Another Little Piece of My Heart Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Goldstein’s Greatest Hits: A Book Mostly about Rock ’n’ Roll

  The Poetry of Rock

  Reporting the Counterculture

  Homocons: The Rise of the Gay Right

  In memory of my parents, Mollye and Jack,

  known by their friends as Malke and Yankel

  Contents

  Wretched Refuse

  Nearly Naked Through the Not Exactly Negro Streets at Dawn

  White Like Me

  I Don’t Know What This Is, but You Owe Me a Story

  A Dork’s Progress

  Flowers in My Hair

  Weird Scenes in the Gold Mine

  The Summer of My Discontent

  I Was a Teenage Marcel Proust

  The Unraveling

  Groucho Marxism

  The Whole World Is Watching

  The Reckoning

  Aftermath (or: There’s a Bathroom on the Right)

  A Note on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Music Credits

  Wretched Refuse

  It’s 1962. I’m eighteen, terrified and turned on by everything. School is the only place where I feel safe. I’m about to enter college, the first member of my family to learn the difference between Hegel and a bagel. I read the way other kids in the neighborhood fuck—constantly (according to them).

  I live in a housing project in the Bronx. My parents think of it as a big step up from the tenements of Manhattan where they were raised, but I have a different trajectory in mind. For me, Manhattan is the locus of a better life, the life of guys in corduroy who play the banjo like they come from Kentucky and girls whose breath doesn’t smell like cigarettes; of poets with beards like the one I can’t grow yet, but want to; of “angelheaded hipsters” like the madmen in “Howl,” which I’ve read and recited to myself dozens of times. Every weekend I set out for the streets where such poems are lived, sorting through the clothing I need for the journey, counting my spending money and deciding whether to wear my beret. (Of course I will.) I slip into the grungy sweater I’ve worn every day for a year. My jeans have sweat holes in the crotch—I sweat a lot, and I rarely bathe. I envy the sleek kids, the boys with tail-fin hair who can unhook a bra on a girl as easily as they tie their shoes. I envy them but I don’t want to be them. I’m from the Bronx but not of it. I’m bound for Greenwich Village.

  Every week I cross the Bronx, by several buses, in order to reach the only newsstand in the borough that carries the Village Voice. I keep a bottle of Dubonnet in the fridge so I don’t have to drink soda with the boiled chicken and canned fruit we gulp while talking loudly over the TV. Late at night, while my family is asleep, I curl up in the bathtub with my transistor radio tuned to WBAI, a small FM station that features radicals, artists, holy men from the Himalayas, and folksingers. To me these are typical inhabitants of the city whose towers are visible from my window as tiny spires in the distance. I can reach its magic streets for fifteen cents—the subway fare in 1962.

  I know every curve and swerve the El makes as it courses through the Bronx, skirting the edges of buildings where people at their windows can almost touch the train, and then plunging into the tunnel to Manhattan. As soon as it goes underground I lose the knot in the belly that is my constant companion in the neighborhood. I’ve managed to pass the test I must take every time I leave the project for the zone of possibility. It’s a danger unimagined by my parents, harsh as their life in the slums was. Thanks to the New York City Housing Authority, I’ve been spared their ordeal of heatless winters, toilets in the hall, dead siblings, and gangsters rubbed out on the stoop. But I have to deal with something nearly as fearsome. I need to get out of the Bronx with my sandals.

  Nobody wears sandals in the project. If I dare, the guys who guard the gates of masculinity will see them as a crossing over into faggot territory and stomp on my feet. So when I leave the house my feet are in camouflage—Keds. I keep the sandals in a paper bag, but when I get to the Village I put them on. I don’t care that my toes are freezing or that the straps chafe. One doesn’t wear socks in the Village, or so it seems to me. I’m obsessed with dressing right, since I don’t feel like I belong here. But I do, at least on the three-block strip that runs south from Washington Square. Hundreds of kids like me are clogging the pavement. I’m safe among my peers, seeing and being seen on MacDougal Street.

  Generations of bohemians hover over this scene. My heroes, the Beats, look down from placards outside the bars where free jazz once mixed with free verse. Folk music fills these clubs now, and the real Beats have departed for less illustrious digs, leaving MacDougal Street to the wretched refuse of the outer boroughs—us. We don’t know from the ways of Zen or the world of art in Greenwich Village. Our culture is hanging out. For hours we brood, sipping espresso in the recesses of the Fat Black Pussycat, or we wander over to the Square, where a year ago we rioted and won the right to sing. In this swarm of guitars I will find the first incarnation of what is not just a new life for me but a new era for my generation—a time of sex and drugs, of revolution for the hell of it, and, most important, music. Music will be for us what it always is for youth: a way to know you’re not alone.

  I was a fat boy, helpless before my weight. I was so hungry—for food, for sex, for attention—that I could never fill the maw inside me. I would wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that invisible hands were choking me. My survival, my very breath, depended on the small group of misfits that I called my friends.

  They were rich, or so I thought. They didn’t live in the project but in small brick houses with yards the size of beach blankets. Some of them lived in a cluster of apartments that had been built by the Communist Party for its members. The Party called these buildings cooperatives, but we knew them as the Coops, and in 1962 they were a very cooped-up place. The residents led apprehensive lives, never sure that Joe McCarthy was really dead. My best friends were the children of these pariahs.

  They were the first people I met who didn’t have the TV on perpetually. Their homes were fascinating to me, with real paintings on the walls and Danish Modern furniture, not Louis-the-Something fakes covered in plastic, my mother’s idea of elegance. There were records by performers I’d never heard of, Paul Robeson and Odetta, and no one minded if we sat on the floor singing loyalist songs from the Spanish Civil War. My mother liked the idea that I was hanging out with radicals. She associated Communism with upward mobility—as a girl she’d made it a point to dance with Reds because she was sure those boys would become doctors. “My little Communist,” she liked to call me with a grin.

  The myth that all Jews have intact families didn’t apply to my parents. As a child, my father sometimes lived in foster institutions or on the street. My mother grew up in a “broken home,” and her own mother, who couldn’t read and barely spoke English, struggled to support the brood. I heard endlessly about how this blessed bubbie put out the stove when her kids left for school and sewed all day in the cold flat. There’s an old ghetto yarn about maternal sacrifice, which I often endured. A son cuts out his mother’s heart in order to sell it. On the way to see the buyer, he trips and drops it, and the heart says, “Did you hurt yourself, dear?” I don’t think my mother regarded this tale as even a little over the top, but I saw it as a feeble attempt to induce guilt in me. Now I realize that she was actually lecturing herself. She strained against a maternal role that thwarted her worldly ambitions. Motherhood was so central to her self-image that she never dealt with her rage at its constrictions, and so she directed a burning ball of drive toward her eldest son. It’s an old story. My father was a frustrated man, and he sometimes took it out on me. In
my family, the belt was what the time-out is today. But he also nurtured my creativity. I owe my lust for fame to my mother, and my artistic urges to him. Both traits propelled me toward the role I would play in the sixties.

  For much of my childhood I thought of myself as a TV network broadcasting my experiences. Nothing seemed as real to me as entertainment, and my father fed this fantasy by taking me to all sorts of exotic spectacles, from foreign movies with glimpses of tit to Yiddish melodramas that turned on the conflict between love and God’s law. We would leave the Bronx in the morning, when ticket prices were reduced, and catch the stage show at a giant midtown theater. I have a vivid memory of the wild-man drummer Gene Krupa—a jazz precursor of the Who’s Keith Moon—rising out of the orchestra pit, his kit sparkling in the spotlight. I wanted to be a singer until my voice changed. (Fortunately, writing doesn’t require vocal cords.)

  My father was a postal worker, and all sorts of high-tone publications passed through his hands en route to their subscribers. He would tear off the address labels so that the magazines ended up in the dead-letter office, and then he would bring them home to me. As a result I read art and theater journals unheard of in the Bronx. Once a month we’d travel to a discount bookstore in Times Square and I’d come home with a pile of classics. He pumped me full of culture, though it was alien to him, just as my mother drilled me in the social skills that meant success, though she hardly knew what they were. The result was a conflict between respect for his modest achievements and loyalty to her dreams. I tried to resolve this dilemma by becoming a beatnik (hence the beret). It was upwardly mobile, but definitely not anyone’s idea of making it.

  I can only guess at the scenario that my friends grew up with, but I don’t think it was much different from mine. Mixed messages from our parents were what we had in common—and not just us. In 1962, a huge cohort of kids, whose families barely qualified as middle-class, was about to enter a rapidly expanding economy. As beneficiaries of the postwar education boom, we felt entitled to be creative, but we were trained to move up, and these clashing desires produced the youth culture that descended on MacDougal Street, among other places in other cities. Folk music was the perfect outlet for our split sensibility. It was proletarian in its sympathies, yet distinct from the taste of the masses. The other kids in my project didn’t know from this music, and they would have found it utterly without the rhythmic energy that signified life. But I found a future in it.

  On my jaunts to the Village I frequented the folk clubs, huffing my kazoo (an instrument I chose because it didn’t demand any musical skill) at open-mike events called hootenannies, or I heard the pros play for very little money. In one of those small rooms—Gerde’s Folk City or possibly the Cafe Wha?—I saw Bob Dylan perform. He was well-known to my friends, had been since his first concert at Carnegie Hall in 1961, which we all attended (I still have the program), so I was aware of his legend long before he became legendary. My father called him “the hog caller” and pleaded for relief from his raspy voice on the record player. Dylan would soon be the emblem of my evolution from a folkie to a rocker, as he was for many people my age. But there was a specter haunting me when I left the Bronx for the peaceful village where the lion sleeps tonight. It was the specter of girl groups.

  Black girls, white girls, didn’t matter. I was tuned to their voices, especially those sirens of stairwell sex, the Ronettes. Also the Marvelettes, the Crystals, and the Shirelles. Their music snapped like chewing gum. It was everything that tempted me in the project—big hair, fierce moves—and it drove me to fantasies that literature didn’t provide. My favorite jerk-off dream involved Dion, the Bronx-bred singer in the Belmonts (as in Belmont Avenue), fucking all the Shirelles. I’m pretty sure I was the only kid at the hootenanny who knew the words to “Baby, It’s You.”

  In high school, doo-wop meant as much as sex to me. It was my link to the gods of the project, the Italian boys. Jews weren’t allowed into the gang system (“It would be like fighting girls,” my friend Dominick explained), but these barriers didn’t apply when we sang together, howling in curlicue scales, as if we were actually momentarily black. This was the only time when I felt truly competent as a male, and the imprimatur applied to all kinds of rock ’n’ roll—not the slick shit from Dick Clark’s stable, of course, but the rough stuff that came from a personal place or off the street. It distracted me from my anguish in a way that folk songs never could. Certain pop melodies would enter my body and make my mind go blank. I identified with performers as intensely as I did with authors. The gyre that was Elvis, the leaps of Jerry Lee Lewis, the shrieks of Little Richard—to me it was clear: they were as hungry as me.

  Folksingers didn’t have fierce moves. Try to imagine Joan Baez doing hand jive or Pete Seeger leaping out of a coffin. Robust and even gritty were fine, randy was not. When I think of this scene, the image that comes to mind is a girl cradling an autoharp and radiating purity, not the stuff of my wet dreams. Folk music had a righteous, optimistic attitude that seemed very middle-class, and I went for it with the enthusiasm of a wannabe. But the gutter remained, hot and tarry, within me. I kept it under tight control, just as I struggled to tame my budding queerness. I was sure that if I gave myself over to the rock ’n’ roll side of me, I would never rise. My new life depended on mastering the codes of the only society that would have me, the boho left. But in 1962, I lucked out, because those codes were about to change. To the shrieks of girls reaching for their first orgasm, the Beatles arrived in New York.

  It wasn’t just their capacity to wring the juices out of female fans that made them fascinating. Elvis had done that too, with his body and his seductive voice. But with the Beatles it was a more elaborate package. Their Liverpool accents sounded sophisticated but were really working-class. They had neat suits and androgynous hair, yet behind the cherubic look you could tell that they were horny devils. Their songs, which seemed conventional on first hearing, were laced with unexpected harmonies, octave leaps, and such. Ringo’s blunt drumming and Paul’s loping bass tied the band to rock ’n’ roll, but everything else seemed subject to outside influences. From the start there was something about this band that spoke of potential—theirs and mine. They, too, were streetwise guys, very ambitious and interested in making art, or at least being arty. I was perfectly positioned to take advantage of everything they represented.

  I realized right away that I should write about them, so I did, constructing an audacious thesis about Beatlemania signaling a cultural shift that went far beyond pop. I called my essay “The Second Jazz Age,” and it ran in the college paper, my first piece on the music soon to be called rock. Propelled by sheer enthusiasm, I had stumbled onto something that would turn out to be a career—and, even more unexpectedly, an identity. Within a few years, at the unready age of twenty-two, I would become the first widely read rock critic and a media sensation, a designated arbiter of hip. I had no idea what hip meant—no one did. But for a time, I pretended that I knew, and as a result I moved easily among rock stars, artists, intellectuals, and celebrities in the mash-up that was culture in the sixties. If they wanted publicity, I was on their radar.

  In 1962, all of this was unimaginable to me. I was Richie from the projects, wide open and shut down, heedless and needy, full of myself and ready to be filled. And I was hungry.

  Nearly Naked Through the Not Exactly Negro Streets at Dawn

  Her real name was Roberta, but if you saw her flaming red hair falling in turbulent curls around her eyes, her teeth jutting into her grin, her conversation constant (the product of a manic personality on speed), you’d know right away that she had to be called Tom. She was a misfit among misfits, an oddity even among my friends. But she was the only one of them who noticed the piece on the Beatles that I’d published in my college paper. “No one’s writing stuff like this,” she said. I knew right away that she was as unrooted in the world of normal expectations, as riven with ambition and anxiety, as me.

  Tom had been raised
in Queens, but the subway system meant that any city college was within easy reach, and Tom ended up at the Bronx branch of Hunter (now it’s called Lehman). That was where we met, in one of the faux-Gothic buildings, or maybe on the sloping lawns where students strummed guitars and necked. There were no dorms; you either resided at home or convinced your parents to get you an apartment near the campus. That was what Tom had done. In 1962, the derelict caves around the Grand Concourse could be had for scratch. She lived in one of them, with God knows how many of her friends, who occupied sheetless mattresses in rooms bare of everything except books and instruments.

  I was eager to visit, convinced I’d find a bordello with folk music, and I wasn’t entirely wrong. It was easier to get laid there than to find something to eat in the rancid fridge. Naturally I came back often, and on one of those visits Tom introduced me to her latest roommate. His name was … well, it didn’t matter. The look in his eyes was welcoming, his lips curling into a slight smile, over which lurked a downy excuse for a mustache, his black hair falling in clumps around his neck, his bony shoulders and arms tethered to a sunken chest. But there was something about this guy that seemed to float above his physique. I guess that aura was his calling card, because he lived in Tom’s place rent-free. All he had to do for his board was fuck.

  Which he did, basically servicing all the women who wandered through the place. Tom kept a supply of raw eggs to feed him, because she thought the protein would increase his potency. But as far as I could tell he didn’t need nutritional supplements. He walked around with a ready bulge in his jeans. I studiously looked away, but he noticed my interest and sent me a signal that said, “Let’s be friends. I need a friend in this place.”

  He treated me to my first joint, smoked on his lumpy mattress. I felt dizzy, also horny, and I was relieved when he picked up his guitar and began to play. He hit the strings badly but beautifully, fragments of melody spilling from his fingers. There were no lyrics, just humming in a voice that broke into a sinus-driven thrum. I listened, transfixed, until he shot me a smile and said, “Think I’m gonna crash.” I retreated to the living room, where a pile of people were going at it. I insinuated myself into the grunting heave, touching and licking, and I left feeling very impressed with myself. But what stuck with me about that day was the guy with the guitar.