing who he was.
Turning on his heels, the onetime highly famous (now not so much so) singer stormed out
of the place and could still be heard shouting-even after the elevator doors had closed: "I'M
RUDY FUCKING V ALLEE!" Proof once more that, as C. B. DeMille remarked in Sunset
Boulevard, "A hundred press agents working overtime can do horrible things to the human
spirit." And that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
***
I had heard about the Apollo Theatre for nearly as long as I could remember;
consequently, one of my early New York forays, after the Five Spot and Automat, was to
Harlem and this (even then) legendary movie/vaudeville palace. For the first time in my life
it didn't matter where I sat in a theater; there was no buzzard's roost, no "whites only," just

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every man and woman for themselves. Movie studios seldom rented anything but the very
worst of its current product to the Apollo. This time it was something called Angel Baby, an
especially ripe piece of cinema d clef about evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. This
potboiler was also being shown downtown, where audiences undoubtedly sat on their
hands, taking in all of its camp awfulness without so much as a whimper. Years later I met
the screenwriter of this morceau du frommage--- his lone screen credit---and could barely
keep from laughing when he told me how Angel Baby had been misunderstood by film
reviewers when it came out. At the Apollo they hooted and howled at the unintentionally
funny film in all the right spots, killing time until Dizzy Gillespie came on. Tastemaker jazz
critics were always carping about how Dizzy sullied his live performances by clowning
around. "And now I'd like to introduce the members of my band" was a bit with which
Dizzy stamped his every performance-like Hitchcock appearing briefly in his films. Then
he'd turn around, his back to the audience, and proceed to introduce the bass player to the
drummer, the drummer to the pianist, and so forth. Even though the savvy, hip Apollo
crowd had seen him do this routine countless times before, it still brought down the house
that night. After my first visit to the place, you couldn't keep me away. The next time I went
was a Sunday morning, at the very beginning of a day's worth of Duke Ellington Apollo
stage shows. He didn't come on until the set was nearly over at around 12:30, but at least he
showed (jazz musicians are notorious for knowing the existence of only one eleven
o'clock). I didn't have the good sense to appreciate being in the presence of legendary
tappers Teddy Hale and Bill Bailey, who proceeded Ellington that day and who I foolishly
thought of as being something boring and passe that I had to sit through to get to the Duke.
This was a common attitude of the day that, for a time, threatened to kill off this great
indigenous American art form.
It was inevitable that I would make yet another New York pilgrimage; thus, my third

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Sunday morning in the city found me bagel in hand, at the crack of dawn, a la Holly
Golightly, making my way down Fifth Avenue to Tiffany's. But even at the crack of dawn
on the Sabbath, the A venue proved far too crowded with auto traffic to comfortably
promenade straight down the middle, like Audrey had done in the movie. Today a whole
Sorbonne full of semiologists might not be able to tell you exactly why it is that more than
forty years after the release of Breakfast at Tiffany's, a teenage cult has grown up around the
film and Hepburn. The classic scene of the begowned actress in front of the jewelry store
still possesses powerful mythic resonance, as evidenced by a spate of late 20th century
projects paying homage to Hepburn-books, documentaries, narrative dramas, etc.-nearly all
of which allude to, contain and/or comment upon the film's display window scene. When I'd
had my fill of decorator Gene Moore's display windows of diamonds in champagne, lime
yello garnished with emeralds, and rubies suspended over bowls of borscht, I headed down
to Greenwich Village. I breakfasted near the Village's crossroads of Sixth Avenue and
Eighth Street at a place that delivered your food on an electric train that ran along the
counter. I think it was called Pam Pam's, located within shouting distance of the Women's
House of Detention, an ominous, dark fortress out of the Middle Ages. Years later, I
happened by the "House of D," as nearly everyone called it, and heard an inmate bellowing
down to someone gazing ten stories upward: "Big Ruby is Dead." Who was this Big Ruby
person anyway, I wondered? How did she die? Whacked by another prisoner in a love
triangle, iced by a guard? Was she even an inmate? Exactly how large was this Big Ruby
person anyway? Nearly forty years later I still want to know the answer to these and many
more questions. Anytime of the day or night you could catch prisoners, and those down
below on the sidewalk, shouting messages to each other. One Christmas Eve I remember,
dozens of prisoners from various floors serenaded busy shoppers and passersby with Irving
Berlin's "White Christmas." We stopped and looked up at living Capra. Until! Reaching the

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final stanza, they rang out:
"And may all your Christmases be. . . "BLAAAACKKKKK. " It was probably meant
more to amuse than to wound.
In the early seventies they tore down the Women's House of Detention and put up a
community garden in its place. A nice touch but the Village has never been quite the same
since.
I lived at the YMCA for several months, wending my way and shuffling through the
enormous amounts of junk that I had brought with me or had shipped from West Virginia;
including a console TV set (probably illegal in the "Y"), and all my records and books. It
added up to a "look" best described as Early Collier Brothers (noted early 20th century pack
rats). After a while I began looking through the New York Times classifieds for a more
permanent place: apartments were arranged by order of price, I got to the end of the "for
rent" column, and my index finger landed on nearly the very last one. It met my sale
stipulation: rock bottom cheap rent. At $95 per month, I could afford this one-room flat on
9th Street between A venue's C & D in Manhattan and I went to take a look. It was clean
and spare, and on the first floor of a six floor walkup tenement that had recently been
renovated on the cheap. A tacky new flagstone exterior stapled onto the front caused the
building to stand out dramatically from its other 19th century brothers on the block.
I had landed on New York's Lower East Side.
Although it might have been so at one time, the area was no longer the "snappy,"
"happy," "wiggin," locale immortalized in song by jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and
Ross. I'd heard their Avenue C in high school and was expecting the "grooviest"
thoroughfare in the city. What I got instead was a neighborhood made up of five and six
flight walkup tenements, stores with signs written in Spanish and obscure Cyrillic script,
streets chock-a-block with garbage cans, and the air filled with so many languages you'd

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have sworn you were back in downtown Babel. I had no desire to "stop and linger" and "pop
my top" over the real A venue C. Maybe I might've in the 1940s when the song was
originally written, but boogie pianist Cow Cow Davenport's "Avenue C Blues" (1930) was a
lot closer to the truth.
My new apartment was so far east on the Isle of Manhattan it gave you nosebleed, but I
paid the deposit and the first and last month's rent to the superintendent and to him, also, I
proffered the vigorish without which it was impossible to rent any New York apartment, no
matter how high class or low beat. I think I slipped Louie twenty-five bucks. But after
renting the place and moving in, the locale proved so daunting, I was fearful of venturing
outside. Fresh from the sticks, for a while I drove my car the half-mile distance to the
nearest subway stop, the 14th Street Station. A died-in-the-wool New Yorker wouldn't have
given the neighborhood a second thought.
Many of the trains on this particular subway line, the IRT, were the oldest cars in
operation in New York, constructed not of metal, but of wood; and divided into what were
essentially three separate compartments---a large one in the middle and 5 x 15 standingroom-only vestibules at either end-which afforded the likelihood of some sort of pleasant
clandestine sexual encounter nearly every rush hour. Definitely not the sort of thing you
read about in politer histories of New York. These end sections were almost always devoid
of women and straight men, meaning that the sexual shenanigans must have been common
knowledge. Rare was the morning and evening when I didn't "get off" from being groped,
and on one occasion, I swear, fellated. . .on a moving subway car! Like I say, "such nice,
interesting people!" Not every train was made up of these ancient froteur specials;
sometimes you had to wait fifteen or twenty minutes before one of them hove blessedly into
view. These cars, which surely dated back to the turn of the century, were so old they must
have begun life as horse drawn vehicles. Not long after my discovery of them, there began

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to be fewer and fewer on the line, then, only months after I arrived in New York, they were
retired completely. I had made it just under the wire. I couldn't believe my eyes. I waited in
vain for upwards of an hour for one to pull into the 14th Street Station, then gave up. These
days when I'm riding one of those bright, shiny, new German cars put together with spit and
chewing gum, I still experience mild frisson upon spying those relics sitting abandoned in a
subway graveyard. Their erotic potential provided the perfect occupational motivation for
hitting the ground running on off-mornings when you didn't feel like punching the old time
clock. What a bargain! The greatest metropolitan public transportation system in the worldplus an orgasm-all for the price of a five cent subway token. Or was it ten?
CHAPTER NINE: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Early one evening, finally gathering the courage to walk to and from the subway, at 12th
Street and Avenue B I spied a tavern that looked like something straight out of San
Francisco's 19th century Barbary Coast. I pressed my nose up against its frosted and etched
glass windows to discover the interior fittings were also the genuine article. But the rest of
what I saw wasn't. Instead of a few stragglers from the neighborhood stopped off for a beer
on the way home from work, Stanley's Bar was packed with an ethnically heterogeneous,
mixed race, overwhelmingly male clientele in its late teens and early twenties. Almost none
of whom looked like they'd just returned from a hard day at the office. Investigating further,
I had barely finished downing my first martini-the only mixed drink I knew how to ask for
up till then-when the person seated beside me at the bar struck up a conversation. She
turned out to be a singer with some eye-opening, dog-eat-dog tales about the folk music
racket-especially about her female competition. More small talk ensued before I was invited
by Sue (her name) to join some just-arrived friends seated at a nearby table. One of them
was a fairly well-known Australian journalist/rock critic, Lillian Roxon. I was impressed. I
said I was a writer, too. The truth, inasmuch as I'd published regularly in my hometown

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paper, the Gazette. Up until that moment, however, I had never thought of myself in those
terms. Otherwise I mostly kept my mouth shut and listened. Later that night I departed with
George Box, an amiable, good-looking cat about my age. Going back to his house, we
smoked a joint (my first ever) and partook of some hot male-ta-male action. Afterward he
told me how Lillian had acted as trystmaker: "Oh, you could get him in five seconds. Go
introduce yourself." Thirty-five years later George and I remain friends, chatting away daily
via e-mail. Even if you don't happen to make sexual contact like G&I did that night,
cruising, as utopianist/educator Paul Goodman once observed, gives you something to do
during those long layovers at airports.
The socio-decadological period known as The Sixties didn't really begin until the drugs
kicked in big time during the middle of the decade and continued well into the Seventies.
The received wisdom is that if you can substantially recollect the who, why, where, what,
and when of those volatile times, you really weren't a part of it. But 1 remember a lot (it
helps that I kept diaries). There are lapses: after Janis Joplin died in 1970, George was
surprised 1 couldn't recall having known her. Recently he e-mailed me more details: "Janis
arrived in New York with her girl friend Linda en group with Ken Hill [a mutual friend of
George's and mine] on his return from San Francisco. She was painfully shy, had acne and
sat in front of the juke box at Charlie's Bar on A venue A just listening to every song and
singing along for hours, never saying boo to anybody." This was before she'd turned pro.
While 1 recall Charlie's, a kind of gay Stanley's, Janis still eludes me---even with the assist
of George's memory prompt. Eventually she went on to develop a public persona that no
one-no matter how ripped on drugs- could forget.
"We went to Stanley's," writes painter-actress Mary Woronov in her 1995 book,
Swimming Underground, "where I stared at a speed freak's dream, a wall completely
covered in purple three penny stamps." Stanley's also had a pressed tin ceiling (real), an

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ancient mahogany bar and the largest porcelain urinals---like they were made for a race of
giant men---I'd ever seen. Taking a leak when you were stoned, like Woronov's purple
stamps, was a trip in and of itself.
One night at Stanley's I was introduced to jazz bassist Bill Lee (soon to be father of
future filmmaker Spike). His right hand, he told me, had become mysteriously paralyzed,
but after a year of psychoanalysis was now restored to full function. Just like Oral Roberts,
only minus Jesus, plus Freud. 1 had never heard a more amazing story!
Stanley's is also remembered in Donald Newlove's memoir of alcoholic recovery, My
Drinking Days, in which he tries to pick up women by whipping out impressive volumes
like The Brothers Karamozov from his back pocket:
"[I'd] sit at the Old Stanley's of The Annex [about which more later] or Vajac's [memory
fails me], trying to take in a page. But the ink was grease, the sentences self-destructed, and
[I] kept re-reading the same rubber paragraph that bulged and stretched beyond meaning. "
For my literary conversation starter I often carried around Facing Mt. Kenya; my logic
being that only the very brightest people in the world had read this classic study of Kikuyu
tribal customs by the president of Kenya. But not once did anyone ever come up to me and
say, "Oh! I see you're into Jomo Kenyatta." I would have been better advised to tote around
paperback New Directions editions of Sartre's La Nausee or Djuna Barnes' Nightwood like
everybody else.
Having walked into Stanley's for the first time was the defining moment in my life. I
was primed and took to the "scene" instantaneously. I went in an almost lily pure naif and
emerged a couple of hours later on my way to somebody's pad for sex and my first taste of
mary jane.
One night at Stanley's, a seedy looking, raincoat-clad denizen of the place sold me, for
the unbelievably low price of five dollars, a huge Mason jar full to the brim with heart-

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shaped orange speed tablets. There were a lot of Miltown jokes on the airwaves and in the
movies just then, especially in comedies about Madison Avenue and the advertising
industry. That there might be physiol psychological price to be paid in exchange for the
pleasure never crossed my mind, and I began popping these seemingly harmless, Pez-like
things like crazy. Overnight, a profound turnaround in my temperament transpired: in place
of my usual somewhat sallow demeanor, now I danced down the street like some demented
Gene Kelly, smiling at strangers and going out of my way to interact with the non-English
speaking proprietors of neighborhood businesses. Now I was not only a Hippie (although
the word had not yet achieved common coinage), a Fag, but also a Junkie. Clearly, it was an
oversight on God's part that the species Homo sapiens wasn't born with "speed" as an innate
part of its biological makeup. My use of "dexies" continued for some months and I
replenished my supply several time- - -surprisingly without any increase in price. Volume!
Volume! Volume! I was happily starting in on my fourth big, brown pharmacological jar
when some concerned person-I no longer recall who- jolted me with the news:
"Bill, can't you see what you're doing to yourself? Don't you know what speed does to
your brain cells? At the rate you're going, your brain'll be fried to a crisp in six months."
Why was I so naive about the downside of methamphetamine? Simple. There was no
drug education in public schools back then-only exhortations against booze, cigs and sex.
Speed was too good to be true after all: I wept in horror at the thought. I would quit! I
proceeded to lay on a cot for more than 48 hours sweating, shivering, itching and generally
going out of my skull. Friends stayed with me around the clock, putting cold towels on my
forehead, wrapping me in blankets when I got the sweats, feeding and encouraging me till
the stuff was out of my system.
Whoever it was that warned me about speed didn't say a thing about acid, grass and
other ubiquitous substances ripe for abuse. I wouldn't shoot up anything-that action

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smacked of no turning back. But short of getting rehooked on uppers, I would continue to
ingest anything that held out the promise of radically altered metabolism: horse
tranquilizers were big for a brief spell. Ah, gay youth! I'd knock back whatever it was with
a swig of a vin du jour like Mad Dog 20/20 or Ripple. The next few years also saw me
stoned on pot most of my waking hours; the same held true for most of my friends.
When history is writ large, Stanley's may prove to have been nothing less than
Hippiedom's very own Les Deux Magots. Without knowing it, I had stumbled upon the first
wave of disaffected (or overprivileged, depending on how you choose to look back on the
era) American youth who were beginning to migrate from allover the U.S. to those unlikely
few square miles of the Lower East Side-as if drawn by some sort of mysterious earth-raythought-force. The cheapest apartment rents not only in Manhattan, but in the known
universe helped focus the influx. You could look around Stanley's and almost see the Beat
Movement transforming itself into its next manifestation before your very eyes. It seemed
that the old ways had been tried and failed: Society had created a world of criminals,
suicides, world war, along with intellectuals who talked, speculated and philosophized but
could not act. The Beats believed that if they averted their gaze and wished long and hard
enough, it would all just go away. But it hadn't. Now a new generation was upping the ante
by actively (the key word) rejecting old religions, philosophies, politics, and the much
maligned status quo.
Soon this "scene" would radiate far beyond the Loser East Side of Manhattan. Nearly
everyone I knew wanted only to (the words one heard most often were) "love" and "feel."
Drugs were perceived as the key to this radical change. . .even before the arrival of the ne
plus ultra of the pharmacopoeia, LSD.
There really was a Stanley-last name Tolkin; a bald, neither garrulous-nor-grumpy proto
bartender-owner type always outfitted in a regulation white apron. The strangeness of the

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"scene' sprung up before his very eyes in a brief space of time didn't appear to faze him. He
remained unchanged by the financial windfal1 his establishment had turned into nearly
overnight.
Fast in the wake of the popularity of Stanley's (which would soon become so crowded it
was often hard to get a drink there even in the middle of the afternoon) came the Charles
Theater just down the street on A venue B. When I first moved to the Lower East Side, the
decrepit 700 seat Charles, like hundreds of other neighborhood movie houses in the country,
was on its last legs, showing double bills of the rapidly decreasing output of Hollywood
studio product of the era. Then abruptly, the fare changed. Under new ownership, the place
began presenting a much more varied stew of Astaire-Rogers musicals, Italian neorealist
dramas, Edgar G. Ulmer "B" programmers, such as Detour and Murder is My Beat, along
with the Marx Brothers, and anything by or with Orson Wel1es. The Charles was suddenly
not at all like the Kearse, Virginian, Rialto or even the Greenbrier and Lyric theaters bock
home in West Virginia---increasingly the yardstick against which my daily life in New York
came to be measured.
Avenue B and 10th was a lot funkier than the locations of the Bleecker Street Cinema,
the Thalia and a handful of other long-running Manhattan revival theaters, whose bills of
relatively avant fare the Charles' now came to resemble. Soon, however, the Charles began
leaving even those fringe houses behind with the birth of what has since come to be called
the New American Cinema. Consisting of odd-hour and midnight showings of films by the
likes of Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, but most notably Andy Warhol and his "Kiss,"
"Haircut," "Blow Job," "Empire" and "Sleep," this new cinema offered up the uniquely
American absurdist vision for which my new friends and myself had been-for the most part,
unconsciously-yearning.
Aside from Stanley's and the Charles, initially there were no other bars, hangouts or

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signs pointing to the coming invasion of the Lower East Side: the remainder of the
businesses continued to consist of stores selling washing machine parts, bodegas, and
Polish butcher shops, etc. It wasn't to remain that way for long.
Historical timekeepers most often point to the Viet Nam War as the irritant around
which the seed kernel of Hippiedom accreted. But I doubt if, initial1y, more than a
handful of my Lower East Side compatriots were even vaguely aware of the far off
"police action." And I can't recall many of my peers buying into the "sell" of JFK's
Camelot as a solution to what was ailing America either. If we were rebelling against
anything, it was most likely the ill-gotten gains that our parents and ancestors had been
able to amass from the legal enslavement of blacks. And when that proved no longer
feasible, the installation of them into an underclass so extreme that it amounted to nearly
the same thing as slavery. None among my new circle of friends talked about it much or
belabored the point, but nearly all were sporadically engaged in affairs across the color
line. I finally got into the act one night when I picked up a black soldier in nearby
Tompkins Square Park and brought him home. Staving off sex, he proceeded to sweetly
fall asleep in my arms. The next thing I knew it was morning, and I awakened to find
him, a cup of coffee in one hand, pulling on his uniform trousers with the other. He
"confessed" that he was straight, with little money, and had recently discovered gay
cruising as an economical substitute for hotels. Mildly apologetic for not putting out, he
thanked me for the use of the hall and was on his way.
Foraging around in the groves of Sodom on the part of both sexes was also becoming
fashionable. Some called it "experimentation," others I knew declared bisexuality to be
nothing less than God's Law. One thing was certain if I came on to a guy in this milieu who
didn't happen to "swing that way," I wouldn't get punched in the mouth. That, in and of
itself, was progress.

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CHAPTER TEN: Public Displays of Rhythm
Ken Weaver was full bearded and long tressed long before it was fashionable and
commonplace. At the time, only his hero Allen Ginsberg and a handful of others affected
this "look." I met Ken when we were employed by a lower Manhattan law finn as long-tenn
temps. When we walked the few blocks through the Wall Street district to our usual
lunchtime destination of Zito's Italian Restaurant, it was as if I were accompanied by a
hydra-headed monster. Car horns honked, people stopped, stared, pointed, shouted, and
leaned from windows ridiculing and laughing at Ken, as though they had never seen a single
C.B. De Mille biblical extravaganza in all their born days. Like myself no surpriseKen
lived on the Lower East Side.
The law firm we worked for had been hired by Westinghouse to represent them in a
treble-damages class-action suit leveled by a consortium of utility companies charging price
fixing. Ken's, mine and several dozen other's task was to prepare and code millions of
documents (hotel receipts, letters, airline tickets, etc.) for dumping into a data base. The pay
was extraordinarily good; with some employees working overtime as much as four and six
hours a day. A few even secretly lived on the premises. Like something out of Sgt. Bilko, an
ongoing high stakes, dusk-to-dawn poker party was part of the picture. With our offices
located in the same building as the U.S. Treasury, it's no surprise that eventually this
exercise in illicit reinvestment was broken up by no less than the FBI.
An epic and early experiment in corporate use of computers, this largest law firm in the
city hoped to eventually prove, after more than a year's worth of data indexing, that the
utility companies had known all along the manufacturers (Westinghouse was not the only
target of the suit) had been in collusion with each other. When the big day finally arrived,
all that came out at the other end was computer glossolalia. Needless to say, the Luddite in
me rejoiced in the failure.

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The previous year, Ken Weaver's army foot locker had been searched, a neoGinsbergian piece of harmless juvenelia about fucking Jackie Kennedy had been found and
he was summarily drummed out of the service. The government had then proceeded to
spend what surely amounted to tens of thousands of dollars spying on him. In public, Ken
pointed out to me these spies who couldn't shoot straight, lurking behind cars and peering
around buildings.
One day Ken began going on and on about "these British rock and roll musicians who
have long hair and get up on the stage of the London Palladium and say 'shit,' 'piss,' and
'fuck the Queen.'" I thought it was Ken's wishful thinking~ later I realized the confusion
probably stemmed from his conflating "early warning" on the (finally not so) anarchic
Beatles, with advance word on the much wilder Rolling Stones. The latter were arrested for
urinating in public in 1965 and had refused to wave goodbye with the other performers at
the end of a British TV variety show. Or else, something had gotten lost in the transatlantic
communication of John Lennon cheekily, but harmlessly, exhorting the Royal Family at a
command performance to "rattle your jewelry" in lieu of applause. Ironically, Weaver
would soon find himself committing the very same acts he'd attributed to the Beatles when
he helped found the rock band The Fugs, which did liberally employ scatology and
indiscreet language (though the Queen escaped their scorn). The group consisted of
Weaver, along with peace activist-poet Ed Sanders, and Tuli Kupferberg, who one time had
jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, and, as a result, found himself immortalized in Allen
Ginsberg's Howl. With a repertoire consisting of ditties like the anti-Viet Nam number,
"Kill for Peace," "Carpe Diem," "Coca Cola Douche," "I Couldn't Get High," "Nada,"
"Slum Goddess" (a title supplied them by me), and William Blake's "How Sweet I Roamed
from Field to Field," no wonder Bob Dylan rated the Fugs above even the Byrds, Beatles
and Stones.

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As should be apparent by the outrageous titles of many of the Fugs' songs, and as was
observed by Dylan in his "Positively 4th Street, II "something [was] happening," but not
even those of us in the middle of it seemed to know quite what it was. This shift in the
zeitgeist, whatever it meant, was helped along by the arrival on the scene of the Beatles, a
musical phenomenon unprecedented in the, theretofore, politically disengaged arena of
rock music (vide Fabian, Pat Boone, Frankie Avalon, et al).
After the U.S. issuance of their first single, the Beatles went from zero to sixty in a
matter of days to become the first true rock mega stars-outstripping even Presley. Colorful
accounts of their long hair, alleged griminess and unconventional clothing and behavior
drifted stateside, lending them an air of seditiousness many of us were searching for in pop
music, but weren't finding in typical AM radio fare of the day like Johnny Mathis, the
Kingston Trio, John Gary and Barbra Streisand. Goodbye to "Hello, Dolly."
The Beatles" anxiously awaited first album hit the stands the day John Kennedy was
assassinated. On that auspicious date of November 22, 1963, instead of patriotically rushing
directly home from work to mourn in front of the TV, I made a pit stop at Sam Goody's
midtown record emporium. Arriving at the very moment the first box of "Meet the Beatles"
was being opened, simultaneously with the store manager placing his final magic marker
touches on his "Closed Out of Respect" sign, I snapped up a copy, went home, and locked
myself in. With the sound of the TV coverage of the assassination turned off and the Hi-Fi
(quaint outmoded 50s term denoting apparatus that plays phonograph records) cranked way
up, I engaged in multi-media mourning for the next several hours. [Several years after
publishing this, I realized my memory had played tricks on me and that there was no
correlation between those two singular Sixties events.]
It might be arguable as to whether I was earliest in Manhattan to buy a copy of the
epochal "Meet the Beatles," but I was unquestionably the first to plunk down my money for

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their February 12, 1964 Carnegie Hall concert. I had surmised they might be appearing
there sometime between their two Ed Sullivan TV dates on the February 9th and 16th. I was
right. The only one in line the morning the Carnegie box office opened, I bought two tickets
for a ridiculously low $15. Duckets in hand, I left the box office, and already police lines
were in place to control the hundreds of Beatlemaniacs suddenly descended upon Carnegie
mere minutes after the first radio announcement of the event. If only I could have channeled
my talents along more societally productive lines than outguessing masses of crazed Beatle
fans. In honor of the occasion, when "B" day arrived, I got ripped on something called 20
mg biphetamines to become the most stoned I had ever been in my life up to that time. I
was accompanied by an equally crazed and stoned friend, now a tenured U. Mass lit prof.
Liz Taylor stood in front of me in line, as did Happy Rockefeller, wife of New York state's
governor. Which caused me to think that maybe there was something to the egalitarian
message being propounded by the Beatles after all. The thing I remember most about that
1964 night is the screaming-like all the tape loops in hell going off at once. They wore
identical mod gray suits, and were still not too proud or hip to do the crowd-pleasing bit
where they put their heads together, shook their mop tops and sang "Ooooh" on "She Loves
You." Then the crowd really went wild. At one point, I looked down from my perch in the
second balcony to espy someone in the first tier having to be restrained from leaping
headfirst to the main floor. (Maybe we're not so far removed from the Mayans after all.) In
response to a reporter's remark that the audience was so loud you couldn't hear the music,
one teenaged female fan Zenfully (and immortally) replied: "But I already know the words."
***
I have bittersweet memories of Jan, the eleven-year-old daughter of Jack Kerouac. She
wandered around the Lower East Side's Tompkins Square Park, her nose perpetually stuck
in a copy of Gone With the Wind, which she had already read several times. Proud that her

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father was, like Margaret Mitchell, also a writer, Jan told me she wanted to follow in their
mutual footsteps. Eventually, she did. Jan had never met her famous father-he'd abandoned
mother and child before her birth-and it was touching how she was looked after and catered
to by long-time friends of Jack's, like Ginsberg. Another crony of Kerouac's was San
Francisco beat poet Bob Kaufman. The latter I recall one time in a New York 9th Street
hallway peering at me through a keyhole beseeching me to let him in. It wasn't my
apartment, and Bob's awareness that it was me on the other side was based solely on my
eyeball and muffled voice. Warned by those huddled around inside the room not to
acquiesce---something about his being a "bad junkie" and a "bringdown"---I didn't open up.
By then, most of the brilliant poet's friends were barring their doors to him with increasing
frequency. I never encountered him again after that. Kaufman died in 1986 on the west
coast, after having embraced a ten-year vow of Buddhist silence in protest of the Viet Nam
War. Like another poet, Ezra Pound, who also enacted long periods of silence, Kaufman's
life was complicated by stays in mental institutions, and by shock treatment given against
his will when he was busted in Tompkins Square Park for declaiming his poetry a little too
loudly and insistently. On the day the war was over, he broke his silence by walking into a
San Francisco coffee shop and reciting a poem entitled" All Those Ships that Never Sailed."
The same perrsons who warned me not to let in Bob Kaufman, also inveighed me from
opening the door to a (now) world-renowned folk rocker, then just another unplugged
Bleecker Street folkie who it seemed,although not exactly a second story man, had a
penchant for ripping you off when your back was turned.
***
I was acid tripping at a Mothers of Invention concert at the Fillmore a few blocks
away from where I lived. The place is melting all around me like a Dali painting when
who should I stumble into, almost knocking him down, but. . . Salvador Dali. I

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apologized, he mumbled something back. Gala, his wife, glared. It wasn't at all like my
encounter a few weeks earlier with another famous but very different kind of painter and
his wife. At the Whitney Museum I'd been gazing intently at the famous
work of art, "The Operating Room," by Thomas Eakins when a man tapped me on the
shoulder with a question about perspective:
"Is that his [the patient's] hand or his [the surgeon's] hand?," he queried, pointing at the
canvas.
It was Norman Rockwell, asking ME!, who can't even draw a straight line, about
perspective! He was with his wife who looked uncannily like him. Where else but New
York in the Sixties could you meet-well, sort of-both the pater familias of psychedelic art
AND the pastmaster of naturalistic painting, along with, arguably, the most underrated of
all American poets, Bob Kaufman, all within the space of a few months? Somewhere
along in there, I also experienced Jimi Hendrix in person at Salvation, a postage stampsized club in the Village. Hendrix, suddenly "hot," immediately after his smash Monterey
Pop success, apparently felt it prudent and necessary to honor previous commitments.
Which was great for Salvation's owners, but bad for my ears. They began oozing some
strange, viscous liquid during Jimi's pain threshold perfonnance, and my hearing shut
down for a week.
Around this time there was a wildfire rumor, believed by even the less-gulliblemyself included-that the new Rolling Stones album was going to be FREE. Which goes
to show just how deeply, desperately, and naively my friends and I were buying into the
idea of rock music as a noncommercial force for social change. Someone DID record a
free record album. However, it wasn't a trendy Eurotrash pop group, but washed-up
rockabilly star Gene "Be-bop a Lula" Vincent.
***

104.
Combining the whack-o sensibilities of famed fifties publicist Jim Moran, crossed with
those of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, Barry Sharp (not his real last name) was
"guilty" of committing acts much more outrageous than anything the Beatles, Fugs, or
Mothers of Invention ever dreamed of. Hailing from Darien, Connecticut, he was upper
class spawn. But unlike many of his Lower East Side-by-way-of-East Egg cohorts, who
were only acting out good old-fashioned nostalgie de la bouie, Barry was dead set on
storming the very gates of capitalism itself, and taking no prisoners. By day, the cartoon
editor of a weekly tabloid similar in style to the National Enquirer, almost all the rest of
Barry's waking hours were devoted to something called the Christian Unity Party; its
members consisting almost entirely of the offspring of some of white America's most
prominent families. He had hopes of building up the C.U.P. to a level of national
prominence, along the lines of the American Nazi Party, followed by the eventual
blackmailing of his young followers' rich and/or prominent parents (he had film and/or
photos of their children goose-stepping in Nazi uniforms and sieg heil-ing photos of Adolf
Hitler), then turning around and secretly giving the money to the NAACP, to which he was
already, early on in the game, funneling C.U.P. membership dues and contributions.
Barry would send a group of actual C.U.P. dupe/recruits to Grand Central Station to
hand out outrageous hate material, Ii la the communist witch hunting publication "Red
Channels." While the latter had targets like the People's Radio Foundation, Council for PanAmerican Democracy and the Artist's Front to End the War, which were in fact real, the
C.U.P.'s "enemies of freedom" were entirely a figment of Barry's imagination. One of the
milder leaflets was a list of 150 allegedly subversive organizations with names like- the
only one I can recall today - the National Federation of Catholic Historians. On alternate
weeks, to stimulate foment, others in on the gag were sent to Grand Central to pass out
anti-c.u.p. leaflets. Next to which, the Father Damion Leper Fund-carried out by Lenny

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Bruce in Miami not too many years before he became Dirty Lenny-paled by comparison.
There was also a newspaper, the CUP Courier, promulgating the notion that, while it
was true that Communists still posed a central threat to Peace, Justice and the American
Way of Life, in the final analysis, they were but one more cog in the wheel of "the
onrushing wave of global domination by the Zionists." One Courier issue contained an
expose of the real reason behind the recent, much publicized sale of Vatican jewels by the
Pope: the Church, it seemed, was so heavily in hock to the "Jewish element," if money
wasn't immediately forthcoming, the Vatican would be foreclosed upon and turned into a
luxury hotel. Wild and wacky neo-Swiftian stuff to those in on the joke. But to the C. U.P.
faithful, who met regularly at McSorley's, the famous men-only bar just off the Bowery, it
had the ring of gospel truth.
"Guess who I'm talking to?," Barry said to me one evening as I arrived at his far-East
5th Street apartment, his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone receiver, the head of
Bonnie, his attractive black girlfriend, cradled in his lap. "Lester Maddox!"
"Not THE Lester Maddox."
"Mister Pick-Rick Chicken himself!"
Barry bid Maddox goodbye, hung up, then told me he had just hit up
the rabid Georgia segregationist for a large C.U.P. contribution. With dollar signs gleaming
in his eyes, he held up a wire leading to a small recording device on the floor next to the
couch: "And," he boasted proudly, "I've got it all on tape."
Barry entertained dreams of exposing the very deepest, darkest underpinnings of
American Fascism by eventually writing a Terry Southern-style book about his experiences
with the Christian Unity Party. For a while the C. U.P. hoax went according to plan: people
were beginning to talk about, and the media to report on, the Party. But these best laid plans
were doomed to failure: not long after the evening of the Maddox incident, I dropped by his

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ground floor apartment to discover that it had been firebombed, and my friend nowhere to
be found. Rumors abounded: (1) Barry was a fascist and there really was a Christian Unity
Party, (2) both he and Bonnie had been killed in the blast and their bodies removed at the
bidding of a prominent politician father of a C.U.P. member, (3) and the easiest one to
believe, that Barry, realizing he was in way over his head, had changed his name and fled
the country. After he had been missing in action for more than a year, his whereabouts were
finally uncovered by our mutual friend Steve Clark.
Barry hadn't fled to Argentina, Canada, or even the next state; instead, Steve had
discovered Barry working as a bank teller in midtown Manhattan-only minutes away from
the scene of his "crime."
"Barry. Long time, no see." Steve said. . "My name isn't Barry. It's Mike. . . now." Like
a lot of us, Barry Sharp thought if he exposed the innate inconsistencies and paradoxes of
capitalism, it would wither up and die. But he AND Karl Marx were wrong: it keeps right
on rolling along, mowing down anything and everyone out of agreement with its essential
contradictions. The best things in life aren't free, but they can be charged to American
Express.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Lower (East Side) Depths
Not since the Irish Potato Famine had the Lower East Side witnessed such an influx;
only this time the settlers were disaffected youth from middle America. The neighborhood
saw businesses springing up that catered to these post- WW II baby boomers: trendy spots
like the Engage Coffee House, Peace Eye Bookstore, Elk's Trading Post, Sindoori Imports,
and the Paradox Zen Restaurant. Over-night, Zapaterias became art galleries, hamische
delicatessens transformed into head shops-"Over Five Million Love Beads Sold"-and so on.
Stanley's Bar remained the Locus centris of the "scene." The great neighborhood movie
palace, the Loew's (pronounced Loewies, puh-leese) on lower Second A venue, was an

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especially noticeable example of the changes taking place. The new Lower East Side
population was far too busy with the drug-induced movies going on in their heads to bother
with those projected on the Loew's giant screen, and after one last final showing of Seven
Brides for Seven Brothers, the place went dark. Then! The lights went on again, when the
old car-barn of a theater played host to Lenny Bruce! For One Night and One Night Only!
Each successive vinyl encyclical of Bruce's had been awaited by my friends and myself
with the same kind of fervor later associated with rock stars. Looking back, it seems that
"Dirty Lenny" was as responsible as anyone for the long overdue Ungluing of America that
took place in the 19608. As it had for Billie Holiday a few years earlier, trouble with cabaret
licensing forbade his playing Manhattan night clubs. But thanks to an old Lower East Side
movie theater no one wanted anymore, he had at last found a performing venue. I snapped
up the tickets for the event for Weaver and myself nearly as fast as I had for the Beatles.
Then I counted down the days, hours, and minutes until the big night. When it finally
arrived, Lenny walked out on stage, looked up at the theater's moldy, tarnished silver lame
curtains rising into the ether-there since the beginning of time, or at least modem show
business-touched them, ambled around the stage, made erotic moaning noises without
saying so much as a word, shuffled about some more, futzed in his pockets searching for an
elusive index card, and at last finding it, read in a loud stentorian voice:
"Ladies and Gentleman! Coming next week to this theater [which was, in fact, true]Blaze Starr [beat] the girl who FUCKED Earl Long!"
With his career collapsing all around him, Dirty Lenny was still not about to be
intimidated by the Brain Police. The entire place, packed with celebrities (the TaylorBurtons, et al) and politicians (Mayor John Lindsay!), supporting Bruce in his First
Amendment crusade, went bananas. The Loew's levitated in a manner remindful of the
Beatles at Carnegie Hall.

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Contrary to the commonly held assumption that at this late point in his career Lenny
had been reduced. to palavering rants about his legal crucifixions, he performed several of
his foolproof set routines; including the one about Norman Thomas waking up and
discovering, much to his disbelief, that after all the failed presidential races he'd taken part
in, he had finally won. The place went wild again and again and again over every bit, even
those some had heard him do dozens of times before. When the evening was finally over,
Loew's went dark again until its transformation into the rock palace, the Fillmore East, a
few months later.
Twenty years after seeing Lenny Bruce at the Loew's FilImore, I had the pleasure and
honor of writing a cover story on Bruce's mother, comedienne Sally Marr, for the Los
Angeles Reader. She told me of the time little Lenny got in a fight with a playmate over a
toy and had tried to bite the friend's finger off. Marr said, "I took a dollar bill, lit a match to
it, even though we were destitute, and told Lenny, 'NEVER put your faith and love in
anything you can set a match to.' He was dumbfounded." The lesson "took," and he
remained the autodidact-ethicist he became for the rest of his life.
***
By the time this social phenomenon known as the Hippie Movement began to overtake
the neighborhood, I was no longer living on 9th Street, but had moved a few blocks away to
5th Street between Avenues Band C to a five story walk-up gone all-hippie; its new
occupants having displaced the building's every last Pole, Ukrainian and Puerto Rican. The
irresistible $35 a month rent was significantly less than the $95 I'd shelled out on 9th Street.
Just before I moved, the apartment immediately adjacent mine made front page news when
it was raided as a major bookie operation. Inside, the cops found two dozen phones manned
by an equal number of people, but in the year or so I lived there I never heard so much as a
peep. According to the New York Times, the authorities hauled away not only the

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employees, but several million dollars as well.
The street vendors' cries of "speedacidgrass" and the exhortations of the (really quite
amiable back then) Black Panthers to "Check it out!," as they hawked the party's
newspapers, mingled with the rhetoric of bowtied "Muham-med Speaks!" news vendors,
filled the air everywhere you went south of 14th Street that season. And who can ever forget
the plangent offerings of "Peacock feathers, five for a dollar"? The colorful bird plumage
was de rigeur just then; my new slum dwelling on 5th Street was filled with them. They
complemented my new" Juliette Greco black" walls perfectly. The two-room flat had no
heat, a tub in the kitchen, and sported a near knee-level sink installed to accommodate
short-statu red late-19th century immigrants for whom these tenements were built in the
first place. The toilet was in the hall. The look and feel of not only that building - but New
York tenements in general- is best captured in the famous photograph by Roy DeCarava of
an underlighted, dirty, slightly menacing NYC "Hallway 1953."
The increasingly disaffected neighbors-mostly working class Latinos ensconced on the
block long before the recent invasion-were so pissed at we "dirty feelthy heepie scum," one
or two of them had even taken to shooting guns at us as we came and went. This Nuyorican
branch of the Welcome Wagon wasn't trying to kill us, but merely scare us- "Don't worry.
It's only a flesh wound." After making your way through the dead end block of Fifth Street,
off A venue C where my new pied de terre was located, the dark passage of the tenement's
common hallway was a relief.
"If I'm yanking on my bootstraps trying to get out of this crappy neighborhood, then
why are you rich gringo kids moving here? Maybe the American Dream isn't worth shit
after all," was the operative philosophy. There was also a sense that the newcomers
represented some kind of vague threat to their children. Before it was allover, someone
from the building did get killed and another had his wrist broken when he interposed it

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between a would-be burglar's axe and the door of my apartment.
In sci fi author Samuel Delany's memoirs, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and
Science Fiction in the East Village, there appears his account of living on 5th Street at the
same time as I did (although we did not know one another). His equally humble flat, in a
building that specialized in renting to mixed race couples(!), was located directly across
from my charming little pied de terre. The portrait he painted of life on the block differed
but little from my own memory of that delightful little slice of urban blight. The one major
exception: his description of the block's alleyway between 4th and 5th Streets. Try as I
might, I simply cannot summon up this convenient passageway. I simply do not remember
its being there.
The Lower East Side got not only a new rock palace, the Fillmore, but also a new
geographical designation when shrewd real estate speculators wed the upscale image of
nearby Greenwich Village to the burgeoning trendiness of Lower East Side. Thus was the
idea of the "East Village" born. Stanley, of the eponymous hangout at 12th and A venue B,
contributed to the entropy when he expanded his barkeep operations westward to
encompass an abandoned Polish social hall on St. Marks Place, the Polsky Dom Narodowy.
He converted it into a place called the Dom. This was where Andy Warhol, the Velvet
Underground and Nico would soon debut their Exploding Plastic Inevitable. You might
think I would have been first in line for this sort of entertainment. Not so. I was beginning
to become mightily turned off by the "scene." The capitalizing on the Lower East Side, as
exemplified by Stanley's expansion, was living proof of the kuIchur's ability to transform
righteous social upheaval into a kind of harmless, selective non-conformity. Thirty years
later the Lower East Side had yet to recover, as was made abundantly clear to me on a
sentimental journey undertaken not long ago one sunny summer afternoon by my friend
Perry Weiner and myself. Walking around our old stomping grounds, which now looked

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like the bombing of Dresden, we hadn't gotten far when cops in a cruiser, thinking we were
tourists in over our heads, pulled up beside us and warned us about this "dangerous stinking
neighborhood." Talk about upsca1ing the Lower East Side has existed for as long as I can
remember, but thus far, like Joseph Conrad's Congo, it has proven relatively gentrification
proof-and will probably remain that way for the immediate future; no matter how many
new fronts they epoxy over the original 19th century facades.
***
Kicked out of the Sorbonne, my high school chum Randal (he of the Lucky Tiger
Butch Eye Liner) came to stay with me in New York "Just till I have enough nerve to go
back home and face the folks." His Paris address had been the infamous Left Bank
establishment, the Beat Hotel, noted as a haven for American expatriates. He had written
me from there that his neighbors in the adjacent room were William Burroughs and Bryon
Gysin, just then at the height of their experiments in cut-up writing. Randal swore that
conversations from his own room had drifted through the paper thin walls of the Beat and
ended up in Burroughs and Gysin's The Third Mind. Randal was a mythomaniac of the first
order, but if one had to have delusions of grandeur, surely this was the best way to go. My
friend from Charleston proved as entertaining and fun to be with as ever. But what was to
have been a brief stay with me was cut even shorter when I came home to 9th Street from
Stanley's one night to find him lying on the floor, foaming at the mouth.
"I've just taken 150 aspirins along with the last of my Mexiton [legal French speed) he
informed me, and if I don't die, I'll have permanent brain damage for the rest of my life."
The massive amounts of codeine he had drunk in high school had probably already taken
care of the latter, and most likely he hadn't ingested anything remotely near the lethal level.
But I wasn't about to take a chance; I forced him to phone the then-equivalent of 911. "I'm
in the middle of committing suicide and I'm taking a smoke break," he said to the person on

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the other end. Within five minutes the place was crawling with ambulance attendants and
cops. What they saw when they got there was me standing in the corner trying my best to
remain invisible and Randal lying on the floor intoning, off-key, the Nancy WilsonCannonball Adderly version of Frank Loesser's "Never Will I Marry." One of our
unexpected visitors made the moistened pinky finger-smoothed-across-the-eyebrow gesture
(the universal symbol for fag back then) to another, effectively canceling out my initial
regard for their professionalism. Randal was zipped off to Bellvue. Several days later, he
was on his way back to West Virginia to, once more, frighten the horses there.
In 1962, at the cavernous 14th Street Academy of Music at the world premiere of
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Baby Jane herself, Bette Davis, made an in-person
appearance. She was greeted in front of the cavernous movie palace by what were clearly
winos from the nearby Bowery hired to pose with Bette Davis Fan Club placards. The star
arrived in the middle of the co-feature, an umpteenth remake of The Count of Monte Cristo,
with Louis Jourdan, where if you look carefully you can see in the background, telephone
poles, and sports cars whizzing by. The place was was packed to the rafters. The lights
came up midfeature, Davis strode down the aisle with her little girl in tow (the same one
who years later blew the whistle on her in a tell-all tome) and arrived on stage to so much
resultant chaos that "Monte Cristo" never resumed even after she left the theater to continue
on her round of a dozen-or-so premiere pit stops. It is often difficult to remember where
you first met a longtime friend. But how could I have possibly forgotten these
circumstances under which I initially encountered Roberto Alonso de La Pompa (but I
never heard anyone call him anything other than "Pompa"). His subteranean apartment, of
which I soon became an habitue, was a two-room basement salon-of-sorts on 9th Street
between A and 1st A venues, where the marijuana more-or-Iess flowed like wine, and where
there were seldom less than a half-dozen adult humans in residence, not to mention assorted

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cats and dogs, plus the occasional child or two. As unconventional as the 9th Street scene
was, even we had to occasionally put the brakes on; like the time we phoned the police
about a woman in the building peddling her seven-year-old daughter's sexual services. Ten
minutes later, the building was crawling with cops (not yet "pigs"). Despite all the grass, by
necessity hurriedly flushed down the toilet, we patted ourselves on the back for days: We
were bent, but not so bent as to "turn out" a pre-adolescent!
Peering through the pot haze that generally hung about the place like an occluded front
moved in from the east, there were also to be found assorted artists from various
disciplines, including most of the Living Theater company, assorted poets and painters, and
characters such as comedian Hugh Romney, soon to be hippie prankster Wavy Gravy.
Pompa's where I met Danny Propper. An occasional 9th Street drop-in, he was the author of
a several-page poem entitled "The Fable of the Final Hour." It was the only one of his
writings to achieve much circulation, but upon publication in 1959, it had nearly as much
immediate impact as Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." According to Danny Propper's vision, in the
first minute of the final hour:
". . .Walt Whitman was found in an ancient subway tunnel beneath 52nd st. where he
had lain in ecstasy since the first bars of jazz filtered through, the trackwalkers who found
him immediately took up their crowbars and smashed in his skull, receiving two month's
pay from the grateful City Council and promotions to the rank of Conductor."
And so on and so forth through each increasingly bleak tick of the clock until phoenixout-of-ashes fashion:
". . .in the 60th minute of the final hour America was discovered and the final
renaissance of beauty and love began its eternity"
Danny Propper, along with what seemed half the artistic community of the Lower East
Side and Greenwich Village, gravitated to Pompa like artists of a previous generation had

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flocked to Mabel Dodge Luhan. Except that his realm was not an estate in Taos, New
Mexico, but a two-room crash pad on the Lower East Side. Out of EI Paso by way of New
Orleans, a year older than me, tall, bi-sexual, Mexican-American, with thick lustrous hair,
bad teenage skin and dazzling white teeth, Pompa possessed generosity and geniality of
Conrad Hiltonian proportions. A mythomonologist capable of elevating the most banal of
daily events to the level of fable, he was also an extraordinary mimic who could do Bette
Davis to a "T", but preferred showing off with more amazing feats like Dana Andrews
imitating Gloria Grahame. A self-styled painter and cartoonist, most of his art work was so
far-out whimsical as to make William Steig seem literal by comparison: One cartoon series
featured Gloria, a Little Lulu-ish baby beatnik who lived in a Greenwich Village apartment
building called "The Cloud" (an actual five story cloud) occupying a space between the old
Bleecker Street Cinema and the Cafe a Go Go. She shared the cumulus pad with her lover,
a sheep dog who affected shades, cigarette holder and beret. All-in-all, not exactly New
Yorker material.
Chez Pompa's acted as a kind of dormitory and dope drop for performers appearing at
Gerdes Folk City, located immediately to the west in Greenwich Village. Gerdes was where
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel first tried out their post-Tom and Jerry routine, Mary Travers
tested her mettle long before there was a Peter or Paul, Joan Baez, while a student in
Boston, made her first New York appearance, and it was where record producer-activist
John Hammond first heard Bob Dylan and signed him to a contract. It was also Gerdes that
drove one chronicler of the era to write of:
"Young artists. . .strumming their guitars, singing old folk, new folk, old blues, and new
blues [who] would become the immortals of the pop music world of the 1960s, the Vietnam
War, the Civil Rights movement; their words and music would be the tender conscience of a
generation daring to question the nation's political drift between Hiroshima and the Vietnam

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debauchery." (Whew!)
All of which may have been true, but most of the Gerdes regulars I knew were at least
equally as intent, if not more so, on scoring their next kilo of grass. Most Gerdes folk who
hung at Pompa's are long-forgotten, like Karen and Richard Tucker; one among them,
however, became very famous, very fast. A complete unknown when he lived at Pompa's in
the early 1960s, ten years later Tim Hardin was an international pop music star. Another
ten-years-on found his life and career reduced to rubble due to heroin The last time I laid
eyes on Tim was on stage at Whiskey a Go Go in Hollywood in the summer of 1982, when
headliner Nico invited him to join her as a surprise guest and you could tell from the
crowd's response, hardly a single person in the packed house knew who he was. Tim came
on stage looking like a Teddy Bear that had had all the stuffing pulled out, water poured
over it and left out in the sun for a week, but when he opened his mouth to sing he still
sounded like an angel. It was probably the last public performance he ever gave.
During the period of the Woodstock mansions and international tours, Tim more-or-less
disappeared from the lives of most who had known him on 9th Street. Some accused him of
high-hatting them. But when he ended up on Pompa's doorstep like a beached whale inl979,
his old friend took him in. One afternoon Pompa and Tim went to a mid-afternoon,
Hollywood Boulevard showing of the Paul Simon movie One-Trick Pony, containing a
scene in which two characters are shown arguing over whether Tim Hardin was still alive or
not. It gave him Tim the best laugh he'd had in years. Eerily, he did die not long afterward,
officially of "natural causes," but there's little doubt he was rolled by heroin addicts in the
Hollywood neighborhood in which he lived, over a rather large stash widely known to be in
his possession. The cops didn't even bother to investigate; here was just one more dead
junkie they didn't have to deal with anymore. I knew him at the beginning, in the middle,
and in the final days; and always he was the original child-man. Poor sweet Tim, at the end,

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belching and farting his way through life from one fix to another.
Claiming almost no skills for bringing the reality principal to heel, back then Pompa
might occasionally sell one of his more earthbound cartoons to men's mags like "Swank" or
"Gent." But whatever else he may have relied upon for subsistence, it definitely wasn't
remittance money from home like some were receiving. As for me, after being fired by the
Empire Sound recording studio for general incompetence. and lacking the gene for hustling
and for dealing drugs, I took the first of countless book store jobs I would have over the
next dozen years: I was hired by the 57th Street branch of a then-popular chain known as
Marlboro Books. Located next to Carnegie Hall, there was nearly always someone famous
browsing the aisles: Margaret Leighton (funny), Vivian Leigh (shy and reticent), Diahann
Carroll (beautiful), Anthony Quinn (the common touch), et al. One day a singular looking,
shambling, white-on-white, ancient rune of a man came in the store. It was Carl Van
Vechten, for most of the century the foremost champion of African-American poets,
painters, musicians and novelists. At the time, I had never heard of this eminence blanc' of
the Harlem Renaissance, can't remember what he bought, or the few words I exchanged
with him. Now thatI know more about Van Vechten, I sometimes think he intentionally
wished away posthumous fame when he chose to call his best-selling 1926 novel, Nigger
Heaven.
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Eighth Street Follies
Staggering through the aisles of today's giant bookstores, its hard not to imagine
that most of the merchandise wont eventually find its way to the nearest Jersey landfill
rather than a readers night table. Ever since these behemoth-sized emporiums took root in
the 1980s, trafficking in assorted lamps, T-shirts, gewgaws, Simone de Beauvoir coffee
mugs, Samuel Beckett tote bags, and oh yes books, the importance of the printed
word has become almost a consumerist afterthought. Its the effect of the literature that

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these stores sell a perfume of culture. So omnipresent has this book sales surround
become, it almost seems as if even to those forty and beyond it has always been with
us. But bookstores used to just sell books. And just as importantly, they offered useful
information, something nearly impossible to glean from todays post-literate, cradle-tograve-minimum-wage chain store clerk. In fact such bookstores of yore, most of which
were a quarter of the size of todays overstuffed bazaars, were often social and cultural
gathering-places where literature took precedence over lattes.
Until the early 1970s, nearly all of the large and small bookstores in the U.S. were
individually owned and operated. By the end of that decade, however, nearly a seventh of
these 7000 independents in the U.S. had shut their doors for good. How could these
vertiginously multiplying outfits like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks offer the likes of The
Olivia DeHavilland Macrame Cookbook at a price even BELOW wholesale? The answer is
simple: volume Volume VOLUME. Then in the 80s came more chains such as Crown and,
in addition, mega-retailers like Walmart and Costco; and in the 1990s, chain SUPER stores
the likes of Barnes & Noble and Borders. And, mostly as a direct result of this influx, a few
thousand more independent bookstores folded. By the year 2000 the total number of
independents had fallen from 5,132 in 1991 to just around 3,200.
As recently as 1991, independent bookstores still managed to account for the largest
amount of book sales (32 percent). But today, thanks to the insult added to injury of Shop
Naked cyber sites like amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, the number of independents
has dropped below the 3,000 mark, with a significant portion of those remaining stalwarts
only barely managing to hang on. The independents are fighting back in a myriad of ways,
including, in at least one notable book distributor / store chain merger, seeking the
intervention of the Federal Trade Commission. But the ground has shifted underneath them
in ways that would appear to be irrevocable.

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With todays computerized inventory systems, the chances are better than good that
youll find what youre looking for in the average book superstore if you know what
youre looking for. Still one cant help but wonder if such consumer certitude is an adequate
trade-off for what the independent book retailer had to offer in the way of bibliophilia,
knowledge, literacy, familiarity with stock, trust, experience, readerly advice, etc. To
underscore what the ABA and its members are trying to preserve, it might be instructive to
recall a bookstore that was not only the largest independent (or otherwise) in the U.S. at one
time, but one that also exemplified some of its best attributes and traditions New Yorks
Eighth Street Bookshop.
As fine a book emporium as Blackwell's in London, Eighth Street Book-shop filled its
display window with the latest Ezra Pound and translations of Kafka while relegating the
latest Jacqueline Susann and the like to its lower shelves. Larger than most of today's
Borders outlets, the (eventual) three stories of Eighth Street prided itself on stocking over
60,000 neatly arranged titles. By its own estimate it was "Greenwich Village's Famous
Bookshop." I went to work there in 1963.
The first location of the store, at Eighth and MacDougal Streets, found it replacing, in
1947, a local outlet of the national Womrath chain. The once ubiquitous Womrath's
specialized in greeting cards and rental libraries featuring the latest best sellers. The
previous tenant of the building had been a Chinese restaurant, the Bamboo Forest, that
prided itself on "no chop suey or chow mein served." This had been in keeping with overall
Village "with it" tastes. Similarly, when the book store's new owners, brothers Ted and Eli
Wilentz, took over the Womrath, out went the froufrou calendars, gift box ribbons,
children's toys and in came an inventory consisting almost exclusively of real books. Under
its new name, the Eighth Street Bookshop quickly became a place reflecting and in turn
influencing the latest local, national, and international vogues in everything from poetry to

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astrophysics. Another factor in the store's success was its willingness to embrace the new
paperback book phenomenon of the 1940s. While other retailers, clinging to the concept of
the hardcover book, tended to eschew those 35 cent editions of the sort featuring Madame
Bovary heaving out of her bodice or Captain Ahab ravishing a scantily clad native woman,
Eighth Street presciently embraced them. As more trends developed (existentialism, et al),
the categorical demarcations on the shelves became more dizzily Jesuitical by the day. The
demier cri in taxonomy was reached the day I had to magic marker a sign for a new section
featuring Astral Projection---all the rage that season.
Pere Wilentz had been a furrier, but Eli, instead of following in his father's footsteps,
harbored ambitions of being a sculptor. There was also an exquisite rumor, probably started
by some droll, dry-witted Eighth Street clerk, that Eli had been a Martha Graham dancer in
his youth, which summoned up among his employees far-fetched images of a stolid and
rather dour Eli leaping about the stage of Town Hall clad in tights. Finally, however, the
mercantilism in his blood won out. By the time I went to work at Eighth Street, in-store
sales, coupled with phone and mail orders, meant the operation had no choice but to secure
larger quarters. But so associated was the store with the street's name by 1963 that "Ninth
Street Bookshop, Formerly Eighth Street Bookshop" etc. wouldn't do. Finally in 1967 there
became available, slightly east at number 17 West 8th, a five story townhouse where Texas
Guinan-of "Hello, sucker!" prohibition fame-once lived. The Wilentzes purchased it, and
the gutting of the interior began. They never did find Guinan's legendary gold bathtub when
they excavated the place, and once renovation was completed, compared to the old shop,
the new location possessed all the warmth of an airline terminal. But the opportunity to play
Library at Alexandria was a fair exchange.
With wages nearly twice as high as any other bookstore in the city, working at Eighth
Street was a sinecure. Exactly what you might expect from a couple of (only) partially-

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reconstructed lefties like the Wilentzes. Long after most other Greenwich Village retailers
had gone the way of high tech security systems to snare shoplifters, Eighth Street Bookshop
stilI did not require you to "Please check all bags, etc. at the front counter." So lax was
overall security that a fledgling poet who worked there was able to steal many thousands of
dollars from the till before getting caught. A self-styled "struggling artist," he honestly felt
his actions justified. Emblematic of the fluffy white cloud of paradox hanging over the
place, when this not-so-petty thief was finally uncovered and sent packing, he was given
generous severance pay. I stilI haven't figured out the moral there, but it didn't surprise me
at all when, years later, he became a prominent figure in the grants/endowment arts
establishment.
Over the years, a surprising number of the store's employees were able to move beyond
book clerking into various degrees of public recognition: LeRoi Jones (in his pre-Imamu
Amiri Baraka days) worked there with me, so did Allen Ginsberg's soul mate, Peter
Orlovsky (as janitor), along with poet A. B. Spellman, who also authored a seminal jazz
book, Four lives in the Be-Bop Business, to mention but a few of the alumni. At nearly the
height of his public notoriety, "draft dodger" David Mitchell also worked there. My friend,
Ken Weaver, was also briefly employed as the store's janitor just before or after Peter
Orlovsky-I can't remember which. Not long afterward, Ken had to quit; The Fugs, the shock
rock group he founded along with poet/peace activists Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, was
an overnight sensation and the three found themselves off on a round of, at first, national,
then international touring. Eighth Street's regular clientele included Edward Albee, Uta
Hagen, Herbert Berghof, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, the curmudgeonly Joseph Campbell,
essayist/ novelist Albert Murray (every day), author/activist Michael Harrington, cartoonist
William Steig, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, poet-translator (later, MacArthur
"Genius" Grant recipient) Richard Howard and Alger Hiss. Hiss was also the store's

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stationary salesman. One time I received a note from him praising me for courtesy and
friendliness. In all likelihood, alleged commie spy Hiss, one of the most vilified men of the
century, wrote encomia like that to anyone who didn't punch him in the face.
***
"This is Shelley Winters. 225 Riverside Drive," the party on the other end of the line
said. "Perhaps you recognize the voice." Who wouldn't?
The call came in at Eighth Street just before midnight closing time. Winters wanted to
know if we had any books on Emma Goldman. We did; practically an entire section
devoted to the legendary feminist/ Communist/anarchist. I would have sworn pit bull
politico Winters had not only heard of Emma Goldman, but somewhere in the heart of her
Riverside Drive co-op had a shrine dedicated to her. But the former Shirley Schrift
continued: "Do you know who this Goldman dame is? I'm auditioning to play her in a
movie, but I've never heard of her." The store stayed open past its usual closing time, just
long enough for a driver to arrive and pick up "one of everything." I never did find out
whether Winters got around to portraying "Red Emma. "
A measure of the enormous degree of clout once possessed by book reviewers happened
in 1963 when Avon Books reissued the obscure depression era novel, Call it Sleep, by the
long inactive Henry Roth. In a act practically unheard of before, or since, this not-new mass
market 95 cent paperback book was the subject of a front page write-up in the Sunday New
York Times Book Review in which it was deemed perhaps the great (albeit lost) American
novel. Minutes after Eighth Street's doors opened that day, it was swamped with customers
in search of a copy of the undeservedly forgotten work. All that were on hand went flying
out the door in minutes. Weekend emergency phone calls were made to the publisher, and
bright and early the next morning we had enough copies of "Call it Sleep" on hand to
supply the demand for this literary wonder. Roth resurfaced big-time in the 1980s with a

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major cycle of novels.
Nearly every time you turned around at Eighth Street found you rubbing the literary
stardust out of your eyes. Djuna Barnes, author of the 1934 novel Nightwood, with as
much if not more influence on a newer generation of women writers in the 1960s than
when it was first published, lived only a short distance from the store. The proximity of
this modernist-feminist hovered over Eighth Street Bookshop much the same way she
did over the the rest of Greenwich Village. Barnes herself, however, was curiously absent
from the streets of the Village. Since the early 1940s she had lived in a one-room
apartment at number 5 Patchin Place, a quaint, gated mews off of Sixth Ave. Next door at
number 4, until his death in 1962, resided e.e. Cummings. But as cruel legend would
have it, the most one ever saw of Barnes was her occasional hand reaching out the door
of the Patchin Place gate to retrieve deliveries of gin left by the local liquor store. Then
one winter day in 1974 Tom Farley, a co-worker at Eighth Street, spotted a very aged
crone, stooped and barely able to make it to the top of the second landing steps. Tom
recognized her at once as the elusive Djuna, and he moved from behind the counter to
help her up the last couple of steps. As he reached out to assist her, I heard:
"Welcome to the Eighth Street Bookshop, Miss Barnes."
I flinched: the unexpected success of Nightwood when it came out so freaked Barnes
she was barely able to write anything after that. I feared this Garbo of avant lettres might
turn around and walk right back down the stairs. Instead she replied:
"However on earth did you recognize me?"
"Why from your photo on the back of Nightwood, of course," Farley explained,
referring to the famed Stieglitz portrait that adorned the back of the paperback edition. "Do
you realize that picture was taken long before you were even born?," Barnes said in
amazement.

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It had been shot nearly forty years before. "Well you haven't changed a bit," Farley
replied. Barnes blushed like a young school girl.
As far as I knew, one of the regulars at the store wasn't a writer at all. Instead, the
main claim to fame of Samuel Loveman---a very sweet old man looking like a cross
between W. C. Fields and the latter day William Burroughs---was that he had once been the
lover of a famous writer. But in his 1976 obit, I learned that Sam had been not only, as the
paper discreetly couched it in the language of the times/Times, "a youthful protege and life
long friend of Hart Crane," but, in the 1920s, a poet and critic of some renown himself.
Loveman more or less lived at Eighth Street in the 1960s, with the people who worked
there constituting a surrogate family. As he shambled through the store, poetry and/or Hart
Crane groupies would point at him and whisper with the fervor of film fans.
Until it was eclipsed by Harlem in the mid-1920s, the Village was the best known
cure for Cleveland blues; the place to go to kick over the traces and let your hair down.
Cabaret life carne to the locale in the late teens and hit its stride during the Roaring
Twenties. Opening and closing up with vertiginous regularity, the memory of these fly-bynight, not-so-intime boites evaporated the minute they were shuttered by the law or their
creditors. A notable exception to the rule was the famous Cafe Society Downtown, which
set up shop on the Village's Sheridan Square in 1938, and was famous not only for its
superb and eclectic mix of performers, who could be seen there, but also for its progressive
policy of total racial integration. The motto of the club was, "The Right Place for the Wrong
Kind of Folks." By the time I arrived in the Village, Cafe Society had gone through several
incarnations to become Salvation where I'd had my ear-blistering Jimi Hendrix experience.
The Village was a haven not just for race experimentation, but also for "pansies" and
"lesbos," as was oft-noted with forthright amusement by guides on the tourist buses that
continued to snake through the Village's narrow streets as late as the l%Os when I lived

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there. The early Clara Bow talkie Call Her Savage features a scene, both accurate and a
knockout, in which the "It Girl" and friends go "slumming" at an early 1930s Village gay
bar. The Old Reliable was one of the first Lower East Side bars to spring up in the wake of,
and attempt to capitalize on, the popularity of Stanley's. In The New Bohemia, an "instant"
book published in 1966 to cash in on "The amazing, sometimes shocking story of the
country's erotic, pace-setting area- New York's East Village," its author, John Gruen, does a
serviceable job in capturing the atmosphere of the "OR," by which name the place was
generally known:
"It's dark at the Old Reliable, but even darker in the back room, where a group of young
Negroes move as if performing some weird kind of ritual. Their arms swing high, and their
shouts and claps sound like wild drum beats. When the music of the jukebox stops, their
chants and shouts continue uninterrupted. They seem to be following another beat, another
music. Marge, the owner, a short frizz-haired woman is angry; she wants the backroom
ritual to stop: 'They should quit it already.' But she's too busy behind the bar, drawing beer
and pouring red wine, muscatel and Scotch. "
Throughout most of "Bohemia, though, Gruen is as off base as the trendy teen TV
reporter dismissed by George Harrison in Hard Day's Night as "a well-known drag." An
uptown arriveste come dowtown to mingle with os novos bohemianos.
***
With the hit tune of the hour, "These Boots Are Made For Walking," whirling away in
the background on the O.R.'s jukebox, a slender-framed, owlish looking black man came
toward me, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself.
"My name's Howard Taylor, what's yours?"
What was going on here?: I, at once, recognized Cecil Taylor, a very big deal in the
small world of avant garde jazz, having seen his photos many times in jazz magazines like

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Downbeat and Metronome. This opening ruse was typical of his elliptical, feint and jab
conversational style: Cecil Taylor talked the way he played the piano. He continued on with
the confabulation, concocting a complete alternate identity for himself. This included a job
at the gas company and an imaginary family at odds with the biographical facts. I never let
on that I knew otherwise. We left the bar and went to a midnight show on 42nd Street of
what must surely rank as one the strangest movie double bills ever: Sylvia and The TAMI
Show. In the former, the radiantly ludicrous Carroll Baker played a teenage poetess whose
father (Aldo Ray), rapes her in Pittsburgh, just before she is abducted by a sleazy
fundamentalist evangelist by the name of (honestly) Black Peter who drives her all the way
to Florida non-stop. "And he wouldn't even stop by the wayside to let me pick one lousy
daisy," complains Carroll; surely the greatest line of dialogue since Maria Montez's
immortal "Gif me the coparah choo!!" Great true trash. And that's just in the first ten
minutes. As for The TAMI Show, I described it in my 1982 book, Rock on Film, as "the
greatest gathering of rock and roll performers ever assembled for one film, Woodstock and
Monterey Pop withstanding."
Channel 42, as 42nd street was affectionately known, also featured sexual goings-on in
nearly every nook and cranny of its theaters (especially the notorious Empire). It was not
uncommon for guns to be fired off. Previously I had thought things were wild there during
more "normal" hours, but they couldn't hold a candle to the three a.m. crowd, I learned the
night I went there with Cecil. Later we ended up at his place-at around 5 a.m., but didn't
have sex (nor for several weeks after that). Instead, he conducted a blindfold test, playing
records by various musicians to see if I could identify them. Finally he spun one of his own
records, which I correctly identified. Only then did this alleged sandhog for the gas
company confess his true post-bop identity.
"You know my real name." "Yeh."

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"Oh!"
And that was that.
Cecil had recently been anointed as something above and beyond mere jazz musician
when, after one of his typical frenzied performances, Leonard Bernstein rushed up and
kissed him on both cheeks at a concert. Or so the story went. Maybe it happened, maybe it
hadn't. Like Sidney Pollack in The Player, I tend to believe that "Rumors are always true. "
It's not just the bitchy world of opera that has its divas: Shortly after we met, I went to
see Cecil opening night of an engagement at the popular and long-running Village
Vanguard. In the middle of his first set, who should walk in-looking very unlike his late
period Electoid From Planet Ten self-but a natty, dapper and Saville Rowed Miles Davis.
All eyes left Cecil on stage and turned to focus as Miles and his still somewhat socially
taboo, blonde date as the two made their way to one of the club's postage stamp-size tables.
They sat down in front of thebandstand, downed one drink apiece, stayed for all of five
minutes, then-when Miles gave the signal-split. I was there again the nc night when, at
nearly the same time, Davis came in once more, this til with a different, but equally
stunning Aryan number, and proceeded to exactly the same thing: five minutes, and gone!
Cecil later told me that this jazz equivalent of a head-on clash between Godzilla and Rodan
to place for several more nights running. Davis' rancor probably stemmed from feeling
Cecil's improperly uncloseted homosexuality, unlike I own more discreet gay ways
(including a rather torrid affair with a North American reggae singer), reflected badly on the
macho image of jazz. maybe he just hated Cecil's off the charts AND walls musicality.
One time Cecil and I went to see Schwartzkopf at the old Met. J, as we were leaving my
place to head uptown, he turned and said: "You wouldn't have anything to do with me if I
weren't famous." Out of the blue, it was a non sequitur of whiplash inducing proportions.
The spectre of race had reared its ugly head in our relationship at last.

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"But, Cecil, I wouldn't have anything to do with anyone who wasn't famous. "
Which so disarmed and amused him that the subject was dropped then and there, and
we continued on to the Met and with our friendship
In the summer of '67, Cecil left the city to chair the Africa American Studies Department
of a small, but prestigious midwestern college. We had long since played out our sexual
string, but remained close. That year found me living with my boyfriend David Ehrenstein
in an apartment on New York's West 85th Street. Is it any wonder tt David, who is Irish
Catholic-African-American on his mother's side a Jewish-Jamaican on his father's side,
refers to himself as "your one stop, multi-cultural shopping center." For all practical
purposes of American identity, however, David is a black man. Cecil took advantage of a
hospitality, staying with us whenever he came to town, then one day a restaurant confided to
me he found David to be pretentious and a phony Ironically, these are the very words most
ill-disposed jazz critics employed to describe his music. I told Cecil to get lost, and I never
saw him after that, though occasionally I still listen to one of the seeming thousands of
recordings he has issued over the years. As for "pretentious and "phony" David, we are still
good friends and constant traveling companions more than 25 years later. For all his
trafficking in fashionable Afro-rhetoric, Cecil, in the grand American tradition of racial selfloathing, most likely disdained not just David, but all black people.
I recall meeting (too genteel a word for it) David for the first time at New York's
Everhard Baths; he insists it was the Continental, farther uptown. Ah, yes, I remember it
well. Today people ask us, "How have you managed to stay together for almost thirty
years?" Our answer is a simple: "We don't have sex with each other. The "no sex" answer
satisfies no one, but as James Joyce once said, "That's my story and I'm sticking to it." And
we refuse to entertain the idea of wedding vows. If gay marriage existed legally, David
insists, it would only lead to the next logical step- gay divorce. The only vow we made

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when we teamed up was no matching outfits or poodles OR poodles with matching outfits.
***
Too avant garde or obscure for other publishers to bother with you? In the 1960s you had to
look no further than New Directions, Grove Press, or Corinth Books/Totem Press. James
Laughlin's New Directions issued the likes of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and
Djuna Barnes; Barney Rossett's newer and even more experimentally oriented Grove list
included Henry Miller, Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett; and Corinth/Totem, operating
out of Eighth Street Bookshop, trafficked in first or early works by poets Frank O'Hara,
Allen Ginsberg, Leroi Jones, Gary Snyder, Philip Whelan and Diane DiPrima.
Perhaps the most important of the Corinth volumes---more like a maniesto---was
Charles Olson's Projective Verse, in which the New Englander laid down many of the
principles that would hold sway in American poetry in the 1960s. The press also dabbled in
reprinting works by established too-good-to-Iet-go-out-of-print writers like poet Delmore
Schwartz, and also publishing The Beat Scene, a poetry anthology that was the first of its
kind. It was edited by Eli Wilentz, but brother Ted was the real literary star fucker. Which is
the best kind to be, I suppose, if you're going to aspire to that sort of thing. Corinth's forays
into "experimental" writing also included the publication of 17th century writer Mrs. Aphra
Behn, who helped lay the groundwork for the form of the novel. Much like San Francisco's
City Lights Books, also an important publisher, as a result of all this activity, the store also
functioned as a mail drop, social club, post office and employment agency for the American
avant-garde. Ted's textual familiarity with literature may have not been that much greater
than Frances Steloff: The prickly proprietor of midtown New York's Gotham Book Mart,
although founder of the famed James Joyce Society, didn't hide the fact that she'd never read
a word the Irishman had written. But whenever a Marianne Moore or W. H. Auden dropped
by the book shop, it was Ted, not Eli, who tripped all over himself bowing and scraping. It

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was entirely in keeping with the older Wi lentz's almost puppy dog avidity for such persons
that one day he came rushing up the steps snagged me by the collar. He dragged me down
the stairs from the mezzanine, revealing breathlessly that someone was on hand that "I just
had to meet." Rounding a corner, I came face to face with Neil Cassady, the Beat
Generation's hovering guru and now-a decade-and-a-half after his and Jack Kerouac's
pereginations had been chronicled for the ages in On the Road-more like the Beat's
eminence grise. Like a golden retriever laying a dead bird at his master's feet offering him
first chew, Ted proffered merely the briefest of intros: "Neil Cassady. . .Bill Reed," etc. Then
he was off in a flash. This was a classic, awkward social situation. Cassady was not really a
writer, but in fact a character in a roman a clef. What could I say?: I sure enjoyed you in On
the Road, like it was some dumb 42nd Street movie like Carroll Baker's Sylvia. What passed
between us was not exactly memorable stuff, probably not even obtaining to the legendarily
banal conversation that transpired between Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht the day they
finally met for the first time. Not in Weimar Berlin but, of all places, Schwab's Drugstore in
Hollywood in the 1940s as refugees from Hitler's Germany.
Neil Cassady: Nice meeting you! Me: Nice meeting you! Cassady: Same here, man.
We shook hands.
Mutually: Well. . .goodbye.
Thanks, Ted! Despite the awkwardness, I'm glad I had the
opportunity to meet the real "Dean Moriarty." I also remember Lenny Bruce, around the
time of his Loew's Theatre concert, coming into Eighth Street wearing a dazzling white-onwhite linen suit. It was a most striking outfit. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall and heard
all his Sidney Greenstreet jokes.
The Little Review was the most famous of all the so called literary "little magazines"
turned out in the basements and ateliers of Greenwich Village. Long before my time, the

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periodical had published Joyce's Ulysses in installments from 1918 through 1920. Among
its other contributors were Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Djuna Barnes. Come the
1960s, the tradition of publications specializing in experimental prose and poetry was still a
way of life in the "Village." Especially vital to the continuance of the small press aesthetic
were the acolytes of poet Frank O'Hara. He had been run down and killed by a beach taxi
on Fire Island in 1966 at age forty in an accident nearly as freakish as the one claiming
another of America's great artists of the advance guard, dancer Isadora Duncan. Long after
his death, O'Hara continues to hold sway over the so-called "New York School" of poets
and painters. Some known and not-so-known writers and painters who satellited around
O'Hara back then were: Larry Rivers, Leroi Jones, John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch, Kenward
Elmslie, Alfred Leslie, Bill Berkson and sui generis writer-artist Joe Brainard. Nearly all of
these artists and many more were given encouragement-through-publication by Eighth
Street Bookshop's Corinth(Totem Press.
In my picaresque 1960s, I left Eighth Street employment at least a half dozen timesusually to hit the hippie highway. Coming off the road and finding myself beached on the
shores of Manhattan, I was always welcomed back to its staff of 35 or so. The place seemed
to offer cradle-to-grave security. . for the time being.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Warning! I Brake for Hallucinations
In the first grade I successfully fended off vaccination with the new Salk polio vaccine:
"I won't!-I won't!!-I-Won't!!!," I screamed, then lay my first-grade self down on the floor
and held my breath till I was blue in the face. In the Sixties this aversion extended to a fear
of the heroin spike: I wouldn't jam a syringe of horse into my arm no matter how hard
people tried to make me. Besides, heroin seemed far too big time. And all the while others
around me were exploring inner space, relaxing, letting their minds float upstream, and
generally experiencing better living through the chemistry of LSD, I felt my drug dance card

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quite full enough.
The story of the invention of acid goes something like this: One day in 1943 a Swiss
bio-chemist by the name of Albert Hoffman was experimenting with diseased kernels of rye
in search of an analeptic to stimulate blood circulation. By accident some trace of the stuff,
called d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartra-25, entered his body: "I don't know by which way,
maybe a drop of the solution came on my fingers." At once the chemical began to produce
weird and unusual effects on the scientist's mind. Objects, as well as the shapes of his
associates in the laboratory appeared to undergo optical changes. . . fantastic pictures of
historic plasticity and intensive color seemed to surge toward him. Without meaning to,
Hoffman had become the Marie Curie of LSD, and the rest, as they say, is street drug
history. Thanks especially to the proselytization of Harvard prof Timothy Leary.
The LSD cautionary tales that American International Pictures began turning out around
1965 did nothing to inspire my confidence in the drug; like the one where the tripping biker
chick, played by Susan Strasberg, comes down with a serious case of the blind munchies at
3 a.m. and breaks into a stranger's house, raids the ice box, only to get caught in the act like
the proverbial deer in the car headlights. Talk about a bad trip!
I'll admit the claims made for LSD were hard to resist. Writer Aldous Huxley, today
somewhat passed by, was to my generation a god. Right up there in the pantheon was Alan
Watts. And both were fervent adherents of the drug. Along with others, they saw it as as a
short cut to the beyond within-or thereabouts-which in previous times had taken mystics
years to achieve. Watts and Huxley withstanding, grass and speed was where I continued to
draw the drug line. So much of the LSD floating around just then was garbage cut with
everything from Drain-o to Prince Matchabelli Foundation Powder Number Four. But when
I was presented with the opportunity of stopping off at Timothy Leary's Millbrook
compound and securing acid along the way to an eventual destination of Woodstock, New

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York, how could I realistically hold out any longer? The Millbrook acid that Weaver
arranged for me to score at Millbrook was guaranteed to be "strong," and "plire." A few
days later, as planned, my friend from Stanley's, George Box, his new Israeli lover, Zvi, and
I headed upstate and scored at Millbrook. In typical Sixties paranoid fashion, we stashed it
under a hubcap, then drove the final thirty miles to Woodstock. Heading into town we were
greeted by the graffiti, scrawled on a giant boulder:
"PENELOPE HAILS ME 360 DEGREES"
A hip and hopeful augury.
Woodstock was still several years away from becoming world famous
for the passe-by-the-fime-it-happened 1969 rock festival bearing its name. Most are now
cognizant that it was held a number of miles away at the dairy farm of a certain Max
Yasgur, later immortalized in song by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Woodstock itself was no
longer the quaint Catskills artist's colony it once was. Now it served as home base to Bob
Dylan and held deep significance for heads, day trippers, and other similar newly emerging
counter culture types from all over. The local constabulary had to called out on an almost
daily basis to deal with wayfarers who, certain that Dylan was God, had journeyed to
Woodstock, then broken into his large, but otherwise mundane English Tudor compound.
Even though the Man from Hibbing was not quite yet the major show biz figure he was
soon to become, his presence already overshadowed the hamlet's many well-known and
long ensconced painters and writers from an earlier generation.
The house we'd secured for our weekend LSD experimentation was, unlike Bob Dylan's,
anything but ordinary. Somewhere underneath this isolated mountain abode there lurked a
large, commonplace mountain cabin. But all the junk sculpture and bits of broken glass, etc.
subsequently layered over the place gave it the look of something that might have been
cocktailed up by the Watt's Towers' Simon Rodia. A friend still living in the area wrote to

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me about it recently:
"Oops, forgot to answer a question or two-that old junk house on Ohayo Mountain--yes, Clarence Schmidt was the builder, owner and resident there. He was the reason I first
came to Woodstock in 1965. As a freshman at New Paltz [State Univ. of New York], my
brand new roommate showed me an article she found in an art magazine about Schmidt, so
we copped out of orientation and hitchhiked to Woodstock with her new boyfriend (we'd
only been on campus a day or two!). We found his place and wandered around but he wasn't
home that day. When I moved to Woodstock in '68 I saw him around a lot. His relatives
tried to get rid of him and his place, so they could sell it. Valuable property you know! They
finally got him into an old-age home in Kingston [NY] and dismantled his house and
garden and, I believe, sold the land. He died not long after. The photographer, Howie
Greenberg was a good friend of his, and visited & photographed him. There was a picture
in the Woodstock Times of Schmidt in a wicker chair on the porch in Kingston-he looked so
frail it broke my heart."
***
After making all the customary preparations-mandalas in place, Ravi Shankar records
cued up, sufficient knosh in the fridge, incense and candles lit-the three of us, along with
strangers already at the cabin when we arrived, blasted off for inner space! But the launch
was not at all what I'd been led to expect. There was no rush, only a mild feeling of
euphoria and sensuousness. Like being immersed in a vat of lime green jello, looking out at
the world through a diffusion lens: A state in which, along with a half-dozen others, I ran
around the woods at night, making scary noises and jumping from behind trees like a sixyear-old. When the "novelty" of that finally wore off, someone suggested that lighting up
the woods with candles might be a fun and "trippy." Bummmmmer! There were only a few
tapers remaining and it was well on past midnight.

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"Hey! I've got a great idea!," some bright soul suggested, like in an old Mickey-Judy
musical.

"Let's drive into town and buy some!"

And off we went in the dark of night down a twisting, turning, perilous old mountain
road, me at the wheel, the others on the fenders and bumpers holding flashlights to help
illumine our way through the fog. When all at once, rounding a bend-Holy Sandoz!---there
loomed up right in front of me in the verdant Catskill mountains, the vision of a sujuaro
cactus as big as a Sherman tank, and as environmentally out of place as a crocodile in a
Catskills lake. I slammed on the brakes, causing everyone to go flying, like water off the
back of a wet dog, into the brush along the roadside. Someone must have taken the wheel
of the car after that. The next thing I knew we were in the town square in front of
Woodstock's first and only-but eventually far from last-round the clock pit stop for all your
psychedelic shopping needs. We awakened the proprietor, who was only too happy to sell
us a few hundred candles. Mission accomplished, we retraced our path back up the
mountain road.
When we'd finished filling up the woods with burning candles, the fog caused the scene
to look like something out of a Josef von Sternberg movie. But for Pat, a waitress from the
scenemaking spot back in the city, Max's Kansas City, it turned out to be too stunning a
visual surround: Tripping for the first time, she proceeded to go off the deep end far worse
than in any LSD movie. All night we tried to center her with routines like meditating on a
flower---ommmmmm---and all the other stuff that books told us to do. But nothing in any
LSD trip guide could bring her back. The next day arrangements were made to check her
into a mental hospital in the Hudson River Valley. It was the same facility where Tennessee
William's sister, the model for "Laura" in The Glass Menagerie, had been a patient for so
many years. Rose Williams was pointed out to us, almost like a prize exhibit, by one of the
hospital staff. I visited Pat a few times in months to come, but found her almost totally

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unresponsive to my presence. Eventually I stopped going. When Albert Hoffman
accidentally discovered LSD in 1943, at first he too thought he was losing his mind. But as
the dosage began to dissipate, he allowed himself to "enjoy the experience." Pat should
have been so lucky. The last I heard, she was still there, outlasting at Farmington even Rose
Williams, who died there in the mid-nineties. "Strong," "Pure" Millbrook acid, indeed!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The City and the Pillow Biter
Hard to believe, but in the early 1960s New York City was mostly devoid of gay bars. It
had to do with some sort of financial standoff between the NYPD and the Mafia. The
blackout even included Greenwich Village, the unofficial capitol of American
homosexuality. One might hear of a sympatico bar springing up fleetingly and sporadically
in the Murray Hill or Chelsea areas, but usually by the time you got around to checking it
out, "Lily Law" was already standing out front with her "Warning: This is a Raided
Premise" sign. You could enter the "premises," but it wasn't wise to do so; the joint could
get raided again at any minute. Third Avenue "men's" bars on the Upper East Side were still
fairly active, but the clientele tended toward the closeted, bland and fiscally-obsessed. Plus
the bartenders and management tended to be straight and resentful. Still there were lots of
cruising alternatives, including: the aforementioned Soldiers and Sailors Monument, always
reliable subway toilets (writer Burt O. Blechman penned an entire novel about them entitled
Stations), and the excellent Columbia University Library fifth floor john. Plus my personal
favorite, with its better class of Upper West Side Fag, Central Park West. Featuring a steady
supply of strollers on the make, I recall one queen who instead of the usual cruising "beard"
of a dog, promenaded up and down with a 2 x 4 on a jeweled leash. The only drawback to
CPW was the occasional band of rude Puerto Rican teenagers roaming this hot zone
making kissing sounds and taunting remarks. But they were basically harmless and
probably part-time pillow biters to boot. To paraphrase Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot,

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the New York homosex scene in the Sixties---especially after West Virginia-was like being
locked up overnight in a bakery. I was not all that good looking, but I bet not even
basketball player Julius Irving, with his public boast of astromical conquests, got laid more
than I did. Proving once more that it's great to be gay. The dry spell in bars lasted only for a
year or two, and when they came back around 1964, there was a deluge.
Around this time I became friendly with a woman so homosexually challenged that she
did not know why a remark we overheard in a bar one night, "Oh, my nerves!," was
amusing; did not know, when it was first offered to her, why doing a night club act at a gay
bathhouse was gloriously absurd; AND did not know that her friend, Ben, and I (both of us
she assumed were straight) were having an affair. Later, "Oh, my nerves!" would become a
catch phrase in the stage act of my new friend, Bette Midler.
The British director Peter Brook once tried to isolate charisma via the complicated
process of stationing a pair of identical twins on a either side of a stage, then tracking the
eye movement of an audience gathered for the sole purpose of watching the duo.
Whomever finally received the preponderance of "looks" was deemed to possess that
elusive quality of IT. Brook could saved himself the trouble. All he had to do was follow
then unknown Bette as she wended her way through the Manhattan of the late 1960's. When
she walked down the street, trucks ground to a halt, horns honked, construction workers
ogled and whistled and the general commotion she caused was not unlike like Jayne
Mansfield in The Girl Can't Help It ("When she walks by, the bread slice turns to toast,"
etc.). I bore witness, on several occasions, to this extraordinary effect she had on the
average New York working stiff. All this before she was even famous. Of course, that
"balcony" you could do Shakespeare off of helped.
Bette Midler is proof that regulation WASP good looks aren't everything and that it ain't
necessarily what you got, but what you do with it. When I first met her, Bette knew what

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she didn't know, was willing to learn it, and was a quick study in her ascendency to High
Priestess of Gay, succeeding the beloved, but much more unintentional Maria Montez.
Bette's friend, Ben, was easily the best looking guy I ever slept with before or since. I
met him in the Meat Rack in Fire Island's Cherry Grove section. Powerfully built and not at
all like the effeminate stereotype of the Broadway chorus boy, Ben had gotten to know
Bette while both were appearing in Fiddler on the Roof When he introduced me to Bette,
she was still with that show, but he had moved on to Hello. Dolly! where he terpsichorically
supported any number of the Dollys coming in the wake of Carol Channing. Ben charmed
with his stories about "Big Mouth" Martha, an inveterate pothead who cultivated the stuff
on the terrace of her New York apartment, harvested her plants on a regular basis, and
brought in the crop to her hard working boys on the front lines of Dolly! Not exactly in
keeping with her high profile image as an inveterate patriot and faithful den mother to
Uncle Sam's troops at home and abroad. When Ginger Rogers played Dolly, she cautiously
blotted her lipstick just prior to making each entrance, then dropped the tissues in the waste
can just offstage. Ben swooped the Kleenexes up, stashed them on his person, danced on
the stage, then gave them away as movie star reliquary later on. Ben supported so many
Dolly Levi's, he probably even corked up for the Pearl Bailey version.
Bette Midler and I became pals just before her career began kicking into high gear-a
fascinating thing to watch happening from the sidelines, especially to someone like Bette.
Truly the proverbial kook, long after her celebrity was in place, I ran into her around
midnight on the 7th A venue subway line. She still had the common touch. She may have
been a star, but to her way of thinking that was no reason to stop taking the subway. .
My last few years in New York found me slowly losing contact with Bette, mostly
because I couldn't work up nearly as much enthusiasm for her onstage persona as I had for
her offstage self. She could tell, and it pissed her off. After I moved to Los Angeles in 1975,

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every once in a while I would find myself sitting next to her at the movies or we'd cross
paths at a party. I'd smile; she'd smile back as if to say, "YES, that's right! I'm Bette Midler,"
and then probably heave a sigh of relief that I didn't ask for her autograph. Each time there
was absolutely no glint of recognition on her part. Finally at McCabe's, a local night spot, I
approached her:
"Remember Me? Bill? Ben? The Baths? Backstage at Fiddler on the Roof? Sitting
around Ben's loft on Prince Street, singing doo-wop songs and talking politics all night?"
"No, not really," she replied sweetly and ingenuously.
Clearly she believed me; but I simply could be accessed in the hard drive of her
memory bank.

Later that night, as both of us were leaving the club, she went out of her

way to come over, say goodnight, and wish me luck. About a year later I had another
encounter with Bette-more official this time-when I interviewed her for the San Francisco
Examiner during a press junket for one of her films, Big Business.
However, there was no sign of recognition. I let it go that time. Six months later, I
interviewed her again for the Examiner. Once more, it was Nada! Zip! Zed! Zero! Nothing!
No recognition! Either Bette has used up all her brain cells, I possess exceedingly flat
affect, or the mind of mega-stars can only handle and store just so much information. In
addition, the sun in Los Angeles---The City Where the Future Comes to Die---can fry your
brain to a crisp if you're not careful. In all fairness those all-day-long press junkets can be a
mind-numbing ordeal for both reporters and interviewees.
Strictly speaking, Bette Midler is more of an honorary fag-hag than the Real McCoy. A
true representative of the species has a gay detector every bit as sensitive as a homosexual
male; but Bette and I had been friends for several weeks and I had to practically drop a tenton hairpin before she became wise to my sexual proclivities. The "Divine Miss M" creation
wasn't then and probably still isn't at all like the private Bette: she failed on every count to

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conform to the following definition of the genus fag hag (you won't find the term in
Webster's) that appears in The Queen's Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon, by Bruce Rogers:
"Some are plain Janes who prefer the honest affection of homoerotic boy friends; others
are on a determined crusade to show gay boys that normal coitus is not to be overlooked. A
few are simply women in love with homosexual men; others discover to their chagrin that
their male friends are charming but not interested sexually."
All of which-and much more, except for the chagrin part-was true of my friend Dorothy
Dean. The Mother of All Fag-Hags, she felt the term had an ugly ring to it, and much
preferred "Fruit Fly." I didn't get to know her until some time after her mid-1950s glory
years during which she was the Queen Bee of a Harvard set that operated out of the
Casablanca bar (where Edie Sedgewick later came to shine). And where the men that she
hung with -none of whom had any notion that there was anything coming down the line
called gay lib-looked to her as a kind of ultimate arbiter of style, attitude and taste. She was
an outrageous woman who would say things that no one they had ever met before would
dare utter. She would tell people to their face exactly what she thought of them and
continued to play this role later on in a number of different contexts. It was almost
inevitable that Dorothy would become part of Andy Warhol's Factory circle, where it was
demanded that people be outrageous and try to top one another. But that scene had pretty
much disappeared by the time my boyfriend David and I met her in the Seventies. Her
breakup with longtime closest friend Arthur Loeb was indicative of a lot of dissolutions and
changes that were going on within the social scene. Gay militancy had to some degree
turned the fag-hag into a symbol of the past, both in its traditional cheer-leader style and
even in Dorothy's overwhelming she-who-must-be-obeyed approach. In addition, unlike
your garden variety fag-hag who fears sex, Dorothy wanted to get it on with her boys-she
wasn't afraid of anything-and was equally inclined toward heterosexual inamorata.

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Complex to a fault, Dorothy was the sweetest, brightest, and most frightening woman I
have ever known. I met her in 1970 while working at a bookstore owned by her friend
Arthur, the inspiration for the Dudley Moore movie of the same name (or so it has always
seemed to me) and a member of a prominent New York family long perched in the more
vertiginous heights of New York's 400. In exchange for their son's pledge to put aside his
legendarily dissolute lifestyle, Arthur was being backed to the hilt by his parents in this
literary emporium that advertised itself as "a carriage trade" operation in the classified ad
that I answered for a job. I was on staff when the place opened, and although Dorothy
wasn't an employee, she was so omnipresent a fixture that she seemed like staff. My
boyfriend David was dazzled when he found out she hung out at the place.
Working for Arthur was not at all like work. A past master of the zippy comeback
department, one day an East Side matron came into the store and with a totally straight face
asked him what might he suggest for "a man who has everything and is going on safari."
Without missing a beat, he replied: "Have you considered giving him Deborah Kerr?" An
avid reader of the New York Times, who always first read the bridge column and obituaries
each day before getting on to the day's less important news, Arthur said that his memoirs
were going to be called (in a play on the Rocky Graziano autobiography), Somebody Down
There Likes Me. I was surely as good an "audience" as Arthur was ever likely to get.
While she may have been black and a woman, in the final analysis, she wasn't black
and she wasn't a woman: she was Dorothy Dean.
Slight, ferret-like, and possessing coffee-with-cream skin, Dorothy wore horn-rimmed
coke bottle lens glasses, usually dressed in a simple, tasteful shift dress; and was, without
question, New York's most incurable diseuse. Nearly every time I was with Dorothy, she
happened to be drinking; she would invariably ask me the same question: "Did I ever tell
you about the time I once danced the 'Tennessee Waltz' in Tennessee with Tennessee

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Williams?" (Which was true.) She claimed that it was one of her proudest accomplishments
in life. I don't think she was joking.
In 1995 the New Yorker ran a lengthy profile of Dorothy, entitled "Friends of Dorothy,"
by which time she had been dead for nearly a decade. Fifteen years earlier the Soho Weekly
News had run a picture of her at a party with "living legend" underneath it, and the New
York Time contained a brief obit of her in 1987 when she died; but until the New Yorker, that
was just about the only public acknowledgment of the unique part Dorothy had played in at
least a half-dozen overlapping social and professional "scenes" in New York in the Sixties.
Hilton Als wrote in the New Yorker profile that years after her passing, people are still
"dining out on Dorothy stories." One of the many tales not included by Als was related to
me by Dorothy herself shortly after I met her. In her usual nasal drawl, which bore a
remarkable resemblance to Mae West if she had gone to Radcliffe (which in fact Dorothy
had), Dorothy asked me, "Have you ever heard of this person, Kris Kristofferson?" An odd
question, because of course I had heard of the hyphenate performer who had just crossed
over from recording artist to actor in a series of mildly interesting films such as Cisco Pike
and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dorothy then went on to tell me about a brief and intense
relationship (were there any other kind for Dorothy?) with the entertainer that had taken
place in Italy fifteen years earlier. She was on a Fulbright and Kristofferson was (hard to
believe) a Rhodes scholar, fully one hundred eighty degrees away from the public shitkicker image he began cultivating in the 1960s. When it came to pass that Kristofferson
resurfaced in this entirely unrecognizable form of movie star! country singer, Dorothy
sprang into action. She sent him a letter excoriating him for all the cultural criminalism he
was wreaking ("Jesus Was a Capricorn" has to be the all time worst song title ever, she
opined) on records and in films. Her missive to him was minus a trace of for-old-times-sake
sentimentalism, but instead was a request-more like a pronunciamento-that Kristfofferson

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tithe a reparative ten percent of his considerable earnings to the New York Public Library.
She never received a reply.
Growing up, Dorothy was believed to be exceptional. Born in 1932 to Reverend Elmer
Wendell Dean and his wife, Dorothy was the first black valedictorian of White Plains High
School. In 1950, she entered the gates of Radcliffe to become one of the few AfricanAmericans on its campus. Four years later she graduated there with a bachelor's degree,
with honors in philosophy, and then went on for a masters at Harvard where at some point,
Dorothy later told me, she had become pregnant by a wealthy student there. The boy,
fearful of the consequences of his blue-blooded parents learning that he had impregnated a
girl-and an African-American at that!-washed his hands entirely of the matter. Dorothy,
even then possessing a fair share of temerity, proceeded to blow the whistle on the cad to
his fraternity brothers. Forthwith they, in an act of honor, broke into the boy's dorm room,
stole a small Matisse from his wall, gave it to Dorothy, who sold it for enough to pay for an
abortion-and then some. In 1956 Dorothy became pregnant once again; this time, though,
she went full term before giving the child up for adoption. Some people believed the father
was a Dutch student she met while on a Fulbright; others thought him a certain M.I.T
professor.
In 1963 Dorothy, her extensive formal studies finally concluded, arrived in New York,
where she was immediately taken up by a set of sad young men and bright young things,
many of them relocated from Cambridge. Once again, they became seminal to her
reputation as the mother of all fruit flies. Now Dorothy also found herself becoming
acquainted with the world of Sixties New York debs, druggies and drag queens.
Some believed that Dorothy harbored toward fellow blacks an aversion bordering on
loathing, as perhaps evidenced by the fact that she ofttimes referred to James Baldwin as
Martin Luther Queen, and was not at all adverse to using "watermelon" and "jigaboo"

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rhetoric when writing or talking about blacks. While this might indicate that even Dorothy
found it hard to avoid the tradition of red, white and blue racial selfloathing, it never
seemed to bother her that my friend David was AfricanAmerican.
A stickler for grammar, even in the most casual of conversations, one nearly always felt
the presence of a giant red pen in Dorothy's hand ready to strike you down and mark you up
for incorrect usage. Thus, it isn't surprising that her passion for lingual concision led to one
job after another in various copy editing and proofreading capacities at such publications as
Vogue, Show, the New Yorker and Essence, "the magazine that proves black is pathetic," she
once said. She was fired from the latter after suggesting that the magazine run a picture on
its cover of her friend Andy Warhol in blackface.
As with most people of slight build, it didn't take much in the way of intake to get
Dorothy drunk. Like my mother, one drink and Dorothy was well on her way to Blotto City.
One evening she came to have dinner with David and me at our apartment on West 85th
Street and was as charming as ever. . .at first. But it only took a couple of glasses of wine to
put her in her cups. She ended up staying the night, and was more or less a royal painwaking David and me up, tickling us, crashing crockery to the floor, etc.-until finally
passing out in the wee small hours. A couple of days later we received from her a pluperfect
"Miss Finch's Day School for Young Ladies" bread and butter letter thanking us for our
hospitality, except for the postscript in which she profusely apologized for her besotted
behavior. We were scarcely the first to be sent such a note. These thank you/apology
missives, we later learned, were a part of Dorothy's dinner going modus operandi.
Dorothy often referred to herself as the Black Barbarella, but reminded me more of
Dennis the Menace's prissy friend Margaret, who wanted your friendship and was willing to
lose it at any cost. In the last analysis, she was an unreconstructed hipster, cut from much
the same cloth as those I had known at Stanley's Bar on the Lower East Side.

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At one point Dorothy was hired to guard the portals of a somewhat trendier, slightly
more uptown version of Stanley's, known as Max's Kansas City. It was home away from
home to the conglomeration of failed hippies, artist manques and Euro-trash who satellited
around Andy Warhol, and had the back room of the trendy spot pretty much all to
themselves. No bigger than a minute, Dorothy Dean may have been the only bouncer ever
hired strictly for the brute force of her vicious tongue.
Be they straight or gay, Dorothy specifically had a "thing" for men with high
cheekbones-in fact, she could be said to have elevated such a taste to the veritable level of
sexual fetish. Her small Greenwich Village apartment was dominated with the famous
Personality Poster of a very handsome, young and shirtless Herb Alpert who, say what you
will about his corny music, had cheekbones like the White Cliffs of Dover!
The same could be said of Clint Eastwood-another Dorothy passion. But the most
devastating cheekbones of all belonged to one Joe Campbell, aka the Sugar Plum Fairy
who, despite that moniker, was one legendarily tough little number. A co-star of Warhol's
classic comedy of manners, My Hustler, where he does his butcher-than-thou act to the max,
this demi-mondaine was the lover of Harvey Milk, when the gay-politico-martyr-to-be was
a closeted New York investment banker. He was also, along with Dorothy, a major
"character" in Warhol's taped "novel" A. I never met him, but my friend David certainly did.
One afternoon in the basement of the Museum of Modern Art, while waiting for the doors
of the film auditorium to open for a screening of something foreign and obscure, Joe spied
David (sitting demurely, leafing through a copy of the latest "Sight and Sound"), and made
his move. Terrified by Joe's ability to move from a quick hello to an even quicker "let's go
back to my apartment," David politely declined. "You turned down The Plum!," a horrified
Dorothy exclaimed when told of the incident many years later, "How could you?" Still for
all his cheekboned perfection, Joe didn't mean as much to Dorothy as her longtime running

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buddy Arthur did.
For a couple who were not married or even sexually involved, Dorothy and Arthur were
an extraordinarily famous twosome. For years they had been nearly inseparable, with their
main base of operations being Andy Warhol's inner circle; one so inner that it is unknown to
all but the most well-versed in Warholian lore. In A, Dorothy appears as "Dodo Mae
Doom," she's "Gwen," a central character in Lynne Tillman's Cast in Doubt (Tillman also
features Dorothy stories in her book about the Warhol Factory The Velvet Years); and in
James McCourt's novel, Time Remaining. she appears as herself. Additionally, she pops up
as nearly herself in several Andy Warhol films, including My Hustler (a very funny walk-on
in the last reel), the original cut of Chelsea Girls (her section, "Afternoon" also featured
Arthur, was shot in his apartment, and somehow disappeared during the second week of the
films' initial run), and in several sequences of Warhol's legendary 25-hour-long Four Stars.
The truly Dorothy dedicated can also find her playing a secretary in Jean-Claude Van
Italie's gay porn classic American Cream.
In what Dorothy later described to me as an act of "systematic sobriety," Arthur
began---shortly after opening up the rehabilitational therapy/retail establishment where I
worked and initially met Dorothy---to slowly chop away from his life all the people and
things that he felt had reduced him to his previous, pitiable alcoholic estate. Almost like he
was going down a list ticking off people, influences and controlled substances one by one.
Just like a tornado which first appears to be miles in front of you and then suddenly is right
on top of you, Dorothy never saw her own de-annexation coming. Finally one day Arthur
came to her on his mental list and, without provocation, never spoke to her again: she
would come in the store, he would leave; she would phone, he would hang up. Previously
thought to be as invulnerable as Margaret Thatcher crossed with Loretta Young, suddenly
Dorothy was a bundle of raw nerve ends-crying like a seventh grader who had just been

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terminally dis-ed by someone they had been friends with for a lifetime. Dorothy begged me
to intervene with Arthur, but I wouldn't have known how to even begin, and so I spent a lot
of supportive time with her in her cups, while she just sobbed over and over again. . .
"Why?" She was willing to do anything, even Alcoholics Anonymous, to regain Arthur's
friendship. But the door of fraternity was inexorably slammed shut. Here was the toughest
woman in New York, and she had met her Waterloo. I have never known one human being
be so hurt by another's actions. And yes, as far as I know, the once notoriously wet Arthur is
still sober twenty-five years later-a feat comparable to crossing the Rubicon.
Shortly after Arthur fired Dorothy from his life, he also gave me, without explanation,
my walking papers as an employee. I never saw him after that.
Dorothy was a long time member of the National Board of Review, the fuddy duddy
quasi-official film board. This was indicative of her station in life as a frustrated film
critic. She once told me an hilarious story about viewing, in her capacity as a NBR
member, a particularly racy foreign film, Louis Malle's Les Amants, in which the heroine
and hero are both horizontal in bed nearly naked. When the former, going down on her
lover, disappeared frame left, the woman next to her began to question hysterically,
"Where did she go? Where did she go?" "To the bathroom," Dorothy answered. Which
seemed to have satisfied her fellow Board member.
Dorothy, David and I had dinner the last night before he and I moved from New
York to California in 1975; but it was not the final time I heard from the "Queen of
Spades" as she sometimes called herself-along with the "Spade of Queens." In what was
clearly a working out of her long suppressed desire to be a film reviewer, Dorothy began
putting out her own rather wild manuscript reply to the NBR's long-running, but
exceeding unimaginative publication Films in Review. Calling her publication the AllLavender Cinema Courier, we began receiving copies of it shortly after moving to

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California, starting in July 1976 with issue number 3. Knowing Dorothy there may not
have even been a 1 or 2, or else these might have been issued sometime during the
Sixties. Enclosed with the issue was a form letter which was a request for money to keep
her venture going. In it she wrote:
"We are all aware, I fear, that most practicing movie critics are pragmatically useless.
They consistently lose sight of the point that the cinema's prime function is entertainment;
they are misleading, pretentious, and needlessly longwinded' fl In the letter Dorothy never
explains how she intends to avoid such pitfalls, but in the "Courier" proper she cuts right to
the chase, heaping praise upon well-crafted commercial crowd pleasers and damning almost
all other films, domestic or otherwise, which fell outside these rigidly constructed critical
boundaries. Much of the "Courier" is Wonderful Stuff. Here is one entry chosen at random:
"The Last Tycoon. Not very good, and who is to say precisely why. Let us not forget that
F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is said, by definition can never be successfully translated into the
movie medium. But given the long string of flash names attached to this latest attempt- Elia
Kazan, Harold Pinter, Tony Curtis, Rbt. De Niro, Robert Mitchum (gone, sadly to fat),
Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence, Ray Milland, Dana Andrews, etc.-one
had hoped for much better. However, all is most humdrum and drab, inane and vacant,
constituting a movie without a personality. The dialogue comes mostly from FSF, as I
remember, except of course for the pitifully false ending; and so it is really difficult to
imagine how Harold Pinter, as has been claimed, consumed an entire year in 'crafting' a
script from what survived of the original MS. It is disheartening to learn that someone
brilliant enough to describe scotch whiskey as the 'great malt that wounds' (Pinter, No
Man's Land) could fail so markedly at patching together extant Fitzgerald. Perhaps if some
of the planes and trains and what have you in the original had been retained, the results
would have been perkier. The spectacle of De Niro stalking about in expectation of

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conveying a commanding presence as the high panjandrum of a big-time Hollywood movie
studio is ludicrous; Robert Allen could easily get away with this kind of thing but not the
aforementioned mealy-mouthed invertebrate."
Doubtlessly Dorothy's ad hominem characterization of DiNiro was based on actual
experience, for she was definitely not of the school that believed that revenge is a dish best
served cold, as evidenced by her remarks re: the film The Other Side of Midnight in issue
no. 8 (14 July 1977) of the "Courier":
"[Marie-France Pisier] is eventually in a most enviable position, indeed as regards
implementing the revenge of one's dreams-the very best kind, whereby the revengee is
made to hopelessly writhe and squirm and agonize, fully cogni-zant of the source of his
suffering."
As for the film itself, Dorothy deemed it, "Quality trash on a high level, and a stunning
paean to [you guessed it] revenge."
Below the "Tycoon" review is one for Brian De Palma's Carrie (a wish fulfillment
fantasy for Dorothy if ever there was one!) which begins: DO NOT MISS!!!! Eight to ten
such squibs were included in each issue of the "Courier" which, at the bottom of number
three, Dorothy scrawled a personal note to me:
"I am dismayed at myself that it's taken so long to get the ALCC going again. Will
answer your letter properly in a few days (I hope)glad to hear you have settled in, as it
were."
But Dorothy never did answer my letter, and then after issue number 8 of the "Courier"
dated July 14, 1977, I stopped hearing from Dorothy altogether. Radio silence.
I began to inquire after her; but Dorothy had been on her last legs as a scenemaker, and
no one I contacted seemed to know or care much about what might have happened to her.
My first trip to New York after moving to California I devoted much of my time toward a

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search for her, but unlike Thompson in Citizen Kane I couldn't gain a clue. I went to her
apartment, but her name was not on the mailbox and no one answered when I rang the bell.
A few weeks later, after I had returned to L.A., David got in touch with a seemingly
reliable source, someone from Dorothy's old Warhol days, now a successful movie
publicist, who told him the following story: an extraordinary tale, but one not so far out,
considering its subject was Dorothy, that it couldn't conceivably have happened. It seems
that she had attended a cocktail party at the penthouse of a well-known Broadway
composer, the gathering composed of the usual witty, brittle people who congregate at such
affairs; the kind of event to which Dorothy had probably been to hundreds of times. At one
point in the evening, her usual two sheets to the wind, she found herself in the middle of a
particularly bothersome conversation with a musician friend of the host. Finally when
Dorothy could take no more, she allegedly leveled at the offending party just the sort of
attack that she'd launched on hundreds of such boors in the past:
"You are a boring, insensitive lout who has misused and mangled the English language
exactly 20 times in the last five minutes while in my presence" she said, "and if you had any
feelings of regard toward the human race, you would march over to the edge of this terrace
and throw yourself off.
Which, according to David's informant, is exactly what the man did, killing himself and
in the process causing Dorothy to have a total nervous collapse, resulting in weeks spent in
a mental hospital. Afterwards, she had gone to Boulder, Colorado, to stay in a commune run
by Off-Broadway playwright, Jean-Claude Van Itallie.
In truth, I was to soon learn, there was not much veracity to the story (the part about
Colorado, though, was accurate). Apparently an individual who happened to have been at a
party with Dorothy a few days earlier, had killed himself; then somehow the two unrelated
incidents had become conflated. An apparently apocryphal tale, but Dorothy would have

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loved the idea of someone killing themselves over bad grammar. All the years of drinking
had finally caught up with Dorothy both physically and mentally. Thrown out of her
longtime Morton Street apartment, she was rescued by sympathetic friends who began the
process of trying to help Dorothy put her life back in order.
After obtaining Dorothy's address in Boulder, I wrote her a simple chatty letter, making
no reference to the recent unpleasantness. I received no reply from her. Then in February
1987, the same week that Andy Warhol died, I opened up the paper to the Death Notices to
learn that Dorothy had succumbed to cancer. She had long been associated, the notice
informed, with the likes of Vogue and Harper and Row and at the time of her death was a
proofreader for the Boulder newspaper, Tire Daily Camera (what fun Dorothy would have
had with inept Boulder cops and the Jon Benet Ramsey case!). Otherwise, the obituary--the only such New York Times unpaid obit ever accorded a mere proofreader?---was short
and perfunctory and with no hint of the "real" Dorothy. Such as that-as I later learned-after
moving to Colorado she had not only joined a bible study group (!), but Alcoholics
Anonymous as well. Joining AA, regardless of her sincerity or lack thereof, must have
finally given her what she had been looking for all her life: complete and total command of
a room full of people. Just like the old joke (one that the old Dorothy would have loved)
about the comic who tells a friend he has to go to an AA meeting. His pal replies:
"But you're not an alcoholic."
"Yes, I know, but I need the floor time.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Fire Island, Island of Romance
"That's not a particularly flattering color on you, my dear. But then,
perhaps, no color is. Well. . . maybe plaid."
Along with talk of Elsa and Noel, Tallulah and Cole, this was typical of the kind of
brittle, and sometimes witty, conversation, one encountered during cocktail time-which was

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anytime!-at the most famous gay resort in the known universe, Fire Island, New York. Most
likely the "dish" took place over daiquiris on a sun-drenched deck while the sound of the
latest Broadway cast albums mingled gently in the background with the pounding of the
surf. A long narrow sandspit some thirty miles long, but less than a mile wide, Fire Island,
forty-five miles east of New York City, serves as a kind of buffer between the Atlantic
Ocean and the southern coast of Long Island. While residents of the nearby mainland have
long been grateful for the protection the barrier provides against the offtimes tempest-tossed
Atlantic, they were never in a hurry to settle it. According to one Island history, before 1850
it was "considered unsafe to even visit there, allegedly because of murdering Indians,
pirates and ghosts." Finally in 1869 an entrepreneur bought a pirate house and converted it
into a hotel, and the Island began its evolution into what would eventually become
America's first gay and lesbian town. There are, in fact, two adjoining, but separate gay
island enclaves; the somewhat more "V," Pines, and the non-"V," Cherry Grove, which
come together to form a kind of mini-gayopolis.
Despite commerce coming to Fire Island in 1869, it was still another fifty years before
mostly straight New Yorkers began to utilize the Grove as a vacation spot in large numbers,
and not until the following decade that gays began tricking, er, trickling in. Electricity
reached Cherry Grove and the Pines in 1960, and it was only then that the gay population
became a majority. Homosexuals are good at a lot of things, but roughing it is not one of
them.
In the early 1950s, pre-electrified Cherry Grove was paid a visit by French
anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, who wrote later in his classic Tristes Tropiques:
"Dismal Oorto Esperanca [Brazil], so wrongly named, remains in my memory as the
weirdest spot one could hope to find on the face of the earth, with the possible exception of
Fire Island in New York State. The two are now associated in my mind, since they are

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analogues in offering combinations of the most contradictory features, although each in a
different key. Both express the same kind of geographical and human absurdity, comic in
the one instance and sinister in the other. Fire Island might have been invented by Swift. "
Line dances, like the Hully Gully and the Stroll, contrary to Philly myth, are said to
have begun at the bars on Fire Island, or at least come into fashion and perfected there.
Devised because gays were not allowed to dance as couples in public-even in the gayest
place on the planet. The fact that the island was almost entirely devoid of constabulary from
the mainland, except when drawn there due to specific complaints, might have helped to
lure gays there. To gays, traditionally harassed by the police, the Island must have seemed
like paradise. There are no cars on Fire Island, only some licensed commercial vehicles-yet
this is where the hovering guru of the New York Poets, Frank O'Hara, managed to get killed
by a dune buggy! taxi on his way back from the Pines to the Grove on the night of July 23,
1966.
To complete his picture of Fire Island," Levi-Strauss wrote in Tristes Tropiques, "I must
add that Cherry Grove is chiefly inhabited by male couples, attracted no doubt by the
general pattern of inversion. . . The place is like an inverted Venice, since it is the land
which is fluid and the canals solid; in Cherry Grove, the village occupying the central part
of the island, the inhabitants must obligatorily use a network of wooden footbridges
forming a road system on stilts. . .In the tiny streets, on higher ground more stable than the
dunes, the sterile couples can be seen returning to their chalets pushing prams (the only
vehicles suitable for the narrow paths) containing little but the weekend bottles of milk that
no baby will consume."
Do we detect a streak of French Catholicism (at its most anal-retentive) running through
the prose of the world's most famed (ostensibly degree zero) structural anthropologist? If
so, it can't hold a candle to the full frontal assault launched on the Island's gay element in an

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article, "The Boys On the Beach" by Midge Decter, in the September 1980 issue of
"Commentary" magazine. The wife of the magazine's editor, Norman Podhoretz, Decter
was previously married to Merle Miller, the novelist and TV writer, who practically
invented the gesture of publicly "coming out" in an essay he wrote for the New York Times
Magazine. Tactfully, Miller never mentioned his ex-wife's name in his piece, and she never
mentioned his in hers. But perhaps still smarting from her ill-advised alliance with Miller,
Decter launched an assault on gay men whose like, according to Gore Vidal (who laid into
it in a "Nation" essay, "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star") hadn't been seen since The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Casting a cold eye on the gay enclave in the Fire Island
Pines, Decter decried "the slender, seamless, elegant and utterly chic" outfits worn, and
proclaimed it "a constant source of wonder" to her that "the largest number of homosexuals
had smooth, hairless bodies" (clearly Midge has no knowledge of gay "Bears" and their
admirers).
Decter had recently tangled with a group of gay liberationists (which included my
boyfriend David) in the offices of Harper's magazine, where she worked as an editor. They
were protesting a rabidly homophobic article, by one Joseph Epstein, that she found
"elegant and thoughtful." Some time later in Commentary Midge asked, "What indeed has
happened to the homosexual community I used to know?" She went on to complain of their
"influence" in major professions, their "efforts at self-obliteration, and "their unappeased
hunger that only their own feelings of hatefulness can satisfy."
"There were also homosexual women at the Pines," Decter declared, "but there were, or
seemed to be, far fewer in number. Nor, except for a marked tendency to hang out in the
company of large and ferocious dogs, were they as instantly recognizable as the men." To
which Gore Vidal, speaking like any sane individual, gay or straight, responded: "Well, if I
were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me on the beach, copies of

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Leviticus and Freud in hand, I'd get in touch with the nearest Alsatian dealer pronto."
In the mid-l960s, at the height of the summer season, six to seven ferries a day full up
with teachers, interior decorators, models, actors, antique dealers, publishing professionals,
etc. made the trip from the mainland. Others were, Decter wrote, "young men who had
recently arrived in the East from their hometowns in the Midwest and were living
temporarily under the protection of an older, or anyway more established 'friend'." For a
change, Decter was correct in her observations. Even a poor little ribbon clerk such as
myself could catch the ferry over from Sayville, Long Island of a Friday afternoon with
only a few pennies in his jeans, and before arriving at Cherry Grove twenty minutes later
could almost be assured of having secured a place to stay over the weekend-not necessarily
for sex, but as decoracion. Santa Baranza! I'd come a long way from a town in the south
where the gayest thing you could do was to get in drag once a year at Halloween and camp
up a storm.
Fire Island rental property was---and continues to be---so expensive that cottages were
sometimes split up ten ways. Often, when the first nine saw number ten coming toward the
house with a stranger, no matter how humpy he might be, dissension ensued over violation
of the unwritten house rule not to bring tricks home. Your arrival might find your ad hoc
host being called into conference with the other housemates, while you waited anxiously to
see if you made the "cut" for the weekend, or at least for the night. Gradually though, the
tension lessened and by the time the sun went down everyone had mellowed out. It really
didn't matter that your host had violated house protocol; in the game of musical beds that
was played out May to early September season, especially in much wilder Cherry Grove,
hardly anyone ended up sleeping in the same house where they had begun the evening
anyway.
In Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss depicted Fire Island as a place where "the dunes are

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so shifting and their hold on the sea so precarious, that notices warn the public to keep off
in case they should collapse into the water below [where) the open sea is often too rough
for bathing and the fish one caught were inedible." But there were other compensatory
pastimes!
By 1960 the scene on the Island had stopped being so, in LeviStrauss' words,
"genteel"---if it ever was. And it was what lay beyond the precarious dunes that proved the
strongest lure for gays: An area of soft sand between the Grove and the Pines forested with
scrub trees, an around-the-clock sexual Disneyland known far and wide as the Meat Rack.
Entirely oblivious then to snakes, bugs, poison ivy and god knows what all, some gays were
known to hurl themselves with abandon off the boardwalks into the Meat Rack and not be
heard from for days. Proof of Lenny Bruce's observation that the male of the species is such
a carnal beast that in a pinch he'll even shtup mud (an observation doubly true of
homosexuals). People slept there in little tents made of mosquito netting; and at the height
of the psychedelic era, tricks wandered around in the several hundred acres of underbrush
with their private parts painted in Day-Glo colors. No one I've ever told the following to has
believed me, but in the dark of night I once heard someone suddenly shriek, "Dad, what are
you doing here?" Followed by much scurrying, then sudden quiet, then the inevitable
giggles from others. Eventually the sound of erotic moans signaled that the Boys of the
Bush were getting back to business as usual. It was often difficult to differentiate between
what you thought happened, what others said happened, and what actually happened, but I
know that I once came across a thriving lemonade/KY lubricating jelly stand, run by some
insane, but enterprising queen (perhaps channeling the spirit of Fire Island's first hotel keep
back in the 1860s). Just like Bette Midler performing at the baths, after you got over the
initial goofiness, it made perf eet sense.
In her Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town,

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Esther Newton writes of one Jimmy Midi Mallios, a "very loud queen out here and loved by
everybody" who was killed in Key West by gay bashers, and "whose friends brought his
ashes out to the Grove to be buried in Midi's favorite place, the Rack." Friends attended the
memorial in black dresses. Writing of Fire Island in Young Man From the Provinces: A Gay
Life Before Stonewall, Alan Helms recalls:
"I was high one afternoon lying on the beach. . . when out of the water came Cal Culver,
soon to become America's first gay porn star as Casey Donovan in Boys in the Sand. It
happened exactly like it does at the beginning of that movie; he walked up to me, I got up,
& without saying a word we walked into the woods."
In the mid-sixties (and probably still) there would be six or seven major events each
season, including elaborate celebrations and costume balls, then on the anniversary of Judy
Garland's death, flags in Fire Island's gay communities were flown at half-mast and the
mood was somber. Writes Helms of the more upbeat occasions:
"Was it the Black & White party, or the Red, White, & Blue party, or the Black & Blue
party where the deck gave way under the weight of a hundred gyrating pumped & polished
bodies & then after a moment's shocked pause everyone resumed dancing, but now on a
tilt."
On the occasions when I wasn't able to score for the weekend, I made certain to get the
day's last ferry back to the mainland. One time at the dock, I explained to a fellow
passenger my dilemma and he made the extraordinary gesture of giving me-a total strangerthe keys to his posh beach house for the remainder of the summer while he was away in
Europe. I kept the place neat as a pin and replaced every last bottle of liquor that I quaffed. I
never saw my benefactor again, but I still recall his name-John Boyt, a set designer for the
New York City Opera, and if he's out there reading this. . .Thanks, again!
The kind of closeted, alcoholic, campy, narcissistic ghettoization represented by Fire

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Island is anathema to many of today's younger gays; but sexuality aside, the few seasons I
spent there gave me a sense of post-adolescent identity unavailable to most straight
members of my generation. Post-gay lib, I must also confess a certain nostalgia for the
Little Orphan Annie Decoder Ring aspect of gay life, now gone the way of the dinosaur and
condomless orgies.
Factor in the vertiginously escalating use of drugs in the midsixties into the existent
heady mix of al fresco sex and alcohol on Fire Island, and the result was a scene not for the
faint of heart. The Meat Rack had turned into a veritable downtown Sodom, making what
went on there PD (pre-drugs) seem positively tame by comparison, with the use of amyl
nitrate, i.e. poppers, in conjunction with speed and downers, allowing you to regulate and
control your libido with micrometric concision.
College had gotten me deferred from the service for a while, and the luck of the lottery
had staved off the inevitable a bit longer. Hovering over my first blissful summer in the
Grove, however, was the awareness that my luck in avoiding the draft couldn't hold out
much longer. Thanks in part due to the time I spent on Fire Island, my "edge" was getting
sharper by the minute. A lot of good it was going to do me in some rice paddy in Southeast
Asia.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: (Not So) Gone With the Draft

"As a sheik I can't be beat, the boys all hand me a laugh

But since I have got flat feet, I'm not gone with the draft
When the boys get back and see how I'm doin',
they'll be sorry they laughed
'Cause one can't keep on wooin' and still be gone with the draft.

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Gone. . gone. . .gone with the draft"
- 1940s pop song
I wanted no part of Viet Nam, nor any war. Most of my friends, old enough to
remember both World War II and Korea, felt the same way and were willing to go to almost
any extent to "get out of it." To many of us this "police action" served as a lightning rod for
a litany of other failures of society and the government, including: the Cuban Missile Crisis,
the death of four young black girls in a Birmingham church bombing, the murders of
Medgar Evers, and of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chainey and Goodman, and the
shooting death of Malcolm X. Not to mention the more widely-covered assassinations of
the Kennedy's and Martin Luther King. The world was simply not turning out at all the way
our parents led us to believe it would. I contemplated draft dodging across the border to
Canada, like the thousands of straight men who, it seemed to me, would rather face exile
north of the border than simply lie about being gay. I also considered declaring my (true)
homosexuality, but was warned by seemingly knowledgeable friends that nearly everyone,
including potential employers, had access to records containing this information which
would "follow you the rest of your life." Not true, but I didn't know it at the time. I
considered getting a 4-F discharge similar to the way a friend had done it; soaking all his
clothes in house paint and letting them dry in the sun. By the time he had crackled and
spackled his way across the room at the induction center, his rejection from the service was
only a formality. Not having that kind of daring, I finally decided to let get myself drafted,
play along during basic training, then just before getting shipped out, pull a big psycho
number and retire on the partial disability for life the way my friend Bobby Kubera had
done. The big day came and I found myself standing in line with a hundred other potential
service candidates, my pants down around my ankles. But when they shoved the
questionnaire in front of the me with the Whoopee Box, i.e. "are you attracted to members

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of the same sex," minus any forethought I reflexively checked it. I was snagged out of line
and shunted to a holding area containing, among other lost souls, an obviously straight
youth in his late teens wearing (ah, the Sixties!) a dress. This resulted in my being taken in
to see the army psychiatrist.
"Now, I'm going to give you a lie detector test and if you fail it, you'll get sent to jail for
perjury. Do you still insist that you're a homo?"
"Yes," I replied.
This pathetic failed professional reduced to separating faux fags from the genuine
article for a living commenced asking questions having to do with argot and actual sexual
practices. Did I know what a blow job was? Did I know what the man who played "the part
of the woman" did in bed? And so forth. I got the first one right, and told him I thought the
second question was kind of ridiculous. Still it wasn't enough. He wanted to know was there
a minister, priest or rabbi (did you hear the one about. . .?) who could verify I was gay.
Faster than you can say "Ohhhh! Father Flotsky!," I answered:
"Ask my minister. I've slept with him. He'll confirm it." I have never been so
emboldened to outrage before or since.
It just sort of came over me, like the "Messiah" over Handel, and, of course, wasn't
true. But that ripped it. He reached for a big rubber stamp and proceeded to nervously stamp
all over my paperwork: 4-F; 4-F; 4-F; 4-F.
There was no lie detector; after being herded through several other doors and offices, I
found myself back out on the streets of lower Manhattan-a free man. To celebrate, I shipped
out to Fire Island for the weekend.
***
By 1965 I was living in a block-long apartment building on Hudson Street in the Village in
which there occurred in the middle of the night, a bad fire where many lost belongings and

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one person died of smoke inhalation. However, sunup found every tenant who had signed
up for the building's chartered bus to an anti-Viet Nam rally in Washington all aboard and
DC bound Ours was one of hundreds of busses streaming out of Manhattan that morning.
Later on, a women's rest stop on the Jersey turnpike became so crowded that a large
contingent of frustrated females took the bold step of "liberating" the men's (much faster)
facility. But instead of cheerfully waving their dicks at the women, many of the men were
livid over this invasion of the lowly pissoir, one of the last strongholds of traditional male
sovereignty. It began to turn quite ugly when a fast-thinking, older black man several stalls
down from me, looked over his shoulder and observed loudly:
"Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm! There sure are a lot of pretty boys in here."
Everyone laughed, the air was cleared; our mass toilet efficiently taken care of-in a
much less traditional, non-binary fashion-we all got back on board for the last leg of our
journey.
Peace marches aside, this was the era of telephone dials with "Don't say anything on
this receiver that you wouldn't say to a narc face-to-face" in the space previously reserved
for your phone number. It was also the time of the belief that the real business of America
around the world was illegal drugs---a point of view going hand-in-hand with the
increasingly popular counter culture belief that the marked increase in inner city heroin use
was part of a calculated genocide plan directed against African-Americans (shades of the
1997 CIA South Central L.A drug scandal). Most who adhered to the theory were the same
ones who believed the government was in the process of readying concentration camps for
seditious hippie scum. Alternative mags and journals even carried photos of the proposed
holding pens.
Both hard and soft drugs had now invaded not just the inner city but every corner of
American life. The wild scene on Fire Island was but a reflection of what was happening

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back on the mainland, where at the height of LSD mania some 5,000,000 Americans, not
just hippies, but many with middle-age crises on their hands, were experimenting with the
drug. My own use of it had increased significantly since my recent first acid trip in
Woodstock. Now I was taking LSD nearly every weekend hoping to be made one with the
universe in the manner advertised by proponents like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs
and the ubiquitous Dr. Leary. But the heavy metal hallucinations (and transcendence)
simply were not coming, only mild euphoria, and I began to feel I had more in common
with Jack Kerouac who publicly announced after his experiments with the drug that,
"Walking on water wasn't built in a day."
Not that I wasn't getting some bang for my LSD buck! One acid trip (again in
Woodstock) I was taken to an abandoned tourist hotel-turned-commune by Roberts
Blossom, the actor who played the old man in Home Alone. I can't remember much more
about it EXCEPT that the room we stayed in, aside from a pallet on the floor, contained
exactly one piece of furniture-an ancient wind-up Victrola, along with dozens of Japanese
78 rpm records. . .all by Spike Jones!
Drugs were so prevalent at Eighth Street Bookshop, where I continued to work, that on
weekends nearly every one of its fifteen or twenty workers were ripped on one drug or
another---mostly grass. One Saturday on the way to work, stoked on acid, my eye caught a
slip of paper glistening up from the sidewalk. Picking it up and unfolding it, I read, "Be
kind to every man and woman you meet, for each is carrying a heavy load." Another time,
again going to work high on LSD, I plucked up yet another piece of paper from the Sunday
morning litter blowing all around my feet. This one read: "Life is Bad!" That's all. Simply,
"Life is Bad!" At Eighth Street I passed the slip of paper to fellow worker Andrei Codrescu.
Amused by the succinctness of my street find, for months after that he would sidle up to me
at random moments and in his then rather thick Roumanian accent mutter the magic words,

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"Life is bad," then scamper off. Recently, after not seeing Andrei, now a best-selling author
and a Public Radio personality, for nearly thirty years, I went to a book signing of his in
West Hollywood. At first, he didn't recognize me, but when I handed him the fabled piece
of paper, which I have hung onto all these years, it all came rushing back. We had a nice
reunion. As for the other sidewalk proverb-the one about "Be kind to every man and woman
you meet. . .," it has since become the closest thing I have to a personal credo. That one,
and Gore Vidal's "No world elsewhere, alas this is the one to change." Not long ago I asked
Vidal about this aphorism. He couldn't recall having penned it. "But it's good," he said, "and
sounds like something I might have written." Chalk it up to the perils of prolificity.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Freak Rags at Half Staff
As part of the first wave of disaffected, white, middle class youth migrating to the
Lower East Side, I had been needlessly wary of the neighborhood. But I'd grown to feel at
home in the polyglot locale. Now, however, the misplaced apprehension I once felt was
becoming a practical necessity: Old-time merchants were increasingly hostile to the
newcomers, rents were being driven up by the trendy influx, rapes and muggings were on
the rise, and noise, dirt and pollution were nearly omnipresent. Ordinary, everyday relations
between the area's newly-arrived hippie entrepreneurs, hardcore politicized like the
Diggers, drug dealers, and the mostly Ukrainian and Puerto Rican residents- there long
before the hippies arrived-were becoming strained (vide the shooting incident in Chapter
Eleven). Because of the rancor and upheaval, I was among the first to beat a retreat.
I didn't so much move as I was shoved. One very cold day in early winter all that was
missing was a plague of locusts and a rain of toads when I came home from the doctor's
diagnosis of infectious hepatitis to find all my windows shattered and nearly everything I
owned, stolen; the culprits had even taken forks, spoons, and cooking utensils! I had no
health insurance and was broke: a grand slam urban nightmare. If my life can be

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determined to have had several defining moments, what happened next was one of them; I
made a phone call to a Columbia University professor I had been introduced to at a party
the night before. I liked Sandy Kadet---his actual and rather amusing name---immediately
and I just knew he would insist---after all, this WAS the Sixties---that I get the hell out of
my bombed-out crash pad and come to his place. Which is exactly what happened. By the
time I arrived at his modest flat in the Chelsea district of Manhattan a half-hour later, Sandy
had ventured beyond my wildest expectations into Walt Whitman territory ("For every atom
belonging to me, as good belongs to you"). He had already prepared a place for me to sleep
on his couch, and for the next month this angel of mercy proceeded to cook for me, make
speed runs for the latest magazines, and more or less treated me like the Infanta of Prague.
Me! A total stranger!
So good was the care I received at his hands that after a month in bed, instead of
losing weight---usual with the disease---I gained twenty pounds. Measured against the
most advanced examples of Sixties communitas, such goodness was rare. I had come close
to being left outside the circle of wagons as a tasty treat for the wolves, but I had survived
thanks to Sandy. We became friends while I was laid up, and in the coming years I saw
many examples of his goodness and humanity, even during the increasingly solipsistic
decades to come. In the ensuing years Sandy became guru, teacher, friend, confidante, and
the brother I never really had.
I was back on my feet in just over a month, but I was without funds, jobless and had no
place to live. I would light out for San Francisco, I decided, where, if rumor and the media
were to be believed, the center of the hippie movement-of which I still considered myself a
card-carrying member-had now shifted. I had never been west of the Mississippi, much less
seen that mighty river, and the notion of hitting the road had a nice "Dean Moriarty" ring to
it.

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It was truly astonishing the different kinds of people one met tricking back in the
Sixties. Gil Alicea was a young doctor that I picked up one night in New York's Riverside
Park. Only recently returned from completing his medical internship in San Francisco, Gil
now wanted to return to the newly emerging People's Republic of Haight-Ashbury and
needed a ride. Quid pro quo, I had a car. I'd just recovered from a month in bed with
hepatitis. Coast-to-coast with a full time physician at my side: Shades of Judy Garland. It
seemed like the perfect plan for two proto-hippies in their mid-twenties with not much
money but a lot of time on their hands. Gil had a knowledge of drugs far beyond those in
the Physician's Desk Reference Manual.
"Dock of the Bay" was on the radio almost constantly that season; and what better
background music for a cross country car trip than Otis Redding's lament (and posthumous
hit) of longing and displacement? The day prior to our departure, Martin Luther King had
been shot and killed, coloring our projected car trip to California with a futile feeling of
heading straight into the belly of the beast. Along for the ride was my big, beautiful
marmalade cat, Jumbo. Also stuffed in the back seat were the few odds and ends remaining
after my Lower East Side flat had been burgled a few weeks earlier of nearly everything I
owned.
Gil and I wedged ourselves into my old green VW Beetle, with him at the wheel when
we hit the road. But instead of making for California the first day out, he took a sharp left at
New Jersey and headed due south. To avoid winter weather, he said. That it was still
autumn when he opted for "the Southern Route" should have been the tip-off; Gil had a
hidden agenda, one which became clear to me a couple of days out of New York in a town
called Cooleemee, North Carolina.
The truck stop in this little dot on the map was a setting not unlike the roadhouse a few
years back where my friend Randal nearly got us killed playing an unwanted jazz vocal

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(Gloria Lynne) over and over again on a redneck jukebox in Virginia. Here too, in
Cooleemee, the patrons were mostly good ole boy truckers. My "look" at the time tended
toward garden variety left-winger, but Gil had fashionably long hair, and was decked out in
full hippie regalia: bells, beads, the works. The waitress was, as they say down there in that
neck-o-the-woods, trouble right from the "git go." She walked toward us, and I could see
the smoke already coming out of her ears. Slapping two menus down in front of us, she
looked Gil up and down, then asked him in a very loud, salty tone:
"What would you and your boyfriend like?"
Gil smiled back at her to no effect. Quicker that you could say, "Adam and Eve on a
raft," she launched into a tirade about: a brother who had died for the likes of us in 'Nam,
my companion's long hair, and concluded with a suggestion that the good old boys in the
place should "take Gil out back and give him a haircut." I could only stare down at the
counter, trying to shut everything out. Despite Cooleemee's quaint name, it was beginning to
look like the locals were anything but picturesque and charming. The truckers, though, to
their credit and my amazement, only laughed into their beer at the waitress' suggestion about
the haircut.
The cross-country trip was turning into a mix of Easy Rider and Deliverance---several
years before either movie had hit the screen. What happened next was even more
astonishing! In a masterful performance, worthy of the Living Theater at its best, Gil began
to engage the not-quite-middle-aged woman in something resembling a dialectical
exchange about freedom of speech, the bill of rights, peace, love and flower power- the
whole hippie nine yards. Even the truckers began looking, listening, and chiming in. And
while Gil did not exactly talk Wanda Waitress into dropping out and hitting the road with us
(there was no room for her in the car anyway), he did manage to convince her of his
sincerity. When we departed a couple of hours later, Gil placed a strand of love beads

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around the woman's neck and she wept. The last image I have is of her standing in the
doorway of the truck stop, waving goodbye and calling after us:
"You hippies, take good care of yourselves, y'all hear!"
We drove off into the good Cooleemee night, leaving those left behind to wonder, "Who
WAS that Masked Man?"
Now I knew for certain why Gil had decided on the long way round to California.
Inclement weather had nothing to do with it, the trip in and of itself was the destination.
Considering how well the rest stop summit meeting between heads and straights had turned
out, maybe the polemical route wasn't such a bad idea after all.
The next night in Atlanta was the start of a three-day stay at a condemned Peachtree
Street mansion-turned-crash pad. Someone in New York had given Gil the address. The
place was falling apart; all its windows were broken, the plumbing shot, its interior gutted
by fire. Even though it was 1968, the scene had a lot in common with segments about
runaways on today's tabloid TV. Cops, ready to pounce at any minute, patrolled nearby the
house, which stood not so proudly in a rapidly deteriorating once-upscale neighborhood. An
interesting footnote: the erstwhile rental property was owned by none other than Fran
Allison of Kukla, Fran and Ollie. Maybe this was an omen; even though interracial sex,
illegal drug use, and contributing to the delinquency of minors were rife in this bombed out
Tara, surely nothing bad could happen to us in a house owned by the star of my favorite TV
show. Miraculously, nothing did, except for the brief disappearance of Jumbo.
Gil and I next blew into the naval town of Pensacola, Rorida. Did the two of us honestly
believe that we were going to change people's minds behaving in such an outrageous
fashion?; bedecked with bells and beads, parading around after midnight in a southern U.S.
military town with enough hash brownies on our person to stone half the naval base. I was
just about to suggest to Gil that we trim our polemical sails for the night when a Pensacola

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cop car pulled up beside us. We continued walking, then slowed slightly when a voice
veritably dripping with unexpected southern hospitality drawled:
"How y'all fellas doin' t'night?"
The cop's low-key come-on was confusing enough, but his
next sally was even more baffling:
"I'd appreciate it if you fellas would step over here to the
car n' answer a few questions. Now y'all don't have to
answer the questions if you don't want to."
If Cooleemee was Easy Rider, and Atlanta Hard Copy, this was Cool Hand Luke: I
turned and said to my companion, by now stopped dead in his tracks:
"He said we don't have to stop if we don't want to."
"Do you want to get shot?" Gil said soto voce.
Ahhh, the old shot-in-the-back-while-resisting-arrest routine. Gil was right.
Roadrunner-fashion I skidded to a halt, walked a few steps backwards, then both of us
began sidling over to the squad car. We followed the cop's instructions to get in back. Each
time he turned away from us to talk into his CB, we packed away another mouthful of Alice
B. Toklas' finest hash brownies (a large mess of which Gil had whomped just prior to our
setting out from New York). Fortunately, the dumb-but-cute cop didn't catch on. This may
have helped us evade a possible drug bust, but it only added to the rapidly escalating
confusion; I had never gotten so high so fast in my life. More and more cops and cars began
arriving, till at last we were surrounded by enough constabulary to staff a small southern
town. Next, a Black Maria arrived on the scene. Do I miss the Sixties all that much? Not
really.
My one and only experience with incarceration before this had not set well with me.
Several years earlier I'd been locked up in a small town jail in West Virginia over one lousy

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parking ticket, and had come down with a bad case of claustrophobia. Lily Law had refused
to let me out of the Mayberry-style jug even long enough to buy a Big Mac across the
street:
"I'm starving."
"You're in jail!"
"But you can see my every move without even standing up. I'm not
going to escape. "
"Don't you understand? You're supposed to suffer. That's why you're
in jail!"
Don't be a such company girl I thought to myself, but didn't say so.
A few hours later I was sprung by my boss at the radio station where I was working. A lot
of my friends did serious time over real issues during the Sixties, but this is the best I can
come up with.
Around two a.m. the first Florida cop phoned the police chief of Pensacola himself.
Showing up a few minutes later, he seemed none too happy to have been awakened in the
middle of the night. The man was a cliche monger of the first water:
"Now boys, we got a quiet, peaceful little town here," he drawled. We like to get to
know new folks in town."
A major naval base, exactly how peaceful and quiet could it be, I wondered?
After a few more Southern redneck platitudes, the chief began going through our ID
(his way of getting to know us better?). Mine was perused first, then came Gil's. The cop
came across something that puzzled him deeply:
"What's this here 'MD' after your name stan' foah, son?"
"Why, I'm a doctor," Gil explained.
This was followed by a mass scratching of heads and shuffling of feet.

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"Wellll, don't that just beat the cars!," the chief chimed in.
It was that curious idiomatic southern expression I had heard all my life but never
quite understood.
The intensity of the scene downshifted at once. A few minutes later we were turned
loose, but not with total impunity.
"Don't let the sun set twice on you in our town," the chief warned as we walked off
into the good Pensacola night. I'd heard that line in a halfdozen movies. Now someone
was actually saying those words to me in real life. Why hadn't I stayed in college and
become a doctor or lawyer like my mother wanted? But despite the classic redneck
admonition, Gil and I remained several nights in Pensacola with several cute-but-straight
Navy friends of Gil's. If I'd had my way, Gil and I would've high-tailed it out of there.
***
The night of our arrival in New Orleans a few days later, Gil, undaunted by our
experience with the Pensacola police, brazenly marched up to a cop:
"Excuse me, officer," he said. "Do you know where the nearest gay bar is?"
I flinched. Surprisingly, the cop proceeded to give him directions.
Gil then, of an obvious tourist, inquired:
"Pardon me sir, can you tell me where to find the hippies?"
Anything to shake people up. Next we struck up a conversation with Patty, a young,
red-haired, bright-eyed teenager from Shreveport. She was a poor soul nearly as lost as Gil
and I were; lugging along her own strobe light on the way that night to work as a stripper for
the first time. Only, she said, till she'd made enough money to go to San Francisco. . . where
the hippies were. Gil and I made an appointment to pick her up a couple of days later to
drive her to the coast.
The French Quarter was exactly the way it had been written about and photographed---

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a free zone for "anything goes" in an otherwise puritanical America. Gil craved some action
our first night there, but I only wanted sleep. Between us, we had a stash of dope, a pound
cake, a large marmalade cat, a box of pretzels, a few cans of sardines, some freak clothes, a
transistor radio-and a car, but hardly any funds. What little money there was belonged
mostly to Gil's, and even though it was against his hippie principles to pay for lodgings, he
anted up enough for me to stay that night at "The Silver Dollar." I t was a flop house just
like the "Lyons House" hotels that dotted New York's Bowery back then. This was only the
second time either of us had paid for a place to stay on the road. The other occasion being at
the Washington, DC YMCA, when I had to sneak my sweet, understanding, patient cat
Jumbo in under my coat.
The next day I drove alone to nearby Baton Rouge to spend 24 hours with Marc Brasz,
an old Eighth Street Bookshop co-worker. He had gone back to school there. The next
morning we awakened to a light dusting of snow on the ground. Surprising, since it was
now almost summer. Marc, his girlfriend, Teresa, and I had breakfast, then I picked up Gil
at the Greyhound station, and we were off again. Patti, the neophyte ecdysiast, never
showed up for her ride to California; she had probably already been swallowed up into
"N'awleens" stripper hell. The VW's increasingly shaky clutch now threatened to expire at
any moment. There was also a sparsity of old friends to stay with in the southwest. And
there was Gil's dwindling supply of money to contend with. We effected a 600 mile speed
run, all the way to Dallas where Gil had friends from his days at Columbia University. The
two guys were lovers living in a tract house in the squarest part of Dallas. It was probably
the only way to go if you happened to be gay and living in Big D. We stayed the night, and
the next day pressed on to Albuquerque where Gil reluctantly paid for an overnight stay at
the YMCA.
The car finally did give up the ghost at the Continental Divide. We had been on our way

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to Flagstaff. The automatic choke had gone haywire due to the extreme altitude. A
somewhat drunk-in-the-noonday-sun Indian helped us push our VW the few hundred yards
to the famed line of demarcation; we began coasting vertiginously downhill, I popped the
clutch and the "bug" fired right up.
Our journey now began to resemble one of those ceaseless migration montage
sequences in Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930s: Imagine the legend "1968" spiraling
toward your POV, followed by the image of two stoned hippies and a cat in a near-broken
down VW zig-zagging back and forth across a map of the U.S., whilst dozens of town
names slide left-to-right, right-to-left across the screen---COOLEEMEE . . PENSACOLA. .
.ALBUQUERQUE, etc.---and you've got the picture. This was my first real foray into the
"heartland" of the country, but I had arrived too late. There was very little regional character
remaining in the U.S. instantaneity at the expense of humanity was becoming the order of
the day. Already there was mile after mile of pod malls strung out along either side of six
and eight lane interstate highways, in advance of the 1970s mother ship malls. At Aagstaff
we spent the night at a University of Arizona crash pad, overseen by two college students,
Dirk and Kyle (with names like that you'd swear they were gay but I don't think they were).
Both were naively and sweetly dazzled by Gil's hippie glamor. You'd have thought he was
Allen Ginsberg.
April 26th found us dropping LSD in the Grand Canyon; that is, we didn't actually drop
acid INTO the Canyon, but ingested the stuff and tripped out on the fabulosity of the place
for nearly the next 24 hours. Everything began looking very flat and two dimensional:
"Wow, man, it's only a few feet deep!" I said, and had to be restrained by Gil from hurling
myself off the North Rim DOWN Down down into the Canyon. Arriving at the California
border the following day, like Steinbeck's loads, we had to shove our dead vehicle up the
rise. Two reasonably strong males could do this with a VW; then, fingers crossed, we began

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rolling down the other side. Popping the clutch at just the right moment, once more
Hermann Porsche's "People's Car" sprang to life. We stayed the night in Riverside with two
more former college mates of Gil's, by which time, our trip, that should have taken five or
six days, had lasted nearly three weeks. During which time Gil had placed me in any
number of situations fraught with my long-abiding fear of, in no particular order, travel,
strangers, and lacking money or shelter. Almost every town we'd swung into had been seen
by him as an opportunity for counter cultural proselytization, i.e., "Excuse me, officer,
could you tell me where I might find the nearest head shop?" Setting out on our crosscountry ride, I had all the makings of a serious agoraphobe. The result of too much drug
taking coupled with too many adolescent years spent prematurely dealing with the reality
principle. Counter-phobically speaking, the experience hadn't been a total bust.
By the time we arrived in Venice, California the next day, Gil and I had almost
completely stopped speaking to one another. I dropped him off at the Pacific Ocean and
drove up to my old Lower East Side friend Pompa's Hollywood Hills address. Almost no
money to my name, I was gambling on his still being in Los Angeles. He'd moved to
California two years earlier, the address I had for him was more than a year old and it was a
long shot. As I rang the bell of the basement apartment, I could hear the sound of loud
conversation inside. No one answered. I rang again, waited some more and was about ready
to give up, when the door flew open and there stood Pompa looking as pleasantly goofy and
disarmingly defenseless as ever. We embraced, I glanced over his shoulder and caught a
glimpse of a scene also remarkably unchanged from 9th Street in New York. Hardly larger
than a closet, the new digs contained an astonishing assortment of visitors. It resembled
nothing so much as the stateroom scene in Night at the Opera crossed with an opium den.
The "great house" upstairs, I soon learned, belonged to the well-known actor John Phillip
Law, and Pompa was the official gardener and caretaker. I made a mental note to believe it

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when I saw him actually performing those duties.
On the east coast his subterranean flat had served as a kind of a recreation room for
performers working at Gerdes Folk City. In California his place functioned as a den and
glorified dressing room for the comedy improv troupe, The Committee, playing in a theater
down the hill. Pompa and I got stoned, hopped in my car, and drove down to Schwab's
Drug Store for some cigarettes. It was the most fun I'd had since leaving New York. No
handsome young screenwriter came in Schwab's to buy a pack of butts for some aging
movie queen waiting in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven Isotta Frascini parked out front,
motor running. Still, all seemed right with the world.
I gave up on the idea of continuing to S.F. with Gil and moved into Pompa's one room
basement setup. In addition to the two of us, others could be found crashing there from time
to time, including a Jean Genet-type ex-con by the name of Lucky, whose last name I would
never learn. A couple of days later I got a job at the late, lamented Pickwick book store on
Hollywood Boulevard, where the only two celebrities who came into the place during my
month there were the guy who played "Wally" on Ozzie and Harriet, and actor Reed
Hadley, "Captain John Braddock" of TV's Racket Squad. In a nice example of life imitating
art, his account had been closed due to non-payment.
My cat Jumbo had turned out to be not much trouble on the road; far less than Gil
proved to be. Jumbo had managed to survive three weeks on the road in a VW, in which he
had to stay alone overnight a few times. I had also had to sneak him into a couple hotels in
a suitcase. In California Jumbo thrived in the Hollywood Hills for several weeks before
disappearing; probably ending up a tasty meal for coyotes. As for Gil, I never crossed paths
with him again after the last day on the beach at Venice.
It's really too bad he hadn't remained in New York; on April 23rd students at his alma
mater, Columbia University, launched their school takeover and the following week, on the

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very day we arrived in L.A., the musical Hair (the Rent of its time) opened back in New
York. Gil would have taken to both cultural phenomena.
It isn't entirely correct to say I never saw my cross country companion again. In spite of
his protestations about tuning in and dropping out, somewhere within Gil there lurked the
soul of a team player: Channel surfing fairly recently, I landed on one of the nightly
network news shows and there he was as a spokesman for the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission championing the rights of the disabled. His sixties-style idealism
had proven highly resistant to eradication. Gilbert Alicea had gone straight, but not straight
to hell.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Lemons in the Gutter
Hollywood, summer 1968 and director Otto Preminger is shooting Skidoo, an alleged
comedy about a retired gangster facing trouble from his mobster past-that is, until his
daughter's hippie friends come to his rescue. Today a guilty pleasure for even the most hardcore of Preminger fans, Skidoo numbers among its many delights: Jackie Gleason on LSD,
and Carol Channing singing a Harry Nilsson song about free love. Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch
weren't ready for Skidoo back then. And they still aren't. But while it was being made, Otto's
folly offered several week's steady employment for a number of hippies hired as
"atmosphere players." Among the film's principals was John Phillip Law of Barbarella
("Decrucify the angel or I'll melt your face") fame. He was one of the hunkiest male starlets
of the era, and owned the house I was living in with Pompa at the time. As natural selection
would have it, Law happened to be dating one of the most beautiful females of the
cinematic species, Barbara Parkins, fresh from her role in the immortal Valley of the Dolls.
On a good day one might catch a glimpse of this ubercouple as they strolled about the
grounds, hand in hand, stripped to their skivvies.
John Law's brother, Tom, had been hired on as Skidoo's hippie wrangler. Because of

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some sort of mineral deficiency or glitch in my DNA, I simply couldn't get my hair to
"grow good in the back"; thus, I looked far too convent-ional to qualify as Hollywood's idea
of a hippie and didn't make the cut. Nor, with his leading man looks, did Pompa's Genet-ish
boyfriend, Lucky; he was far too, well, Tom of Finland to evoke counter culture. But
hirsute dozens of others did. Each morning the fortunate ones congregated at dawn in front
of John Law's to be picked up by a bus and driven to the Skidoo set in Valencia.
Among the film's other stars was the towering Donyale Luna, one of those wonderful,
crazy sixties people who was the prototype for all the black fashion goddesses who
followed in her wake, ego Iman, Grace Jones, Naomi Campbell. Born in Detroit, educated
in Switzerland with, so she claimed, "an IQ higher than Einstein's," Donyale left college at
fourteen ("because it was bullshit"), went to New York where Vogue and Richard Avedon
put her under contract and the rest is high fashion history. While working on the film,
Donyale was put up at the (in)famous Chateau Marmont just down the hill from where we
were living. It was fun to go to the Chateau ---forevermore identified as where John Belushi
bought the farm-and listen to this space creature wax (and wane) on her philosophy of life
and the secrets of the human heart. She possessed a rhetorical style not unlike ice princess
chanteuse Nico, who, although she wasn't in Skidoo, should have been. And could have
been, inasmuch as, during this period, she was hanging out in Hollywood (for reasons I've
yet to figure out) with a group of sideburned Mafia types in Sy Devore suits. With Nico and
Donyale, it was difficult to know exactly where ingenuousness left off and the put-on
began. They had other things in common: both had come to the big city, got taken up by the
smartest fags in existence, and made into the flavor of the minute; both began as models
before graduating to appearances in Fellini filmsNico in La Dolce Vita; Luna in Satyricon;
and they came from backgrounds which they did their best to obfuscate. Alas, both died
before their time.

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During Skidoo, Donyale and Nico spent a lot of time hanging out together at the
Chateau. Oh, to have been the proverbial fly on the wall trying to decipher those mittelMartian accents! I loved being at the Chateau of an evening after Skiddo had closed down
for the day and listening to just plain "Luna" (as she was billed by Preminger) holding
court. One night six or seven of us were there, and heaped around us on the floor were the
hugest piles of grass I had ever seen. Donyale was just getting revved up--- "I came to
Hollywood not to make films, but to come down off my mountain which is an estate more
than half the size of New York City. . .I'm not a woman, I'm a black baby goddess," etc.,
when at the door there came a knock, our hostess opened it and in trooped several of L.A. 's
finest. Proceeding to stomp about the premises, they paid no attention whatsoever to the
obvious piles of hemp, while all six feet (plus change) of Donyale brazenly stalked after
them and, in her unforgettable faux European accent, bellowed baritone indignation in a
manner vaguely reminiscent of the great '30s comedienne Lyda Roberti:
"Bodju kawnt arrest heeem, thawt ees Pompa." Gesturing to Lucky, she continued,
"Yewww kawnt arrest heeem, thawt ees. . .?"
She couldn't remember Lucky's name.
"What's his name?," she said soto voce to Pompa. "Lucky," Pompa whispered back
She began again:
"Yewww kawnt arrest heeem, thawt ees Lucky." The logic of which escaped me.
Completing their curious perambulations about the room, the cops departed as
unceremoniously as they had arrived. Shrugging our shoulders, we all stared at each
other---after all, these visiting officials could have sent us up the river big time for
"possession." Then, it was back to business as usual. It Vias the closest I'd ever come to
inhabiting a living screwball comedy, and marked the second time in three time that I'd
been holding drugs and the cops were either oblivious to the fact and/or didn't care.

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The pigs/fuzz/Lily Law were everywhere on the Sunset Strip that season-not just at the
notorious Chateau Marmont. Shortly after the incident at Donyale's, Lucky and Pompa
were busted across from the Chateau. The police claimed that the two of them matched
exactly the descriptions of burglars in the neighborhood. Sure! A second story team that
looked just like Jean Marais and a singular looking, mildly effeminate Mexican-American.
They disappeared into the bowels of the L.A. prison system for days.
One of my diary entries from around this period in L.A. made mention of the fact that I
had:
". . .met Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary at a Sunset Strip liquor store. Happy to have
finally met Ginsberg, if only briefly. He knew my name from mutual friends' mention [most
likely Ken Weaver]. They are the Leopold and Loeb of the New Morality."
I can't recall what I meant by dizzily comparing Ginsberg and Leary to Bobby Franks'
killers, nor, try as I might, can I summon up memory of the encounter. Another entry, this
one for April 25, 1968, reads as follows:
"I'm glad everyone kept their cool, for I thought I was dying last night. Sadiac Maniac.
[?] John and Tom and Pompa were put through incredible changes by my insisting that I
was passing over to my majority [sic]. No one fell for it but me. If my mind is playing
tricks on me that are so insidious, is there anything I can do to stop it? Will I ever be ready
to die? The answer to these questions and much more is yours for tuning in daily."
I wrote this following a terrifying experience with something called "ice pack" grass,
brought into the house by Hog Farm guru Wavy Gravy (ne Hugh Romney) who warned any
and all about the powerfulness of the stuff. It's just grass, I thought as I reached out to take
the proffered joint. Famous last words. The next thing I knew, I was flat on my ass sobbing
like a baby that I was going to die. The lovely and aforementioned Barbara Parkins
happened to be visiting upstairs/downstairs-fashion from the "great house" one flight up. As

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sensible in rea1life as the character she'd limned in Dolls, cradling my head in her lap, this
angel of mercy began smoothing her palm across my forehead, repeating to me over and
over again the standard bad trip mantra: "You're going to be alright. . .Y ou're going to be
alright." Under normal circumstances I probably wouldn't have made it; however, coming
out of a bad acid trip (ice pack was grass soaked in LSD) and gazing up at the stunning
Parkins worked wonders. I t was the first time I'd ever had a negative drug experience (with
the exception of my withdrawal from speed a few years earlier), and it marked the
beginning of an ever-increasing period of "bad tripping" that would reach critical mass
during an acid excursion the following year in New York. On those occasions (about which,
more later) I didn't have one of the world's most beautiful women as a trip guide. I should
have quit while I was ahead.
My failure to make the Skidoo cut notwithstanding, there remained hope for my getting
into the movies, thanks to a friend from my home town now living in Los Angeles. Bob
Barron had come to Hollywood a few years earlier, and I had kept up with his activities via
the "Charleston Boy Makes Good" type stories appearing in the local papers. He had won a
writer's Emmy for a Bonanza script, and also directed and written three or four films which
had turned a profit on the southern drive-in circuit, including one called Cottonpicking
Chickenpickers starring. . .Sonny Tufts!
In mid-May I rang Bob up, re-established contact with him and a couple of days later
drove out to visit him in Tujunga where he lived with his wife Gloria, another
Charlestonite. On my way there, I thought I was hallucinating when I passed a dinky little
neighborhood movie house whose marquee read, "Live! The Firesign Theatre." It was the
last place in the world you'd expect to see these counter-cultural comedy heroes-of -the-day
performing.
The Barrons were a very straight couple, bohemian around the edges, who lived with

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Gloria's grandfather. Grandpa had been a young man at the turn of the century, and
possessed extraordinary sense memories of the first time he looked up and saw a plane fly
over, viewed projected motion pictures, witnessed the first car drive down the main street of
his home town, etc.---all as an adult. The Barrons comfortably dwelt in a ranch house
located in a middle middle-class neighborhood. Hot food, clean floors, hot damn. . .they
even had a color TV! It took me a few minutes before I could reorient myself to such
conventional surroundings after being on the road in bizarre circumstances for so long. The
Barrons were very amiable, serving me dinner, after which we viewed, enfamille, the first
colorcast showing (a very big deal at the time) of The Wizard of Oz. I stayed the night.
Before leaving the next day, Bob offered me a job on his next film which was to start
shooting in a couple of weeks. Granted Blood Bounty wasn't exactly going to be an "A"
picture, perhaps not even "B" minus, but still, it was The Movies. He had accrued a stock
company of actors that included not only the redoubtable Sonny Tufts, but also people like
old time vaudevillian Beatrice Kay, jazz singer Sue Raney, and most notably, John
Carradine (who Bob had once paid in cases of canned tuna fish). Needless to say, Bloody
Bounty's intended star wasn't exactly Robert Redford, or even Gardner McKay for that
matter, but legendary troublesome movie spud, John Drew Barrymore (father of Drew). I
couldn't wait. The next day I drove back to town, quit my job at Pickwick Books, then
mostly killed time at the beach until it was time to begin work the second week of June. By
now I had changed my mind about going on to San Francisco.
However, events occurring on the sixth of June changed all this when the life of one of
the nation's most possible heroes (to paraphrase Norman Mailer) was snuffed out and with
it, down the drain also went my hopes for working in the movies. Blood Bounty was
intended as a spaghetti western spoof projected to feature its anti-hero, played by
Barrymore, blowing away some forty-five bad guys. But with the assassination of RFK,

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overnight a deeply upset Barron scrapped plans for his hyper-bloody film. Though Blood
Bounty was of little consequence in the grand Hollywood scheme of things, Bob's antiviolence gesture made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The next day a studio,
specializing in low-budget films similar to his independent productions, went on record as
cancelling one of their carnage-filled projects. These were the first of many such stories
filling the papers for months to come in the wake of RFK's assassination. Bob, who had his
ear to the ground of that area of movie turf, assured me that the second movie in question
did not exist, even in early stages of pre-production. Paging Sammy Glick.
If America hoped to clean up its act-and a lot of post RFK shooting rhetoric seemed to
indicate it did-there was work to be done. This was a time marked in Los Angeles by
numerous messianic cults springing up, several of which began roaming the Strip while I
was there. One of the most obnoxious and dangerous of the lot palmed itself off as a
religion, but in reality was nothing more than a plain old-fashioned white slavery ring
wrapped up in the latest trendy trimmings. This was not at all like the Lower East Side of a
few years ago. Instead of coming up and gently handing you a flower or a peacock feather,
evil and nasty hippie teen runaways were just as likely to shove the feather up your nose if
you didn't stand still till they had completed their Moonie-like rap. Everywhere in the U.S,
but especially in Los Angeles1968, an era was coming to pass that would later be known as
the The Big Evil. L.A. Police Chief Ed Davis' boys were beginning to behave in an
increasingly irrational manner in response to what was going down---as evidenced by the
"raid" on Doyale's hotel suite at the Chateau.
I should have seen all this coming as early as 1965 when I walked into Stanley's Bar on
the Lower East Side one winter afternoon and happened upon a fashion shoot overseen by
Lee Radziwell for Vogue magazine, i.e. thin-thin-thin models in haute couture draped
across the mahogany bar in high fashion poses, while "real life hippies" garnished the scene

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like so much boho seasoning. A still small voice told you that this was not a good thing. At
Stanley's there was also the recurring sight of celebrities "slumming, most notably,
Madeline Sherwood a very wellknown Broadway and film actress engaged in patrolling the
place for sex. White, her tastes ran exclusively to African-American males; uncommon for
the times, there were a lot of blacks at Stanley's. I was not "shocked" by her sexual tastes,
only by news of this authentically bohemian bar having leaked out "uptown."
In the Fall of '67, in a basement adjacent to the Lower East Side's Charles Theater, one
James Leroy Hutchinson, a speed dealer better known in the neighborhood as "Groovy,"
and his upper class runaway girlfriend, Linda Rae Fitzpatrick, daughter of a Greenwich,
Connecticut spice merchant, were found murdered by three members of a black nationalist
sect. This resulted in the first-ever instance of multiple national magazine covers-Time,
Newsweek, etc.---devoted to the demise of a smalltime drug dealer. The "hippie murder" of
a yet another dope merchant known as "Superspade" occurred around the same time in San
Francisco's Haight-Ashbury section. Then there was John Kent Carter, a San Francisco acid
dealer who went by the name of "Shob," found dead in his apartment with his right arm
severed at the elbow; a news account read:
"One Frank Dahlstrohm, a friend and LSD customer of Shob's, was stopped by police in
Sebastopol driving the victim's car. Found in it were Shob's pistol and, wrapped in a red and
black suede cloth, Shob's arm. Dahlstrohm claims to have stabbed Shob in self-defense
after an argument about bad acid, but added, 'I'm very, very hazy about the arm.'"
Nor did the police have an explanation about the arm, but dealers in the Haight
remembered Shob's habit of keeping large quantities of money for deals in a locked
briefcase, which he handcuffed to himself to prevent its theft.
Talk about your drug deals gone bad!
All of this and much more set off a national wave of "Whither-our children?" tongue

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clucking as reflected in a Fall 1967 Newsweek cover story, "Trouble in Hippieland. There
was a "funeral" for the media's distorted notion of the "Hippie," overseen in San Francisco's
Golden Gate Park by the real thing. In only a scant three years, a social phenomenon of
major proportions, the counter culture had gone into an irreversible skid. And to think,
Charles Manson hadn't even arrived on the scene yet!
Like my career in film, the national about-face from grand guignol didn't last long. The
next year, director Sam Peckinpah upped the violence ante to undreamed-of heights with Tk
Wild Bunch. Bob Barron, however, remained true to his resolve. The last I heard, he was
writing cartoon adaptations of things like Tom Sawyer and Little Women for HBO.
The ultimate example of how it all turned rancid can be found in Jane Fonda.
Everyone I knew in the peace movement considered "Hanoi Jane" an arriviste, an
opportunist, and a joke---a poor little Hollywood rich girl searching for a cause. Not long
after her Viet Nam phase, I saw her on TV working hard for the money, singing Peggy
Lee's song "Manana" in a stereotypical Spanish accent. Flash forward ten years later and
she was making bad movies and earning a mint off of the cult of "lookism." Today she's
[was in 1999] married to one of the world's most powerful capitalists, Ted Turner, and
can be seen performing the offensive Indian chop gesture at the home games for the
Atlanta Braves, which hubby owns. One wonders how many important civil rights rallies
she conveniently missed on U.S. soil during her high Hanoi period spent mostly abroad. I
never wanted this woman to represent my feelings about Viet Nam in the first place. I
was much more impressed by Jane when an ad agency wanted her to do an TV spot for a
feminine hygiene spray, and she wrote back to them:
"There's nothing wrong with my body!"
***
At the start of my cross country sojourn, Martin Luther King had been assassinated;

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bookending my journey, Robert Kennedy was gunned down only a few miles from
where I was staying. Two days prior to the RFK shooting, Andy Warhol (a minor hero of
mine) had almost been killed. Norman Mailer's essay, "Possibility of a Hero," had gone a
long way toward disabusing me of the political disaffection I had fallen into over the
deaths of MLK, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Lenny Bruce (at the time, rumored to
have been a police "hit"). Now, Robert Kennedy, the central figure of Mailer's essay had
been similarly dispatched. In 1%3 Malcolm X had gone on the "Les Crane" TV show
and made a much-discussed remark about JFK's murder: "The chickens are coming
home to roost." In other words, the nation's power base of imperialism and racism was
beginning to erode. Alright by me, only I didn't want to be around to help pick up the
pieces. I was not alone in my feelings: six months earlier San Francisco had been the
new Happening Place, replacing New York as ground zero of hippiedom, but the socalled S.F. Summer of Love turned out to be a bust. Many of the Haight's original black
residents were being driven out due to vertiginously escalating rents. Similar fates had
befallen many utilitarian merchants, pushed out to make way for head shops and other
similar operations, including: Far Fetched Foods Health Store, Quasar's Ice Cream,
Middle Earth Clothing, and the Magic Theater for Madmen Only Boutique, sprung up
overnight to capitalize on the expected New Age equivalent of the D-Day.
Somewhere on the average of about 700 new arrivals per day were coming to San
Francisco with "flowers in their hair;" adding to the already 20,000 "heads" living in the
Haight. The city government had done everything short of calling out the National Guard as
it girded itself for what was projected to be the onslaught of four million (!) youths that
psychedelic summer of 1968-an invasion that S.F. Mayor John Shelley deemed
"unwelcome." It was far more than the city wanted to or was prepared to deal with;
especially in light of the fact that one hospital alone reported a hundred admissions per day

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due to bad drug reactions. The lunacy reached critical mass on July 11, '68 at a pot party in
Hashbury, as the Haight was coming to be known, when no less than establishment darlings
Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn were busted. Shortly after that, seemingly in reaction,
area alternate newspapers such as the San Francisco Oracle and Berkeley Barb began
urging all true followers to head for the hills. In Los Angeles, where I had remained, the
mood was similar, as exemplified by this following letter in a 1968 issue of the hippie rag
the Southern California Oracle:
"Hello Groovy People
My name is Deckey and I'm dropping out. On the 14th of August I will be leaving L.A.
with my few belongings and my five-week-old daughter.
We are going to the Monterey area to find a cabin in the woods so I
can paint and learn more of myself.
Until I am able to become entirely self-sufficient by selling my paintings I need
household items. . .These things I will pass on to others who want to drop out.
Groovy, beautiful people help me drop out---send whatever to the Oracle and I can pick
it up there.
Thanks and Love. "
Right back at you, Deckey! With no family, money or career prospects to speak of, what
did I have to lose by pulling a little H. D. Thoreau number myself? For my leap into the
wilderness I chose a small town whose name had a nice ring to it---Mendocino-about a
hundred miles north of San Francisco. Later I learned that large portions of East of Eden
were filmed there.
Very early one weekday morning I began my drive northward intentionally bypassing
my original cross-country destination of San Francisco. Arriving in Mendocino very late
that night, I staked out a spot in a meadow that rolled down to a steep bluff overlooking the

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Pacific. I was many miles away from industrialization and heavy population. The sky and
stars above and out over the ocean were liquid blue and crystalline. Jerry-rigging the VW's
interior, so as to stretch out diagonally to nearly my full height, I drifted peacefully off to
sleep. By now my VW no longer had a starter and I could only park on inclines. The next
morning I sat at the wheel of the Bug, took off the emergency brake, and rolled downhill. I
got to the edge of a cliff, hung a very sharp left, and popped the clutch; the VW sprang to
life and zoomed right back up the hill. Sweet Jesus! It was the most dangerous thing I had
ever done in my life: I could just as easily skidded sideways and crashed to the rocks below.
Gays are no longer just your hairdressers and interior decorators. . . we are everywhere;
and so, later that day I managed to scratch up a laboring job with a demolition crew tearing
apart an old mansion. I continued sleeping in my trusty VW. In a couple of weeks I had
enough money saved to rent a cabin in a nearly abandoned motel court off the main drag. It
looked like the kind of place where gangsters holed up in classic Warner Bros gangsters
melodramas. Every time I stepped out the door I halfway expected to come face-to-face
with Bogie's "Duke Mantee." As for myself, I'd been "on the lamb" for nearly six months
with no fixed purpose; now at last I had a bed to call my own. Somewhere during the
middle of all this, I attended a multi-media event consisting of a screening of East of Eden
in the interior of the Mendocino church whose exterior plays so large a part in the film.
Many in the audience had been extras in the film. Paging Luigi Pirandello!
I had traveled to Mendocino with hopes of finding a commune where I could sit by the
roadside and be a friend to man, and subsist on homegrown fruits and vegetables for the
rest of my life. In other words, the whole sixties cornball nine yards. And I found the
makings of commune in a loosely grouped bunch using Mendocino as a staging area for a
final leap into the great bucolic unknown. But there was something about its members'
Gung Ho attitude and a too strong an emphasis on garden variety Christian dogma that

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bothered me. I had a vague itch to "belong" to any group that would have me, but
something ultimately told me this particular setup was not the way to go. How did I know?
I just did! Thanks to a still small voice that always warns me away from going off the deep
end. I later learned that this was the beginning of Jim Jones' People's Temple. And to think I
had come that close to becoming a Kool-Aid Kasualty!
That fall I did a lot of hitchhiking back and forth between Mendocino and San Francisco
to take part in peace marches, attend rock concerts and Peace and Freedom Party rallies.
The rides I got were mostly forgettable. . .except for one. It was high noon twenty miles
south of Mendocino and I had just stuck my thumb out after being dropped off by a
sympathetic "straight" when an Inter-national Harvester truck screeched to a halt beside me
and I was offered a lift by a tie-dyed, bearded, longhaired regulation hippie. Almost
immediately, the ride began to take on serious what's-wrong-with-this-picture? overtones
when my driver began wildly exceeding the speed limit and knocking back beer after beer,
throwing the empties out the window, and in general, behaving like part of the problem
rather than the solution. Fifteen minutes later he pulled over to buy another six-pack at a
roadside convenience store. I began seriously considering bailing out on the spot, and had
my hand on the door handle when he reappeared. Up to now, Charlie (his name) had been
reticent to talk much; now that began to change.
"What are you going to San Francisco for?," he asked. When I innocently replied, "An
anti-war rally," Charlie's response was anything but benign: he ranted and raved for a full
five minutes about "fuckin', stupid hippies," then reached back over his shoulders and lifted
a tarp, underneath which lay any number of extremely serious looking guns.
"See those? Next week I'm going to San Francisco to off me some pigs. If there's one
thing I can't stand, it's PIGS."
"But you're a hippie," I ingenuously proffered in my best Little Mary Sunshine delivery.

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Folks with long hair and tie-died clothes simply weren't supposed to act this way!
"Hippies don't kill people, do they?," he growled.
"Uh, no."
"Well, I do," he snarled. "So I guess I'm not a hippie. I hate hippies. . .nothin' but weak
cry babies. . .let the pigs walk over all over 'em."
This hippie from hell began hyperventilating, driving still faster, forcing cars onto the
berm, and causing some to go into spins. Screwing up the courage to look at the
speedometer, we were now going over a hundred. Now he began punctuating his rant with
the horn: "Did [honkkk] you hear [honkkk] what I said? I [honkkk] kill people."
As casually as I could, under the circumstances, hoping to mollify
him, I asked who his victims had been.
"I've killed lots of people."
"Oh! Who?"
"I said. I've killed lots of people," he repeated.
" Anyone in particular?" I could barely get out the words stuck in my throat, and had to yell
to be heard over the roar of the engine.
"Last fall I caught a spade speed freak in bed with my oLd lady, I carved them both up
and shoved 'em down the garbage disposal. "
He waited a beat for a response that was not forthcoming, then
continued:
"Welllll, what would you do if YOU caught a nigger junkie in bed with your old lady?
Wouldn't you kill 'em and shove 'im down the disposal?"
"Oh, yeah, sure. . .right on. . .what I'd do. . .you bet. . .most natural thing in the world," I
said with as much ingenuousness as I could muster up under the circumstances. I
comprehended to the very marrow of my being the full implication of holding on for dear

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life as I contemplated the odds of survival were I to jump and roll from the vehicle now fast
approaching the speed of sound. Looking back through the rear window, all I could see was
a roadside chockablock with stalled cars and a vanishing point diminishing at a
vertiginously escalating rate.
Heading for the desert, Charlie had reached his turnoff. We went from 90 mph to zero
in no time flat as he slammed on the brakes. Rather than hitting the ground running, I
behaved as if I had just gotten a ride from a workaday insurance salesman: I thanked him,
he zoomed off, and that was that. Or, so I thought. After a few days in San Francisco, I
returned to Mendocino where it began to dawn on me that a psychopath had imprudently
confessed multiple murders to me. And he knew where I lived. I was unable to find a news
item at the local library about the alleged homicides. As with the Zoomites who were going
to destroy the world when I was eight, I ended up keeping all this to myself. I drove to a
nearby town, sold my VW, and with just enough money for a big bag
of granola and a bus ticket, caught the next Greyhound back to New York. I was able to stay
pleasantly high most of the time thanks to some leftover morphine from a minor industrial
accident I had sustained a couple of weeks earlier. It was a journey devoid of incident, with
one exception long about midnight west of Baltimore on a packed-to-the-gills Greyhound
bus, when a lone hillbilly in the rear began to wail and whine in a loud and angry voice.
Passengers tried to sleep, but every last pregnant woman, soldier and baby aboard had been
jolted wide awake. Thanks to the common sense that ofttimes obtains in cramped quarters,
everyone, driver included, bit the bullet and left the drunk to his ravings. The only
alternative-probably illegal-would've just been to pull over to the side of the road and toss
him overboard. Sleep an impossibility, and with nothing better to do, I tuned in to the
stranger's rant. I heard:
"Godamn. . .godamn. . .godamn, I tole him, Otis don't get on that plane. Godamn..

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.godamn godamn, he was the best ole boy even if he was a nigger. I told him, Otis don'
go, but he hops in that plane anyway and it crashes head-on into the lake. I loved that ole
Otis. I tole him...".
I sat bolt upright: "Otis" was clearly Otis Redding, killed in a plane crash the year before.
Six months previous, I had been California-bound and his "Dock of the Bay" had played ad
infinitum on the car radio. Now Redding was bookending my trip back to the east coast.
Why had good ole boy warned Redding not to get on the plane? He had seen Otis' private
plane take off in Macon, Georgia, but it hadn't crashed until five days later in Wisconsin.
Nearly every death of a public figure---pop or political---in the 1960s has had a conspiracy
theory attached to it. Otis Redding, I have learned subsequently, is no exception. Nearly
thirty years later as I write this I am at once struck by the question: did that seemingly
innocuous drunk actually know something about the inevitable fate of Redding's plane?
Thanks to the miracle of morphine, the only other thing I remember about the days long,
coast to coast bus trip is the occasional waking up for what Louis Armstrong called "tire
inspection" (taking a leak); and finally arriving a week later in Woodstock. Stepping off the
bus at the local newsstand-bus stop I was greeted by the following headline in theNew York
Times:
"Film Star, Sharon Tate, and Four Others Slain in Hollywood."
I thumbed through the story for the details, and even though the authorities didn't
have the killer (or killers) yet, I had a pretty good idea who had done it---the hippie/not a
hippie who had picked me up a few weeks back. A few weeks later the eyes of Charles
Manson stared out from the front page of nearly every newspaper in the country after he had
been apprehended, and my suspicions were confirmed. The crazed driver and Manson were
one and the same. As more details of the murders were made public, I would learn that
Manson and I had both attended the same grade school (albeit five years apart) back in

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Charleston. What a claim to fame!
The Manson affair symbolically marked the end of the "Summer of Love," and
transpired just as the system was beginning to figure out how to market the very rhetoric
and various lifestyles that had up till now been directed against it. My old buddy Ken
Weaver's group, the Fugs, had begun as a self-styled anarchist band and the absolute
forerunner of everything from metal to punk to grunge, and had briefly been on the obscure
ESP label. Now they had a big ticket deal with major Reprise Records. Now even the most
jejune of pop phenomena had to be coated with a patina of high hippie seriousness to pass
muster: no more fun for fun's sake. Proletarianization was beginning to take a cultural
quasiaesthetic form; something Karl Marx would never have dreamed possible. The very
means associated with the notion of "dropping out," e.g. LSD, strobe lights, electronic
amplifiers, etc. were coming to be yoked to the idea of speed, scientific discovery, and
profit motivation. There was even a rumor afoot that tobacco companies were preparing to
launch brands of marijuana cigarettes, once the drug-at some golden age in the near futurebecame legal. Ironically, even hippie costumes opened up a new market for shrewd clothing
manufacturers-remember Nehru jackets and bell bottoms? Like lambs to slaughter, most of
my contemporaries had believed American Society would magically rise like a phoenix out
of the ashes if-like Peter Pan-we all just wished long and hard enough. But the gross
American societal indecencies, anomalies, and inconsistencies--including the madness of
Kent State, escalating racism, political assassination, the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, etc. --were clearly not to be dispelled by the pseudo-utopianism of just-add-water-and-screarn
cults like the one I had narrowly avoided becoming a part of in Mendocino. For millions of
disenchanted, disenfranchised millions like myself, there seemed to be no middle ground. It
was a choice of either hiding your head in the sand or selling out. Few among us dreamed
that Amerika-and business as usual was destined to keep right on rolling along.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN: Woodshuck
Hi. I'm Bob Dylan. Remember those fabulous sixties? The marches. the be-ins, the
draft-card burnings and best of all - the music. Now Apple House has collected the best of
those songs on one album called Golden Protest. . .and if you order now you'll also receive
A Golden Treasury of Acid Rock and The Best of the Super-groups. Yes, it's a collectors
dream: Golden Protest and two fabulous sixties albums for only $3.95. If you were to
purchase these selections separately they'd cost you many hundreds of dollars, and many
cannot be found today at any price. . ..
National Lampoon's Radio Dinner (1972)
I arrived back from California in late '68. I spent a lot of time shuttling back and
forth between New York and Woodstock. In neither locale did I have a place to---in
the newly evolved parlance of the times---crash. For a while I held a job in a
Woodstock bookstore, The Juggler. It was there that I experienced the thrill of
selling a copy of Faulkner's Light in August to Tuesday Weld, star of Lord Love a
Duck," that Beach Party musical by way of Nathaniel West, and numerous other
cinematic delights.
There soon occurred nearby Woodstock, twenty miles or so away in the hamlet of White
Lake, an event of such magnitude that, more than three decades later, it still possesses
major mythic resonance. The most media-publicized event since the birth of Little Ricky
Ricardo. The weekend that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair happened, relatively grizzled
old-timers like myself stood on the sidelines and watched as starry-eyed teens and early
twenty-somethings traipsed through the town of Woodstock proper on their way to the
event. The whole idea of "three days of peace and love" was the corniest thing we had
encountered since our parents' Guy Lombardo records. Hundreds of thousands clearly felt
differently though, and before the weekend was over, Woodstock had already taken on the

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world-wide significance of a religious pilgrimage and the founding of a new social order.
More importantly, from the point of view of commerce, the happening at Max Yasgur's
farm represented the first major coming together of various marketing skills on how to
neutralize, contain, and capitalize on the rapidly escalating disaffection among a majority of
those born after the start of World War II.
Woodstock was the youth culture Triumph of the Will! Like the eventual coming of
sound to the movies, it was an historic inevitability-an accident waiting to happen. Rolling
Stone magazine had begun to play a key role in establishing the scenario for marketing rock
music to an unprecedentedly affluent youth market. With the aid of the record company
advertising, almost overnight Stone and a rapidly escalating number of imitators were
becoming the tail wagging the dog of the music industry.
Until the emergence of pop music as mass metaphor in the Sixties, the record industry
had been relatively small potatoes measured against the impact of broadcasting, film, or
even book publishing. From the 1920s on, phonograph recordings had been a
conservatively profitable area for investors: Post-Woodstock, the sky was the limit. Thanks
in large measure to rockcrit's aesthetic validation of what is nothing more than, in most
instances, innocuous recreational music. In the new scheme of things, even the most banal
and vernacular of songs were elevated to the level of high seriousness ("'Hound Dog' and
the Ethos of Rural Stratification," etc.). No longer was music to be enjoyed qua music: this
was a reactionary and puritanical mindset that signaled the death of fun for fun's sake.
Depending on the quasi-political message one wanted to convey to your peers, one now
wore varying music styles almost like different varieties of clothing. Rock lyrics have come
to displace the written word as the arbiter of ethical and political concerns among the
young. Even though-let's face it-the best of rock (with rare few exceptions) is ephemeral
and not much above the level of the nursery rhyme. The crass Marcusian nightmare of the

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"The Man Can't Bust Our Music" print ad campaign in the rock press says it all. Unleashed
on American youth by Columbia Records around the time of the Chicago 8 riots, distinctly
hippie types are seen from behind prison bars defiantly waving picket signs based on CBS
album covers for such groups as Big Brother, Electric Rag and Moby Grape. An essential
link in this scheme of things, which writer Richard Meltzer calls "the record industry food
chain," were/are "rock critics," who, since their arrival on the scene in the 1960s, have
become indispensable to rock and its various offshoots, i.e., rap-soul-funk-metal, etc.
By way of an apologia pro vita sua, I confess that I too became a part of the
rock=revolution racket. . .along with nearly every writer of my acquaintance. While living
in Woodstock I began tossing stuff over the transom of Rolling Stone, which in turn began
accepting and publishing nearly everything I sent. Soon I was also copiously writing for
Rock, Zoo World and a number of other now-forgotten Stone-clones.
It was as if the only kind of music existing was that which had pretensions toward social
transformation. But I didn't completely hide from my readers the increasingly cold eye I had
begun to cast in the direction of "The Music" as rock was now being called. In a 1970
review of some bootleg Bob Dylan demos I had accidentally come across while house
sitting in Woodstock, I mostly assailed the sides (all of which were commercially issued
eventually), which consisted mainly of cornball country music: Dylan had come a long way
down from "The Times, They Are a-Changin'" Nearly everything I wrote concerning rock
music betrayed a distinctly Rock Gods Were False Prophets stance. With one notable
exception; while nearly all my rock crit brethren had the good commercial sense to direct
their energies toward writing about such trendoid outfits as Martha Proud and the Birth of
God, AxeMeat, Urban Sprawl, the Desi-Rays, and the Triffids, I had the bad fortune to be
deeply strung out on the "uncool" Beach Boys. History has absolved me as far as the group's
Brian Wilson is concerned. I was flacking for them at a time when they couldn't even get

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arrested. Pre-Beatles, they were the hottest thing in American pop, now they were
considered a joke. A 1969 concert at the Fillmore East had been a near disaster. They came
on stage decked out in ice-cream colored suits. Fillmore habitues liked their groups grungey,
raw and au courant, and the Good Humor apparition on the stage couldn't help but bring out
their sadistic side. By the end of their set, the Beach Boys were reduced to goosing each
other and acting like panicky circus ponies.
The "Boys" were so desperate for coverage of any kind, that I received their
cooperation during this period on numerous pieces I wrot about them for "Rolling Stone,"
Fusion" and in the aforementioned "Rock." I had the opportunity to do a Q. and A. with
the notoriously reclusive Brian Wilson. A sample:
Brian: Bill?
Yes, Brian.
Brian: Have you ever talked to Mick Jagger?
No, I never have. Why?
Brian: Are you going to?
I'd like to, sure. But I don't foresee it in the near future. Why?
Brian: I think you should.
What do you mean?
Brian: I think he would be a really interesting rap. He's in this movie Performance
where he's dressed like a girl, and I think he'd make a good rap.
Okay [beat] Are you tied of of being asked about "Surfs Up"?
Brian: NO!
Do you think it might make it onto a future album?
Brian: No.
Why?

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Brian: We lost it.
No dubs or anything?
Brian: Nope, it's gone. [Slightly retooled, of course, the dub did appear on the group's
1971 album, Surfs Up, released not too long after this interview].
What are you working on now?
Brian: I'm doing the soundtrack of an Andy Warhol movie about a spade gay surfer.
There was eventually a Warhol movie along these lines, San Diego Surf. But it was
never released and to the best of my knowledge Brian Wilson had nothing to do with its
music.
I helped propagate in the press the then novel idea of Brian Wilson as a creator of
something beyond mere surf music. It's just about the only thing I'm proud about the time I
spent shilling for the record industry. That, and my proselytization of slide guitarist/singer
Ellen McIlwaine. I was happy to learn via the internet recently, that though still
(inexplicably) unknown in the U.S., she's had a sturdy career established north of the border
and in Europe 10 these many years.
At a Greenwich Village record store where I was briefly employed, one Saturday
afternoon a very pretty young woman, accompanied by two side-burned, guys-whose-lastnames-ended-in-vowels types, came in and asked Ron, the manager, if he would mind
playing a Melanie record for her companions. Ron, an embittered and opinionated would-be
jazz singer, acceded; but throughout all of side one's playing time kept offering running
commentary on the music. This included a supposed imitation of Melanie that sounded
more like Eleanor Roosevelt on an acid trip doing a takeoff of Lotte Lenya. The young
woman giggled politely and continued to do so even after Ron began index-fingering the
turntable. At which point the customer let the clerk in on the real gag, which was-you win
the cigar-that she, herself, was none other than Melanie! Instead of proceeding to sweep out

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of the store leaving creepy Ron standing there with egg all over his face, she remained and
talked with him for another forty-five minutes.
A New York City native, and a veteran of the Bleecker Street folkie circuit, her career
took off after the failed Watkins Glen Festival; a Woodstock clone that went down in flames
in a welter of unpaid bills and bad weather. Famed avant-garde Italian director Marco
Fererri (you remember Gerard Depardieu slicing off his winkie with an electric carving
knife in his 1974 masterpiece, The Last Woman don't you?) turned up hoping to cash in
cinematically as Michael Wadleigh had done with Woodstock. But after a quick survey of
the scene, he left. Melanie, however, stayed. In fact, she was one of the few performers
scheduled to put in an appearance at the massive debacle to actually show up in the first
place. Inasmuch as she played acoustic guitar, she didn't need the electricity that wasn't
there anyway. As the rain poured down, Melanie encouraged the crowd to light candles
while she sang her song "(Lay Down) Candles in the Rain" which became a top ten hit for
her the following summer. In 1971 I was assigned by a now defunct rock mag out of Boston
known as "Fusion" to review a new album by this (by now) unfashionable performer. "No
one else will do it, Bill. Will you? Pleeeese!" I had never heard an editor whine and beseech
before. "Okay," I said, and wondered how I could possibly give anything other than a good
write-up to someone whose reaction to such an actual asshole of the universe (Ron, the
record store manager) had been so hip and cool? And I didn't.
In my review I noted that the Melanie's music had very little in common with rock, but
everything to do with the French chanson tradition (I could Euro-terminologize with the
best of 'em). I went on to suggest that it was grossly unfair for rock crits to judge her
against the yardstick of boogie, etc. I also hypothesized as to exactly why the rock press
found itself so ill-disposed to this otherwise perfectly harmless and innocuous singer:
"Her association with Buddah-Kama Sutra has perhaps been a subliminal factor in

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engendering rampant Melanie reactionaryism. The fine Mafia Rock (my itals.) folks at
Buddah have hyped Melanie within an inch of her life in the same characteristic fashion
that they've accorded to [sic] every junk act they've had on their various labels."
The recording conglomerate in question was home to such timeless "Bubblegum"
groups as the 1910 Fruitgum Company, the Ohio Express-I always mis-heard their big hit
as "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I've Got Blood in My Tummy," ugh!-and the Archies. The
ink on the review was barely was barely dry before I received a phone call from the
infamous head of Buddah Records:
"This is Neil Bogart. Do you know who I am, and do know how much power I have. I
can squash you like a bug, and I'll do worse than that if you ever use the world 'mafia' and
Buddah Records in the same space again. "
Oooh! He really had me quaking in my wedgies.
Bogart slammed down the phone before I even got a chance to respond. In its following
issue, "Fusion" magazine, where the piece had appeared, printed an apology. Mafegala
Bogart was to die early on in the AIDS epidemic right after launching the career of Donna
Summer, the queen of Disco. Which I've always thought of as the Mafia's revenge for losing
its control of the bars in the 1970s thanks to the Stonewall rebellion. In using "Mafia Rock"
as an alternative to the phrase "corporate rock" I just may have been onto something: A few
years later, in 1978, one-third of Buddah's stock was given over in "tribute" to Vincent "the
Chin" Gigante, the reputed head of the Genovese crime family (Blame it on the Cosa
Nostra). It is a measure of how naive and eager the rock press was even at late as 1971 that
it let such clearly loaded phrase as "Mafia Rock" slip into print.
As for Melanie, by the following summer she was already considered a joke, and by
'75, tired of being unfairly typecast, she said, as "a sicky sweet person singing sicky sweet
songs," Melanie retired. Were it not for for the incident that I witnessed involving her and a

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clerk in a Greenwich Village record shop, I would probably have been as snottily illdisposed to the oogly-woogiy performer as the rest of my critical brethren.

An even more extraordinary incident that demonstrates just how relatively fast,
loose and vital rock journalism was in its infancy, occurred around the same period as the
Buddah incident. It involved another publication for which I wrote, the eponymously
named "Rock." Almost an entire issue was given over to an expose in minute detail of how
organized crime had systematically taken over a large and successful black-owned record
company. Names, dates, how the head of the company was held hostage in his own house
until he had signed the company over to a certain conglomerate, the number of stitches in
his face, who had inflicted the beating, what he'd eaten while under house arrest, the tenus
of the agreement down to the last dotted "i" and crossed "t---it was all there! I came across
the inflammatory article on the way to the publication's offices, located on NYC's 14th
Street. Spying the new issue of "Rock" hot off the press at a newsstand, I stopped to flip
through its pages and couldn't believe my eyes. I put "Rock" back in the rack, quickened
my pace to its the mag's office and when I got to the bottom of the steps in the small, walkup office building where the publication was located, I noticed something new: A heavy,
locked wrought iron gate was now in place, along with a call box and buzzer. I rang and
when the person on the other end felt confident that it wasn't Vinny the Snake come to pay a
little social call, I was admitted to the mag's dumpy little headquarters. Already the
publication been inundated-no surprise-with bomb and death threats-as the result of a story
that had not yet been on the newsstand for a full 24 hours. The most amazing thing about
the entire episode was that absolutely no one involved with writing or researching the
article had any idea that it would turn out to be that incendiary. THAT is how innocent, yet
gung ho, the rock press was as late as 1971. Obviously "Rock" magazine was not much
longer for this world; only one or two more issues hit the stand, then it sank without a trace.

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You do the math.
Today my anti-rock bias is nearly on a par with one-time Ambassador to Italy and wife
of the publisher of Life magazine, Claire Booth Luce, who successfully lobbied to get the
early rock flick, Blackboard Jungle, withdrawn from the 1955 Venice Film Festival. David
Ehrenstein and I wrote about the incident in our 1982 Rock on Film, a book which, in its
original draft, was meant as a critique of rock music and an antidote to rock star
hagiography. However, by the time the publisher, Delilah Books (now Delilah Films),
finished gutting our book, it could barely be differentiated from any other work of gushy
garden variety rock crit
Three decades after Woodstock-The Event! The Movie! The Clothing! -that
phenomenon finds its apotheosis in the late '90s Broadway phenomenon Rent. For the price
of $67.50, Rent gives you three hours of singing, dancing HIV -positive, pretenddisaffected youths lashing out against the exploitation of the Lower East Side some thirty
years after the real damage was already done. When the show is over you can head across
town to Bloomingdales' Rent Boutique where you purchase faux distressed clothing just like
the costumes worn by the victims on stage at the Nederlander Theater. Like Woodstock, the
megaevent that wrote the book on mass marketing and neutralizing social disaffection, Rent
will be with us for a long time to come in one form or another.
The same weekend of the Music and Art Fair in White Lake, there was an actual
Woodstock Music Festival in the town of Woodstock proper, one featuring mostly local
performers who, for various reasons, had been locked out of the White Lake proceedings.
Just like the Music and Art Fair, the real Woodstock Festival ran for the weekend; unlike the
Music and Art Fair, this one was free. Its existence has never appeared in any books or
reportage on the Mother Ship fest that I've ever come across. Whatever qualities and
attributes the rock press may possess, accuracy in reporting nor a strong sense of irony are

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among them.
CHAPTER TWENTY: The Big Sledgehammer of 1969
Around the time of "Woodstock" I was given some LSD "guaranteed"---ah, love's old
sweet song---to be right off the boat from Millbrook. Every previous trip, I'd become
pleasantly narcotized but hadn't experienced the profound states of mind attributed to the
drug. Thus it was without much faith in the claims made for this particular batch when I
dropped the allegedly "dynamite" stuff at the Greenwich Village apartment of an actor
friend of mine, Jack Harkins. An hour passed but nothing happened: "Y ou start cursing the
creep that burned you," observes Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Then
just as I was conjecturing that maybe it wasn't acid I had taken but a placebo, all at once the
Persian rug I was lying on seemed to fall through the floor. Seemed to. . . hell, DID! And I
began experiencing visions that, nearly thirty years later, remain extraordinarily vivid in
memory. Transported back in time to my teenage bedroom, I re-experienced furtively
smoking cigarettes, the room pitch black while I listened to Yma Sumac records. By
comparison, my first acid experience in Woodstock the previous year was like the buzz you
got from a glass of sherry .
During previous acid trips my mind had apparently worked overtime stav-ing off the
potential effects of LSD. My guard now dropped for one neurocentric reason or another, I
had ceased fighting the stuff and finally landed in Third Eye City. Cacti had been what I'd
"seen" that first time on acid in Woodstock. Now my teen hallucination was disrupted by
the same specter. Shooting up through the floor of Jack's apartment, the entire room began
to fill up with the prickly things. Soon everything in my lysergic world view was either
cactus or cactus-like. But instead of getting off on the "ecstasy of revelation and the
revelation that there is more," as one LSD wag had described it, the Bummerscopic visions
continued. I began to bad trip. In 1999 I saw director Terry Gilliam's film of Hunter

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Thompson's book of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, and it all came flashing back to me.
Especially Johnny Depps's acid freakout in the Vegas hotel lobby. I had to look away from
the movie screen.
I vaguely recall having thrown myself on the phone, dialing wildly and explaining my
predicament to someone---I had no idea who---on the other end. A few minutes later found
me climbing onto the window ledge of Jack's fifth floor apartment. So that was who I had
phoned!: Sandy Kadet walked through the door. For the second time in little over a year this
amazingly charitable man, the angel of mercy who had helped the year before when I had
contracted hepatitis, had come to my rescue. He talked me back into the apartment and
stayed with me for several hours until I began to come down. I wasn't trying to do away
with myself, but had only been-in the words of the Buffalo Springfield- "expecting to fly."
There'd been a lot of that sort of thing going on that season: The great young modem dancer
Freddie Herko announced that he could "dance on air" and tripped the light fantastic off a
fourth floor Greenwich Village ledge straight into the great beyond.
The next day I was fine. Or, so I thought. One evening in early 1972, a few months later,
I was sitting idly watching TV in my fifth floor walk-up flat on Hudson Street when,
without warning, it was as if a ten ton Acme wrecking ball had hit me. Everything began to
melt. Sobbing hysterically, I bundled myself up, staggered halfway across the Village at
night. I lunged through the front door of the only place that felt safe/right; Eighth Street
Bookshop, and while dozens of customers and co-workers looked on, ran up the Djuna
Barnes Memorial Staircase. I locked myself in the closet-sized bathroom. When an hour
had passed I opened the door, peered out, and said to the closest thing I had to a family:
"There. . .all better now," and departed as suddenly as I had arrived.
Of course, it wasn't "all better. It All my adult life, people around me had talked about
being depressed or sad or angry, but I had never really felt an instant of panic, sorrow or

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self-doubt in all my thirty years. Now the anomie and alienation I should have experienced
all along had caught up with me. I could barely leave the house for several weeks, and
when I finally did I had to almost inch my way along the sidewalk, hanging on to buildings
just to stay vertical. I sought professional help, and learned I was suffering from something
called "anxiety attacks." Eighth Street Bookshop took me back but it wasn't easy doing my
job. I still spent a lot of time in the bathroom:
"Bill, what are you doing in there?"
"Having a nervous breakdown.
I experienced these anxiety attacks---a common phrase now but not back then---with
regularity and without warning for the next few years. One minute would find me coping
with the reality principle, the next, shaking and hyperventilating. By and large, I was able
to wrestle the "beast" to the mat with the help of anti-depressants. I didn't maintain a
regimen as was prescribed, but took the librium only after the attacks hit, then tried to keep
my cool while the stuff did its job. Just the awareness that I could take a pill and make the
attacks go away offered solace. With the help of a therapist I began to comprehend the
reason for the attacks. It wasn't just the speedacidgrass: a childhood spent being my own
parent a lot of the time had taken its toll. I still remember with astonishing vividness where
I was standing and exactly what I was doing five years later-washing dishes late one
Sunday night-when I knew intellectually and for certain that I would not suffer any more
from these bedeviling black clouds of disorientation. Any other problems I've had since
then seem like a day in the park by comparison. It was during this period that I met David,
who proved to be an anchor in the storm (an irresistible mixed metaphor that came to me
just now).
I am lucky enough to have had two protectors in the fox hole of life; along with David,
there was Sandy Kadet with whom I remained close until his death of AIDS in 1991. At that

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late date in the epidemic, he was my first friend to have succumbed to the disease. Shortly
after his passing, I happened to be reading the memoir, Young Man from the Provinces: A
Gay Life Before Stonewall; much of which takes place in the Sixties in and around
Columbia University. Sandy taught there for many years and I expected his name to crop up
on almost every page. But although names of several of his friends appeared, along with
places and events common to Sandy, he was curiously missing. I finished reading Helms'
book, then wrote to him about this structuring absence. I soon received the following reply:
"Yes, of course, I knew Sandy very well. And if memory serves (it increasingly doesn't,
which is an odd & damning admission from a memoirist), I didn't know he'd died or was
even HIV+ until I received your letter. Odd, the circuitous routes news takes in the gay
world. . .I'm not surprised to hear how generous Sandy was w/you; some of the best insights
in my published scholarly work were from Sandy's gifts."
As the the Sixties-during which time he became deeply involved counseling draft
resistors-wore on to the Seventies, Sandy's terminally upbeat outlook began to get slightly
frayed around the edges. Believing strongly in communitas and personal boundaries, his
reaction to the increasing solipsism of the so-called Me Decade was not sanguine. One
evening, after a pleasant meal, a few of us were sitting around engaged in perfectly
civilized conversation when someone made the harmless remark ---a propos of what, I no
longer can recall---"Oh, well. Anything goes." Sandy's usual sunny disposition underwent a
change so abrupt as to induce whiplash. Red-faced, he began to rant:
"Anything goes? I hardly think so!"
It was the first time that I had ever seen him so overbearing and
phlegmatic.
"There are some things that absolutely do not go! Don't ask me what they are right
now, but when I hear them, I'll let you know what they are. "

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There was dead silence. He wasn't being moralistic, but only wanted to communicate
that he was tired of the increasing societal tendency not to realize that for every personal
action there was a reaction. A while back Anatole Broyard observed in his "New York
Times" review of Kerouac's Visions of Cody; "There are all kinds of spontaneity, good and
bad, and the notion that what comes naturally is naturally welcome is one of the great
idiocies of our age." I wonder if Sandy ever came across those words in the act of his daily
voluminous reading.
Before teaching at Columbia he had been Cecil Beaton's social secretary, and you can't
get much gayer than that. Sandy was gay with no pretensions to bisexuality, so it came as a
surprise to his friends when he married in 1972. Her name was Lin, an attractive woman
from London in her early thirties. Only a few months later I received a from letter Sandy,
now living in England with Lin:
"I have the uncomfortable feeling that by now---that is, by the time this reaches you--the news will be all over town, but I hasten to write all the same in in case my paranoid
phantasy of billboards, subway graffiti, & ceaseless telephonic buzzing should turn out to
be not a delusion of persecution but of grandeur. Linny & I have decided to give up our
unequal contest with the Centrifugal Furies and to bow out gracefully before we reach the
point of tearing one another apart savagely."
Not since Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman. . .. I never quizzed him about what lay
behind such middle age, mid-summer madness. Perhaps it was the need to be a father to his
own flesh and blood, rather than to the many surrogate children, such as myself, who
satellited around him night and day. It was an amicable divorce. After the marriage
dissolved, continuing to exercise his mentor complex, Sandy remained close to several of
Lin's young nieces and nephews.
My avuncular friend would have loved Alan Helm's Young Man from the Provinces, a

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book which goes a long way toward proving that the line between Great Art and Great Dish
(with Helms' tales of Lucino, Lenny, Tab, and Tony, et. al) is a fine one indeed. I identified
strongly with his depiction of his own 1950s mid-western adolescence. I too was told I was
somehow "special," and, like Helms, wondered if I truly was so unique why couldn't I just
make all the parental alcoholism and neglect go away?
During the twenty-five years of my friendship with him, Sandy mentioned the name of
one particular friend, March A very, the daughter of painter Milton Avery, on an almost
daily basis. But I never met her until we finally came together at Sandy's bedside in
Roosevelt Hospital during his final stay there with AIDS. For years, before meeting March,
I imagined her as a formidable presence, but she turned out to be pleasant and easy to talk
with. During the final years of his illness, Sandy visited California on a regular basis and
stayed with a friend and colleague named Gerald. By then David and I lived in California.
Sandy would spend time with us, but, as with March Avery, I never met Gerald. After
Sandy died, I slowly arrived at the realization that his practice of partitioning off friends
from one another was not by happenstance: It was no accident that I had never encountered
Alan Helms or March A. very or Judy Fireman, or any number of others. "On some
unconscious [and neurotic] level," to use a favorite phrase of Sandy's, I came to understand
that he would feel out of control and ganged up upon if too many of his friends knew one
another. It was a harmless enough neurotic trait.
An attractive, diminutive, compactly built man, Sandy was exceedingly vain. If one of
his students at Columbia mistook him for a schoolmate instead of a teacher, one heard
about it for days. One evening at dinner, Sandy began going on and on how youthful he
looked, when finally, Lin, his new wife, could take it no longer: in her "V" accent (to apply
Nancy Mittford's term), she veddy precisely offered to Sandy and the other five or six of us
at table:

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"Oh cawse you are tenibly wel1-preserved Sahhhndy Dahling. But there's one thing
that NEVER lies. The skin. If people look closely at your skin, they can tel1--- within
seconds--- how old you are. "
She then grasped his chin, turned his face toward the light and continued:
"THIS is NOT the skin of a thirty-five-year-old. . .it is the skin of a man who is your
age, Sandy. . .FIFTY!"
Everyone laughed; at last someone said the unsayable. Sandy, who usually was
amused, this time was not.
He had enough emollients, creams, unguents, lotions etc. overflowing from his
medicine cabinet to insure that chronological misperceptions kept happening on a regular
basis. He was an exercise fanatic long before most of the rest of the world took it up. Even
in his mid-fifties, Sandy was the proud possessor of a washboard stomach that wouldn't
quit. Ultimately, his vanity was a harmless peccadillo, more endearing than annoying.
A few weeks after receiving the letter from Alan Helms in which he confirmed that, "of
course," he knew Sandy, we met in Los Angeles. We'd made a postmortem end run around
his tendency to section off friends from one another, but I think Sandy would have
appreciated the literary and ironic circumstances surrounding the encounter.
Equally disturbing as the passing of those "before their time" and "tragically young"
from the scourge of AIDS, are the deaths of those---ike Sandy---on the verge of sage,
fabulous old gay manhood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Life in the Off-Ramp
In 1973 the formal agreement was signed in Paris ending Viet Nam hostilities; and
before you knew it, the powers that be were, in the immortal lyrics of the Firesign Theater,
"bringin' the war back home." Almost at once the u.s. went into a socio-political skid that
left even the most enlightened of U.S. social critics slack-jawed in amazement. By the time I

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left Eighth Street Bookshop's employment (this time for good) in 1976, the changes
Greenwich Village had undergone were everywhere and unavoidable. There was hardly a
single business establishment left from when I first washed up on its shores in the early
Sixties. Gone was the Bon Soir, the mafia-run intime boite best remembered for helping
launch the career of Barbra Streisand and which, by the time I screwed up enough gay
courage to wend my way down its basement stairs to catch perhaps Kaye Ballard, Ethel
Waters or Dick Cavett, had become Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studio: I could get down at
the Lower East Side Old Reliable bar, but was wary of a basementful of Greenwich Village
faggots. Gone too was the southern Manhattan branch of Marboro Books where I worked
briefly on the night crew with the legendary experimental filmmaker, Gregory
Markopoulos. Gregory, who managed at one and the same time to combine in his
personality both grand queen imperiousness and great sweetness, always referred to himself
in the third person as in, "Markopoulos thinks he will do this now," etc. There was no irony
intended. It was rumored that on the occasion of a brief audience with Jean Cocteau in the
early fifties, after Gregory departed, the great Frenchman merely sighed and said, "Oh, will
these Americans ever learn?" David Ehrenstein told me that he once had a meal in a
restaurant with Gregory, and instead of ordering the "number three," Markopoulos, with an
entirely straight face, read the entire florid menu description to the waitress: "I will have the
Virginia ham sandwich, with the tangy imported mustard, served on a bed of baby Bibb
lettuce [ad infinitum] $4.95, coleslaw fifty cents additional." Again. . .no irony.
***
In the early 1970s pre-shopping mall urban blight began laying low not just Greenwich
Village, but most of the U.S.'s traditional retail and recreation areas. It was a disease with no
single cause, but resulted from a combination of factors, including the incursion of fast food
restaurants, chain stores, increased crime, and wildly escalating rents. Seemingly impervious

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longtime Village business establishments began dropping like flies. (The "Closed for
Remodeling Signs," fooled no one.) Miraculously, a few old haunts remained afloat: former
speakeasy and watering hole Chumley's on Bedford Street; to the east on Thompson Street,
the literary hangout Grand Ticino; and El Faro, with its exotic mix of Chinese, Spanish and
Italian food. Eighth Street Bookshop was another of the old-timers managing to hang on.
Well into the 1970s it looked like the place might roll on forever. Even when a branch of a
large book store chain had opened nearby, with more of its kind on the way.
Having unceremoniously aced his brother, Ted, out of the Eighty Street operation a few
years earlier, Eli Wilentz was now the sole owner. It was a heavy burden for one man. The
door to his office now remained closed at all times while he held meetings with various
people who tended to shout a great deal. Something was wrong; this venerable old retailing
lady was ailing badly after all, an inevitable victim of the changes taking place in the
Village all around her. Eli, who had previously been only phlegmatic and sometimes hard to
"read," became downright uncivil, especially to his employees. Now he was an imperious
and nearly out-of-control straw boss who refused to discuss with me even the matter of my
long overdue vacation. I had no choice: one spring afternoon in 1976 I took my lunch hour
as usual at noon, but instead of returning, made a B-line for the nearest unemployment
office where I filed a grievance. The following morning I received a strange phone call
from Joe Bitowf, an Eighth Street co-worker, a notorious practical joker and uncommonly
elliptical conversationalist:
"Where were you early this morning at around five o'clock?," he asked. The opening
gambit was par for the course.
"Asleep in my bed."
"The book shop burned practically to the ground last night. Since pissed off exemployees are the first ones they question, you should be prepared when the fire inspector

209.
comes calling. Do you have a witness to your alibi?"
I didn't quite believe him. Later that day in the New York Post, under the headline "Blaze
at 8th St. Bookshop," I learned that everything he'd said was true. Curiously, no fire
inspector ever came calling on me-a classic textbook example of the disgruntled exemployee. David, of course, was my witness that I'd been fast asleep in bed while what was
inarguably the country's best book-store went up in smoke. The local Village Voice
newspaper later reported there were witnesses to the fire being arson related. But nothing
ever came of it.
In Dan Wakefield's New York in the Fifties, poet Harvey Shapiro recalls a gathering of
artists and writers held shortly after the fire". . .to honor the store and the owner, to give
him the desire to go on after the fire. . .You know, the Eighth Street Bookshop was the place
for poets- I met other poets there, some poets even got their mail there, it was a real center
for us. What I remember about the evening was that Allen [Ginsberg] improvised a poem,
'The Burning of the Eighth Street Bookstore.' It was really pretty good. . .He thought it was
good too, and after the reading he ran around the audience to see if anyone had a tape
recorder so he could save it. Get a copy of it."
Later that year, Eighth Street Bookshop reopened its doors with a kickoff party covered
in the October 4, 1976 issue of the New Yorker.
"Familiar faces included Joe Lash, the ubiquitous Hentoffs, Michael Harr-ington (the
writer, not the congressman), the poet Richard Howard, and Imamu Amiri Baraka, who
arrived with his wife and some free copies of Unity & Struggle, the political organ of the
Revolutionary Communist League. "
But the Eighth Street that reopened some six months after the disastrous fire, first night
guests notwithstanding, was not the bookshop of yore. The mammoth third floor social
studies section, which had drawn heavy business, was gone; the stock in general was

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drastically diminished; now the latest Jackie Susann was no longer a lower shelf item,
which I noticed to my shocked amazement one day walking by the store, but was dutifully
displayed in the window. I learned from friends, who still worked there, that the place was
now as realistically security conscious as any other run of the mill business in the Village,
i.e. "Please check all packages. . ."
No longer was Eighth Street a bookstore where, said the Village Voice, "on the front
shelves [emphasis mine] you found Walter Benjamin chock against Charles Bukowski, and
inevitably some ragged edition of Nightwood left over from the hey-day of New
Directions."
It was a day I was certain would never come. I had once believed that I would end
my days there. I was wrong on that count, but it still appeared as if Eighth Street
Bookshop would never die. The rebuilding after the fire seemed to demonstrate that.
Again, I was wrong. Under a
headline reading "Great Moments in Labor History," the October 1, 1979 issue of the
Village Voice reported the store's personnel had shown up for work earlier that week to find,
without prior notification, the locks on the door changed. The "Voice" implied that Eli
Wilentz, rather than give in to unionizing his operation as the majority of employees were
now pushing for, had decided to close up his store for good (although Eli later denied this
was the reason). The sign in the window read as follows:
"To customers and friends-After thirty-two years of
running the bookshop, I have decided to retire. I
appreciate your friendship over the years., Long live
Greenwich Village and its poets, writers and readers.
- - - Eli Wilentz
There was no mention of the store's staff of would-be union men and women.

211.
Stores, theaters and restaurants, etc.-reflective of the character of the Village from an
earlier day-continued dropping like soldiers in battle, including: the Cafe Cino, stomping
grounds for a generation of New American Playwrights, and the still popular Figaro Cafe on
Bleecker Street where, rumor had it, Jack Kerouac once worked as a dishwasher. Almost
overnight it became a Blimpie's hoagie shop. My Eighth Street co-worker (now NPR
commentator and author), Andrei Codrescu, said it looked like someone had stood at the
door of the Figaro and blown up a giant balloon containing the franchised interior of a
Blimpies. Gone with the wind too were: Sutter's Bakery, which had been in the Village for
as long as anyone could remember and still seemed to be going great guns when it
suddenly, unexpectedly and unceremoniously closed its doors forever; the nearby Women's
House of Detention, reduced to a pile of 19th century rubble; the Stag Shop with its
stunning line of abbreviated, tight-fitting male clothing creations by Parr of Arizona--whose
catalogue, along with ads in "Esquire," afforded many of my contemporaries and myself
our first real exposure to basket. All, and more, gone the way of inauthentic pizzerias,
discount clothiers, gay leather shops, newsstands stacked high with the latest issues of
Screw, Eat and Orgy, etc. The Village Barn and the Bon Soir nightclubs were also victims of
the change. The smell of fresh bread wafting out of dear, departed Sutter's Bakery gave way
to the stomach churning odor of open air souvlaki clashing head-on with the patchouli oil
and incense that came drifting out of head shops; their windows chock-a-block with dayglo
decals, granny glasses, fanciful bongs, and other paraphernalia that gave new meaning to
the phrase, impulse shopping. A sign on the door of Sam Kramer's Studio, a Village fixture
featuring classic jewelry made from anything on earth and also possibly not of this planet,
read, "Teenagers not Allowed." But beginning in the mid-I970s, the Village became nothing
but a hangout for the the post pubescent Bridge and Tunnel set, and as a result even
Kramer's, one of the last holdouts, bit the dust. Finally even my sinecure, Eighth Street

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Bookshop, was gone.
New York, I decided, had had it!
I wasn't alone in such feelings, for the mid-seventies marked the beginning of an
unprecedented bleak and blue period in the New York City's history. Commercial and
residential occupancy were at an new low and yet rents for both (only New York could
manage such an economic anomaly) were sky high; and the crime rate was at all-time peak
(after fifteen years living there nearly unscathed, I was robbed twice at knife and gun point
in one month). Big Apple bashing was all the rage. Over and over again, the litany sprang
from my partner David's lips, "This is just not the city I grew up in anymore." The luster had
kind of worn off for me, too. When I arrived in the city a decade earlier, it was still the
center of the country's art and commerce; a subway ride was a quarter, the Camel cigarette
sign was still blowing smoke, Broadway plays cost less than a deuce, art films were shown
on 42nd Street, the parks were relatively safe for cruising at night, the old Metropolitan
Opera was still up and running and Lincoln Center had barely begun its blight of the San
Juan HilI area, you could stilI walk underground from 42nd to 59th through an intricate
network of tunnels under the skyscrapers, South of Union Square on Third Avenue was
wall-to-wall used book stores, the original swinging Birdland was blowing, still in place was
the Olivetti typewriter on Fifth A venue where Frank O'Hara wrote a poem nearly everyday
on his lunch hours away from MOMA; and, well, I think you get the picture. To give New
York some credit, in the early Seventies, historic preservation of buildings had become a
way of life in the City (they hadn't managed to rescue Penn Station, but at least they had
saved Grand Central, etc.). Another sure sign of the city's demise was the ongoing
metamorphosis of the Upper West Side's Columbus Avenue, where David and I lived, from
a sensible thoroughfare where you could buy anything from washing machine parts to
grommets, to sensibly priced vegetables, into a trendoid, boulevard of conspicuous

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consumption overrun with yuppie restaurants, gay coffee bean stores, and leather maternity
shoppes.
Naively perceiving the west coast as fertile territory in which all sorts of new social
ideas and political strategies could take root, in 1975 David and I decided to move to Los
Angeles. Two nights before our departure we fought our way into Carnegie Hall to witness
what would turn out to be the last public performance of Thelonious Monk. The next
evening, we had a farewell dinner with Dorothy Dean at one of the trendy new restaurants
just beginning to spring up around the Upper West Side at that time. The service was
horrible, and the management seemed to take specific umbrage at the fact that three of us-a
mixed race gay couple and an African-American fag hag-didn't quite fit the profile of his
ideal patron. This time Dorothy didn't verbally counterattack in the manner that was once
second nature to her. She had finally given up the good fight, either because she felt beaten
down or else understood that, in the new New York, such gestures were futile. A few
months later, we were to learn, Dorothy had the nervous breakdown that saw her being
shipped off to Boulder, Colorado, where she died of cancer shortly thereafter.
The thing I would miss most about New York was my friend Nat Shapiro. He'd been
Michel Legrand's manager for a number of years, had co-written the classic jazz text, Hear
Me Talkin' to Ya," and was of the old school of record men like Irving Townsend, George
Aakian, Mitch Miller and John Hammond. Less impressively, although not monetarily so,
he'd .been the guiding force behind Hair. We sometimes had dawn-to-dusk conversations in
his Central Park West apartment overlooking the park. In the biz for a number of years, he'd
been Frank Sinatra's press agent at the lowest point in the singer's career early in the 1950s.
One always sensed with Nat that there were some subjects best left undiscussed; clearly his
time on the cross in Sinatra's employ was one of them. Once---and I don't know what
possessed me to make the remark---I slipped and said, "I think Sinatra would make a really

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good Norman Maine in a A Star is Born." "Yes, except at the .end," Nat said, "Sinatra
would have to be walking out of the ocean instead of into it." Then he abruptly changed the
subject. That's the only I ever heard him utter the name of his former employer in any
context. I went with him to see Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, which starts at
the conclusion and proceeds backwards to the beginning. At the end of the first act Nat
stood up and announced, "Aha! The plot thins!"
Nat produced recordings for Dietrich, Brazilian grande vedette Maisa, and many others,
and was deeply amused that he had produced the only album in which Count Basie's
rhythm guitar player Freddie Green's name appeared above the title. All Greene did on the
date was his usual elegant 1-2-3-4 chunk-a-chunk accompaniment. Nat often talked about
what he called "singer's disease": the insecurity that arises when intuitive singers (Shirley
Horn, Blossom Dearie et al excepted) clash head-on in the studio or on the bandstand with
skilled, trained musicians. As a result, singers are often forced into ridiculous, defensive
diva-like postures. Nat once rode in the back of a cab with a very famous male singer of the
Sinatra School.
"I really envy you," said the singer turning to Nat.
"Why is that?"
"I've never read a book," said the boy songbird.
Nat had read lots of them and when he died left behind a first-class
collection of modem American first editions.
I loved his stories. The first day on the job as Billy Eckstine's press agent, the singer and
his wife had been busted in a pot raid with an minor teenaged girl. I wish I could remember
all the great stories Nat told me: the details are hazy regarding some dicey Johnnie Ray
anecdotes. Shortly before highly acquisitive Nat died unexpectedly, he began giving away
things to friends, including myself. I would tentatively pull something off the shelves, such

215.
as the rare ten-inch Billy Strayhorn Ip on the Mercer label. "Good choice," he'd remark and
drop it on the pile. I was shocked at this atypical generosity with things. The last time I saw
him, shortly after I moved to L.A., he even hugged me, something he never did, at least not
with male friends. The gesture is one of the few things in my life that found me, after his
death, pondering the unseen at the expense of the seen. Somehow Nat knew he was going to
die, even though he was in relatively good health. I miss him still.
The day David and I left for California the airport terminal caught fire just as we were
boarding our plane; aloft a few minutes later, I put on the in-flight earphones, and the first
thing I heard was Benny Goodman's glorious original "Sing, Sing, Sing." I regarded these
as omens that we were leaving behind an old and broken down world and moving toward a
future as bright and shiny as that timeless B.G. recording. We flew to California with our
three cats, Baby, Dinah and Frances, in tow. After arriving we found good homes for ther
first two and hung on to Frances. She lived for a long time and died years later at the
uncommon age of twenty-two. In human years, that's as old as Zsa Zsa Gabor. Once,
Broadway's Mandy Patinkin, who trafficks almost solely in the falsetto, was on TV. The
sound was so annoying and painful to Frances, she leapt across the room, jumped up on the
couch, put her little paw on the TV remote and turned off the set. She'd observed me doing
it so often, she'd finally figured it out how to do it herself. If Frances had lived much longer
than her uncommon two decades plus, she'd probably have started to talk.
***
In the early Sixties, I had happened to pick up an old copy of a book by a poet I'd never
heard of before by the name of Cavafy. I was astonished at the enormous amount of gayola
in it; finally, though, it was his poem, "This City," that really captured my attention. It
begins:
"You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea. Another city will be

216.
found better than this, a better one than this." "The City" concludes with the lines:
"As you have so destroyed your life here
In this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world."
Or as Martha, of the Vandellas, put it:
"Nowhere to run. . .nowhere to hide."
During the Sixties and early Seventies, with nothing that qualified as a permanent
address, I had lived in forty different places. Cavafy was right! The proverbial grass was not
greener. Nevertheless, for the next fifteen years I'd just kept on running. Now, after dwelling
for a record three years in a West 85th abode on New York's Upper West Side, I was off and
running again. At least this time I had a running buddy. David and I arrived in L.A. just
when the west coast began to overtake the east coast as the symbolic center of the universe.
After moving to Southern California in '76, it was a shock to me to see, unlike New
York City, edifices with historical and aesthetic import toppling left and right. Not just
disposable kitsch like the Brown Derby, but also important pieces of architecture such as
the streamline-style masterpiece, the Miracle Mile's Broadway Department Store,
"replaced" by a giant gaping hole in the ground which remains to this day. No one raised so
much as a whimper to save them.
The building boom that took place in the Seventies and early Eighties in L.A. could
really play havoc with navigating an auto, and with your inner gyroscope; you'd turn a
corner with expectations of seeing a familiar building, but saw only horizon. Horizon
inevitably due for replacement by what urbanologist Rainer Banham has termed the
"Dingbat architecture of freeway-land."
David and I also arrived in time also to see Los Angeles replace New York as the heart
of the record industry food chain. The message of rock music had, at one time, tended
toward "Kick out the jams" --- without exactly telling you how this was to be accomplished.

217.
Now, as expressed in most so-called "alternative rock" originating and/or disseminated
from SoCal, the message was "I am horribly upset and I don't know what to do about it." It
was called "alternative music" (how can something that outsells everything else in the
record store truly obtain to the label "alternative"?). Now there's something called shock
rock, as exemplified by Marilyn Manson: Can't our children be left to their own devices to
figure out that life sucks?
Living in a cultural backwater like Los Angeles does have certain perverse advantages.
Take for example Rose Hobart-both the 19308 and 40's "B" movie actress, and the 1946
work by artist Joseph Cornell. In a fit of whimsy, Cornell had hand-tinted, and re-dubbed 12
minutes of the 1931 film East of Borneo, in which Hobart starred, and re-titled it "Rose
Hobart." Over the years the work had obtained to the status of a major surrealist work. In
1985 the Motion Picture Academy held a showing of famous experimental films, and in a
mailer to its members noted that "Rose Hobart" would be shown. Almost immediately the
organization began receiving calls regarding their upcoming "Rose Hobart Film Festival";
there was even a call from Hobart herself. She had lived in California at least since 1946,
the year Cornell created the work, yet no one had ever once brought it to her attention. Talk
about nouveau Hicksville!: a major artifact of American surrealism (but of East Coast
origin) had existed for decades, yet 99% of self-styled Southern California art cogno-scenti
had never heard of it. SoCal police are under orders to confiscate at the border all books
that aren't being made into movies: It isn't much interested in cultural stuff from the Before
Time.
***
Upon our arrival in L.A. David began writing for the old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner on
what he called "Schlock Patrol," doing film reviews of stuff the first and second string
critics on the paper, Mike Sragow and Peter Rainer, didn't want to cover. Films like Pia

218.
Zadora's The Lonely Lady, Shark Boy of Bora Bora (" Come, it now time to dive for the
sacred pearl. H), and Short Circuit II. If there was a Roman numeral in the title, David was
automatically assigned to review it, except for Godfather II, of course. One day he was
sitting at his computer terminal, at the paper, minding his own business when he was
"discovered" by the producers of a Budweiser beer commercial, who had come by the
"Herald" scouting locations. With no experience in acting, David was tapped to "play" the
part of-what else-a newspaper reporter. ("You're going out there a journalist but you're
coming back a star!") The next day, swaddled in a cashmere overcoat, seeing eye Afghans in
tow, David reported to work for the shoot. He ended up devising "business," telling them
where to place the camera and how to light the shot. Commonplace attractive in real life, in
the Bud spot, he is a dropdead, good-looking male model. Like Dietrich he knew how to use
that key light and practically directed the commercial himself. He only received scale for
these few hours of work, but by the time the commercial had played itself out, including
heavy rotation on a couple of World Series, he had earned some big residual bucks. Some
actors try all their careers for a break such as this; instead the jobs go to carhops, dress
extras and film critics.
Twenty years later I still receive tiny royalty checks---$l8.50, etc. from TV runs on
Baffin Island, and the newly emerging Third World nations of Chad and Upper Volta---for a
lone sitcom episode I penned for the long-running series "One Day At a Time." Between
these two sinecures, both of which we stumbled into, David and I earned more than we had
made during the several years we worked at, respectively, the 8th Street Bookshop and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. David had been employed there as a guard there before we
left for California. If it was good enough for the renowned film reviewer and painter Manny
Farber, who had worked at the Met in the 40s in the same capacity, it was good enough for
David.

219.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Sex!
When I was twenty, typical of youth, I thought I would live forever: In the immortal
words of African-American comic Timmie Rogers, "Everybody wants to go to heaven, but
nobody wants to die." It was then that sex began to kick into high gear for me. Like a lot of
gay men I have known, I felt myself to be more or less immune to time weaving its
inevitable entropic spell. I was stupidly certain I would escape the curse that had plagued
men on both sides of my family since forever: male pattern balding. Equally unthinkable
was the notion that gravity would begin to take its toll on my face and at my waistline.
Nevertheless, around the time I hit forty, as it must come to all gay men, I experienced the
first incidence of ageism, about which my venerated gay elders had long warned me. It
happened one night at an L.A. sex club known as Basic Plumbing, where one shuffled
around in near-total darkness en dishabille. Previous to its erotic incarnation, the location
had been the salon of hair stylist Jay Sebring, who, along with several other Hollywood
notables, had been done away with a few years before in a night of the ghouls overseen by
Charles Manson.
"Come back when you've dropped ten pounds," snapped the nasty little queen
behind the counter of Basic Plumbing. He then proceeded to rip up my membership card. I
was now on the other side of the Big 4-0, but I was hardly a troll missing body parts. It hit
me hard. How could I have turned so undesirable overnight? What with tricks not returning
your phone calls and the rising cost of opera tickets, gay life was difficult enough already,
without ageism being added to the mix.
The location where that blow-jobs-to-go operation, once stood has, for a long time
now, been occupied by a furniture store. Nowadays when I pass by on my way to work, I'm
struck with the Baroque worry: Do the people working there have any idea how much
felching, buffling, platejobbing, golden-showering, gunching, hum-jobbing and back-

220.
scuttling once went on the very spot where they are now selling room dividers and 8-piece
sectionals? After the last love seat salesman has gone home for the day, do the ghosts of
betoweled catamites, now passed over to that great bath house in the sky, prowl the place at
searching for that one last assignation before calling it a night?

The pre-Aids sign on

the walls of more than a few gay bars used to read: "So many men, so little time," but I
don't think I've ever seen "So Many Woman, So Little Time" signage in a straight bar. Most
hetero or homo females, or even straight males, would never dream of having sex under the
circumstances that obtained in Basic Plumbing, nor, for that matter, in most other venuesbaths, subway toilets, etc.-that are commonplace for most gay men.
Author Paul Goodman once wrote that cruising gave homosexuals some-thing
interesting to do between airline flights. While it's true that the straight male can likewise
eyeball the passing female parade at the TW A terminal, unlike Goodman, notorious for his
airport sexual encounters, Harry Hetero isn't likely to follow the object of his lust into the
nearest toilet for a quick session of vertical tenderness. Minimal female demands of civility
and the interpersonal have more-or-Iess bred that out of straight male DNA. Humping in a
jumbo jet john is about as far as straights will go when it comes to public sex.
Although the baths have existed as gay meeting and trysting places in New York since
the early part of the century, the tubs, as they are alternately known, were at the absolute
height height of their popularity in the late 1960s. At least a dozen were in operation during
that period in New York City. The three most widely patronized were the Everard,
Continental and S1. Marks, which, if their respective hallways were Scotch-taped end-toend would probably have stretched for several city blocks. A convenient idea now that I
think of it!
With their patrons reduced to wearing the common costume of a towel, the baths were
unquestionably the most democratic of all gay institutions. Today, they continue to be

221.
egalitarian, although one can't help but wonder how virally safe they are. Unlike the lookist
Basic Plumbing, seldom was anyone ever denied baths admission, regardless of how old,
fat or ethnic they might be (although prior to the Sixties nearly all were off limit to blacks).
Most heterosexual men are incapable of conceiving even in their wildest imaginations
what went on at the baths on a typical night at the height of their fashionable fury in the
1960s. All-in-all, the tubs were faster, cheaper and offered a much wider selection of
possible sexual partners than even the most wide open arenas of heterosexual concourse.
One could operate on a Platonic basis at the baths; however, most who entered checked
impulses toward agape at the door and concentrated strictly on eros: Body fluids were
exchanged much more often than conversation. Aside from the sexual efficiency, the baths
were by far the safest of all gay gathering spots-mostly free of predators set on mugging,
robbing, belittling or blackmailing. A straight male psychotherapist once vouchsafed to me
he'd been told so much about the different baths in Manhattan by clients, that he could
probably navigate them blindfolded.
In 1977 a fire destroyed the most popular of New York tubs, the Everard, killing nine,
including a friend of mine, Ken Hill. I knew two people by that name, both of whom were
gay and frequented the baths. It took me a day or two to sort it all out with phone calls
around town. Just when I finally certain that it was Ken Hill Number One who had
perished, I ran into him on the street and had to start the grieving process over again for the
other Ken Hill.
Eventually a species of "grope bar," far wilder than the tubs, began springing up around
lower Manhattan-places like the Mine Shaft and the Barn-that might have given even the
Marquis DeSade pause to think. Places that were variations on the aforementioned Basic
Plumbing. At the Barn, located near the meat warehouses in the West Village, an overly
amorous yet anonymous person, whose face I never even saw, kissed my right ear so hard

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that he popped my tympanic membrane. I lost my hearing in that ear for three months.
Nearby, parked under the West Side Highway out by the Hudson River in the Village,
were hundreds of trucks which even if you stood across the street at night from them and
looked hard, you really couldn't see anything. But from nine p.m. on, as SF writer Samuel
Delany writes in his memoirs, The Motion of Light in Water, "between thirty five and a
hundred fifty (on weekends) men were slipping through and between and in and out of the
trailers, some to watch, but most to participate in numberless silent sexual acts, till morning
began to wipe night from above the Hudson, to dim the stars, to blue the oily water." Poetry
aside, Delany reports that the first night he experienced "The Trucks," as the locale was
known, he stayed six hours, had sex seven or eight times and left exhausted. Wasn't that
dangerous?, you might wonder. It was!
In the late 1960s I lived in Columbia University country just around the corner from the
West End Bar. My roommate at the time was a exceeding good-looking straight Irishman
with whom I worked at the Eighth Street Bookshop. Steve knew I was gay and it really
didn't seem to matter to him. Until one night when he could take it no longer. A trick had
departed only moments before when he began ranting:
"For God's sake, Bill, you can go out in Riverside Park and score in fifteen minutes. I'm
much better looking than you. I've been prowling
the singles bars for weeks and haven't got lucky yet."
He stormed out determined to get laid that night.
Lenny Bruce once observed that the male of the species is such a carnal beast that he'll
even shtup mud in a pinch. In the final analysis, heterosexuals simply are not wired the way
gays are. I didn't then, and still can't fathom how straights can tolerate the system of sexual
deprivation enforced on them by society. They might be daring on the football field, but in
the sexual arena they're relative cowards. Most straight men wouldn't dare make it with a

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woman in a place knowing the chances were good he might get busted; but that didn't stop
most gays I knew from playing vice arrest roulette with the New York subway cops in
underground toilets.
In the 1960s nearly all but the most far-flung subway stops held out strong possibilities
of IRT affection. When I first began to explore this subterranean realm not long after
arriving in New York, the subway johns afforded the opportunity of quick, efficient sex.
They were a model of civic cooperation: One party often operated as a lookout who would
alert the others about the approach of strangers or the cops. Entrapment was also a problem
and a certain amount of codified body language and signaling usually took place before
amorousness began. Now all but a handful (all?) of the N.Y subway Tearooms (or T
-Rooms) are boarded up, not so much because of AIDS, but crime. Once in the mid-I960s at
the Sheridan Square stop, a clearly underage youth made a pass at me, and even though I
wanted nothing to do with jailbait and drew away from his advances, he pulled a knife me
and demanded money. I refused and walked away. The boy followed me, with a knife at my
side, up the steps into broad daylight and onto the Greenwich Village sidewalk. Shades of
Kitty Genovese, no one made any attempt to help me, and it wasn't until I walked into
McNulty's, a Christopher Street spice and coffee seller's shop nearly two blocks away,
where I was a regular customer, and begged for help that I was given any assistance. The
youth made quite a scene, yelling at the top of his lungs that I had tried to molest him,
which was patently untrue. The boy was run out of the store by the management much the
same way a shoplifter might have been. By way of thanks, I bought a pound of their most
expensive Jamaican Blue Mountain, but was so embarrassed that I never went in the place
again. But did that deter me from heading right back to the scene of the crime a couple of
days later? Hardly! Tea Rooms could be scary, but they could also be fun and diverting.
SUTTLE [sic] DOVE IS BACK. SHE LOVES IT. SHE IS QUEEN was a great piece of

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graffiti I remember from the Astor Place subway john.
The tea rooms were fraught with all kinds of other unexpected possibilities. One time I
furtively glanced over at the next stall only to espy one of my closest friends-to employ a
quaint phrase-"playing with himself. II I'd long assumed him to be a screaming
heterosexual. The evidence? He didn't mince or lisp and had a longtime girlfriend. This
placed our friendship in an entirely new light.
I feel sorry for today's survival-minded young who have no realistic choice but to
subject potential sexual partners to a CIA-style background check. Sex is a great
conversation starter, and homosexuality was once a great finishing school. The first person
I tricked with after arriving in New York, the next morning served me breakfast
accompanied by lighted candles. How romantic! Could it get any more sophisticated than
that? Toast by candlelight! Had I died and gone to heaven?
My second trick took me to (my first ever) French restaurant, then to an Off-Broadway
revue consisting of theater work by a playwright I'd never heard of, Bertolt Brecht,
performed by a group of players, all of whom were also new to me---Lotte Lenya, Viveca
Lindfors, et al. Shortly after that, a pickup I met cruising the "Y" got me involved in a
scheme to smuggle Polaroid cameras into Montreal every weekend. There was such a
differential between the U.S. and Canada Polaroid prices that I got a free plane trip north of
the border every weekend with all expenses paid. This went on for several months: I felt just
like Mata Hari! Some might argue that there is no such thing as a gay sensibility, that there
is only personal psychology that reacts to a whole set of social and economic factors. Maybe
so. But was there EVER a woman who served a one night stand breakfast by candlelight?
Once, a pickup by the name of Togo---the only Togo I ever slept with---took me to what
I assumed to be his apartment-an extremely opulent duplex on the upper east side, its walls
covered with expensive modern art. But it turned out that this wasn't his place at all; he was

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house sitting for the owner, a dress designer. How the couturier had managed to amass such
wealth? I was told the following Cinderella story:
Several years previous, the designer had been employed as a mere ribbon clerk working
in the back room of a Boston dress shop when one day he heard tremendous commotion
emanating from the sales floor. Sticking his head out to investigate, he espied in the salon a
very angry black woman who'd apparently just felt an extremely icy Back Ba "draft," a term
used by blacks at one time to signify discrimination.
"Call the police, this woman's crazy," the owner told her employee. "Don't you know
who that is?," he replied within earshot of the blues queen. "You can't treat her that way.
That's Dinah Washington."
At which point, and with no further prompting, the Queen of the Blues grabbed the
young man by the arm. "C'mon, honey, this place is too good for us," she said, and dragged
him out the door. She installed him as her exclusive designer, and before long, after moving
to New York, he had all the couturier work he could handle. Shortly afterward, he began
acquiring his extensive collection of Picasso's, etc.
I stayed overnight with Togo who needed my help. Later that morning he was to receive
some Broadway producers interested in a play he had written. For reasons too convoluted to
go into here, I was to pretend that I was the owner of the duplex. Mid-visit, one of the two
men opened a kitchen cabinet and spotted a box of dog food in an otherwise canine-less
abode.
"I see you have a dog. Where is he?"
"Kennel," I replied ever so cooly, extricating myself from the screwball comedy black
hole I'd just been sucked into. Not exactly the greatest comeback of all times, but it worked
just long enough for me to spin on my heels and exit the kitchen before he got a chance to
ask, "What breed?"

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Another trick, a notoriously bisexual actor, in either the dernier cri or nadir of
sophisticated pillow talk, once told me after we made love:
"I recently had a venereal disease."
"Oh," I gulped.
"Don't worry, it's cured," he reassured me. "Besides, it's a form that's only known to
exist in chimpanzees.
"Yeah, but you contracted it."
"I got it from this woman I was sleeping with a few months ago. She has a pet chimp."
Talk about your beast with two backs!
Widely noted for his improv skills, Paul (his name) then began leaping about my
bedroom like a monkey. No offense to heterosexuals, but you just don't get this kind of
anecdotal content in straight one-night-stands.
Do I miss the way it used to be? Yes! Not so much the sex part, easily the single most
overrated part of the whole gay trip, but nearly every other aspect. At one time in my life,
nearly every friendship I forged with another male began with sex. That's how I met, David,
my good friend and constant travelling companion of the last thirty years.
If the AIDS epidemic hadn't resulted in my trimming my sails sexually, the age process
probably would have resulted in my doing so sooner or later. I was wrong about escaping
male pattern balding, and have taken up advanced selective combing. And you just know it's
time time to put your prom dress in permanent moth balls when you peruse those personal
ads and the median age sought is usually around 25-30 and you're twice that. One personal
ad I saw began "36, looks 35."
When I first set out on the high seas of sexuality twenty years earlier, upon realizing
how promiscuous I had quickly become, a caring friend warned:
"If you keep this up, eventually you'll just keeping getting grayer

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and grayer and then one day you'll just have disappeared altogether. "
Those words rang through my mind as I dejectedly slouched away from the gropefest at
Basic Plumbing the night I couldn't meet their pinch an inch criterion.
Can God make a rock bigger than himself? Who cares? If I couldn't taste, touch, smell,
feel or fuck it, I didn't care to know about it. Up to that point in my life, I'd probably had
more sex than many homosexuals, and most heterosexual males. Now, an attitude
adjustment was called for. Like Garbo, Artie Shaw and J. D. Salinger and a rare few others
who had the good sense not to overstay their welcome, maybe it was time, before I turned
totally grey, to withdraw from the sexual olympics.
In the air just then was talk about something called "gay cancer," also known as GRID
(gay related immune deficiency). For those too young to recall, both phrases were used to
describe the disease now known as AIDS. At first, like some others I knew, I foolishly felt
this was a CIA plot or a controlled and limited experiment in gay/black genocide.
Fortunately, an actress I knew, whose brother was an oncologist at New York's Sloan
Kettering Cancer Center, convinced me that new and mysterious disease was only in its
beginning stage. Another incentive for me to bow out of sex gracefully. I had rarely gone a
day from twenty onward without having sex either with a fuck buddy or a stranger, and
thought the withdrawal pains would have been unbearable. But since 1980, and the night I
was 69'd, I mean 86'd from Basic Plumbing, I have been uncomplicatedly and completely
celibate. It's a change of habit that turned out to be far easier than quitting smoking, which
took me twenty years to bring off. [As of 2000, howevvvverrrrr. . .]
CHAPTER TWENTY -THREE: You CAN Go Home Again, But Don't Stay Too Long
High school reunions are something you have to do at least once in your life-a rite of
passage; in early 1989 I began making plans to attend my first one. Not so much out of
curiosity about how various classmates had fared over the past three decades. The truth is I

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didn't have that many friends in high school. Instead, I wanted to gain a better sense of what
and where I had come from. The reunion was scheduled to be held at someplace called the
Heart of Town Hotel, whose name I didn't recall and which I later learned had been erected
fairly recently on "The Block," at one time, ground zero for African-American social life in
Charleston. The Block was where once stood Race Record Shop, the place where I had
bought my first r 'n' b records nearly forty years earlier. Not only had The Block been
decimated, two other adolescent stomping grounds of mine had also been levelled in an act
of so-called urban renewal: the area around my grandmother's old house had been razed to
make way for new state office buildings, and several square miles surrounding the housing
project I had grown up in were wiped off the face of the earth to make way for a mall and
downtown "revitalization." When I arrived for the reunion, my sister-in-law, Juanita, was so
proud of the new mall she couldn't wait to show it off to me. We stopped there on the way
from the airport. No surprise, Charleston's Town Centre was like stepping into
Anywheresville U.S.A. But with a twist! Inside, rounding a turn and glancing up at the next
level, I spied my old newspaper mentor, L. T. Anderson. Renegade that he is, you'd have
thought he might avoid such places. But there he was blissfully strolling along hand-inhand with his wife, the two of them pleasurably engaged in conversation. They looked like
a couple of lovestruck, starry-eyed teenagers. I couldn't bear to interrupt. Diplomatically I
refrained from telling Juanita that we had dozens of malls like this-only much larger-back
in Los Angeles. In L.A., though, you never see people you know.
In the path of destruction/renewal, the gigantic Kearse Theater had also bit the dust.
That's where my high school friends and I had seen not only the disappointing Island in the
Sun, but all the good 20th Century-Fox movies as well. They didn't even have the decency
to erect a building in its place but only paved it over for a parking lot. The original edifice
could/should have been renovated into a cultural center like they do in more progressive

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locales. Also going the way of the wrecker's ball was the somewhat smaller and even more
classic 1912 Virginian Theater. Complained one enlightened local over this particular act of
decimation, "Imagine if someone had decided to take an axe to a Dusenberg car or
Chippendale chair, they'd take them to the crazy house." Also gone were the less
architecturally distinguished Greenbriar and Lyric grind houses, where they specialized in
fare from the Monogram and Republic Pictures schlockwurks.
It's a classic high school reunion phobia that you won't recognize class-mates from
aeons earlier. The night of the reunion, before I'd even had a chance to go inside the Heart
of Town Hotel, a middle-aged man came running up to me on the sidewalk. He threw his
arms around me.
"Bill, you old son of a gun. How are you?"
"I'm sorry," I replied in all honesty. "I haven't the foggiest notion who you are."
"Clay. . . Clay Hamilton."
I had heard Clay went with the CIA after college; I was a little disappointed. He'd been
one of the cooler guys in our class.
"CLA Y HAMILTON OF THE CIA," I said in my best FBI in Peace and War radio
voice.
"FBI," he corrected me testily.
"Whatever!," I replied, employing that late-20th Century response of utter and total
disregard. And dashed off.
I'd barely stepped inside the large room where the reunion was being held when an
African-American woman came running up with tears in her eyes, and embraced me. "You
were so nice to me that first day," she said. "You have no idea what that meant to me." It
was Cynthia Henicke, whom I'd arbitrarily annexed as my first black friend in high school
after Brown v. Board of Ed kicked in. So maybe my self-conscious act of radical chic

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wasn't such a bad thing after all. In 1994, when I attended the funeral of my good friend,
actress/activist Frances E. Williams, I was the only Caucasian in sight out of hundreds upon
hundreds of blacks in attendance (including Rosa Parks). I hardly gave it a second thought.
Kitty Harter was also at the reunion. At SJHS, she'd been the rare combination of babealicious blonde bombshell AND scholar. In college she could be found picketing alongside
blacks at local segregated roller skating rinks and swimming pools, while I stood to one
side, reporter's notebook in hand, covering the stories for my hometown paper. At the
reunion, she volunteered: "I think that it's time for whites to begin writing books about all
the pain and struggles they've endured coming to the aid of blacks. "
"That's just what African-Americans need at this point in history," I shot back, "a book
telling them how miserable they've made ole massa feel. "
She conceded my point.
Nearly everyone, unlike myself, arrived a deux with a mate of the opposite sex. Those
classmates who'd gone gay after high school apparently chose to remain home in Mud Lick
rather than face the inevitable question.
"Where's your wife?"
"I guess I just haven't met the right girl yet," I kept repeating. Little did they realize that
the right girl was a boy. I didn't feel the necessity of outing myself.
On everyone's lips was the fate of class valedictorian Dick Reed (no relation). Under the
incessant whip hand of his father, he'd been an overachiever in high school. The moment he
left for college, however, he found himself unable to perform. Flunking out of West
Virginia University during the second semester of his freshmen year, a few months later he
killed himself. A younger, faster fall from grace is hard to imagine. There was also much
talk of my girlfriend Lynn's suicide. Fortunately, the false rumor that I'd been the father of
her unborn child never came up.

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At the reunion was a woman who men gazed at lustfully, women enviously, but who, at
first, no one could place. It was Nona Hatfield. In high school she'd been a bespectacled,
drab, aquiline-schnozzed drudge; now she looked like a million bucks: a svelte knockout
with flaming red hair, retrousse nose and carriage and confidence to spare. Easily the bestlooking woman in the room, Nona stayed a moment, then departed.
We had lunch the next day at the beautiful forties, streamline-style Blossom Dairy, one of
the few things in Charleston that was still the same. Nona, however, was another matter.
"Well, Nona," I began diplomatically "you certainly have changed."
"You mean I used to be ugly, but now I'm beautiful."
"I wasn't going to say that."
"But that's what you were thinking. "
"How did you do it?"
"Uh, first you get some henna. . .," she joked, then changed the subject. Like Bette
Davis in Now, Voyager, Nona had shown up at the reunion seeking to discomfit her high
school classmates, most of whom now looked like hell. She'd left high school an ugly
duckling; now she reigned as queen of the hop. If revenge is a dessert best served cold,
Nona's was frozen on a stick. She'd agreed to have lunch with me because I was one of the
few in high school who'd been nice to her. Nona wasn't the only one who painted a picture
of me that I'd left forgotten, leaning against the walls of the hallways of mind. Others at the
reunion also reminded me that I'd been the class sounding board and shoulder to cry on. If I
was ever that charitable I can't remember it.
I came away from the reunion with the sense that my classmates and I had been born in
time to escape becoming a part of the upcoming narcissistic Me Generation. And to late to
plug into the conformity of our Eisenhower era parents. An inordinate percentage of the
class of the SJHS '59 had gone into service professions: nursing, teaching, medicine, with

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very few having gone into high yield/quick return big business type jobs. Several had
entered the field of alcoholism prevention; each of them had stories about teenage coping
similar to mine.
We had come from a pre-TV, small-boundried world; in our late forties we were, at least
superficially, more alike than we were unalike, perhaps the last of the (pre-TV) species to
share common traits and beliefs to such a large degree. We possessed not only amazing
similarities in body language, vocabulary, slang, cadences, gestures, inflections, etc., but
also in social attitude. I thought about all those Vance Packard-type pop sosh muckraking
books of the 195Os, which had been taught to us in high school:The Hidden Persuaders
(advertising), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (advertising and 50s conformity), The
Status Seekers (planned obsolescence). Those books had really put the fear of God into us.
***
I once awakened David in the middle of the night with a request far too urgent to wait
until morning: "If I should die before I get a chance to write my will, make sure my
relatives don't get any of my stuff."
"Like your complete John Coltrane collection. I'm sure they'll fight each other to the
death over that," he yawned wearily, then went back to sleep, while I lay there, the covers
pulled up around me, with egg all over my face. That's how bitter and confused I eventually
became over the estrangement from my brothers and sisters. Charleston, West Virginia is a
relatively small town, and there was no way I could realistically avoid getting in touch with
them; my high school reunion was going to be a family reunion as well.
From the first time I saw it, Carol Burnett's episodic TV skit The Family----the Joads as
re-imagined by William Inge---really hit home: that was my family that Burnett, Harvey
Korman, and Vicki Lawrence were not so gently poking fun at. In what could have been an
episode in the recurring adventures of Burnett's strife and bile-beleaguered Higginses, what

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finally ripped it between my older sister and me happened at Christmastime, 1959. Ruth
Dolores had just purchased a very expensive artificial Xmas tree, and began prattling on
and on about how much she had paid for it. "It'll practically last forever," she crowed. This
was fifties fakery at its worst, I finally decided, and could take it no longer. If I had known
then what I know now, I would've praised the advanced eco-consciousness of her artificial
Christmas tree. Instead, I haughtily pointed out that "Only God can make a tree"
That was the last straw; Ruth Dolores let fly with nearly every grievance she'd harbored
against me since the day I was born, but had managed to mostly repress up to then. Among
her many complaints, she was especially bothered by the title of my bi-weekly college
newspaper column.
"I looked it up in the dictionary and it says 'misanthrope' means 'a hater of people.' So
if you despise people so much, you must hate me, too. Get out of my house."
I had never been close to my older sister. After that incident, like siblings in the TV
Higgins family, Ruth Dolores and I became cooly distant with one another for many years
to come.
My brother Tom seldom surfaced from his basement family room where he usually could
be found alone watching football on TV. Plagued by alcoholism most of his adult life, his
three children were near strangers to him. So was I.
Like Carol Burnett's The Family, the rift between my younger sister, Nancy, and I
resulted from misperceived slights and crosstalk. In the heat of an argument I'd said, "I'm
not coming back to my house till you're gone." What she heard was, "When I get back to
my house I want you gone." In an act worthy of The Family's "Eunice," she then stormed
out with her 16-year-old daughter and months-old granddaughter in tow, and stubbornly sat
at the airport for nearly 24 hours until she could get a flight out of L.A. We stopped
speaking with one another after that. Nancy had come to my rescue countless times when I

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was growing up; being stranded at LAX was the last thing I wanted for her.
Since I'd been away, Nancy had become the grandmother to a lovely black
granddaughter. Her living room walls were overflowing with photos of her; there were
more of this lone child than most blacks had of their entire families, and I was proud that
my sister was able to "get with the program." She had not held out the prospect of being so
enlightened and racially aware when we were younger. A few years ago my then sevenyear-old goddaughter, Tiffany, asked me: "Does it take a long time to grow up." "Yes," I
said, "and then the rest happens fast-wayyy too fast. "
Composer Richard Rodney Bennett once told me, "I forget, but I never forgive." I've
contemplated that Zen koan by way of Oscar Wilde ever since, and have finally decided it
means, "Let both real and imagined slights wash over you, but always keep an eye peeled
for the smile with the knife." I highly recommend reconciliation whenever possible. Which
is as close as I'm going to get with giving out with the kind of selp-help advice I
determinedly vowed to avoid in the writing of this book. Like my high school reunion,
getting back with my family turned out to be much easier than I'd pre-lived it. After the
initial flush of embarrassment had worn off, it was almost as if we had never been apart.
***
When I was a kid you could roam around, taste, touch, sample, try on various hats,
and experiment with all manner of lifestyles; living a highly marginal existence, and yet
with little fear of toppling into the abyss. You could graduate high school, perhaps do a year
or two of college, then safely drop out for a while. Maybe travel to Europe or perhaps take
an appealing entry-level job before dropping back into the grand scheme of things.
Nowadays, when college choice is often made for up while you're still paddling down the
birth canal, such picaresque ways are no longer practical.
We had U.S. imperialism and racism, too; however, neither was discussed much back

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then. In the 1950s the powers that be threw open the game to African-Americans, then
turned around and refused to tell them how to play it. In 1995, writer-director Elaine May
offered the idea of "a huge tax break for interracial marriages" as a possible solution to
racism. That's the kind of statement my generation might have made and meant as long ago
as the 1960s ... before the racial meltdown of the 1990s.
In addition to war and race, we are also faced today with the rain forest decimation, the
ozone hole, homelessness, etc., etc. Fin de siecle, it's now all tooooo much. Today, unlike
the Sixties, no one much cares to discuss any of it. II n'existe-pas. Abroad in the land, there
is a kind of invisible repression that is best exemplified by the lunacy of many millions of
black American teenagers' belief that rap actually has something to say about the current
racial situation in the U.S. Just as sad, a nearly equally great percentage of white youths
utilize the image of the rapster to confirm notions of black ignorance and sexual mania.
Statistics also show that more than fifty percent of black teenage males think they can make
the grade as a rap star, a figure perilously and unrealistically close to the full seventy-five
percent who believe they have a chance of making it in the National Basketball Association.
All that potential for social reformation and change. . .thrown on the slag heap of black
aspiration! White teens are only half as susecptable to similar Mitty-ish delusions.
I have to face the fact that in the 19608, as a so-called rock critic in the record industry
food chain, I helped along the installation of Pop as a means of social control.
Rockfpop/rockfrap/ thrash/punk junque has the power to keep just about all young peoplewhite, black and beyond-in their place. The engineers behind this mindlessness are
supposedly responsible adults who send their kids to private schools on the accumulated
pennies of mostly poor uneducated black kids. I have my price, too; but $2,000,000 isn't it.
Around 1980 an African-American friend, Ernest Harrington, was laid low by an
Epiphany: "Do you know," he suddenly realized, "I don't think I've seen in the newspapers,

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or heard on the radio or TV, a si:1gle word about race in the last ten years." I thought about
this a moment and realized that he was right; for the last decade the prevailing attitude, if
one existed at all, had been, "Didn't we take care of that already? Didn't Bob Dylan and
Motown free the world from the tyranny of racism?" In 1995 I saw a labor of love of mine,
a history of African-American show business, scheduled for publication by Temple
University Press, canceled at the last minute. I learned soon afterward from a "deep throat"
what had happened: The press' overwhelmingly white editorial staff had assumed I was
black; then, by accident, they learned otherwise. I neither masqueraded as black, nor hid
that I was white in numerous phone conversations with them. They reneged on publication
out of fear of reprisal from The Black Athena set at the school. Afrocentrism! And even
worse, some cryptofacist nonsense that Afro-centrists have made up, called melaninism,
under which lies the sub-theory of essentialism. The basic premise of which is that only
blacks are bio-psycho-sociologically equipped to write about The Black Experience. Not
since the heyday of phrenology in the 19th century has such a large body of seemingly
intelligent individuals fallen for hogwash like this. Thanks to the politics of black payback,
I was the victim of white-on-white racism! Only in America! I contacted longtime First
Amendment columnist, Nat Hentoff, about the possibility of his writing publicly about my
situation. But he was already in enough hot water with blacks (and gays) without taking on
the Afrocentric set; he didn't even answer my letter. The Machiavellian Mr. Hentoff and the
lovely Margo (Mrs. H) choose their civic crusades wisely and well. What a pair! Since then,
they've taken up the causes of Kenneth Starr and and anti-abortion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: That's Where We Came In
"Chief Complaint/History of Present Illness:
This 49-year-old, David Ehrenstein, was presented to the Emergency Room at Midway
Hospital on 12-28-96 complaining of headache and weakness. The patient's blood pressure

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in the Emergency Room was 207/126, and a head CT showed a large intracranial
hemorrhage originating just adjacent to and extending into, and nearly completely filling
the right lateral ventricle. The patient was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit where. . ."
This thing that happened to David, my significant other of nearly the last thirty years,
wasn't what I had in mind as a dynamite finish to this book. Two days after Christmas '96,
and I had just been laid off from my job as a film researcher. To postpone telling David the
bad news, I almost stopped on the way home to check out a new video store in the
neighborhood. But I would rather be with David than aimlessly eyeballing empty video
boxes. I got back behind the wheel of my beloved and beat-up three-decades-old VW and
continued home.
Pulling up in front of the house a few minutes later, something was wrong: David was
supposed to have been home all day working on his book, yet it was six o'clock and mail
still had not been taken in. Without even grabbing the accumulated post, I ran up the
hallway stairs two at a time. All over the house wet towels lay scattered about. In his
bedroom I found David lying prostrate, nearly unconscious and unable to respond to my
entreaties to tell me what was wrong. He could only moan: "Leave me alone. I'll be be all
right." Bullshit! I called 911, the paramedics quickly arrived, and after a cursory
examination, David was diagnosed as suffering from nothing more serious than a "viral
infection." Odd! He didn't even have a fever. They prescribed bed rest, liquids, aspirin, and
departed.
An hour later, David was somewhat more responsive, but I remained unsatisfied with
the diagnosis: how could you have a viral infection but no fever? Our friend and neighbor
Sharon Butler and I were somehow able to get him down the stairs and into the car. We took
him to a nearby emergency room where he lay the next two hours almost entirely
unresponsive in a chair. At last a doctor summoned us back to an examining room. Again,

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the diagnosis was the same as an hour earlier.
"But how can you have a viral infection without a fever?," I pleaded
with the physician.
"It happens sometimes."
"Oh.. .."
As with the paramedics, aspirin (the worst thing that you could have given him it turned
out) and bed rest were prescribed. We went home where it was a nightmare. David mostly
moaned and cried out for something to kill the pain. Fortunately, for no particular reason, I
gave him Tylenol instead of aspirin. Instinctively, I applied cold compresses. Later I learned
that the "burning" of ice effects a kind of deflective and competitive false pain, which helps
cancel out the real pain.
Something had been not quite right with David for at least a week. He'd chalked it up to
having eaten a "bad burrito" at a Mexican fast food place. "Does your stomach hurt?," I'd
asked.
"No."
"A bad burrito could only give you food poisoning," I nagged. "Leave me alone. "
I let the subject drop.
Sunup found David no better. And again I shoehorned him into the VW. Because it was
close, we went to the same emergency facility. This time, however, all it took for a different
doctor was a cursory exam before he hazarded that David clearly did not have a viral
infection but was most likely suffering from something much worse. A half-hour later after
a rush cat scan, the doctor's worst fears were confirmed: David had suffered a cerebral
hemorrhage. Much later, I learned that he had been knowingly sent home the night before
with diastolic blood pressure of over 200. That's nearly twice what it should be. By the time
I found out, it was too late to file a malpractice suit in doctor-friendly California.

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"WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE DOESN'T HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE?" The
hospital's chief neurosurgeon of voice rang out from across the ER facility where David and
a dozen others lay scattered about on gurneys. He stomped toward me.
"You've committed fraud allowing your friend there to be admitted to the hospital under
false pretenses!" he pointed at David and ranted. "Do you have any idea how much the kind
of operation he needs costs?"
"What operation?" I wondered to myself.
He stormed off.
Ordinarily my impulse would have been to shout at the retreating doctor, "If I had
known we weren't wanted here we wouldn't have come in the first place, we'll take our
business elsewhere!" Instead I kept my cool and didn't give him an opening to toss us out
bag and baggage. A few minutes later David was admitted to the hospital's neuro intensive
care unit.
Midway Hospital is one of the most expensive private hospitals in the city. Early on, I
had twice informed personnel there that David had no health insurance (most free-lance
writers don't!): still he was allowed to continue along the Hippocratic conveyor belt. And by
the time the cr had uncovered the serious nature of his illness, it was too late for them to
legally dump him the way they'd tried to the night before.
I've always been a strong believer in E.M Forster's axiom that in the process of dealing
with and embracing the daily "seen," there is little or no time left for dealing with the
"unseen." But I contemplate those few minutes that I hadn't spent perusing the video store
the night of David's (as we came to call it) "incident." It could have meant the difference
between life and death for him. All those years David and I spent worrying about the
inevitability of AIDS laying waste to one or the both of us. Instead, he had suffered a bomb
in the brain. That's what killed my father fifty years earlier before he'd even hit the ground

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in front of me.
Even though "Profit Before Patients," is Midway Hospital's motto, after stabilizing
medically uninsured patients, its policy is to ship them off to a public facility post haste.
But it was an especially busy time of year, what with the traditional Christmas upswing in
driveby shootings in Los Angeles, the city where the future comes to die. There was not a
single bed available in the L.A. County hospital system. They were stuck with David.
After David's admission to the hospital, there was talk of a shunt into his brain to
syphon off the pressure caused by the leaking blood vessel. I thought of "I LOVE MY
shunt," from Julia Sweeney's God Said Ha. A continuing impulse was to get on the phone
and call his takecharge mother, Pearl. But she'd been dead for nearly a decade. David had
no immediate family, and the responsibility for making decisions and seeing to it that he
received proper treatment was mine. Now it was up to me to be David's (in current medical
parlance) advocate.
David spent the next week in and out of what I would usually describe to others as a
"comatose" and "vegetative" state. "The proper word for it is 'non-responsive'," doctors
would correct me. He was fed intravenously and given massive amounts of medication to
lower his blood pressure, which, unbeknownst to him, had probably been sky high for a
number of years. Inasmuch as he hadn't been to see a doctor during all that time, it's hard to
know exactly when the problem began.
The first week David was strapped down with restraints to stop him from, in his less
lucid moments, trying to get out of bed to return home. I finally found a compassionate
nurse who'd take them off when I was in the hospital room with him. Most waking hours
found me by his hospital bedside I only went home to sleep, keen, wail, fall on my knees
and, even though I'm an atheist, pray. Go figure! Maybe altruism wasn't why I looked after
him with such diligence: I could no more contemplate his eternal absence from my life than

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I could meet the Dostoevskian challenge of not imagining a white bear. But the David I
knew was not there. I would whisper to him lying there in neuro ICU, "I miss you." Finally,
on the third day, he opened his eyes and uttered the first words he had spoken to me since
his admission to the hospital: "You really miss those bon mots, don't you?" Soon, his ability
to communicate began to improve considerably, at least with others than myself. When
visitors came he attempted valiantly and somewhat successfully to effect a presentation of
self, more or less resembling the David they knew. Once they departed, however, he fell
back to sleep like a rag doll that had just had all the stuffings pulled out of it. He didn't feel
he had to (painfully) "perform" for me, but for others, he did. Later, when I told him about
this, he said, "Hey, that's the way I was brought up, to be friendly when company comes
calling. You're family. I could be myself with you." He wasn't always able to bring off the
charade. Even with visitors, sometime he would only lie there with tubes coming out of
what seemed like every second orifice in his body, like the Infanta of Prague, and receive
but not really respond to visitors.
On several occasions I "apologized" for what was happening. I saluted him for his courage.
"What choice do I have?," he said.
Asked by nurses and doctors about my relationship to David was, I was too unguarded
to say "friend." I found myself responding with somewhat more accuracy and candor. "I'm
his "S.O" (significant other). The respect and comprehension that I mostly received in
return beat all to hell the right for the two of us to (au courantly) marry in all of the lower
48, along with Hawaii, Alaska and downtown Guam. I would be asked how long we had
been "together." "Nearly thirty years," I would reply.
"I don't know any heterosexuals who have been together THAT LONG," I was told
more than once. It was almost like we were beings from another planet.
In the cold light of day, I find the phrase "S.O." a trifle too PC for my tastes, but I use it

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always now. Every time I say it I'm reminded of the good fight that David and I waged.
Normally a cooperative sort of fellow, he had fought off doctors and nurses twice when
they tried to secure him in the claustrophobia-inducing MRI machine. His mother had done
the same a few years earlier. It was more than a week before doctors were able (on the third
try) to take an MRI (more definitive than a cat scan) to find out what had happened to
David's brain. It revealed nothing except that the bleeding into the brain had mercifully
ceased.
***
Every last penny we had was in his banking and checking accounts. "WHAT! "You
mean the two of you don't even have a joint checking account!," others said when I
described my plight. I laughed. That was something that grownups did, while David and I
live so marginally that neither of us even have a proper/adult TRW credit record. The
solution was to use his ATM card. But after thirty years together, David, like paranoid
George Costanza on an episode of Seinfeld, simply would not part with his pin number.
Even if it meant starvation for the both of us. Each time I would ask him for his code, with
uncertainty he would give me a different number. Armed with the new information, I would
trot all the way to the bank only to be rejected again by the machine. This happened five or
six times. Finally I gave up.
After David's admission to the hospital, basket upon basket of flowers arrived. There
were phone calls from people David hadn't heard from for years. Some were even from
those on our enemies list that we used to joke about. Friends and acquaintances rallied
round, and the getwell cards stacked up.
After two weeks David was well enough for Midway to legally get him off their very
expensive hands, and he was shipped off to a county hospital. Midway was less than five
minutes from home. Rancho Los Amigos, the new facility, was an hour away. That's where

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they'd hospitalized Jan Berry of Jan and Dean after his brains were splattered all over L.A.'s
infamous Dead Man's Curve in a traffic accident. At Rancho he was put into a ward
populated mostly by drive-by shooting victims, with a police guard at the door, and patients
being kept there under aliases-all very Wamers Bros '30s crime melodrama! One day I
talked with-more like flatH-the basket case in the bed adjacent to David's. From the little he
was able to communicate, I sensed that twenty-year-old Sparky was almost proud of having
finally achieved lifelong consignment to adult strength diapers and a wheelchair. Everybody
in his community, including four of his good buddies, had fallen victim.

Now,

it

was his turn. THE thing to do.

David turned to me, seated next to his hospital bed, and mumbled, "When big breasted
women who are men carry atomic weapons, then we'll know the end is near."
I summoned the nurse; she called a psychiatrist.
"Do you believe in psychiatry?," he asked David.
"I believe in psychiatry, but I'm not sure it believes in me." The shrink didn't
laugh.
The Sally Jessie Raphael's geek parade happened to be on TV at the time when he'd
made that enigmatic remark. It was an episode about paramilitary cross dressers. David's
remark about big-breasted transvestites had been in response to that. He knew exactly what
he was tallking about. But who can blame me for overreacting?
***
David's medical doctor's last name was Saperia, but when he first introduced himself
David misunderstood and thought he'd said "Superior."
"I'll be the judge of that," David remarked. That, coupled with his reply to the
psychiatrist, convinced me that he was on the mend.
After two-and-a-half weeks of hospitalization, David was discharged. He still seemed

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very ill, but was a charity patient and there was no way I could fight them off. Back home
he let fly with a real shocker.
***
"This is a very nice place," he turned to me and said. "When did we move here? Did
you sell all our furniture and rent this? It looks just like the set of a Douglas Sirk movie." It
would have been amusing if it hadn't been so scary.
Most of the time, however, he was rational and, in an attempt to get him even more
focused I showed him tapes of his favorite films. I chose untaxing, fast-paced fare like the
Hope-Crosby "Road" movies, but he tended to drift off after only a few minutes. Finally, as
an experiment, I popped one of the slowest movies ever made into the VCR, Carl Dreyer's
Gertrud, likened by some of its less sensitive critics to watching proverbial paint peel-and a
favorite of David's. I thought maybe it would have the opposite effect. But five minutes
later he was (again) fast asleep, unable to bring any more powers of concentration to bear
on Gertrud than Road to Morocco.
"What time is it?," he asked me.
I would tell him the time.
"Morning or evening?"
"Work with me! Look out the fuckin' window and figure it out for
yourself," I growled eventually. It was the only time I lost my temper with him.
For the first few weeks I could not leave David by himself: I had to make elaborate
arrangements for someone to keep watch over him. After a few weeks, when I finally did
so, I walked up the stairs certain I would find what I had that previous December 27th. I
began wearing a pager to help allay the post-traumatic stress.
One afternoon we were watching TV together. "Look! Look! On the TV," I yelped. It
was Elizabeth Taylor's-and David's!-doctor talking about her recent brain surgery. It amused

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us that David had this in common with the mother of all fag hags. But he couldn't place the
face that had looked down at him on a daily basis in his hospital bed for nearly two weeks.
He also couldn't recall that we'd spent New Year's Eve together in the Intensive Care Unit.
Absolutely FAAABULOUS! Next year, simply everyone will be doing it, he yelped.
Three weeks after David returned home the more definitive procedure of an angiogram, a
semi-invasive surgical procedure consisting of shooting dye into the brain, then x-raying it,
was scheduled. Taking everything into account, including pre-op preparations, it was an all
day affair beginning at four a.m. with the readout at the end of the day confirming the MRI
reading of a few weeks before-that, in fact, there was no aneurysm or other deformity, such
as an arteriovenous malformation, waiting in his brain to re-erupt. In other words, brain
surgery would not be necessary. The down side is that we will never know exactly what
happened to David. It's reasonably safe to assume, though, that if he keeps his blood
pressure under control, there probably won't be a re-occurrence. [And as of this 2009
edition, there still has not been.]
Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, David remembers nothing of what happened to him:
brain scans, being strapped down, none of it. For a month or so he was unable to
concentrate on anything terribly taxing. He channel surfed a lot. Thrice daily I swooped
down on him to take his blood pressure and to give him his portfolio of medications;
overnight we'd made the leap from perennial college roommates to altacockers. At all times
David demonstrated grace under fire, minus a trace of (understandable and allowable) self
pity throughout the entire ordeal. My friend, George Box, from the good old days at
Stanley's back in the Sixties wrote to me recently: "Laughter heals. Life is too important to
take seriously. Lightness in all things is the highest perspective. II NewAgey as it sounds,
George might be right.
The instant David became clear-headed, like Dwight Frye in Dracula, and without so

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much as a hello to me, rose up out of his bed, ambled dazedly over to his word processor,
and returned to writing. He had been working on a history of gays and lesbians in
Hollywood when he'd been so rudely interrupted. His Open Secret: Homosexuality and
Hollywood 1925-1998 turned out to be a bestseller for William Morrow in the Fall of '98. In
the acknowledgments he gives Thanks to Midway Hospital. I'm not so sure they deserve it
after the doctor there sent him home from the emergency room with sky-high blood
pressure that awful night right after Christmas.
This is the worst thing that's ever happened to to either of us. But the quality of our
lives has improved greatly as a result. Coping with David's illness has taught me that I can
handle anything. I no longer need that road map, leftover from childhood, before I can drive
to the end of the block. I now pre-live the future much less than before. I had to deal with
getting him admitted to the hospital when all he was supposed to be suffering from was a
simple virus. He was, in fact, dying. Then there were the hosptial social workers who had
no idea how to handle a gay man who didn't happen to be suffering from AIDS. Post-stroke,
now that the worst is over and the smoke has cleared, I look back on the ordeal as a
textbook example of the prayer not to have visited upon one's self any more than can be
handled. David has benefited too, having slowed down considerably from the frantic pace
of his daily pre-stroke grind. The Stroke Cure is not a regimen I recommend for getting
your life in order, but it worked for us. And who knows? Maybe I'll just turn the entire mess
into a niche self-help book about "What to Do When Your Gay Lover Has a Stroke."
In 1996 a musician with the so-called alternative (to what?) group Smashing Pumpkins
OD'd on something called redrum heroin ("murder" backwards, from The Shining, get it?);
shortly thereafter, sources reported, sales of that specific stripe of junk went through the
roof. Factor in 90s TV beer commercials featuring beatniks recast as frat boys trooping
through the rockies behaving like ass holes, and you know that it's well past time to declare

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the Death of Hip. Only seemingly unrelated, as of this writing (1999), the richest state in
the union, California, just came out dead last in public school reading scores. Let I sound
like the terminal Byronite, I do believe that positive solutions and results invariably arise
out of epochal mires. At the turning of the millennium, though, it's difficult to fathom
exactly what form that phoenix rising from the ashes will take.
By age eighteen I had lost the three most important people in my life: my parents, to
natural causes, and my best friend, Lynn, to suicide. I had to survive the Sixties with its
pushmepullyou excess baggage of opti/cynicism, exploitation, drugs, assassination
conspiracy theories and . . . Wayne Newton. After my last bad experience with LSD I
became a raging thanatopophobe. Just about the time I got over that, I morphed into an
AIDS hypochondriac soon after the epidemic's initial onslaught. Like John Lennon, "I
really thought love would save us all." It didn't. But Candide-fashion, I've forged on. They
have a gene for everything else, and what I would like to know is this: Is there a gene that
determines optimism? If so, I acquired it. Or else, was it "something good" instilled in me
somewhere in "my wicked childhood, to cop a phrase from, of all people, songwriter
Richard Rodgers. If, like me, you were an adolescent in the 195Os, there was usually
someone there to lend a helping hand; it could even have been a stranger, who in today's
postMcMartin times might only turn away. I remember it as a time when, if your parents
didn't have time for you, someone did. Women usually took the lead, with manly men---as
best they temperamentally could --bringing up the rear. When you're six years old and the
world is going up in flames around you-as was often the case with myself and, I belatedly
learned at my high school reunion, a lot of other kids in the 1940s and 50s-there's really no
such thing as being made of sterner stuff: it does take a village to raise a child. Even more
than genetics, this is the best explanation I can give you for my having made it from Then
to Now.

248.
AFTERWORD
The year was 1949, a pre-TV time when the last resort of faded movie glamor queens
d'un certain age was something called the "white telephone circuit. " These were summer
stock productions typified by a small cast of mostly local players appearing in marital
melodramas, murder mysteries, and drawing room comedies said to be in "pre-Broadway"
tryout, with a name" player in the lead. In such affairs, the star spent a lot of time "in one"
(theatrical terminology for center stage, solo and in the spotlight), horizontal on a chaise
lounge, spewing forth loads of exposition, as often as not into a white telephone and
therefore undistracted by such petty inconveniences as, oh, plot or too many other actors.
Occasionally the butler might walk on, announce something like, "Hark, I hear the cannons
roar!"; to which Constance Bennett, Miriam Hopkins, or (if the straw hat impresario was
really lucky) Tallulah Bankhead would reply, "Be that as it may," and the servant would
exit, leaving the star happily solo and center stage once again. Which, as you can imagine,
was a setup appreciated by audience and performer alike. No, we're not talking Cocteau's
La Voix Humaine here, but such long-forgotten (by most) vehicles like The Last of Mrs.
Cheyney; Good-bye, My Fancy; Mirror, Mirror; Portrait in Black; and A Night at Mme.
Tussaud's. And of all the ex-leading ladies of the cinema who trod the "white telephone"
boards, none was more active than Kay Francis, the thirties-era Warner Bros. clothes horse
with the fetching inability to pronounce her Rs.
Which brings us to: one night somewhere in the wilds of New England circa 1949,
when Francis was then appearing in a typically featherweight piece of piffle called Let Us
Be Gay; though, for all that the play actually mattered to the audience, the evening could
just as well have consisted of their beloved Kay reading the proverbial telephone directory.
Yes---I know---once upon a time Kay Francis had starred in one of the masterpieces of
world cinema, Trouble in Paradise. But the people who had come to see her this evening

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were there for one reason alone: to see if she still looked as good as she had in such second
string features as: Dangerous Curves, The Marriage Playground, Behind the Makeup,
Street of Chance, Let's Go Native, The Virtuous Sin, Transgression, The False Madonna,
Street of Women, Guilty Hands, and. . .well, you get the picture.
On the night in question, when the curtain went up on Let Us Be Gay, revealing Francis
reclined on the regulation chaise, it was obvious to all that they had got what they'd come
for. Yes, dear Kay still had IT. However, before she even had the chance to utter one line,
she let out a thundering fart so loud that at first the audience thought surely it must've been
the foghorn in the old lighthouse-turned-summer-stock theater itself, come back to life.
Ever the pro, Kay stayed in place on the chaise like a pinned butterfly. The audience,
however, was another matter. The first isolated titters quickly turned to outright laughter of
such proportions not even her previous season's successful mirth provoking summer tour in
the Noel Coward comedy, Hay Fever, could compare. The sight of the former icon of screen
elegance displaying for all the world to see that, after having an especially rich pre-show
meal, she could cut the cheese with the best of 'em, was simply a "showstopper." Down
went the curtain while the crowd of 300-or-so continued to "lose it." Finally, several very
long minutes later, when they had gotten it all out of their systems, the curtain rose once
more to find-voila!-Kay Francis in exactly the same position, looking for all the world as if
nothing had happened. The play began allover again and, thanks to a remarkable feat of
self-control on the part of Francis, there were no further interruptions. Now. . .THAT is a
star!
Like Kay Francis, I'm a great believer in (to mix a platitude or three) when life deals
you lemons. . .or gas, you pick yourself up, wipe yourself off, and go on with the show.

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Bill Reed is a journalist and writer whose articles on show business, the arts and popular
music have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Rolling Stone, the San
Francisco Examiner, and International Documentary. He has five published books to his
credit, including Hot from Harlem: Profiles in Classic African-American Entertainment and
Shared Air: My Six-Decade Interface With Celebrity. He has also worked as a video jackof-all trades for the Criterion Collection, and produced many jazz records for Japan.