American Gangster (20 page)

Big Bart was one of those bald-spot-in-the-middle/long-greasy-hair-on-the-sides type of hippies. Now the bald spot has grown like a spreading Rorschach blot, but the grease remains the same. So did the chub. We had some info that Big Bart was married to a woman who had a snake tattoo on her tummy who put him on a yoga diet. You'd never be able to tell.

Back then, in 1969, when we shared a seventy-dollar-a-month pad on Hillside Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard in Queens, there was a saying that Big Bart either had the lowest-cut pants or the highest-cut ass in town.
The crack was always visible. Big Bart used to come out of his room naked. (The room was painted orange and black: Mr. Rotherstein, our landlord, railed, “You painted this wall psychodeckic. Psychodeckic is not in your lease.” But we were the only whites in the building, so we got over.) He'd lay that hairy ass on me and my former wife. Moon over Miami, Big Bart called it. We hid under the covers hoping it would go away. But every time we peeked out it would still be there, shining on.

I was with Big Bart the last time I took acid.

Those days Big Bart played drums in bar bands on Long Island. If the joint was past Exit 51, Big Bart played it. For a sweating slob in a flannel shirt, Bart was immortal, in that Island rocker kind of way. He twirled his sticks better than Sal Mineo in
The Gene Krupa Story
. He knew the Young Rascals' greatest hits better than Dino Danelli. When Big Bart beat out “Can't Turn You Loose” on his meaty thighs, it could be magic.

On this particular night Big Bart was moving uptown. He had a gig in a church basement on Lexington Avenue and Twenty-second Street, borough of Manhattan.
The City!
Man, this was the big time. But the show wasn't until ten o'clock. We had eleven hours to kill and Big Bart had two yellow pills shaped like pumpkin seeds he said would do the trick. I had my doubts. I had just returned from California and was skeptical of what the potent combo of pumpkin seed acid and the Big Apple might foment in my increasingly pock-marked brain pan. Up in Tilden Park in Berkeley you could look at a tree for six hours, say “Oh, wow,” and incur minimal permanent damage. New York was another story.

But after Bart dropped, there wasn't much choice. What was I gonna do, spend eleven hours watching him take acid? Everything was cool as long as the sun stayed up: we made faces at the gorilla in the Central Park zoo, acted unruly on Park Avenue, stared at the guy blowing smoke on the Times Square Camel ad, watched the buildings weave like in a Stan Van Der Beek underground movie. For a kick, we bought some Gypsy Rose, the cheapest rotgut available, and went looking for our buddy, George Washington Goldberg.

G.W.G., as he called himself, spent the majority of his time in Washington Square Park, where he had achieved a modicum of fame for once making his way up into an NYU biology lecture room. Pushing his way by
the professor, George erased the diagrams on the blackboard and told the hundred students, “Okay, now G.W.G. is gonna tell you what biology is really all about.” The Wackenhuts carried him out. A star, G.W.G. He'd see you from a distance, stand up, bow, and say, “Oh, finally, a better class of people … would you guys like a job, Sonny Liston is looking for sparring partners.” This time, though, we blew G.W.G's mind, pulling out our bottle of Gypsy Rose from the brown paper bag and handing it to him, as a present.

“Unopened,” George said, tears welling up in his eyes. “The seal not even cracked. No tooth marks. I'm overcome.”

Later Big Bart and I went to Hong Fat on Mott Street to giggle over the bacon-wrapped shrimp with the rest of the hippies. Bart ordered his usual: curry beef, superhot extra sauce, five Seven-Ups. He ate the slop in sweaty spasms, banging his chest like a doctor gunning a pacemaker. And said, “Good!”

What a day we were having! Big Bart said there was only one hassle. For Big Bart, any time you had to do
anything
, it was a hassle. The hassle was that Bart had to call Ben the bassist to tell him where the gig was. Bart went off to find a working phone booth while I sat on the curb of Elizabeth Street staring at the streetlamp. It could have been the moon. Bart returned with a look of horror on his face. He was pasty white. Ben the bassist couldn't make it. He was sick. The only other bass player Bart knew was Lou, the crazed 650-Triumph freak who lived in Bensonhurst. There was something wrong with Lou's phone. We'd have to go out there.

Oh shit.

The N train, what the fuck do we know from the N train? We're from Queens. Brooklyn is a dark and scary thing. The subway map. Fuck. Some Puerto Rican wrote on it. In, like,
Spanish
.

Journey to the end of the Nightsville. Drunk on the subway, okay. Glue on the subway, ride it out. But acid on the subway,
yaaahhh
. Big Bart and I held on to each other. All we knew was: Bay Ridge Parkway, get off. The train is packed. Across the way a pizza-faced white guy in a pea coat is playing 45s on a portable turntable. Like life or death, Big Bart dives at the guy's leg and asks, “Do you have any Chuck Berry?” The kid pulls “No
Particular Place to Go” out of his pocket. Saved. Thank you, Lord! Saved again. The people on the train are going nuts. Half of them want the kid to turn it up, the rest want to kill him.

Somehow we found Lou, a husky weight-lifting type, communing with the television in his mother's living room. The mother, a Jewish-Italian widow lady, came to the door, took one look at our faces, and almost broke out crying. It was easy to see why.
Lou was taking acid too!
He was nearly catatonic. Big Bart and I breathed relief: Here, at last, was someone we could talk to.

Lou indicated, sure, he could play the gig. Only problem was he worked for Grand Union on Eighty-sixth Street and had to make his deliveries first. He said it would go faster if we came along. Eighty-sixth Street has an elevated train running over it. Lou shot that Dodge Tradesman between the subway pilings like an amphethamined slalom skier. Big Bart broke into a box of Oreos as we rolled around in the back of the van trying not to barf into the bags of groceries. How Lou had a nice smile for all those Italian ladies when he brought them their Ronzoni is an unsolved mystery. How we got to the gig is another event lost in the mists.

Talking in front of Cakemasters on Thirty-fourth Street, Big Bart and I agree that we can't remember much more of that day—except that the priest at the church smoked pot to show he was hip. Outside of that and a couple of questions about how our respective parents were, there wasn't all that much more to talk about, even if Bart did play “Can't Turn You Loose” on his leg for old times' sake. Bart has been in half a dozen bands since those days. Once he was supposed to go out on the road with Don Covay, author of
Chain of Fools
. But it fell through. Now playing in bands is just a job. Big Bart works in an auto parts store during the day. I remember when Big Bart slept all day. But what are you going to do when you're married and have three kids? Bart hasn't taken acid since that night either.

They shoot old bohemian newspapers, don't they? You know, when they can't dance anymore. A personalized NY media story of a wound that never heals. From
New York
magazine, 2005
.

What a bittersweet little sojourn down memory lane it was, reaching into one of those nasty free boxes from which the
Village Voice
is dispensed these days to pick up a copy of the paper's fiftieth-anniversary issue. A big, fat thing it was, too, the big five-oh, sporting a reproduction of a
Voice
cover from each year of its existence, 1955 on to now. There were reprints of old stories, rekindlings of famous, long-vanished bylines. Up front was Mailer's, of course, the founding editor lambasting the paper's nonexistent copy department for so many “obvious mis-spellings,” in his essay “The Hip and the Square,” and saying that he had no choice, given “the fairly sharp words—certain things said which can hardly be unsaid,” but to resign his column.

Other hallowed names were invoked. There was Jane Jacobs, who stopped Robert Moses's Lower Manhattan Expressway, thereby making Soho safe for Prada. And Jack Newfield, who sent crooked judges and land
lords to jail, ten at a time. Noted too were Jonas Mekas, Andrew Sarris (how much us budding Queens
auteur
theorists owed him!), the beatnik John Wilcock, Howard Smith, jill johnston (only lowercase for her), Lucian Truscott IV, Alexander Cockburn, Ellen Willis, and dozens more, with pictures by Fred McDarrah and cartoons by Feiffer, one more dance to the newsprint fungibility of it all.

The
Voice
: how to explain what it meant, in 1961, to plunk down a dime onto the counter of Union News on 188th Street and thumb through those mucky little pages—pages that opened a Cocteau-like portal to a whole other world. Here was the ticket from Mom's pot roast, from Queens civil service and the neat six-foot square of lawn in front of the corner house on Fifty-third Avenue. Simply to be seen with the
Voice
set you apart: you were one of
those
people—hair too long, mouth too smart, not likely to go to the prom. Growing up in Flushing, the dream felt good.

Later on, as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, I had a subscription. The guys in the hall, all aggie majors and barely closeted Jewhaters (I assumed), looked at the picture of LeRoi Jones on the cover and asked, “What's this, a commie paper?” No, I tried to explain to these sons of McCarthy, it wasn't a commie paper, it had a lot of stuff in it: politics, jazz, stuff about movies. I tried to tell them I read the paper because I was from New York and to me the
Voice
embodied the legitimate, indigenous clarion of what mattered. Really, I read it because I was homesick and the
Voice
was my lifeline; it kept me sane, and warm, in the middle of fucking Wisconsin, where the temperature hadn't broken zero in weeks.

My dorm mates looked over the paper again. There were some naked hippies in there, I think, maybe some piece about some judge who took money. “This is a commie paper,” they said again. “Yeah, right, it's a commie paper, you pig farmers,” I said, slamming the dorm-room door.

The
Voice
: it was an attitude, back then.

This, and the fact that I would wind up writing for the paper during the seventies, made the fiftieth-anniversary issue a perfect nostalgia storm: Like, wow, look at that picture of Dustin Hoffman, I forgot he lived right next to that town house on Eleventh Street the Weather Underground blew themselves up in.

What a long, strange proverbial trip.

That was my frame of mind as I slipped past security at the current
Voice
office at 36 Cooper Square. I wanted to be there because it figured to be a special day, one that could only be conjured by the lords of irony that often hover over the paper. On this day, the same one that the fiftieth-anniversary issue hit the streets, the
Voice
management thought it would be an excellent idea to have the paper's new owner come by for the very first time. And there he was, blown in from the Barry Goldwater–whelped precincts of Phoenix, Arizona, one Mr. Michael Lacey, a tallish fifty-seven-year-old with spiky gray hair, watery pale-blue eyes, and spreading shanty-Irish honker.

In the fiftieth, there is a piece by Jarrett Murphy tracking the checkered history of
Voice
ownership. They are all in there, from Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher, who along with Mailer spent $10,000 to open the paper in a second-floor office at 22 Greenwich Avenue. Wolf sold it to Kennedy pal Carter Burden, who sold it to Clay Felker, the founder of
New York
magazine. Felker (one afternoon a disgruntled playwright who got a bad review burst into the office and screamed, “Clay Felker! Your days are numbered,” prompting the entire staff to stand up and cheer) lost the place to Rupert Murdoch, the penultimate bigger fish who knew not to mess with a money-maker no matter what anti-Republican swill it published. After that came Leonard Stern, the pet-food magnate, who paid an unthinkable $55 million in 1985. By 2000, Stern sold out to a consortium of faceless bankers and lawyers for $170 million. Now there was Lacey, almost certainly the only
Voice
owner to get his kicks from revving his mustard yellow Mustang Cobra past 100 while cruising the Navajo Reservation.

Actually, Lacey, who described himself as “this year's Visigoth, the new asshole in charge,” his longtime partner, Jim Larkin, and their New Times Media corporation weren't exactly taking over completely. They were merging with Village Voice Media, which includes the
Voice
and five other “alternative” newspapers, most notably the
LA Weekly
. New Times was getting 62 percent of what was being called the “business combination,” leaving VVM with the other 38 percent. Subject to Justice Department approval (more on this below), the merger will create a seventeen-entity mini-empire reputedly valued at $400 million. Together, the NT-VVM
papers will reach as many as four million readers, dispensing “alt” staples like club listings, movie reviews, and reams of smudgy sex ads, along with local and a smattering of national reporting.

This was a long way away from 22 Greenwich Avenue and a dime at Union News. Still, as
Village Voice
management changes go, Lacey's visit to the paper's offices at 36 Cooper Square was far from notable. Nothing iconic happened as with the 1974 Felker takeover, when star writer Ron Rosenbaum ripped up his (meager) paycheck in the
New York
editor's face, saying there was “no amount of money” that could make him work for “the piece of shit” the
Voice
was certain to become. Rosenbaum then stormed out, a dramatic gesture, topped only by Felker's puzzled reaction: “Who was that?”

Later, in the great rebellion of 1977–78 that greeted the Murdoch regime, the
Voice
staff commandeered the office in support of editor Marianne Partridge. Partridge had been hired only two years before by the previously despised Felker, but in
Voice
land, dread of the future usurper always exceeds the virulent hatreds directed at the current one. Murdoch's choice for editor, David Schneiderman, was barred from the newsroom, forced to cool his muted jets for six months in an office on Fifth Avenue.