Another Little Piece of My Heart (2 page)

Folksingers didn’t have fierce moves. Try to imagine Joan Baez doing hand jive or Pete Seeger leaping out of a coffin. Robust and even gritty were fine, randy was not. When I think of this scene, the image that comes to mind is a girl cradling an autoharp and radiating purity, not the stuff of my wet dreams. Folk music had a righteous, optimistic attitude that seemed very middle-class, and I went for it with the enthusiasm of a wannabe. But the gutter remained, hot and tarry, within me. I kept it under tight control, just as I struggled to tame my budding queerness. I was sure that if I gave myself over to the rock ’n’ roll side of me, I would never rise. My new life depended on mastering the codes of the only society that would have me, the boho left. But in 1962, I lucked out, because those codes were about to change. To the shrieks of girls reaching for their first orgasm, the Beatles arrived in New York.

It wasn’t just their capacity to wring the juices out of female fans that made them fascinating. Elvis had done that too, with his body and his seductive voice. But with the Beatles it was a more elaborate package. Their Liverpool accents sounded sophisticated but were really working-class. They had neat suits and androgynous hair, yet behind the cherubic look you could tell that they were horny devils. Their songs, which seemed conventional on first hearing, were laced with unexpected harmonies, octave leaps, and such. Ringo’s blunt drumming and Paul’s loping bass tied the band to rock ’n’ roll, but everything else seemed subject to outside influences. From the start there was something about this band that spoke of potential—theirs and mine. They, too, were streetwise guys, very ambitious and interested in making art, or at least being arty. I was perfectly positioned to take advantage of everything they represented.

I realized right away that I should write about them, so I did, constructing an audacious thesis about Beatlemania signaling a cultural shift that went far beyond pop. I called my essay “The Second Jazz Age,” and it ran in the college paper, my first piece on the music soon to be called rock. Propelled by sheer enthusiasm, I had stumbled onto something
that would turn out to be a career—and, even more unexpectedly, an identity. Within a few years, at the unready age of twenty-two, I would become the first widely read rock critic and a media sensation, a designated arbiter of hip. I had no idea what hip meant—no one did. But for a time, I pretended that I knew, and as a result I moved easily among rock stars, artists, intellectuals, and celebrities in the mash-up that was culture in the sixties. If they wanted publicity, I was on their radar.

In 1962, all of this was unimaginable to me. I was Richie from the projects, wide open and shut down, heedless and needy, full of myself and ready to be filled. And I was hungry.

Her real name was Roberta, but if you saw her flaming red hair falling in turbulent curls around her eyes, her teeth jutting into her grin, her conversation constant (the product of a manic personality on speed), you’d know right away that she had to be called Tom. She was a misfit among misfits, an oddity even among my friends. But she was the only one of them who noticed the piece on the Beatles that I’d published in my college paper. “No one’s writing stuff like this,” she said. I knew right away that she was as unrooted in the world of normal expectations, as riven with ambition and anxiety, as me.

Tom had been raised in Queens, but the subway system meant that any city college was within easy reach, and Tom ended up at the Bronx branch of Hunter (now it’s called Lehman). That was where we met, in one of the faux-Gothic buildings, or maybe on the sloping lawns where students strummed guitars and necked. There were no dorms; you either resided at home or convinced your parents to get you an apartment near the campus. That was what Tom had done. In 1962, the derelict caves around the Grand Concourse could be had for scratch. She lived in one of them, with God knows how many of her friends, who occupied sheetless mattresses in rooms bare of everything except books and instruments.

I was eager to visit, convinced I’d find a bordello with folk music, and I wasn’t entirely wrong. It was easier to get laid there than to find something to eat in the rancid fridge. Naturally I came back often, and on one of those visits Tom introduced me to her latest roommate. His
name was … well, it didn’t matter. The look in his eyes was welcoming, his lips curling into a slight smile, over which lurked a downy excuse for a mustache, his black hair falling in clumps around his neck, his bony shoulders and arms tethered to a sunken chest. But there was something about this guy that seemed to float above his physique. I guess that aura was his calling card, because he lived in Tom’s place rent-free. All he had to do for his board was fuck.

Which he did, basically servicing all the women who wandered through the place. Tom kept a supply of raw eggs to feed him, because she thought the protein would increase his potency. But as far as I could tell he didn’t need nutritional supplements. He walked around with a ready bulge in his jeans. I studiously looked away, but he noticed my interest and sent me a signal that said, “Let’s be friends. I
need
a friend in this place.”

He treated me to my first joint, smoked on his lumpy mattress. I felt dizzy, also horny, and I was relieved when he picked up his guitar and began to play. He hit the strings badly but beautifully, fragments of melody spilling from his fingers. There were no lyrics, just humming in a voice that broke into a sinus-driven thrum. I listened, transfixed, until he shot me a smile and said, “Think I’m gonna crash.” I retreated to the living room, where a pile of people were going at it. I insinuated myself into the grunting heave, touching and licking, and I left feeling very impressed with myself. But what stuck with me about that day was the guy with the guitar.

“He’s amazing,” I said to Tom.

“Yeah,” she replied. “He can fuck you and make it feel like a feather.”

“Wow.”

“That’s why we keep him.”

Tom was a writer, naturally. There were manuscripts all over her room, carpeting the paisley bedspread. She was avidly drawn to journalism, and in her mind that meant reporting your inner news. Tom didn’t believe in punctuation, except for the occasional !!!!!!!!! But she had found a home for her musings, a publication that circulated among people who didn’t mind text creeping up the sides of pages. There were all sorts of similar rags floating around lower Manhattan in those days. Cheap printing technologies had given every faction of style and radical politics a voice. By the end of the decade a network of underground newspapers would spring from this matrix, but back then there were only splotchy things stapled together. They were the zines of their day.

Tom was my guide to this hidden milieu. Thanks to her, I got to be the mascot of a black writers’ collective that published an influential journal called
Umbra
. (I didn’t know about its rep, but I liked the vibe, and I had the feeling that Tom was working her way through the masthead.) I also discovered
Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts
, whose main appeal to me was that each copy had a drop of the publisher’s sperm on the cover. Stoking my meager courage, I wandered into the magazine’s headquarters on East 10th Street, a storefront called the Peace Eye Bookstore. There I met the copious publisher himself. Ed Sanders was a tall man with ruddy cheeks, curly blond hair, and a prairie accent, all of which reminded me of Mark Twain. Years later, he would wrap his arms around my head to protect me from police charging at a demo. But back before we heard the crack of billy clubs, and a decade before punk inherited the earth, when it was still possible to be sincere on the Lower East Side, Sanders sang in one of the most unlikely rock groups of the sixties, the Fugs. I don’t think he imagined, when I met him in 1962, that beatniks in a band could possibly have a fan base, but he certainly seemed like a star to me. He represented everything hardcore and handmade about the scene I’d begun to explore.

Sometime that spring, under Tom’s prodding, I ventured far east of MacDougal Street to Tompkins Square, a large patch of mottled green surrounded by avenues named for letters of the alphabet—
A, B, C
, and
D
. They were pretty mean streets. The park had a decrepit air, incredibly attractive to me. There were hippies hanging out before there were hippies, and they mingled with old Ukrainians willing to sit near anyone who wasn’t a junkie. The area was full of European restaurants that specialized in borscht and butter-slathered challah. They were filled with young people who wanted off the doctor-lawyer track, kids like me. We would fortify ourselves with soup and wander through the park, just sort of soaking up the wreckage—children playing in a dogshit-infested sandbox, street people noodling on badly strung guitars, wanderers who had arrived from every Omaha in America, and the occasional bullet flying. Yes, it could be perilous. But that was where Tom felt most at home.

On one of our trips from the Bronx, she led me into a tenement, up three flights of chipped stone stairs, and down a barely lit corridor slicked with cooking grease. I heard the familiar sound of guitars coming from an open door. Inside, on a wall you wouldn’t lean against unless
you wanted cement dust on your jacket, was a giant drawing of the Buddha with a machine gun strapped to his belly. This is my most vivid memory of the publication that ran Tom’s musings. I’ve forgotten its name, and so, with apologies to an underground paper that was actually called
The Rat
, I’ll call this rag
The Rodent
.

The articles snaked around tiny ads from homemade jewelry shops and notices of political meetings with an obscure Trotskyite pedigree. The house style was a variant of what the Beats called “automatic writing.” The lead might refer to an arcane work of Eastern devotion, leading to a description of police brutality and ending with some quote from Kierkegaard. I’m kidding, though not by much. Deciphering the prose felt like walking through a maze, but it was lively and engaged. And the most interesting thing about
The Rodent
was that anyone could write for it, provided they were willing to work for free.

The editor was the oldest person in the place, and he had the jaded look of someone who had been through many careers. I didn’t ask about his relationship to Tom, but it was clear that, at the least, she amused him. He greeted her as “Brenda Starr, reporter.” She flung a few pages into his hand, and he read them, nodding in agreement every now and then, whipping out a pencil and circling a word or two. “Tell you what,” he said. “If you let me add a few periods I’ll print it.”

“Fuck you,” Tom negotiated. But I knew she would agree, because, under all that flaming hair and speed-driven chaos, she was as ambitious as me, and any chance to appear in print pushed her buttons, even if it meant using punctuation.

“Hey,” she grunted to the editor. “Meet my friend Richie.”

He checked me out warily. “Okay, write something.”

“What should I write?” I stammered.

He shrugged. It was all the input I got from him.

But that night, in the tiny room I shared with my younger brother—when the bed was open there was no space to walk—I lay awake trying to think of a subject. I could hear my father snoring through the wall. I could hear the laugh tracks from TV shows audible through the ceiling. To live in the project was to join a community of coughers, moaners, and TV-rerun insomniacs. The building seemed to breathe as one, especially when a baseball game was on. And when something important happened, like the Yanks winning the Series, the cheers reverberated from every window. It was all raw material to me.

I never told my friends about the role writing played in my life. It put me in a timeless daze, a comfort zone where nothing could hurt me. Creating a story with a beginning, middle, and end was a way to give the jumble of my feelings a shape—it was a model for making sense of painful chaos. And I was enchanted by words, especially rhymes, had been ever since the age of four, when my parents enrolled me in a poetry class at the Henry Street Settlement. As soon as I could write my name I scrawled it on the blank pages of every book in our house, convinced that I was the author. I wrote poems as a kid, and as a teenager I branched out into short stories. My subject was the life I didn’t feel part of, the worker’s world of roles assigned, accepted, and eroticized. Lustiness radiated from my neighbors’ bodies, thick and pocked or gnarled and muscled. (Some of the men still wore sailor hats from their navy days.) I wanted to smell every cranny of their flesh, women and men, girls and boys alike. Instead I began to keep detailed notes on them, the music they liked, the way they danced, the precise sounds of their speech. I didn’t have a plot or a plan, but I wrote every day, filling pad after pad until my hand ached.

During the summer that I turned eighteen, I went on a serious diet. Eventually I would shed about eighty pounds, and, probably as a result, I had several sexual encounters. Not that I was new to the nasty. When I was maybe nine, I grabbed the luscious breasts of my best friend’s mother. I had no idea why I’d done that, but she slapped me. I ran home only to hear a knock on the door, and I shrank into my bed as my parents let her in. To my immense relief I heard her apologize for the slap. They never mentioned the incident to me, and so my career as a fiend proceeded undisturbed. And there were many opportunities in the project, even for a fat kid. I was initiated into fucking by a girl I didn’t even like—I think I was fourteen, and it confused the hell out of me. But in high school, I had a different kind of experience, with a boy, sprawled across the front seat of his Pontiac. (I still remember the Madonna on the dashboard.) After that, I felt like a radio dial that couldn’t settle on a station. The sense of being suddenly exposed to my desires in all their ambiguity was terrifying.

Looking back, I think I was heading for schizophrenia—it ran in my father’s family. I was saved by many things, including the love of my friends, but nothing was as powerful as the impact of a certain book. Lying on the chicken-bone-strewn sands of the local beach, I pored
through James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. No novel had ever held me so tightly in the sinews of its prose and its landscape of the interior. It was one of those times when incipient mental illness meets the palpability of literature. I didn’t get the modernist references or the allusions to
The Odyssey
, just the breathtaking flow and the intense feeling of empathy it called up in me. That summer I decided to be the James Joyce of the Bronx. I might as well have imagined blonde maidens with parasols strolling on the Grand Concourse.