3563. AND AUGUST, 1967 (early for me)

 AND AUGUST, 1967

(early for me)

Manchatter and the Marktones we hid beneath the stairs.

We kept the tea the color of tan shoes and we often enough

laughed at all the wrong things. That was the way things were

in 1967 along St. Mark's Place. Cat Mother and the All Night

Newsboys, they too were playing at the Psychedelicatessan.

I only realize now, in looking back, how really Jewish at core

all this movement stuff was. I went to the Diggers Free Store

often enough, mostly in the hopes of getting a glimpse. Those

girls from Ave A by Third Street, they most often had on

no clothes, and there was always some excuse to go there.

Fetch this. Bring a message back. It was all a Summer's fun for

a boy like me. I lit my incandescent lamp by the firelights at their

knees, and just always hoped they'd answer again the door.

'God,' I'd say to myself, 'they are so advanced.'

-

We drove a parts truck all across the all-night streets.

Throwing papers to the curb, packing the East Village

Other in the small storefront doorways, smoking cigarettes

or reefer as we ran. And then, dawn. At which point we'd

get to the corner of 10th and sit with all the angry Con Ed

guys slurping their 6am shift oatmeal from the Polish guy

with numbers on his forearms. Those guys were tough;

mean and ugly and not liking us too well either. We were

the threat they'd read about - the dirty kids who never

worked, stayed high, and screwed their girlfriends or

each other. Yeah. Diggers forever!

-

They overheard us, once, talking about blowing up the

generating station down at the riverside by thirteenth.

All we knew to do was talk, but talk was good and talk

was cheap. We talked so big  -  our dynamite and timers

and nitroglycerine caps. Those Con Ed guys would have

swept the floor with our hairy heads had they caught us  - 

so we never went back, Strength in numbers never mattered

when the sum amounted to zero. And then the Polish guy

died. He was a camp survivor, never spoke, and the lashes

of his eyes were still singed off somehow, and he had pink

eyes and skin with tears that never stopped, slowly, dripping.

-

What little bit I came to know about that stuff back then, I

learned from hearing about him. Auschwitz, Treblinka and

Bergen-Belsen. I think my eyes would always be tearing too,

if I was ever him. Or what he'd been. Or what he almost wasn't.

So this was the New World to a man like him. The more and

more I thought it over, the less and less I was proud of that, or

where I was and where I'd been; but still, it was early for me.