RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,200
(memories of my biosphere, NYC 1967)
In 1964 the writer Willie Morris
lived in NYC. On the upper west
side. He was a displaced Mississippi
person. Oddly enough, I found
out years later, James Meredith
- who'd integrated the University
of Mississippi in that big civil
rights push of those old days (I
was in seminary, as a 13 year
old) - had also moved to that
area as a Columbia University
regular student. These two guys,
both Mississippians of different
backgrounds, oddly enough had
phone numbers that differed by
only the last digit (Morris an 8,
and Meredith a 7). They kept
getting each other's phone calls.
How's that for magical thinking!
-
In 1967, I landed in NYC too,
August. Though there was nothing
august about me - I came in as
an unschooled bum, and stayed
that way too, mostly. There was
ferment and violence in the air,
yes, but it mostly kept getting
interrupted by the strangely new
melange of free-love hippie crap
that was flooding in from everywhere.
It was a time when being a 'native'
New Yorker was like being in
second place. Streams of kids, all
from the outlying provinces, and
having self-defined as 'Hippies,'
flooded in. Long Island, Connecticut,
and from both the uppercuts out of
New Jersey, and the lowercuts too,
like myself, draining as blood into
the new-found sewer of NYC.
Coming out of the scum-bucket
sinkholes of places like Woodbridge
and all other parts of New Jersey
was nothing but an incendiary
invitation to a form of continued
idiocy - lawn goddesses and high
school cheerleaders (emphasis on
high) made it all so apparent that
the dregs of central Jersey school
systems - like most other places -
could produce nothing but scum and
then try to filter that foul product
out to legitimize that version of the
world on others. 1967 was truly a
watershed year, and I was there, as
it were, at the beginning of both death
and deliverance. The streets were rank
with conflict and, naivete. Engaged
together, they mated and produced
some malignant, unstructured thing
as 'hippie.' Unschooled, raw, untested,
and open for anything.
-
Any real hippie girl of those days,
now in her dotage, would 'fess up
to that. There's no longer any reason
to disguise or avoid Truth. Sex and
violence together wove a sweater that
covered no one's tits. In the same vein,
(drug reference) any hippie guy from
those days would have to own up to
being, back then, an opportunistic and
miserable slug, no matter what his
later-life accoutrements became. It
all faded away in two years. Violence,
murder, terror, and death, soon superseded
any Christ-like intentions of goodness
and mirth. It was all bullshit then, and
it still is now. The 'hippie' was a media
encampment, fabricated mostly by
Jewish-media liars. Sorry to have to
say that, but it's true. Remember that
movie 'Matrix'? Well, every hippie
guy somehow thought they were 'Neo,'
but way before that movie was even
thought of. It was all false, because
hippie guys were pushover weaklings,
closer to being girls than guys anyway.
-
The August I first got there, I remember
well. From Tompkins Square Park (where
I landed and first encamped, for days)
to St. Marks to Cooper Union to the
Orange Julius place on Eighth Street
(which only recently to that time had
been Main Street USA to the beatniks,
but they were gone), to District 65, the
trucking union hall, to old Book Row
at Fourth Ave, to the Bowery, Chinatown
the Northern Dispensary and Sheridan
Square, I was all over that place like
flies on shit. I met people, and walked
away. There were so many levels of
strangeness there - all around me -
that each day soon became a nightmare
on re-run. There were girls everywhere -
let me state - for the feasting. There
was such a primal level of naivete and
sexuality together that it improbably
should not have been allowed. Clothing
was only as unwieldy (and unyielding) as a
coat of paint made of air. No rules existed
and new ones had not yet been written.
-
At every streetcorner, waiting for the
light to change, waiting to cross, if
one looked down in the endless
zillion-degree heat, there were
bottle caps, pennies, nickels and
dimes pressed into the soft tar
everywhere - like a second
pavement. I never knew what
happened to any of that, especially
with all the beastly poverty. I'd
have though that some diligent
prying-work could get someone
five dollars with not too much
effort. I never saw anything
happen on that count. For me
the whole world around me was
a new treasure, whether it turned
out as dismal or not. I never much
went by 'decades,' and was hardly
even conscious then of it being
the tail end of 1967. That in itself
meant little, As the hot Summer
turned to later Autumn, everything
else began changing again: There
was, for me, suddenly Draft Board
problems. I never registered or
whatever that was about; I was flagrant
in my anti-war efforts and disrespect:
in fact had given over my e11th
apartment to mostly harboring
AWOLS on their way to Canada,
with the passage as well of much
stolen contraband, and even a
few government cars, later sanded
down and made unrecognizable
at the 'body shop' across the
street (now some fancy-ass bar),
whose Puerto Rican management
was somehow in on the deal, with
my 'roommate' and on-site crime
boss Andy Bonamo. I often did
wonder over him, or any syndicate
crime connections he may have
carried, and even his name - which
he pronounced 'Bonamo,' like the
Turkish Taffy candy out then, but
which I rather figured was probably
Bonnano, like the NY crime family
of syndicate note and Mafia fame.
He'd get a few hundred bucks per
car but we kept getting carloads
of 4 or 5 kids, mostly from some
base in Virginia, who were hastily
on their way to Toronto and for
whom we were an overnight sort
of Underground Railroad stop.
People were always on the move,
and with planned marches, protests,
and more, the place was always
humming - not often to the good.
-
I never knew what happened, really.
Evidently my mother, after a letter
or two had arrived at her home,
about my delinquency in registering,
gave them a 'current' address for me.
Somehow these two idiot guys
caught up me along the street. They
were in a car, and were draft board
people or something. I got hauled
in to the lower Broadway induction
station (Whitehall? It may have been
called). I was lectured at, scolded,
etc., and told to return three or four
days later for full registration
proceedings and possible induction.
Pleiku, here I come!' That was my
first thought anyway, but I quickly
thought better of it. That induction
center was a dismal craphouse -
old, institutional light green walls,
gated windows, and recalcitrant
elevators. I rode a bicycle there,
and simply parked it within the
atrium, and walked in, not knowing
if I'd ever see the 'outside' world
again. More on that later.
-
As for Willie Morris, whom I
mentioned in the opening here,
he was a Jewish southerner, and
he wrote of that odd complexity.
But what I found most interesting -
lost for a while as I was amidst
all that old-line NYC Jewish
culture and all that moribund
post-Holocaust shock which still
haunted so many of the froze
oldsters I'd seen sitting around
in their moribund, park-bench
vacuity (while around the, again,
the entire world was changing) -
was how he put this paradoxical
clinging to a 'past' by citing
something written by another
writer*: "I have for years been
intrigued by the way Jews and
Southerners are alike - stepchildren
of an anguished history. From
before the Civil War Southerners
have used Old Testament analogies
to portray themselves as the chosen
people, surrounded and outnumbered
but destined to survive and triumph
against overwhelming odds." All
over New York that Summer, and
wherever I stepped, it was much
the same - some bizarre, gooey tar
of the past, drawing everything in,
like some La Brea Pit of the mind.
Just try and survive something
like that!
----
*Eli N. Evans, 'The Lonely Days Were
Sundays; Reflections of a Jewish
Southerner.'
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