Another Little Piece of My Heart Read online

  “He’s amazing,” I said to Tom.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “He can fuck you and make it feel like a feather.”

  “Wow.”

  “That’s why we keep him.”

  Tom was a writer, naturally. There were manuscripts all over her room, carpeting the paisley bedspread. She was avidly drawn to journalism, and in her mind that meant reporting your inner news. Tom didn’t believe in punctuation, except for the occasional !!!!!!!!! But she had found a home for her musings, a publication that circulated among people who didn’t mind text creeping up the sides of pages. There were all sorts of similar rags floating around lower Manhattan in those days. Cheap printing technologies had given every faction of style and radical politics a voice. By the end of the decade a network of underground newspapers would spring from this matrix, but back then there were only splotchy things stapled together. They were the zines of their day.

  Tom was my guide to this hidden milieu. Thanks to her, I got to be the mascot of a black writers’ collective that published an influential journal called Umbra. (I didn’t know about its rep, but I liked the vibe, and I had the feeling that Tom was working her way through the masthead.) I also discovered Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, whose main appeal to me was that each copy had a drop of the publisher’s sperm on the cover. Stoking my meager courage, I wandered into the magazine’s headquarters on East 10th Street, a storefront called the Peace Eye Bookstore. There I met the copious publisher himself. Ed Sanders was a tall man with ruddy cheeks, curly blond hair, and a prairie accent, all of which reminded me of Mark Twain. Years later, he would wrap his arms around my head to protect me from police charging at a demo. But back before we heard the crack of billy clubs, and a decade before punk inherited the earth, when it was still possible to be sincere on the Lower East Side, Sanders sang in one of the most unlikely rock groups of the sixties, the Fugs. I don’t think he imagined, when I met him in 1962, that beatniks in a band could possibly have a fan base, but he certainly seemed like a star to me. He represented everything hardcore and handmade about the scene I’d begun to explore.

  Sometime that spring, under Tom’s prodding, I ventured far east of MacDougal Street to Tompkins Square, a large patch of mottled green surrounded by avenues named for letters of the alphabet—A, B, C, and D. They were pretty mean streets. The park had a decrepit air, incredibly attractive to me. There were hippies hanging out before there were hippies, and they mingled with old Ukrainians willing to sit near anyone who wasn’t a junkie. The area was full of European restaurants that specialized in borscht and butter-slathered challah. They were filled with young people who wanted off the doctor-lawyer track, kids like me. We would fortify ourselves with soup and wander through the park, just sort of soaking up the wreckage—children playing in a dogshit-infested sandbox, street people noodling on badly strung guitars, wanderers who had arrived from every Omaha in America, and the occasional bullet flying. Yes, it could be perilous. But that was where Tom felt most at home.

  On one of our trips from the Bronx, she led me into a tenement, up three flights of chipped stone stairs, and down a barely lit corridor slicked with cooking grease. I heard the familiar sound of guitars coming from an open door. Inside, on a wall you wouldn’t lean against unless you wanted cement dust on your jacket, was a giant drawing of the Buddha with a machine gun strapped to his belly. This is my most vivid memory of the publication that ran Tom’s musings. I’ve forgotten its name, and so, with apologies to an underground paper that was actually called The Rat, I’ll call this rag The Rodent.

  The articles snaked around tiny ads from homemade jewelry shops and notices of political meetings with an obscure Trotskyite pedigree. The house style was a variant of what the Beats called “automatic writing.” The lead might refer to an arcane work of Eastern devotion, leading to a description of police brutality and ending with some quote from Kierkegaard. I’m kidding, though not by much. Deciphering the prose felt like walking through a maze, but it was lively and engaged. And the most interesting thing about The Rodent was that anyone could write for it, provided they were willing to work for free.

  The editor was the oldest person in the place, and he had the jaded look of someone who had been through many careers. I didn’t ask about his relationship to Tom, but it was clear that, at the least, she amused him. He greeted her as “Brenda Starr, reporter.” She flung a few pages into his hand, and he read them, nodding in agreement every now and then, whipping out a pencil and circling a word or two. “Tell you what,” he said. “If you let me add a few periods I’ll print it.”

  “Fuck you,” Tom negotiated. But I knew she would agree, because, under all that flaming hair and speed-driven chaos, she was as ambitious as me, and any chance to appear in print pushed her buttons, even if it meant using punctuation.

  “Hey,” she grunted to the editor. “Meet my friend Richie.”

  He checked me out warily. “Okay, write something.”

  “What should I write?” I stammered.

  He shrugged. It was all the input I got from him.

  But that night, in the tiny room I shared with my younger brother—when the bed was open there was no space to walk—I lay awake trying to think of a subject. I could hear my father snoring through the wall. I could hear the laugh tracks from TV shows audible through the ceiling. To live in the project was to join a community of coughers, moaners, and TV-rerun insomniacs. The building seemed to breathe as one, especially when a baseball game was on. And when something important happened, like the Yanks winning the Series, the cheers reverberated from every window. It was all raw material to me.

  I never told my friends about the role writing played in my life. It put me in a timeless daze, a comfort zone where nothing could hurt me. Creating a story with a beginning, middle, and end was a way to give the jumble of my feelings a shape—it was a model for making sense of painful chaos. And I was enchanted by words, especially rhymes, had been ever since the age of four, when my parents enrolled me in a poetry class at the Henry Street Settlement. As soon as I could write my name I scrawled it on the blank pages of every book in our house, convinced that I was the author. I wrote poems as a kid, and as a teenager I branched out into short stories. My subject was the life I didn’t feel part of, the worker’s world of roles assigned, accepted, and eroticized. Lustiness radiated from my neighbors’ bodies, thick and pocked or gnarled and muscled. (Some of the men still wore sailor hats from their navy days.) I wanted to smell every cranny of their flesh, women and men, girls and boys alike. Instead I began to keep detailed notes on them, the music they liked, the way they danced, the precise sounds of their speech. I didn’t have a plot or a plan, but I wrote every day, filling pad after pad until my hand ached.

  During the summer that I turned eighteen, I went on a serious diet. Eventually I would shed about eighty pounds, and, probably as a result, I had several sexual encounters. Not that I was new to the nasty. When I was maybe nine, I grabbed the luscious breasts of my best friend’s mother. I had no idea why I’d done that, but she slapped me. I ran home only to hear a knock on the door, and I shrank into my bed as my parents let her in. To my immense relief I heard her apologize for the slap. They never mentioned the incident to me, and so my career as a fiend proceeded undisturbed. And there were many opportunities in the project, even for a fat kid. I was initiated into fucking by a girl I didn’t even like—I think I was fourteen, and it confused the hell out of me. But in high school, I had a different kind of experience, with a boy, sprawled across the front seat of his Pontiac. (I still remember the Madonna on the dashboard.) After that, I felt like a radio dial that couldn’t settle on a station. The sense of being suddenly exposed to my desires in all their ambiguity was terrifying.

  Looking back, I think I was heading for schizophrenia—it ran in my father’s family. I was saved by many things, including the love of my friends, but nothing was as powerful as the impact of a certain book. Lying on the chicken-bone-strewn sands of the
local beach, I pored through James Joyce’s Ulysses. No novel had ever held me so tightly in the sinews of its prose and its landscape of the interior. It was one of those times when incipient mental illness meets the palpability of literature. I didn’t get the modernist references or the allusions to The Odyssey, just the breathtaking flow and the intense feeling of empathy it called up in me. That summer I decided to be the James Joyce of the Bronx. I might as well have imagined blonde maidens with parasols strolling on the Grand Concourse.

  Journalism was a much easier reach, but making the move from a college paper to The Rodent seemed very scary. Despite its tiny circulation, it signified Downtown to me. I was afraid to go to Tom’s house because I knew she would noodge me about my piece, but I couldn’t stay away for long. Fortunately, she was out when I arrived. In a corner of the kitchen I saw the stud with the magic guitar. Actually, I saw his ass bobbing up and down. I stood there, queasy. After it was over, he wiped his dick with a crusty cloth and grinned at me dreamily. “Wanna jam?” he asked.

  At first I thought he meant sex, but then I realized that he wanted to play for me. Relieved, and a bit regretful, I followed him into his room. He picked up his guitar.

  “I can’t think of what to write,” I whined.

  “Well,” he said. “What do you like? Write about that.”

  “I like … you,” I blurted (probably blushing).

  His smile said, Of course you do, but besides that …

  “Well … I like poetry—the Beats. And folk music. I play.”

  “Guitar or banjo?”

  “Kazoo.”

  I could tell that he didn’t regard that as a real instrument.

  “What else do you like?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess rock ’n’ roll.”

  He looked baffled. “Frankie Avalon?”

  “No, no. That’s crap. I like doo-wop.”

  “But what about new stuff? Like, the Beatles.”

  “Sure. Absolutely. They’re amazing.”

  “Okay!” he said. “Write about them.”

  Well, I’d already done that, and there was nothing to stop me from recycling the piece on the Beatles that I’d published in my college paper. So, with Tom along for support, I brought it down to The Rodent. But I made the mistake of telling the editor where it had previously run, and he wasn’t up for sloppy seconds. Only when Tom insisted did he look at my manuscript. “Just stop wearing that dumb beret,” he groused as he read the lead.

  Then he delivered his verdict: “It’s not for us.”

  I wasn’t just wounded; I was baffled. I couldn’t understand why my piece wasn’t right for a paper willing to publish anything. Now I realize that it had to do with its readership, which didn’t include rock ’n’ roll fans. The Rodent may have been an open book, but its editor had an unerring sense of what would offend its readers. Prose poems about sacrilege and oral sex were welcome, as was coverage of the Women’s Strike for Peace, but not an article about pop music. Pop was too vulgar for this crowd. It was part of the same tide that had brought the blacklist, the hula hoop, and the TV dinner to the center of American life. Like the Cold War, it had to be resisted.

  I learned a lesson that would stay with me for the rest of my career. Writers and publishers are fire and ice. We’re in it for the words and the attention; they’re out to make a buck. I know there are exceptions, but nonprofit partisans are no more likely than media barons to embrace what threatens their values, and in 1962 their values were the only options. The blogosphere has made everyone a writer, but back then, there was no alternative to the limitations of print. Publications had stables of writers, and for a wild-eyed kid like me it was very hard to break in. The most adventurous journals, such as Evergreen Review, limited themselves to work by credentialed radical intellectuals. I was invisible to a magazine that published Albert Camus. Music mags were only interested in jazz or folk, and in fan books, writing was beside the point. As for the fledgling underground press, it, too, was a business—so I concluded. If I wanted to join the word trade, I’d have to accept that. Or not.

  Sometime in the next few years (I’m not sure when), Tom died. She overdosed—on heroin, I presume, but it could have been amphetamines, or both. These were the so-called hard drugs that only the most reckless of us went near. In the course of the sixties, that changed. I would know many junkies, friends who stank of sedatives, speed freaks whose teeth chattered as they spoke. Most of these people were dear to me, especially the women. It may be that I’m drawn to women who radiate a sense of doom as they blaze with energy. Something always stopped me from hitting on them; I think I feared that they would suck me into their addictions. But that didn’t stop me from wanting to protect them, or from feeling, when it proved impossible, that I’d failed at a sacred duty. Thinking back on it, I realize that Tom was a model for my attachment to Janis Joplin.

  I didn’t go to Tom’s funeral because I didn’t want to see her in the grasp of her family. I was sure that they were every bit as bourgie (a word I’d just learned) as she was not. But a week later I stopped by her place. The apartment was empty. All her roommates, including the guy with the guitar, were gone. I felt bereft of a community I never thought I’d find. From now on I would have to face the fact that hanging out in the Village was not the same as living there. I was from the Bronx, and that was a place where creativity meant leading a solitary life.

  But just a year later, when I was verging on nineteen, I felt a shock of recognition that would change my sense of possibility. The radio was tuned to a Top 40 station. Suddenly, I heard a song I knew from the folk clubs, Bob Dylan’s civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It didn’t belong on the charts, but there it was, in a rather anodyne version by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. The beat was about as driving as a tuna melt, and the lyrics were far from the simple (though often poetic) patter that hit songs required—but still, I was stunned. It meant that something I’d regarded as the sole passion of my coterie was popular. Even in a place like Santa Barbara, where I pictured teenagers whose brains ebbed and flowed with the ocean tide, kids would soon be singing songs like this on the beach. Rock ’n’ roll was about to make a fateful leap, though it wasn’t evident yet. Surf music dared not tread where Dylan did, and not even the Beatles ventured into his literary terrain—not yet. But I was sure that this unlikely hit was a sign of more than musical change. I sensed that something was stirring, shuddering on its foundation. The present was beginning to feel different from the past. Nothing was stable, and that thrilled me.

  It crossed my mind to try writing about Dylan’s role in this transition, but I was far too busy to think about journalism in the summer of 1963. I joined the civil rights movement, along with all my college friends. There was no need to find our identity in a song. We were the answer blowing in the wind.

  White Like Me

  Race was at the core of nearly everything in the sixties. Even more than sitars and exotic beats, it shaped the structure of rock. Even more than the war in Vietnam, it dominated politics. Even more than LSD, it defined the consciousness of my generation. Look at any aging boomer and you’ll see someone who was formed in the crucible of civil rights. The man I am emerged when I joined a campaign against job discrimination at the age of nineteen. I came to see my neighborhood—and my father—in a new way, and I broke with them, decisively. In other words, I became me.

  I was itching for something to believe in as passionately as I didn’t believe in myself. And there were all sorts of causes to choose from in 1963: nuclear disarmament, environmental destruction, the Cold War and its absurdities. (Having failed to topple Fidel Castro, the CIA was trying to kill him with exploding cigars.) But I was riveted by images of black students in the South braving fire hoses and police dogs. There was something personal about fighting racism; it had a payback that working for peace did not. Yes, I believed in social justice, but it was also about identity. Marching for civil rights meant connecting with a traditi
on that went much deeper than my roots in America. It was a way to be come what my grandparents were not and what my parents wanted to be—a Yankee.

  There were other reasons why I was drawn to the civil rights movement. It had something to do with my sense of oppression as a fat kid, and quite possibly with my incipient queerness. But I also had a deep aversion to racism. It was absurd—rock ’n’ roll had taught me that—and repugnant. This feeling was instilled in me, as it was for many people my age, when I saw pictures in the paper of a black teenager named Emmett Till. He’d been lynched in the South for whistling at a white girl. His body was swollen grotesquely, but his mother had insisted on an open coffin at the funeral. This was 1955; I was eleven. His mutilated face was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen.

  If it had ended there, I might have lulled myself into believing that racism was a southern sin. After all, we had black next-door neighbors, and my brother and I had a few black friends. No one cared who came and went in the Bronx. But it was different in Manhattan. There were parts of that borough where black kids weren’t supposed to be.

  As a teenager, I often went downtown with friends to see movies or rock ’n’ roll shows, and this time my companion was a black kid I liked a lot (perhaps because he never taunted me for being fat). We were on our way to Times Square when a cop stopped us and ordered us to get off the street. That had never happened to me, and I knew right away why it was happening now, as did my friend. The look on his face, frozen with fear, caused a reaction that I still have when someone makes a racist remark. I was nauseated. The power of that cop, the utter certainty with which he reduced us to helplessness, made me feel like vomiting. I think it was the first moment in my life when I wanted to strike out against authority, a reflex that had so much to do with the way I acted in the sixties. And I was hardly alone—many young people who ran wild in the streets during those years were reacting to a string of events like the one I’ve described. So it wasn’t just a projection of my insecurities that led me to join the movement. It was the memory of standing passively by while the police menaced my friend and glared at me. By the time I turned nineteen, I was old enough to know that I wanted to do something about it.