A Freewheelin' Time (31 page)

Summer

My mother and Fred
were spending half the year at the little house they had bought in Sardinia and the other half in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Fred was a semiretired professor. Both were looking forward to living in Italy full-time in a few years. Feeling magnanimous, they invited Carla and me to visit them that summer to see Sardinia. We decided to combine our vacation with a trip to Perugia and London. I wrote to Enzo, someone I had met in Perugia in 1962. He was still there and said he would be happy to meet us; coincidently, he was going to London, too.

We booked passage on the
Maria Costa,
a cargo freighter that took passengers. Though Genoa was the ship’s final destination, it would be making stops in various ports to unload the cargo. We disembarked in Naples, where Enzo met us, and went to Perugia for a week before going to Sardinia.

Back then, freighters were the cheapest way to travel to Europe. I paid for the trip with money that had finally come my way the previous year from the car accident. The money seemed like manna from heaven, after all that time.

Traveling by freighter was not at all the same as crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a passenger ship; there were no amenities like movies or swimming pools or live music. The ship wasn’t very big, and there were few passengers. I read books to pass the time.

The crossing was tranquil and the passengers were an interesting group of primarily middle-aged people; my sister and I were the youngest. One traveler was a very thoughtful retired judge from Brooklyn, another an Italian portrait painter who painted my portrait, which was purchased by a young man from Switzerland. In addition to spending some time with the young Swiss man, I read the poet-naturalist Loren Eisley’s
Immense Journey,
contemplating the sea and remembering that as a child I wanted more than anything to be a sailor when I grew up.

It felt odd to be in Perugia again. The many months I had spent there in 1962 had been like time in a magic place, a new world within the old world. But at the same time I had been harboring an inner pain that left me melancholy and detached. Visiting now was different; that painful past was not forgotten but it was gone. Enzo and I hit it off right away and made plans to meet in London.

Sardinia was beautiful beyond words. This outermost island, an overnight or all-day boat ride from mainland Italy, occupied over time by as many civilizations as Sicily, has developed a language and a culture all its own. The huge rocks that line the island have been sculpted into immense undulating and cloudlike forms by centuries of winds constantly whipping at them.

The island is arid and whatever vegetation there is grows low and thick to the ground, sucking out the available moisture. Growing wild and dense in front of my mother and Fred’s house were rosemary and oregano bushes and stunted bay laurel and lemon trees. When I brushed my hand along them, their perfume filled the air.

People came from all over the world to scuba dive in Sardinia. The bottom of the salty and crystal-clear Mediterranean Sea was visible no matter how far out you went. And we discovered what it meant to eat fish that was truly fresh.

But in our short skirts, my sister and I were like bait. We were hooted at and wooed continuously. Cries of
Mini gonne, dove andate?
(Miniskirts, where are you going?) followed us everywhere. Divine as it was, Sardinia was the outback. Foreign women wearing the clothing of the times were a very unusual and enticing sight.

W
hen Carla and I got off the train in Victoria Station in London after a few weeks in clamorous Italy, we were suddenly aware of how loudly we were speaking compared with the hushed hum of the crowds moving through the station. Self-consciously, we lowered our voices to a whisper. In England, even when we spoke in a normal New York tone of voice, we still seemed to be shouting.

London was swinging, and as two miniskirted young women we blended in easily, though being very tanned in cool, overcast London marked us once again. But the voices of the young men who took notice of us were always muted and terribly polite.

We sailed to New York on the newly renovated
Queen Elizabeth
ocean liner. Tickets were a bargain because of the growing competition these old ships, modernized or not, were encountering from the jet planes that crossed the Atlantic in less than half a day rather than a week. Our five-day voyage turned out to be one of the great liner’s last transatlantic crossings before it and the
Queen Mary
were retired forever and replaced by the newly built
QE2,
which in turn lost out to airplane travel in a very short time.

Don’t Look Back

The basement
of 1 Sheridan Square, the building where I lived for a few months in 1961 while Bob camped out with other folkies in an apartment a few floors below, had once been the legendary Café Society, the club where Billie Holiday’s career was made. When Barney Josephson opened the club in 1939, he made it the first downtown spot that openly allowed an integrated bandstand and audience. John Hammond did the bookings.

That same basement became a theater and performance space in the early 1960s, and a few years later it was made over into a disco called the Downtown.

While Janet and I were living at her West Twelfth Street apartment, and after I moved to West Tenth Street and she to Jones Street, we went to the Downtown often. Live bands played on a raised stage in front of a big open dance floor encircled by tables and chairs. Hanging above the floor was a rotating ball made of little mirrors that reflected the colored lighting effects on the dancers as they boogied about below. The Chambers Brothers, who were electric in every way, opened at the Downtown and were hands down the best group that played there.

I loved to dance—fling-my-hair-around dance. Dancing is a haven for shy people, or at least it was for me. Even as an insecure young girl, I never held back when it came to dancing. In the predawn of rock and roll, there was great music to dance to: Johnny Ace and his “Pledging My Love,” “Earth Angel” by the Penguins, Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” followed by Buddy Holly and the Crickets, to cite a very small sampling.

When Bob and I were together, we both loved, and listened to, music not necessarily filed under the category “folk.” And although we were of prime dancing age, we didn’t do any dancing in public—an unfortunate side effect of folk music’s reign. There was no place to boogie until somebody plugged in and got the party started.

J
anet and I were making jewelry from found objects and papier-mâché, still calling them Suja-baubles, and as we peddled our goods around town, trying to focus our lives, we hoped our vulnerability didn’t show.

We had some success selling our handmade jewelry—we even got a write-up with pictures in the
New York Post
—yet our earnings were meager. A big store would buy Suja-baubles outright, but the little stores worked on consignment only and took forever to pay us when anything sold. Our real joy was in making wearable miniature artworks, some figurative and others abstract. Many were hippie-style colorful and others were Franz Kline–graphic black and white. Still others were hand-drawn takeoffs on elaborately designed or carved art objects we admired. Our taste in decorative art was greatly influenced by Art Deco and Art Nouveau and the late-nineteenth-century artists Beardsley and Mucha. I loved drawing stylized Art Nouveau heads of women with flowing hair outlining the oval or round shape of the pin. Some styles we’d glue into Mason jar lids to create a faux-brass frame.

The Downtown was a good place to let off steam dancing and enjoying ourselves among friends. The times had evolved way past Allan Block sandals, and now Janet and I wore knee-high boots with a Suja-bauble clipped to the sides, the fake stones glued onto the jewelry catching the light as we danced. We wore miniskirts and little tops and had a penchant for purple because it was the color of creativity, mysticism, and spiritual unity. Janet loved purple fishnet stockings, and I added a ring with a purple stone to the several rings I always wore.

We also hung out at the Riviera on Sheridan Square, across Seventh Avenue, where it still is today. The Riv, as it was known, was a restaurant and bar with a great jukebox. What really made the place special were the short music films shown on a television screen as the song played on the jukebox, like prehistoric music videos. Ike and Tina Turner were the big draw, making rock and roll out of the traditional song “Mockingbird” in grainy black and white.

Despite the good times there was an underlying atmosphere that felt bleak, false, and malevolent. The times had definitely changed, and we knew something was happening here that warranted attention.

Melody Lounge had a working fireplace and while Janet and I lived there we’d walk west along Twelfth Street toward the river scrounging for things to burn in it. We’d split and roll old phone books into logs and burn them with pieces of wood we’d found. On cold winter nights the two of us would sit before the fire with all the lights out except for the one from a deep blue glass globe liberated from the subway by an artist friend, Jim. The blue ball bathed the room in a soft pink glow as we plotted our escape listening to Mozart, Bach, the Beatles, and music from the Middle Ages.

Janet and I talked about leaving New York City and moving to Europe. It was a seedling of an idea at first, but we kept watering it until it took root. We deliberated for months as we continued living our precarious lives, and as we went around town peddling Suja-baubles, we discussed the details.

Janet wanted to go back to France, while I was set on returning to Italy. We both felt stalked by the darkness of bad times past and bad times coming. The idea of returning to Europe symbolized sanity and a better quality of life. We searched for freighters going to the right destinations on dates that would be feasible.

N
ew York City was getting grittier and more dangerous. The streets late at night were menacing and people were acting crazier. Paul Clayton and Phil Ochs were erratic and broken, and friends I cared about were doing drugs.

The counterculture was imploding; chaos lurked along the edges. Long before the violence at the rock concert in Altamont, I felt that darkness coming.

The country was mired in Vietnam. There seemed to be no end in sight to that appalling war. The U.S. government’s continuous distortions and lies prevailed, and more death and destruction and demoralization were the results. Politics and political discourse were overwhelmingly depressing. Dogma and drugs seemed to be the choices and I wanted neither. I anguished over what was going to happen to America, so torn apart by the war that people actually called for the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam—praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

Everything going on around me seemed predictable or inevitable. I began to see myself circling the edge of a whirlpool of repetitious events and scenarios that led nowhere. Crossing Sheridan Square on my way home one day I ran into a friend who said, Hey, there’s a new theater production starting soon, and I gave the set designer your name. Normally that would have had me smiling and hopeful; instead I was indifferent to the prospect of another theater job. It was time to move on. To take a risk as I approached the age of twenty-three—a leap into the unknown—felt right.

News of the terrible flood in Florence in November 1966 added to my sense of unease about the world. Janet had found a Norwegian freighter headed for France after the New Year. My Sicilian grandfather had died and left a few hundred dollars to each of his grandchildren. That was all I needed to make the final decision. I booked passage on a freighter scheduled to leave in early January for Genoa, Italy.

Another journey was about to begin. Although it felt like a lifetime away, it hadn’t been so long ago that I got on the subway in Queens and got off in Greenwich Village, without looking back.

Wrap

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll
became the sound bite for the 1960s. It characterized the times—decade of this, decade of that—but it was not really about anything that superficial. Those years were about a way of thinking, seeing, and believing—a way to live. We had depth; we were not superficial. We honestly believed we could change the world, and we did, for the better. What made the 1960s special was the way the culture changed. The civil rights movement and the antiwar movement led to a new outlook and new laws. The draft was abolished in 1973, and in 1971 the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. The legal drinking age in New York was eventually raised to twenty-one, completing the reversal of what was deemed permissible in the 1960s and what is acceptable today.

T
he unique qualities of a time or an era are discovered after it has passed. What puts a place on the map is connected to what happened there that was special. Greenwich Village became a destination because of its bohemian history, which encompassed rebellious politics as well as revolutionary art, music, poetry, and prose. It was a community of people and ideas that soldered and welded itself together into odd structures pointing every which way yet maintaining a solid base with common beliefs in the validity of the voices of the outsider and the underdog.

Some denizens went on to fame in their time and beyond, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, e. e. cummings, Willem de Kooning, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan, who changed music the way Jackson Pollock had changed painting.

With his creation of the Folklore Center, Izzy Young was a cornerstone of the expansive folk culture of the 1960s. Sam Hood ran the Gaslight despite hassles with the mob and a precarious basement locale. Mike Porco, from a dive, made Gerde’s Folk City a music mecca. Art D’Lugoff sired the Village Gate, and Joe Cino created a venue in a café on Cornelia Street where he, along with the Living Theater and others like them, reinterpreted theater.

They and numerous others had the tenacity and foresight to internalize the old ways and forge new ones. Soon an influx of tourists made it possible for the clubs, experimental galleries, and theaters to survive and thrive; yet the commercialization made it harder for younger artists to experiment and to develop their skills or to find a following the way the first arrivals had. Everyone started coming to the Village to audition, to play, to paint, and to write, hoping for exposure, fame, and fortune. It got crowded and more competitive. The hustle was out of the closet big-time.

Record company reps went to the clubs and concerts scouting for the next Bob Dylan, resulting in a glut of pale imitators who wrote even paler songs. The surplus of singer-songwriters suffocated folk music, which was slowly dying of ennui. The population of acoustic folkies performing traditional music gradually thinned out, and those who kept at it found a way to survive with dignity, even with fewer and fewer well-paying gigs in the Village and around the country.

Greenwich Village—with its bohemian tradition overtaken by the hep cats of jazz and the Beats and subsequently the hip folk crowd, which evolved into the hippie culture with a psychedelic soundtrack—had become the place to be. But I was gone by then.

Greenwich Village bohemia exists no more. It was the public square of the twentieth century for the outsiders, the mad ones, and the misfits. Today all that remains are the posters, fliers, and signs preserved on the walls as a reminder of that bygone era when rents were cheap and New York replaced Paris as the destination for the creative crowd.

Those who feel they are not part of the mainstream are always somewhere, however. Greenwich Village is a calling. Though it is a concept now priced out of its physical space, as a state of mind, it will never be out of bounds. In the end, like finds like: it doesn’t matter whether there is an actual physical neighborhood or not. A compelling and necessary idea will always find a place to plant itself. The creative spirit finds a way.