The Mayor of MacDougal Street (16 page)

I was also keeping pretty active in the political world. A few of us had started a sort of offshoot of the Libertarian League called the Carlo Tresca Club. It was an organization with only three requirements: you had to be opposed to both capitalism and Stalinism, had to believe in direct action as a way of accomplishing social change, and had to participate in some activity
that the group agreed constituted direct action, and report back on what you were doing. At its height the Tresca Club had about seventy-five members, almost all of them around my age, and people were involved in all sorts of things, including groups like CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.

I fulfilled the third requirement through my work with the Folksingers Guild, though I also was involved in some other minor actions. For instance, this was when the United States had officially declared an embargo on arms to Cuba, but the CIA was still shipping weapons to Batista. There was this Cuban freighter that was docked in town, supposedly with a cargo of agricultural implements, and the word went around that it was actually carrying weapons to prop up the dictatorship. I am not sure how we got that information, but it came from a fairly reliable source, so some of us went down to alert the crew to what was going on. Well, talk about “doing well by doing good”! We walked off that boat loaded down with
añejo
rum and Havana cigars. Nobody we knew was smoking anything but the best Cuban cigars or drinking anything but the best fifteen-year-old rum for a couple of weeks. I do not really know what happened to the freighter, but the story went around that the crew mutinied and deep-sixed the whole cargo, and it would certainly be nice to think that was true.

At some point I also joined the IWW—me and Lenny Glaser hitched out to Chicago to sign up—and Tom Condit, who has a much better memory for this than I do, remembers that in December of 1957 he and Nan Kern and I also joined YPSL, the Young People’s Socialist League. (This was pronounced “yipsel,” which I recently learned is Yiddish for squirrel—explaining why the older Jewish party members always grinned when we were mentioned.) The three of us went down to Socialist Party headquarters, and there was this huge office with only one person in it, way in the back. That was Irwin Suall, who was the national secretary at the time, and when the three of us came in together, he instantly became very suspicious, because it was probably the largest group that had come to join the Socialist Party in years.

My dedication to syndicalism and political organizing made me particularly impatient with the attitudes of a lot of people on the folk scene who were so eager to be heard that they completely ignored the fact that they were being used as unpaid labor. The Café Bizarre experience continued to
rankle, and other bright young entrepreneurs were by now poised to learn from Rick’s success. The Guild was doing what it could, but as is always the case, there was a constant supply of kids with guitars who were more than happy to take any work we might reject. My feelings about this were summed up in another
Caravan
piece, which I titled “Ethics and the Folksinger” and signed, for a change, with my own name:

I went on to point out that there were plenty of opportunities available for those who wanted a chance to play for free in front of an audience, such as concerts at hospitals and charity benefits. “The pay is the same as at
Sherri’s Loft (none) and no one is lining his pockets at anyone’s expense.” There was also Washington Square, where no money was made by anyone, and if people wanted to play in a more formal setting, they could pool their resources and hire their own hall.

I had reason to be acutely aware of the financial deficiencies of the expanding folk business. I was making a little money teaching blues guitar, and a little from concerts, but the light on the horizon remained frustratingly dim. All of us were sure that there was a folk revival on the way, and as it turned out, we were absolutely correct—but any airhead can predict a future event accurately; the trick is to get the tempo right. (My Trotskyist comrades began predicting the collapse of Soviet Stalinism in 1928, but when it finally went belly-up, they were caught just as flat-footed as everybody else. They’ve been predicting a major depression since 1945, and they’ll get that one right too . . . eventually.) Meanwhile, there I was with a reputation as New York’s premier young blues interpreter, and nothing to do with it. Great days were a-comin’ and a new dawn was in sight—but for the present, as my sainted great-grandmother would say, “Live, horse, and you’ll get oats.”

My colleague Phil “Dusty” Rhodes (né Perlman), faced with the same problem, had lit out for the territories. Within a startlingly short time, he was holding down a regular gig in Hermosa Beach, California, and he dropped me a note saying, in effect, “Come on in, the water’s fine.” It sounded too good to be true: He was working five nights a week in a coffeehouse called the Insomniac, getting something like $125 a week with a free apartment right upstairs thrown in for sweeteners. He was less than a block from the beach, he had taken up surfcasting and miniature golf, it was warm, they paid you to take marijuana off their hands, and the women were gorgeous and not vulgarly overdressed. Furthermore, he wrote that
he had told the club owners about me and they could hardly wait for me to show up so they could give me the same deal. I had heard yarns like this before, and it really sounded like the Big Rock Candy Mountain, especially since Phil was never given to small enthusiasms. Still, by now it was clear that if I stayed in New York, running in ever narrowing concentric circles, I was bound, sooner or later, to disappear up my own asshole. So what the hell, it was Horace Greeley time . . .

C
alifornia! It was a continent away, but I talked the matter over with Terri, and we hit on a scheme to get me there for next to nothing—precisely my capital holdings. We were active members of YPSL, and the organization was having its annual conference in Chicago. We could get elected as delegates and get a lift that far with whichever other delegate had a car. From there, Gary Craig, a political accomplice from Seattle, planned to get one of those “Triple-A Drive-away” deals, where you got paid gas and expenses for driving somebody’s car from point A to point B, point B in this case being San Francisco. I would join him for that leg of the journey, then Gary would proceed north to Seattle and I south, by hook or by crook, to Hermosa Beach.

I remember almost nothing of the drive to Chicago. There were six of us in a VW Beetle, and I recall dreaming wistfully of the roomy semi cabs and sleek bourgeois bombs I had traveled in when I made that same trip hitchhiking. Hitching cross-country in winter, however, was out of the question; people literally froze to death on the road out there in the wide-open spaces.

The conference was the usual stew of bellow-and-drang and clumsy Machiavellianism to be found wherever young ideologues gather. I loved that stuff, and had a fine time. We stayed at a comrade’s apartment, which Terri later described as having “polka-dot wallpaper that moved”—even as
a cockroach connoisseur and veteran of countless East Side crash pads, I had to admit it was pretty impressive. Two other things that I remember: I heard Howlin’ Wolf for the first time, and Gary and I acquired a passenger, A.K. Trevelyan, age twelve, known forever after (by me) as “Red Chief.”

I do not recollect exactly how we got A.K. for a road buddy, but he was the son and heir of an old friend who was sending him to spend some time with his mother in the Bay Area. I did not envy the poor woman. Red Chief had the intellect of an Einstein and the temperament of a pissed-off wolverine.

The arrangement Gary had with Triple-A gave us only four days to get the car to San Francisco. That meant doing about five hundred miles a day, a solid pace but not unreasonable if the roads were clear. Gas money and a small per diem were thrown in, which made a big difference since Gary and I had only about a hundred bucks between us. A.K. had some bread, as well, but he categorically refused to tell us how much.

We left Chicago early in the morning to get as much daylight driving as possible. Gary had to do all of it—I did not have a license, then or ever. The weather got right down to business as soon as we got into Iowa: a regular “blue norther,” snow so thick you had to squint to see your windshield wipers, shrieking winds, the works. There was not another car in sight. We crawled along at 20 miles an hour, losing the road from time to time since the terrain was flat as a pancake and there were no tire tracks to follow. When this would happen, I would get out of the car with a tire iron, poke a hole in the snow, and if I hit dirt we would back up and repeat the procedure until I struck pavement. Clearly, this was not a good system for getting to Omaha by early evening. “Gary,” I said, “if this keeps up, we’ll be lucky if we can reach the next town. We’d better find ourselves a motel and hole up until this blows over.”

“We can’t afford it,” he said. “We only have enough money for three nights of motel.”

“It’s warm in Nevada,” I said. (I was thinking of Las Vegas, not Reno, which was where we were headed, and which gets as cold as the ninth circle.) “When we get there, we can sleep one night in the car. Or else,” I continued, “we could always stay right where we are until they dig us out, sometime in April. That wouldn’t cost a cent.”

Red Chief was in favor of pushing on. He was having the time of his life. Gary was having no fun at all, but he kept driving until somewhere west of Iowa City, at which point my fatuous reasoning, with a strong assist from the blizzard, prevailed. Next morning, bright and early, we were back on the road. In the brilliant sunlight, the world was a vast, flat, blinding snow-field from horizon to horizon. The roads had been sanded, though, and we could do fifty or better—Gary was a superb driver.

The car was a Chevy Impala, which was a pretty hot little number, and we were just waiting to get some dry road under us so we could really boogie. We stopped somewhere around Omaha, but only for gas and a bite to eat. I was beginning what would become a lifelong fascination with “real American chow.” Heretofore, my idea of a Lucullan feast was the kasha varnishkes with mushroom gravy at the Garden Cafeteria on East Broadway, lo mein at Sam Wo’s, or the arroz con pollo the Spanish anarchists used to dish up at their loft on Broadway and 12th. Chicken fried steak? You’ve got to be kidding. Country ham with biscuits and redeye gravy? Hush puppies? Give me a break. Mostly it was awful, but I gradually realized the problem was not the dishes themselves but the fact that the hash slingers in those truck stops were unbelievably lousy cooks. I have since had chicken fried steaks that could stand toe-to-toe with the best
filetto di manzo
I have ever eaten in Italy.

Whatever may have been wrong with the food, they gave you plenty of it and it was cheap. Gary was a westerner and knew from this stuff, and curiosity led me to experiment. A.K. made faces at it and stuck to BLTs. He was also beginning to develop a parody of a midwestern accent that dripped venom. He would try it out on everybody we talked to, and I was sure it was only a question of time before some no-neck behemoth took offense and killed all three of us on the spot. He especially loved to say “You betcha!” which he seemed to think was the most hilarious thing he had ever heard in his life. We were getting some pretty funny looks.

Our beards did not help a whole lot. The culture wars of the sixties had not yet begun, but the battle lines were forming and one of the great, burning issues was to be “the beard.” You could see it coming—“Hey feller, what’s that growing on your chin? Spinach? Hee, hee, hee.” You smiled politely and disengaged as quickly as possible.

The road opened up in Nebraska; snowbanks six feet high along the shoulders, but the blacktop was clear and dry. Gary was determined to make up lost time, and dropped the hammer. Seventy-five, eighty miles an hour—we were really rolling. Just after dark, we hit a patch of black ice that was slick as greased glass. The car pinwheeled, executing two or three complete spins while we watched helplessly. Somehow Gary managed to get some control, and miraculously brought us to a stop almost gently, against a snowdrift on the side of the road. A quick check of body parts turned up nothing broken, but we were firmly wedged into that snow bank, with our front end three feet deep and nothing but ice under our rear wheels. Gary tried his best, but could not move the damn thing an inch.