New York

Street Smarts

I was walking down the street with my friend and a guy asked us for money.

“I can give you some food,” I said. He walked on, then turned back and said, “You got a samwich?”

“I have some sunflower seeds,” I said. The guy groaned and moved on. I shouted after him. “Hey, I'm as broke as you!”

“You're more broke than him,” my friend said to me. “At least he has street smarts.”

Slum Living: 533 E. 13^th Street, NY, NY

Back in 1975 the city was giving away buildings on my block if you wanted to fix them up to code--I remember some hippies with tool belts doing that. My old fat Italian landlady told me coke dealers had lived in the $86 a month apartment before me. “Cokaina, cokaina!” she said. On the top floor two old queens paid $25 for their rent-controlled digs. In the store front lived an odd, very skinny black guy named Calvin who who wore long curly wigs and didn't pay rent. The rest were Puerto Ricans.

The paint was peeling off the walls and there were so many cockroaches I didn't even bother to try to kill one. The kitchen was in the living room and the bathtub was in the kitchen. To furnish it I found a mattress on 52^nd street and carried it on my head down to 13^th. Someone gave me a refrigerator, which I wheeled across town on a hand truck. My radio was a box of tubes I kept permanently tuned to WBAI; it was the exciting era of Bob Fass, Steve Post, Julius Lester, Margo Adler, Paul Gorman, and other freethinking talk show hosts.

Once, with no apparent pride, shame or hesitation I invited my father to visit and the fifteen minutes he spent in that hell-hole probably confirmed his worst fears about me and my future. Another cabbie I knew was living in a really nice apartment for $289 a month which seemed very extravagant to me. I was making $120 driving taxi on weekends at night and saving half that as I plotted my return to California.

Winos

I hung out with some winos for awhile, fellow poets--back then low-life alcoholic panhandlers had places to live, similar to my $86 a month slum pad. Once I went back to JimJim's apartment, his girlfriend Maria was taking a bath and a cockroach skittered along the tub rim, across her brown body, and onto the adjacent wall.

Billy Dave was a champion panhandler, he would have you reaching into your pocket with his persuasive banter, I tried it a few times asking for a dime for my therapy. During one of our walks around the East Village I saw an easy chair outside a building and plopped down in it, not knowing that it was the Hell's Angels'. An irate biker soon accosted me but Billy Dave calmed the situation. “He doesn't know, he's from Indiana.”

Subway Slicing

While scribbling in my journal waiting for the subway on New Years Eve a young thug came up to me and said, "Are you writing about me? Don't write about me.” He put a razor knife to my chest then sliced up my notebook. We changed trains and at the next station he came at me again with fists raised, I raised mine also. Just then, like out of a movie, a policeman bounded down the stairs and said, “I don't want to be in court on New Years day.”

We got on the train and when midnight struck the passengers got up smiling, going around and shaking hands and saying, “Happy New Years!”

Greta Garbo

I saw my first Greta Garbo movie last night and it reminded me of the time I lived across the street from her in Manhattan when I was nineteen. Pam had taken me home to daddy, a retired stockbroker who made his own yogurt and had a flour tin full of Colombian smoke. I had met Pam a few days earlier at Cambridge Commons where I was lounging out in the grass with my pen and ink, drawing and writing poetry.

“Do you want to come back to my place to make a soy bean pie?” I said. She demurred but found me the next day in the same spot and said, “How about that soybean pie?”

We swam in the Atlantic with a couple more of her well-off Upper East Side friends, swimming intimately together in the sexy splash of new connection. Pam wanted to take me to The Path, a retreat in the Catskills called “The Center for the Living Force” where she was a member in good standing along with many other New Yorkers seeking something, a connection with their feelings was the party line, but I called it the Crying Cult.

When we arrived a naked volleyball game was in progress and we joined right in, had I arrived in paradise or what? After a memorable week there we went down to the city to stay with Pam's cool father on 52^nd street but on the second night he found I'd crept into Pam's bedroom and kicked me out the next morning, home made yogurt and stash of pot notwithstanding.

I never did catch a glimpse of Greta Garbo.

Denouement

When I was a taxi driver in New York I roomed for awhile with a fellow cabbie named Heather Schreiber in an apartment on the corner of First Avenue and First Street. The old Italian guys played bocce ball out front and the little Puerto Rican man sold the best egg cream in town for a dollar in his bodega downstairs. Heather fed her cat rice and vegetables and would chant, “Little black cat with little black paws and little black balls.” She was forty-five with a cute little seven year old with shoulder length blond hair under his baseball cap. She sent him walking across town everyday to PS 41, the cool school in Greenwich Village. She called him Huggy.

I first heard the word when Heather wrote me a year or so later. “I've reached the denouement in New York,” she said. “Can I come out and live in Whale Gulch?” About thirty years later I saw the name Leiv Schreiber in the entertainment news, he had just won a Tony award for best actor on Broadway. “Could it be?” I thought? I googled his name and Huggy and sure enough it came up that he never liked his mother calling him Huggy.

Slum Life: Problems With the Puerto Ricans

I was putting mustard on the sardine cream cheese sandwiches when Angel forced the door open and dumped the okara (soy bean grit left over from straining soy milk) on the floor. I chased him out with the knife still in my hand and a crowd quickly gathered on the street. The biggest one came up, punched me in the neck, and said, “Go home.”

I soon loaded a taxi with all my stuff to move in with Heather and Liev Schreiber at the corner of First Avenue and First Street and as I got into the back seat Angel kicked me in the ass. (I guess I was literally kicked out of my neighborhood.)

Cool Grandma

In her early 90's my grandmother went for a walk and was back in a minute with a smile on her face. What a concept: the one minute walk. I thought of her today as I took my minimal fifteen minute stroll to the river and back. When she was winding down I would visit by her bedside but I never knew what to say. Either I sat mutely or jabbered away about some experiences I'd had, not even sure if she heard me toward the end. One day after one of these sessions I gave her a kiss goodbye and went to hike for an hour on the Appalachian Trail, when I got back she was gone.

Elizabeth Doren was a librarian, a painter, wrote a column for years, reared four children, and was a cool grandma. She introduced us to nutrition and natural foods and taught me how to make miso-tahini spread. In 1970 when I was sixteen and living at home in Indiana I sent in for tickets to HAIR on Broadway months in advance. When August 26^th was approaching I realized I didn't have what it took to get to New York so I sent the tickets to her and she took a friend to the show. Once I sent her a joint from Mexico and a year later when the family was visiting I found one in her parking lot. Hmm, could it be? It was slow-motion smuggling but it got the job done.

A few years later I ended up living in New York City for a couple years after coming east for a rock festival in Watkins Glen. For awhile I would drive taxis at night on weekends then hitchhike up and stay with her at her cool little caretakers cottage during the week, she had the old gardeners place and I had my own room nearby. I remember the delicious omelettes she made me for breakfast, those little cut up mushrooms.

When it was time for me to go back to the city she drove me to a spring where I filled up my plastic bottles, packing them in colorful Oaxacan string bags which I had gotten a couple years before when my cool grandfather, Elizabeth's former husband, took me and my sister on a road trip to Mexico. As I was traveling back toward Manhattan with the skyline like a majestic sculpture before me I was filled with hope and excitement that anything was possible and this time I would really make it in New York, but by April I was done and headed west to California.