A Freewheelin' Time (28 page)

Cambridge

Everyone was obsessed
with the presidential election in 1964. I was, too, but with my twenty-first birthday more than two weeks after election day, I couldn’t lie about my age to the Board of Elections. In 1964, there was a definite difference between the two candidates. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was a conservative Republican and Lyndon Johnson, who had taken over the reins after the assassination of John Kennedy, was a traditional Democrat. Lines were drawn in the sand; the stakes were high.

With the country still traumatized by the assassination and the turmoil over civil rights and with the dangers of the Cold War turning hot, not to mention the war in Vietnam, the choice between the two candidates was a crucial one. People from both Cuba trips dropped by Avenue B even more to hang out and talk politics with Albert Maher, who was around quite a bit.

Albert was a tall, blond, lanky Texan from a wealthy family who had been a student at Harvard when Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were professors there conducting experiments with LSD. Albert became more interested in politics than in following the expanding psychedelic drug culture, and he evolved into an East Coast radical who spoke with a slow Texas drawl.

In those days there were many friendships that intertwined and overlapped in the connected worlds of the arts and politics; Albert was another who lived in both. It is possible that Bob and I first met him at a party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but I really got to know him in New York City in 1963 when he began showing up at Avenue B. As Dylan’s fame grew, and larger and larger crowds surged around him after performances, he needed protection. Since Albert was already a buddy, it made sense to use him as a bodyguard too.

Albert was always interested in what I was reading and what I was doing. He read the Beat writers and poets, and by the time he gave me the
Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen
our friendship had changed course. When Albert decided to move back to Cambridge in the late fall of 1964, he asked me to go with him. A move to Cambridge was a way to leave the Village, where I felt I would forever be linked to Bob Dylan and harassed by those who wanted to know what he was really like.

Whenever I had extra money I would take a course in a subject that interested me at the New School for Social Research, an open-enrollment university in the Village that offered inexpensive classes without college credit. When Albert told me about the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, I registered for a course in theater history and production and an Italian language class.

The Harvard Extension School was founded in the early 1900s by the president of the university. The enrollment fee was adjusted yearly to the price of the harvest, making it possible for the general population of Boston to have access to Harvard, minus the hefty fees and entry requirements, with classes scheduled at the end of the workday. The school was a precursor to adult education programs.

Once I had moved to Albert’s Somerville apartment, just outside Cambridge, I bought a secondhand bike to ride to the campus. To anyone who didn’t know better, I could have passed for a real Harvard student.

The apartment was roomy and had big bay windows facing the street with window seats that I loved to curl up in with a book or an art pad. We painted the apartment and moved around the furniture already in it, filling up the shelves with record albums and books, slowly settling ourselves in. Albert’s brother John lived nearby, and friends from the city came and stayed with us every so often. I was cooking pots of food and baking bread and trying to feel good about life, but I don’t think I really succeeded.

Some months before my move to Massachusetts, while still in New York City, I had found out about the macrobiotic diet and its philosophy of balance from the musician Johnny Hammond (son of the producer); and had begun experimenting with it. In Italy, an Argentine friend who was studying Buddhism had given me a book about Zen philosophy. When I returned to New York, I read more. As articulated by the Japanese philosopher George Ohsawa, the macrobiotic approach espousing the necessity for balance in all things, beginning with food, appealed to me.

The diet required ten days of eating nothing but organically grown short-grain brown rice. Cigarettes kept me from feeling hunger pangs. I was so health and balance conscious I really should have quit smoking, but I was still working on that.

After the ten-day initiation ordeal, the allowable foods on the diet included vegetables, nuts, tofu, fish, delicious grainy breads, and crunchy seasonings based on sesame seeds either ground into pastes or whole, toasted, and mixed with salt. Since I liked to cook, I enjoyed making the breads, soups, and stews. When I went to a macrobiotic center somewhere on the East Side, probably with John, they told me I was addicted to dairy products. They could tell from my complexion. I was to compensate for my cravings by eating more sesame paste.

I got a job as a waitress at a macrobiotic restaurant on Second Avenue called the Paradox, an easy walk from Avenue B. The owner was very strict about following the rules of the diet, not at all like the man who ran the anything-but-kosher kosher luncheonette where I used to work. I was required to hand over my tips every night; then I’d be paid for the hours I worked that day. I thought that was odd since I was the only employee. But a job is a job, so I complied.

I took to wearing a dress with two deep pockets in the front where I could surreptitiously drop the major part of my tips. Back then credit cards were not common; everyone paid cash. After each customer left, I handed over a portion of my tips to the owner, and at the end of the night he would count out my wages. Gingerly, I’d walk out the door, trying to keep the coins in my pockets from making noise.

The owner grew suspicious and began keeping a very close eye on me. Even after I was fired, I stayed on the diet.

Cambridge had a big macrobiotic center where Danny, a friend from New York, was staying. Danny took the philosophy and diet very strictly and refused to eat anything but brown rice, even after the start-up phase. He became so very thin, very peaceful and philosophical. All his friends were extremely worried about him. I brought him bread but he wouldn’t touch it.

The people who ran the center were also concerned and did what they could to get Danny to eat. Nourish the body, nourish the soul, they said. But no matter what anyone tried, he would not eat any more than one small portion of brown rice a day. Slowly he starved to death. He was beatific in the end, which was very disturbing. Danny was seduced by his visions. Probably it was Albert who said that starving to death was one of the kinder ways to die, because the person goes into a trancelike state and no longer feels pain of any kind. It made me think about some of the stories of the Catholic saints.

One of the hardest things to do when I moved back to New York was to go with Danny’s girlfriend to visit his parents outside the city. And one of the easiest was to get off the macrobiotic diet.

A
lbert and I were invited to a concert Bob was giving at a venue somewhere in Cambridge. Though we went, we left after intermission. Some of the songs Bob sang were too close to the bone; I felt exposed. Later that night when we ended up at the same party, Bob demanded to know why I hadn’t come back for the second half. He was pissed. And he didn’t appreciate Albert, of all people, trying to cool him down. Others at the party did their best not to notice the commotion. Several girls were hanging on to Bob. Afraid I would forever be pulled his way, I kept silent, feeling a pain I thought had passed.

Though I avoided the music scene in Cambridge as much as possible, I was happy to see friends I had gotten to know with Bob. Some friendships transcended the mess that accompanies love stories, so I wasn’t shy about seeing Betsy and Bob Siggins; he was one of the musicians in the Charles River Valley Boys. I was definitely looking forward to reconnecting with Jim Kweskin, who was back in Cambridge after living in New York City and traveling around the country with his jug band, which sometimes included Maria Muldaur, still Maria D’Amato back then, another friend from the Village. Geoff Muldaur, the man Maria later married, had a unique voice I truly loved; it was high and honey-toned with a vibrato that sounded like the voices on jazz recordings from the 1920s that Dave Van Ronk played.

I
was living a relatively quiet existence—almost too much of contrast to my life in New York.

Albert decided it was time I learned to drive and began giving me lessons in an open parking lot in his beautiful Porsche. On a reckless night, with too many people crowded into the small sports car, Albert decreed I was ready to drive for real and off we headed toward Storrow Drive. I was in a daring and confident mood that masked my underlying terror. Following Albert’s right-turn, left-turn directions, I stopped and started easily enough with little harm to the clutch or any grinding of the gearshift. Suddenly Albert gave me a direction to turn without enough advance warning; I took the turn way too fast and came to a dead stop in front of a very big tree on the wrong side of the road. I fell apart completely as Albert calmly explained that he’d been testing my reactions.

That was it for Albert and me. He was way too composed and even-keeled in the face of doom. I could hear and smell the accident and was quaking in my boots. After Albert took the wheel, we headed back to where we’d come from.

D
uring my time with Albert in Cambridge, I enthusiastically agreed with his idea of spreading the news about what our group saw in Cuba and demonstrating why the travel ban was un-American. At a party we met a very nice student from one of the colleges that might have been somewhere around Boston, but I no longer remember. I talked to him about my trip the previous summer and my belief that the arts would survive and flourish under Castro—that his government wouldn’t stifle or censor artists as had happened in the Soviet Union under Communism. While in Cuba, a few of us had traveled around the island with a theater troupe to places so remote that no one there had ever seen a play performed before. These novice audiences would get so entirely caught up in the play that they would join in—break the fourth wall—and call out or jump onto the stage to help a character in distress.

I described how we visited the newly constructed Cubanacán, the Cuban National School of the Arts for music, dance, and visual art. The building was low and sprawling, with a Mediterranean feeling. Built entirely of bricks, it had arched entrances and domed studios at the end of wide corridors. The atmosphere was exuberant and hopeful about all the changes taking place and the worlds opening up to the students despite the scarcity of supplies. We also toured the previously wealthy area of Havana, where officials of the Batista regime had lived in stately houses on palm tree–lined streets. These houses were being converted into residencies for writers and poets. Impressed by my passion for all that I’d seen, the young man invited me to speak at his university, together with others who had traveled to Cuba that summer. Off he went to discuss the details with Albert.

By the time the Cuba talk was scheduled in early 1965, I had already moved back to New York City. Albert and I did much better as friends.

The organizers of the event paid my expenses so I headed up to the college, where about four others were scheduled to speak before me. I had been so upbeat about Cuba informally at the party in Cambridge just a few short months previously that my talk was meant to close the evening on a rousing note. The others were more experienced speakers since they had been traveling around college campuses giving talks.

As I listened to each one of them, I realized that I had nothing to add to what they were saying. The auditorium was full of interested listeners, but I was in a gloomy frame of mind that evening. In general, I had lost a good deal of my enthusiasm for politics.

After my trip to Cuba, I worked with people who were active in organizing antiwar marches and also did a stint as art editor for a short-lived political arts magazine called
Streets,
which appealed to me more than political discussions. Though Lyndon Johnson had won the presidential election, I didn’t think for one minute there was nothing more to be worried about. But I lacked revolutionary zeal.

Most of the people who went to Cuba were politically knowledgeable and dedicated souls, but others were regimented in their thinking. Some even believed it was antirevolutionary to pay attention to popular culture.

I remember telling them that the number one song on the radio was “Eve of Destruction,” a genuine protest song. While I didn’t claim the song was great art, it was worth noting that it was on the top of the charts. Maybe they should start paying attention to what was going on outside their castle windows.

What really alienated me was the constant use of the terms
the proletariat, blue-collar workers,
and
the working class.
In another outburst of antirevolutionary ire, I told them that I was the only one among them who came from a genuine blue-collar, working-class family and that my father, who had worked in a factory, never referred to himself as “a proletariat.”

None of this went over well. Not only was I antirevolutionary in my thinking, I was a great disappointment to “the cause,” to boot. It was clear that it was time for me to give so-called revolutionary politics the boot. It wasn’t Cuba I was disillusioned with but rather the harangue of political correctness—the old party line.

To say the least, I didn’t give a rousing closing speech at the Cuba talk at the university. I spoke credibly but without conviction. Embarrassed, I felt very bad for the student who had expected so much from me. That was the end of my efforts at public political discourse.