Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle.

—Jan Christiaan Smuts

In the city, you were free to be what you wanted to be. Nobody hassled you because they couldn’t be sure if you were some bottled-up crazy who might stick a knife in them. You soon learn in the city not to mess with someone else’s trip. Even a thought ventured in the wrong direction—a slight nuance, the smallest air of disdain—could lead to a massive pummeling.

Some neighborhoods you didn’t venture into, and if you did, you went in broad daylight—and scurried out forthwith. NYC in 1969 contained the nucleus of modern man at the time; the greatest of good and the baddest of bad walked together. Any new concept of living naturally made its way to the city, both for its tolerance and its anonymity. Many in the embryonic hippie movement had yet to decide on their “back to the basics” inclinations until they breathed of the decaying scum in the city.

In New York City on a summer day in 1969, you could shower, take a walk around the block, then wipe a sooty black sweat off your face. As noted, the pollution there was the equivalent of smoking two packs a day of cigarettes. Some days you could walk out to the avenue and see no farther than maybe twenty blocks to the north. Everything past that was shrouded in a sulfurous yellow haze.

Weekends, especially when odd weather conditions showed blue sky, city denizens flooded Central Park, flying kites, playing softball or soccer, all in general celebration of the sun—an escape from the tedious concrete existence of the city. Months were planned around escapes upstate or just “out to the country,” but most people never really got away. The city will always hold its own.

The ghettos, then not well defined and localized but massive and diffuse (poverty of mind and body that a thousand scholarly liberals couldn’t imagine), went on forever. Your average redneck would have lasted about as long in the ghetto as he would have in a pool of starved sharks. You plucked those big fish from the small pond of the suburbs and slapped ’em down on the Lower East Side 1969, the junkies would have carved them up. All those hallowed terms associated with the golden visions of America, equality of opportunity and rugged individualism, didn’t resonate well in the dark heart of the city. The beasts of a thousand generations of man lived there, peering out of the darkness and snickering at the odd customs of this civilization that lived in the fluorescent sterility of a million Madison Avenue commercials. You came to this land, you were subjected to street justice, swift and merciless.

While the West Village—once the province of beatniks and poets, given over to the newly hip—promised excitement, music, and more, the East Village stunk of rotting garbage, piss, and passed-out winos. Long before money seeped in and gentrified the area, society’s derelicts haunted this outpost of civilization. But, boy, rent was cheap.

It was said that a civilization can be judged on its prisons, and the bungholes of our cities serve as our modern-day gaols. Mired in his own set of problems and aspirations, the average citizen forges on, not even aware of the screaming, surreal horror that lurks there, nurtured in the rotting puke of the ruins of our great society.

Well, you see: once upon a time there was a blazing fire inside me. The cold could do nothing against it, a youthfulness, a spring no autumn could touch; a source of light, glowing wells of joy that seemed inexhaustible. Not happiness, I mean joy, felicity, which made it possible for me to live . . . There was an enormous energy there . . . A force . . . it must have been the life force, mustn’t it? . . . And then it grew weaker and all died away.

—Eugene Ionesco

But the city did offer its attractions, including an incredible overlap of cultures. You could buy a slice of pizza at one sidewalk stand, step next door and eat curried rice at an Indian restaurant, then cross the street to buy halvah and “shoe leather” (apricots pressed by some God-given miracle into thin sheets and wound up on spools) at the delicatessen. And New York City never rolled up its sidewalks and went to sleep. At any time of day or night, people bustled by on the streets with their errands and places to go. And into that mix ventured the Sixties hippie.

After the vaunted 1967 “Summer of Love” vaulted the movement into the public conscious, reality set in. The real “peace” and “free love” movement lasted probably all of a day before the knives and fast raps began penetrating the benign haze. Gradually, lessons hard learned yielded to a much more brutally realistic outlook. A generation of kids who had shaved their heads in Mohawk haircuts and popularized the Davy Crockett coonskin cap and buckskins had crossed a line, envisioning some new egalitarian construct of civilization, but they had not stepped into the sunny meadows they had envisioned—rather to the ugly underbelly of society, relegated therein by their limited commercial prospects.

But still, to many this seemed a step in the right direction. For Carlito, working on his accounting degree, that meant finding a job to keep his bachelor pad afloat. He answered an ad and found himself helping to clean out an old movie theater on Second Avenue. His boss was Bill Graham, and the theater became the Fillmore East. Carlito then started working the box office when it opened with the Doors and Janis Joplin.

The theater sat a block and a half from St. Mark’s Place (Eighth Street everywhere but between Second and Third avenues). All manner of human garbage descended to linger there. While the West Village still exuded a sort of bohemian class for visiting tourists, the East Village, home to the Fillmore, reeked from the angry mix of human flotsam residing in the area.

On St. Mark’s, the Electric Circus reigned, a speed-freak mecca, and the colorful decay and stench of the young minds hanging there lent itself well to the thieves-market air of street chaos. On weekends and holidays, the Tactical Police Force set up shop to protect the clucking tourist masses that dared venture there to search out the “real city.” To be in the TPF, you had to be over six feet tall and a hundred and ninety pounds—and bad.

Cops in the city were tough, it goes without saying, but they could be the best thing that ever happened in a pinch. In 1969, papers reported that some hundred thousand junkies haunted the city, a jungle of rotting humanity. The need for smack turned jagged nerves desperate, so knifings and shootings were just another fact of life, like deserted streets and slobbering winos.

Mike E., a Fillmore employee, was once unfortunate enough to find himself being soundly beaten by a pair of assailants, when an avenging squad car screeched up and spilled out nightstick-wielding cops. Thus sprang like the phoenix from the bloodied pile of would-be robbers the public-minded spirit of a new Mike E.

And all Fillmore employees went out of their way to ­cultivate a good relationship with the local constabulary. Occasionally, a cop or two on the beat in the Fillmore area would stop in on a cold night, and we’d all make sure they got anything they might need: cigarette, coffee, wine, a toke. (Most city cops were pretty street-wise, with too much to worry about with junkies to sweat the small stuff.)

During the big shows with sell-out crowds, several precinct cops would be slipped ten each to escort Carlito to the bank with the box-office receipts. Word had it that Bill Graham picked up the tab for extravagant catered layouts at the precinct Christmas parties. One fine fall Sunday, we even sponsored a football game in Central Park between the cops and Fillmore employees (6–6 tie). It may have been true then that New York City was one of the few places in the country where hippies welcomed the sight of that blue uniform. Junkies did more for the police image in the city than any ten kill-crazy terrorist groups.

The Lower East Side, the Village included, was not a very nice place in 1969. During the winter, the morning papers would carry a small notation somewhere chronicling the number of frozen stiffs found that day.

Into this brave new world ventured Carlito, moving into an inexpensive apartment on East Third Street, an architectural masterpiece in Early Cro-Magnon Gothic. It squatted directly across the street from the Bowery Men’s Shelter (Third Avenue turned into the Bowery at Third Street). The typical fourth-floor walk-up boxcar flat, it featured three rooms in a row, with a toilet stall the size of a large phone booth sandwiched to the side of the middle room, the kitchen. Actions within this stall in any but a standing position required the door to be slightly cracked to allow for knees. Thus, the facilities were appropriately labeled—from a similar sobriquet on a construction site Johnny-on-the-Spot—“Expo ’67 Polish Pavilion.”

Bathing required a working form of “Beat the Clock.” In the post-war rush to build newer and more efficient tenements, slum moguls economized on space by stashing the tub next to the sink in the kitchen, covering it to serve as a drain board when not in use. This presented an additional problem because the door to the outside opened into the kitchen, on the other side of the sink, so the bather often found himself in hot water, literally, when friends arrived.

The door itself had to be solidly braced to withstand a not-uncommon onslaught from junkies and sundry reprobates. Several standard door locks fortified the entry plus a chain, a deadbolt, and—the final deterrent—a burglar bar. For those who have never lived in a high-crime area, the “boogie bar” is the last line of defense. It’s simply a half-inch steel rod that secures to the floor, centered a couple of feet from the bottom of the entryway, and props securely to a receptacle in the middle of the door. Unless you have the key to release the rod from outside, you literally have to break the steel bar levered against the door to get in and rip off the apartment.

Our boogie bar at Third Street gave three junkies a hard enough time on one occasion. We were on our way laboring up four flights of stairs to the apartment, when three dudes we didn’t know scurried down past us. Only when we got to the door and began the unlocking process did we discover that the locks had been mangled useless. They just didn’t have the time to try to figure out how to get past that final line of defense.

I hadn’t been long in the city at that point and still reckoned myself a force, so I blew up and went roaring down the stairs after the culprits with Carlito and Ricky V. trailing behind. On the street, I thought I recognized one and, taking his arm, bade him come into the building a moment so that I might have a word with him. He obviously demurred and backed off. Aggravated beyond all reason, I wanted to have at this guy but then noticed a beat cop approaching. I blew a gasket.

Beckoning him over, I blustered: “I caught this motherfucker and his friends trying to bust into my goddamn apartment.”

Wheeling to the buster: “If I ever see your fucking ass around here again I’m gonna blow your motherfucking head off.”

Cop to buster: “Did you hear what he said?”

New York City justice.

It took me aback that anyone might even think one of these tenement apartments harbored anything worth stealing. Anyone with a modicum of decency generally avoided the neighborhood.

Once in a while a Salvation Army entourage would invade Third Street at nine in the morning to broadcast marching music and prayer at a hundred decibels toward our windows. Usually having gotten to sleep scant hours earlier (and not at all overjoyed by this amplified injection of the Lord), we would quickly put them to rout with a return barrage of one-hundred-decibel metal-band Blue Cheer directed back out the window at them.

Other mornings, the frustrated musicians among the local winos proved harder to dissuade from their extended conga jams on alto and tenor garbage-can lids. Blue Cheer artillery only added to their reverie. Screaming threats to “beat the shit outa you,” sounding afar from fourth-floor windows, failed to penetrate the wine fog, though something along the lines of “I’m gonna blow you motherfuckers away,” accompanied by the display of a weapon, could generally bring the session to a halt. Even in the gutter, discretion is the better part of valor.

With the men’s shelter across the street, it eventually proved useful to employ one enterprising wino to stand guard over our building for a dollar a day. Sitting on the steps with his arsenal of zaps (broken bottles, clubs, or thick lengths of electrical cable) and his own pint secreted nearby, he’d keep all the other winos from passing out, puking, or pissing in our building—a common problem for the time.

Still, it was relatively safe living just west of Second Avenue. On the Lower East Side in the late Sixties, you could venture as far east as First Avenue or maybe Avenue A, but you took your chances going as far as C and D. During daylight hours, you might sally that far from civilization but only if you were well armed and on high alert. Hard-core gangs, speed freaks, and junkies ran the welcome wagon there.

Third Street east of Second Avenue suffered a drop in property values when the Hells Angels set up shop in an old storefront. But before they moved in and made all of the eastside bikers into Angels (“we’s all friends, RIGHT?”), there were two main gangs, the Aliens and the Motherfuckers, bitter enemies.

Ah, the good old days—happy memories of a phalanx of green-shirted Fillmore “ushers” repelling a Motherfucker attempt to storm the fire exits in the middle of a sold-out show.

On one occasion, an Aliens head honcho was killed in a knife fight with a Motherfucker, so the Aliens grabbed an MF, tied him to a chair, and burned him to death. And probably roasted marshmallows on the flames. One night in front of the Fillmore, a street punk was stupid enough to rip off a biker. A couple of bikers uprooted a street sign and chased him down the alley beating him over the head with it.

By the time the Fillmore hit full speed, some forty inside and outside “ushers” worked to channel people in to their seats and enforce the rules mandated by fire laws. The outside crew, because they had to deal with street people, grew into a bad bunch of mothers (and they were all my friends).

The crowds of concert-goers commingling with the dregs of the East Side and the warps and dark alleys of a million weird minds necessitated an especially “skilled” outside crew. Kim, for one (who was actually quite an artist), stood six foot six and weighed in north of two hundred and fifty pounds. A former biker, he’d once made a living running guns for the Black Panthers. He proved the key to an uneasy understanding with the Hells Angels when they moved in.

The outside crew all ran big and bad. They regularly handled knifings, beatings, and ripoffs while lining up the incoming second-show crowd behind barricades, which allowed for quick first-show customer exit. When Graham or one of the bands threw a party at the Fillmore after a grueling weekend, I’d make sure to drink a few with every one of the outside crew, making them all good old drinking buddies.

Eventually the junkies got so bad that Graham hired one of the crew (a black belt in karate) to stand guard in the lobby during the day—with a machete in his belt, no less—so the customers coming in to buy tickets wouldn’t get ripped off.

On one particular night, a junkie pulled a knife on one of the outside crew and allowed that he’d “cut me up a nigger.” Unfortunately for him, he stood facing away from the backstage door, whence issued a certain Ronnie C. from the backstage crew—at the end of a combination twenty-yard dash/dropkick, blasting the assailant haplessly into the clutches of a quite perturbed black brute.

At the outset, the man refrains from contention during the initial stages of strife. He suffers a little, but he knows that he needs to walk together with his associates and cannot advance alone.

—I Ching

This New York provided a lesson in street. Canandaigua and Syracuse didn’t even show up as big dots on a map of the state. A “country” boy has a way of running into things, even with eyes wide open. Thank God for the survival instinct.

For a time I found a safe place in the courses I took at the School of Visual Arts, a far cry from those I languished in at Syracuse. The emphasis was entirely art, of course, but the teachers themselves were far more laid back and much easier to like. The students made friends effortlessly, sharing an interest in art and photography as they did, and they readily accepted me even though my dad taught there. (I didn’t enroll in his class to avoid any semblance of impropriety.) In the city, it was important to have friends in different places to hang with, as you won’t find many on the street.

That would take some time, though. There weren’t any openings at the Fillmore the first weekend after I arrived in the city, so I went and watched the show. Carlito worked in the offices during the week and usually worked the box office during shows on the weekends. Ricky V. had secured a spot on the “crew” during the week, working the backstage on week­ends. Thus, I was virtually assured a job, as the upstaters moved in, and the next weekend I became an “usher.”

For my first weekend, though, Carlito had off and secured a couple tickets so we might just sit and watch the show. To enhance our experience, we split a tab of acid—something we never more than dabbled in—because the headline act left something to be desired: Iron Butterfly. After their initial success with their theme song and a first album, they “soared” to not-so-great heights with “Ina-Gadda-da-Vida” and its “fabulous” drum solo. By the time they reached the Fillmore, they teetered on the brink of music’s bottomless chasm claiming forgotten stars.

So we made sure we were quite high to watch the old dinosaur take its plunge. We wondered about the opening act with the weird name. Somebody allowed as how they might be good, though they’d never played in the States. We goofily assumed our seats, medicinally enhanced as we were—front row on the right. We babbled semi-coherently to each other and fussed in our seats until the sonic boom from a stack of amplifiers blasted us into our chair backs as ten feet away, Jimmy Paige launched into Led Zeppelin’s first tune. I don’t remember much about the set, drug-addled as we were, though something about it messed with my DNA. I wanted to be that guy.

For the nonce, however, I needed to generate more income than the Fillmore would provide. I applied for a proofreading position advertised in the Village Voice, then a small relatively conservative weekly—before changing to tabloid form and going hog wild. I sent in a puffed-up résumé glorifying my proofing and editing work around Mom’s newspapers and the columns I wrote, my glorious success in three semesters at Syracuse, larding it on thickly. I lamented that my one drawback was that I had long hair (Beatle-ish, anyway, not much beyond mod). Summoned to the office, I was met by a shaggy dude who looked like Jesus Christ incarnate, and he offered me the gig.

The job, as it turned out, proved rather daunting. One day a week I’d catch a Path train in the afternoon out to Newark to the building that printed the paper, sitting for hours with my tunafish sub for sustenance while grizzled old Linotype operators delivered warm proofs of the contents of that week’s paper. I snuffed and scratched at the galleys till the last piece of lead fit neatly into place, then made my way back to the train station. At two or three in the morning, walking around in Jersey can be intimidating, but I strode hard the darkened streets like I belonged and never did have a problem, saved perhaps by the early-morning hours midweek. Not exactly the gravy train, but with weekend nights spent working the Fillmore I felt pretty good about my prospects.