Another Little Piece of My Heart (3 page)

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.

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 tradition 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.

A number of my college friends were Freedom Riders. I was tempted to join them, but my cowardice overcame my ideals, so I decided to stay close to home, and I set out to integrate my parents’ “beach club.” It was basically a strip of concrete and lawn on the Bronx side of the Long Island Sound. A large swimming pool was the only luxury, but for working-class Jews this was the closest thing to a golf course, and they wanted the perks that came with such a retreat, including racial segregation.

That summer everyone there was reading
Exodus
and sighing over the plight of Jewish refugees trying to make their way to Palestine. I wanted to teach them a lesson in hypocrisy by bringing a black friend to the club as my guest. We figured that she’d be turned away, and our plan was to document it with the tape recorder in her bag; then we’d take the evidence to the city’s Human Rights Commission and, voilà, a blow for justice. But she made such a fuss that the attendant at the front gate let her in. We had the whole pool to ourselves, since everyone else got out of the water when we jumped in. I knew they weren’t actually horrified; they were imitating those who would have done the same thing to them. It was still common in the fancy suburbs—where we would drive just to ogle the elegant homes—to bar Jews from country clubs, and deeds had clauses that forbade selling property to Jews. But here in the Bronx, we were kings.

Word quickly spread around the club, and my parents were mortified when I came by to introduce my black friend to them. My father sat silently on his beach chair, hands gripping the sides, but my mother’s reaction surprised me. She scolded, half in jest. “Richard,” she said, referring to a pair of pet rodents I’d once sneaked into the house, “this is worse than the hamsters.”

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, the civil rights movement signaled my arrival at the point where my mother wanted me to be. I had entered a world of noble ideals and, not incidentally, upward mobility. That was why she hadn’t really objected to my stunt. After all, the black friend I’d brought with me was middle-class, as were all the people I met in the struggle, blacks as well as whites. And I have to say, because it was obvious, that the whites weren’t exactly white—they were Jews.

My mother instructed me to call colored people Negroes, adding, “Remember, they’re human too.” This wasn’t exactly the Gettysburg Address, but it was a departure from the spirit of the project, where certain firecrackers were called “nigger chasers” and we chose up sides in ball games with a chant that went, “catch a nigger by the toe.” (I never realized, until I became an adult, that this had anything to do with race.) My mother bragged that she allowed my brother’s black friend to eat off our plates, but she also complained that we were too poor to afford a
schvartzer
, the Yiddish word for maid and also for black people. This contradiction wasn’t lost on me, and it became the seed of a conflict that would threaten my solidarity with the family, especially
my father. He didn’t hate Negroes, only the idea that they could advance beyond him at the post office. “They got the world by the balls and they’re squeezing,” he would snarl. It was easier to explain their success as racial favoritism than to admit that they’d done better than he on civil-service exams. This is a typical story of the white working class—can you say Reagan Democrats?—but back then I had no perspective on his feelings, and even less sympathy. At nineteen, you don’t cut your father slack.

That summer I became a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which ran picket lines and sit-ins at places that discriminated by race, including lunch counters that wouldn’t serve blacks. Some of them were located in midtown Manhattan, not far from where that cop had accosted my friend. But I volunteered for a campaign in the Bronx. I wanted everyone in the neighborhood to see what I was up to.

Our target was the White Castle chain, which at the time wouldn’t hire blacks to work at the counter. I loved their burgers—grease and onions with a square puck of meat—and I could scarf eight at a sitting, which I often did at the stand about ten blocks from the project. There were several White Castles in the Bronx, and we picketed all of them. I’d been trained by CORE in the techniques of nonviolent protest. I learned to fall, covering my head if someone took a swing at me; how to dress in layers so that scalding coffee wouldn’t burn if it got thrown; how to handle taunts with a hymn. Anyone who resorted to violence, no matter how justified, would be thrown off the line. These preparations were hardly a drill, since all of the above would happen during the campaign. The risks were real, and so was the bonding on the picket line. It was a major inducement to interracial friendship, also dating, and I was a wet-dreaming devotee of the Shirelles.