3 The Scene I’ll get on with that story just ahead, and to the other dramatic episodes of Tod’ and my political work that are the primary focus of this memoir. But there are also wider contexts to consider. Our lives occupied other milieus, broader than the confines of our work. There were love interests, cultural and educational pursuits, world travels, and our connections to our families and the past. And there was place, first and foremost, the East Village, the downtown New York remnant of Bohemia where we lived, and where, after work, we dallied in the local bars and restaurants, the theaters and the movies houses, at each other’s pads or in some steamy Jazz club. Certainly for two American radicals there was no better scene in New York City, and, speaking for myself, no better time to live there.
I say “our lives,” but this is mostly my story, at least it is told by me and, while documented wherever possible, remains the product overall of my own fragmented recollections and of the singular perspectives I bring to them. Tod’s voice and point of view enter only in those places where he is quoted from the record and where, while writing this, I have gotten him to respond to my relentless queries or, on one or two rare occasions, to reminisce in person about our decade-long collaboration. There is very little in my possession beyond memory on which to sketch an accurate and detailed account of the private segments of my life in the early seventies, the odd letter to remind me of a fleeting connection, or even of a long lost friend, a few old business cards, some photographs. Not much at all. In contrast, the public episodes, the political work Tod and I accomplished is richly documented by news accounts and by a wealth of correspondence, position papers, newsletters, funding proposals, brochures and the like. And there are the ample sheaves of letters from old girlfriends, both the steadies and the flings, which record one-sided views of my love life. As sources of facts these letters only tantalize, and mostly plot the heart songs and, not infrequently, the grievances of a lover still in courtship, in the language of feelings and - often - reproach. They make me long for my own end of the correspondence, undoubtedly much more newsy. But those letters from former paramours still chastise me, and remind me of how clueless I was about relationships, how emotionally fragile and unavailable, and sometimes how dishonest and exploitative. While every letter may provide a fleeting glimpse of my movements in the world at a given moment throughout the seventies, each is more a mirror that reveals how I was seen at the time by some intimate other. All in good time. It was inevitable that I would move to the East Village after meeting Tod Ensign and Jeremy Rifkin. They both lived there. During my first half-year in New York City I had been loath to even visit that neighborhood. I didn’t think it safe. This is ironic since I’d just come back from Vietnam, where I was seldom preoccupied with concern for my own security. It was my status as a transient, a grad student, someone passing through. I hadn’t yet decided to settle in the city. Without much effort I’d found an apartment on the West Village side of Broadway, on Waverley Place near Washington Square, the virtual campus of New York University. My flat was a half block from most of my classes and from my office in the linguistics department where my position as TA, a teaching assistant, added a couple of hundred bucks to my monthly disability check from the VA, so I was pretty flush by student standards. I had a carrel in the Student Union across the Square where I read and studied for hours. At night I’d hang with NYU friends at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. This was the traditional Village scene I had known since my Army days when my childhood sweetheart, Katie, was living here and had turned me on to the White Horse, one of New York’s premier downtown literary dives. It took about six months for me to strip away those old habits from my past and to fashion a New York life on the other, rougher side of town in the neighborhood I’d once been - literally - too cautious to walk in. It’s amazing how quickly one’s opinions and attitudes can change, depending on the influences at hand and on the ambitions that bind you to them. But aesthetics in the deep sense are fused to one’s being in formative years. I grew up in Babylon, suburban Long Island, where a comfortable and orderly sameness spread itself over the surfaces of daily life. I rebelled quietly against obvious forms of convention; but alienation in itself does not purge the unconscious of its deeply habituated values. It’s true that as an undergraduate, I had lived in two other cities, Washington, D.C. and Rio de Janeiro, in privileged quarters surrounded by, and insulated from, their ghettos where someone from my background did not wander casually or unescorted. That’s what initially kept me out of the East Village. I identified it with the ‘other,’ the impenetrable ghetto, a place of foreboding, want and danger. Moving there was of a piece with all the undercurrents of change in identity and aesthetics that accompanied my adaptation to big city life, and transformed me in rapidly evolving stages from suburban to urban New Yorker. Today the East Village is a high rent district where old time residents struggle to hang onto digs that are rent-stabilized, and multiple dwellers live in spaces once inhabited by singles. But in 1971 this was still a marginal neighborhood and rents were cheap, thus attractive to immigrants, students, artists and to all manner of eccentrics existing, voluntarily or otherwise, on the down-and-out side of the urban fringe. I picked up my first flat there when the secretary to the head of my department who’d heard I wanted to move told me of an available unit in her own building on East 5th Street. The situation was unusual. The apartment was in a little building behind the actual tenement that fronted the street. You entered there, crossed the ground floor corridor and exited to a small courtyard beyond which another door opened to the second building with two tiny flats, front to back, on each of its four stories. I think mine was on the second or third floor, two rooms, a kitchen-bathroom-sitting area looking out on the court and a little square of a bedroom facing across a small garden enclosure of the building behind which fronted E. 6th Street, the next block up. The rent was seventy-five dollars a month, thought way too high by some neighborhood denizens, roughly a tenth of my monthly income. What I discovered later is that some folks had rather comfortable nests in this part of town - neither Tod nor Jeremy among them - and I set out to emulate that pattern as best I could. I’ve never broken with the habit of making myself as comfortable domestically as possible. When I’d first met Jeremy he had a place on Avenue B, much deeper into the East Village (the “alphabet” avenues A through D run east of First Avenue going toward the East River). Later Jeremy would move to First Avenue and 4th Street, the building next to Tod’s. Jeremy’s apartments were crash pads, pure and simple; he never planned to stick around. Tod had been in the neighborhood for several years already. But he too didn’t give much scope to home comforts, a fringe benefit his girlfriends always provided, and at whose places Tod spent most of his nights. After work he’d stop off at his own apartment to chill over a glass of wine and listen to some sides from his jazz collection, seldom going out before nine unless to the theater - his second passion after jazz - to catch an eight o’clock curtain.1 My daily routine was somewhere at midpoint between that of my two comrades. I was seldom out very late like Tod, nor up very early like Jeremy who, when unaccompanied, was asleep by nine. But where Tod was in the clubs most nights, or at the theater, and Jeremy, always working the phones, tirelessly planning or organizing something or other, and then content to watch a hour of television before retiring, I still had to spend a certain amount of time pondering the mysteries of Noam Chomsky’s system of Transformational Grammar. Until, that is, early ‘71 when I dropped out of my doctoral program to devote myself to radical politics exclusively, and to the self-directed education of an autodidact, a leftist tradition of long standing. All three of us spent a good deal of the time we weren’t working chasing after women. An old friend from Georgetown, who’s settled in New York helped me build a platform bed which filled my entire bedroom but created ample space for a chest and other storage underneath; I would cut a foot or two off those posts every time I moved thereafter, and that platform bed would follow me around for the next twenty years. For furniture and housewares I scoured the local second hand stores and flea markets, and found a choice piece or two on the streets uptown, still functional but that some upscale resident had tired of and discarded. Then I settled into the neighborhood I wouldn’t leave for a decade, and even then with considerable melancholy. I would quickly become captivated by the whole scene in the East Village, every minute detail of this rectangular Manhattan reservation, boarded by 14th Street on its upper end and thirteen blocks downtown by Houston Street. The neighborhood ran along the East River, facing Brooklyn on one side, and on the other along Broadway, across which you were now in Greenwich Village, also called the West Village. There was a small town aspect to the East Village, enhanced by its many modest shops and specialty stores, like those along lower First Avenue catering to the quarter’s large Ukranian and Polish immigrant populations. There were several butchers, their display windows festooned with multiple varieties of sausage and kielbasa. I particularly recall another little market where I purchased sweet butter by the chunk and fresh eggs trucked in daily from farms in New Jersey, or so it was claimed. The fruit and vegetable stands were still Italian-owned, but the quality of the produce had slipped badly and would recover only some years later when, virtually city-wide, these sidewalk produce stands were taken over by a new wave of immigrants from South Korea, who like their Italian predecessors two generations earlier, sought advancement in a traditional entry level enterprise.2 |
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