A Freewheelin' Time (4 page)

Death

I went
to Bryant High School in Long Island City, Queens, a bus and subway ride from where I lived in Jackson Heights. When I graduated in 1960, at sixteen years old, my prospects were limited to an extended version of what had been my summer jobs. My father had died suddenly in 1958 and I missed two weeks of school. The first week was for obvious reasons, and the second was a gift of a trip to Puerto Rico.

My mother worked for Samuel Rosen, an ear doctor who had originated stapes mobilization, a surgical procedure that cured a certain kind of deafness. The singer Johnnie Ray was one of his patients, but Dr. Rosen wasn’t able to do much for him. My self-educated mother knew French and Italian, and her job involved translating correspondence, some medical papers, and writings about his procedure.

After my father’s sudden death, Sam and his wife, Helen, gently insisted that my distraught mother and I come with them, all expenses paid, to a medical conference in Puerto Rico. At fourteen years old I had never been in a hotel, but I knew this was an especially luxurious one, with a pool, a balcony, room service, and all. The Rosens were wonderful people.

When I returned to school I was even more distracted and withdrawn than usual, and I didn’t do well. The only class I looked forward to was Drama Workshop, or maybe it was called Theater History. The teacher, Mr. Kaufman, did not give me a hard time about what I had missed. I was in the plays the class put on for the school, and he made sure I continued reading and doing scenes.

Other teachers were less sympathetic about my circumstances. The science teacher gave me a D, citing excessive absence. Others left out the written comment but gave similar grades. I distinctly remember one teacher who chose to tell me directly what a loser I was and that I had better shape up or I would never amount to anything. He was the same English teacher who in my sophomore year felt it was his duty to use me to illustrate to the class what the expression
lack of poise
meant. Justice was mine, however, because many years later, while I was waiting for a subway train, I spotted him walking along the platform mumbling to himself with a large wet stain on his crotch. I knew who he was despite the change in his demeanor, but he didn’t recognize me.

With nine hundred kids in the graduating class, Bryant High School worked on shifts, and the classes were overcrowded. I was aware that the teachers were overworked and underpaid and didn’t always know their students, but understanding that didn’t help. My attitude changed. I stopped caring and didn’t even attempt to keep up. I preferred the extracurricular activities the school offered. In addition to Drama Workshop, I did artwork and layout for the school newspaper and joined a current events discussion group. The result was a low average, which was not helped by the fact that I scored slightly above fool on my SATs. I didn’t do well on tests. In any case, college material I was not.

Wrapped up in grief, my mother was in no condition to care. At forty-seven, she was widowed for a second time—her first husband had drowned in an accident when she was in her early twenties—but now she was left with two teenaged daughters. It was not comforting or comfortable to be around her. She spent a lot of time trying to find survival skills inside a bottle.

Life at home was thrown off the last vestiges of balance. It was the end of our world as we had known it, the end of childhood—the end of innocence and the beginning of a new kind of fear.

M
y father had suffered what was diagnosed as a mild heart attack two years earlier, shortly after President Eisenhower suffered a serious one. I don’t know if Eisenhower smoked, but my father did. He was six feet tall and in no way overweight, but he had had tuberculosis as a child, making him unqualified for military service. I’ve heard it said that TB takes a toll on the body, even if one recovers from it. Cigarettes certainly took a toll, but smoking in his day was promoted as good for you.

My father worked at Mergenthaler, a linotype factory near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was a shop steward for the union and well liked by his coworkers, even though they were aware of his politics.

He had bought a car, which made the trip to Brooklyn from Queens a little easier. When he had the heart attack he was driving home from work. My mother was very anxious because he was unusually late. When he finally made it home, he could barely climb the stairs. Apparently he had stopped the car by the side of the road several times to wait for the pain to subside before continuing.

He took a medical leave from work and began to paint and to cook. It was strange having someone at home when I returned from school. Painting with oils was difficult in a small apartment, so instead he used gouache or watercolors, and he did a lot of drawing. I would often pose for him when I got home but after he died, in the upheavals that ensued, somehow the drawings were lost.

His coworkers from the Mergenthaler factory visited him on weekends, and when the decision was made to leave his job for good, they took up a collection and bought us a television set. He planned to work as a freelance illustrator and take up painting again. Despite the fact that he had suffered a heart attack, he was noticeably happier. He sang as he worked on drawings at the kitchen table.

He continued to smoke, however, even though the doctor told him to quit. Both he and my mother smoked unfiltered Chesterfield cigarettes. By then so did my sister, but maybe she smoked something with a filter, newly on the market. Not too many years later, I took up the family tradition.

Just when he seemed to be getting stronger, my father was hit by some sort of ministroke that left half of his face paralyzed. I was embarrassed to have my friends see him with his face held together with medical tape, looking disfigured. Gradually the feeling in his face came back, but he did not look well. He was thin and drawn and looked much older than his years.

On top of this, my mother had been diagnosed with an overactive thyroid and an ulcer; it was a highly stressful time. I was in my junior year of high school, and Carla had started Hunter College.

Socialist realism for Christmas

We both traveled by bus and subway to our respective schools, but at different times, so our paths never crossed. On an unusually mild February day, considering there had been a snowstorm a few days before, my sister chose to go home right after her last class ended, and we caught the same bus at the Roosevelt Avenue subway station.

We thought that it was an odd thing for us to meet and we laughed over the coincidence. On the three-block walk home from the bus, we were in a good mood. Just a few yards from the apartment, Selma Shill came running out, calling, Girls, girls, come here! She sounded frantic. She ushered us in to her house to block our view of our father’s car, motor running loudly, with him slumped over the steering wheel.

Selma was saying over and over that something terrible had happened. And of course it had. Our father had been headed to meet his painter friend, Ralph Fasanella, who worked in a gas station for many years and wasn’t discovered until the 1970s, to see the studio they were planning to rent together. Afterwards he was to pick up our mother at Dr. Rosen’s office in Manhattan. My father had gone to the car, turned on the motor, and died. Selma said later that she kept hearing this strange sound, and when she looked out her window, she saw him in the car. Realizing what had happened she called an ambulance and then sat in wait for it and for us. At some point I saw from the window my father lying on the ground in front of the building, covered by a sheet. A crowd had gathered. People were standing nearby staring, and the neighborhood kids were dancing around and playing. They had no idea the sky had fallen. It was fortunate that my sister and I came home together that day.

T
he year my father died I was reading the poetry of Lord Byron and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I came across her poem “Lament,” which begins:

Listen, children:

Your father is dead.

And concludes:

Life must go on,

And the dead be forgotten;

Life must go on,

Though good men die;

Anne, eat your breakfast;

Dan, take your medicine;

Life must go on;

I forget just why.

Its accuracy stunned me.

As I grew up and older and my life became what I made of it, I acquired a habit of taking special note of technological developments. I would think of a way my father, who died in 1958, might regard these new inventions. We had a telephone back then and a TV, and Dr. Rosen had given us a reel-to-reel tape recorder. So reasonably my father could have grasped the technological evolution to cassette tapes and portable music. Cell phones, CD players, DVDs, and videos—he could have handled all that. Computers were problematic, but once I walked him through the other stuff, he might grasp it.

It was a game, really. I didn’t for one minute believe anyone could come back alive. It was a way to think about the world as it was and to inventory the changes I would normally take for granted.

A trauma creates a freeze frame, stopping time in a still series of snapshots that pop up in total recall if the day or subject is referenced in some way. The year 1958 became my yardstick.

But a thought struck me as the century ended and the new one began. It’s not so much the technological advancements that show how different our world is: it is the change in people. The people of New York City in 1958 were predominantly white or black. Immigrants came from Europe, as my father had. To compare the faces on a subway train in 1958 with the faces in the twenty-first century becomes incomprehensible. I couldn’t possibly walk someone through the immense cultural changes, both the visible and the invisible. So I let my father go. I no longer idly sift through the changes around me and attempt to define them. I let them accumulate and use what I need to live in the present.

Beginnings

McCarthyism reigned
supreme during the 1950s, its influence—like a slowly retreating flood—permeated the decade, and the damage left in its wake was evident in the beginning of the next one. In the span of ten years Stalin had died and the Rosenbergs had been sent to the electric chair. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, was elected president in 1952 and served two terms. A notable act he was responsible for, in addition to denying executive clemency to the Rosenbergs, was completely desegregating the armed forces.

Since we didn’t own a television set until 1957, the radio and the phonograph held sway. The music we listened to included recordings of folk music from around the world, the Édith Piaf and Billie Holiday records my mother loved, opera arias my father sang along with, classical music, and Toscanini conducting the NBC Radio Orchestra. A program called
Make-Believe Ballroom
delivered mostly bland popular music until the day the DJ placed a single titled “Sh-Boom” on the turntable, inaugurating the arrival of rock and roll on mainstream radio.

Folk music had been sidelined as being for radicals, especially after the nationally known folk group the Weavers, with the Communist Party member Pete Seeger on banjo and vocals, had become victims of the blacklist, making it impossible for them to appear on TV or in concert halls and clubs. The Cold War had hit its stride.

M
y sister Carla was seventeen in 1958, in her first year at Hunter College. She had a group of friends whose families had a political background similar to ours. I was a withdrawn fourteen-year-old, and our mother might have asked her to take me under her wing. For whatever reason, she decided to bring me along to a party she was going to. She and a girlfriend put a few tissues in my bra, undid my ponytail, and gave me a cute skirt to wear so that I’d look less like a kid. I was still very awkward, but progress was being made. They schooled me in a few dance moves and made sure I knew the words to the Gene Vincent song “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” I was happy. Usually my sister treated me like a bug she needed to swat away, but life had radically changed a few months previously with the death of our father, and now I was getting some friendly attention.

With Carla and my mother, ca. 1959

I had a great time at the party. There was no way to hide in a corner with this group. Right away a few boys headed my way, to my amazement. In school I was another sort of bug, to be avoided by boys and even some of the girls. In contrast, this party was heaven. I felt less like an outsider with these people. We actually had things to talk about. One boy read the same poetry I did and told me he was learning to play classical guitar. The other boy liked opera; I didn’t think anybody knew about opera but my family, some of our friends, and the man who played it on the radio. He invited me on a date (a date!!) to go to the Amato Opera House on the Bowery to see a performance of
La Bohème
the following week. The boy who read poetry looked a little miffed. I lied and said I was fifteen when he asked my age and for my phone number. He was sixteen, and I thought he was very intelligent.

After that life definitely improved. I was more confident and my circle of friends gradually grew over the next few years. Most of them lived farther out in Queens than I did or out on Long Island. Because we went to different high schools, we would arrange to meet in the Square (as Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village was called) to listen to the folk musicians who gathered there to play on Sundays. Folk music was the antiestablishment music, the music of the left. In addition to traditional folk songs there were songs about unions and fighting fascists, about brotherhood, equality, and peace.

Most of us were children of Communists or socialists, red-diaper babies raised on Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Pete Seeger. We had listened to Oscar Brand’s
Folksong Festival
on the radio while still in our cribs. The pop radio stations played ridiculous treacle, the worst of which was a song called “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” sung by Patti Page.

Late at night Carla and I would listen to WWVA, a country music radio station out of Wheeling, West Virginia. We heard Les Paul and Mary Ford, Hank Williams, Faron Young, the Everly Brothers, and others on a program called
Grand Ole Opry.
This was new and exciting for us; I adored the Everly Brothers and Hank Williams, especially.

The atmosphere in Washington Square Park was lively. Groups of musicians would play and sing anything from old folk songs to bluegrass. Old Italian men from the neighborhood played their folk music on mandolins. Everyone played around the fountain and people would wander from group to group, listening and maybe singing along. A banjo player gave me an ebony banjo peg and I wore it on a string around my neck for a long time. There were poets reading their poems and political types handing out fliers for Trot-skyist, Communist, or anarchist meetings and hawking their newspapers. Children played in the playground while their mothers talked together on the benches. The occasional religious zealot held forth, waving a Bible, haranguing sinners about redemption. Everything overlapped nicely.

I
looked forward to Sunday in the Square with my friends and to that particular atmosphere. On Friday or Saturday nights we would meet and go to folk concerts—hootenannies—at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, and a concert hall that no longer exists and whose location I no longer remember, the Pythian. Pete Seeger, who personified the power of folk song, was the draw, heading the roster of a list of performers that included his sister Peggy Seeger and her husband, Ewan MacColl, who sat on a chair on the stage with his hand cupped around his ear singing Scottish ballads and sea chanties a cappella.

Sunday in Washington Square, early sixties

The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, four Irishmen wearing thickly knit white fisherman sweaters, always brought down the house with their energetic renditions of everything from bawdy drinking songs to heartrending ballads of the Irish struggles. A more formal concert might be a program of “Folk Songs from Many Lands,” with Cynthia Gooding as headliner. Cynthia was over six feet tall and sang songs in several languages in a throaty alto. She stood on the stage in a flowing dress with her guitar high on her body, looking elegant as she rendered an old Italian folk tune in perfectly enunciated Italian. Though an incongruous combination of elements, the performance worked because of her sexy voice.

At one of these folk concerts I saw the singer John Jacob Niles, who looked like an ancient balladeer brought forth from the dead. With his spectral appearance and eerily high voice—which I later learned was a classic countertenor—he provoked thoughts of the castrati of bygone times. Watching him perform, reaching for a still higher high note, made me feel that he might lose control and dissolve into a puddle on the stage—or maybe disintegrate into a pile of bone and ash instead. He truly scared me.

Some years later, when I was living in the Village, I met a countertenor named John Winn whose voice did not sound unnatural at all; it was lovely and warm and it helped that he was young and not scary looking. John Winn’s repertoire consisted of the songs of John Dowland, ballads, and folk songs, but he also sang old bawdy ballads. He would get Van Ronk, Dylan, and the bass-voiced Ed McCurdy up onstage with him to sing madrigals. The four of them were quite an unruly and truly funny sight—no formal attitude or attire—yet they never failed to bring patrons of the clubs and bars to their feet as they belted out the madrigals in four-part harmony, because they really sounded extraordinarily good.

The satiric songwriter and performer Tom Lehrer, who also taught mathematics at Harvard, was a big draw and my friends and I went to his concerts at Carnegie Hall or Town Hall. He wrote very funny songs satirizing the politically dangerous and socially strangled times we were living in, banging them out on a grand piano, singing at full volume with a deadpan delivery. One song exposed the dubious ethics of Wernher von Braun, who first developed rockets for the Nazis and later for the United States:

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,

Say rather that he’s apolitical.

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

N
one of us had much money, and over time we developed a system to get into Carnegie Hall without a ticket. We pooled our resources and bought one or maybe two tickets. Then we’d charge the entrance door. When the usher asked for the ticket, we’d say that the person behind us had it and point in that direction. Far behind in the crowded line, the designated person would wave the ticket for a second, and we would pass through, repeating, he’s got them, as we pointed vaguely off to the rear. Then we would race up the stairs to the top balcony and sit in any available empty seat or hide in the bathrooms until the concert began. We knew the ushers could not leave their posts to come after us. This technique worked well back in those more open and innocent times. We got so good at it that we stopped buying tickets altogether.

W
e also went to the Ethical Culture Society on West Sixty-fourth Street, just off Central Park, a humanistic religious and educational organization that gave classes on a variety of subjects for all ages. In the big gymnasium they offered weekly folk dancing lessons. Though I went to a few of the political study classes with fellow red-diaper babies, I was never enthralled by theoretical political discussions of Marxism, socialism, or any other ism. Mostly we were there to socialize, like the other kids. I hated the folk dancing; I was young and curious, but not that curious.

My political beliefs were based on a dislike of injustice and a fear of the bomb. It is hard to comprehend this fear now, as it is only one of so many, but postwar culture was possessed by the threat of Communism and the hydrogen bomb. All throughout elementary school we were instructed to duck and cover: duck under our desks, face away from the windows, and cover the backs of our heads. When the siren stopped, we took our seats again and the teacher resumed the lesson. In high school I was put on probation for soliciting signatures on a petition to ban the bomb distributed by the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, or SANE, a worldwide organization for nuclear disarmament with Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Schweitzer, and Bertrand Russell as prominent spokespersons.

Two of my close girlfriends and I volunteered to be ushers at a rally in Madison Square Garden for SANE in 1959. The three of us were taken backstage to meet Eleanor Roosevelt, the keynote speaker that evening. Overcome by adolescent shyness, we weren’t able to recall what she said to us, but we have a clear memory of her smile as she came forward to shake our hands. It was thrilling for each of us to encounter this remarkable woman.

The 1950s were a very repressive and politically black-and-white time; there were no shades of gray. To conform was the ideal and to be different was to be suspect.

Joseph McCarthy, the anti-Communist Republican senator from Wisconsin, ruled the media, spinning horror tales about Reds hiding everywhere, ready to destroy the American way of life. Communists were lurking not only in the government but also in the classroom, taking over the unions, writing books and songs, and making movies. A Red could be your child’s piano teacher.

The FBI was knocking on doors, tapping phones, visiting people’s workplaces, and always leaving behind a sprinkle of doubt. The imprisonment and execution of the Rosenbergs as Russian spies left young children of Communists unable to comprehend what was really going on and fearful that their parents might be next. I know I was. I would stare at the newspaper pictures of the Rosenberg children and be paralyzed with worry for them and for myself.

There was a boy in the group of kids who went to political studies classes at the Ethical Culture Society who was serious, quiet, and nice-looking. He smelled of Old Spice. In the classes he could speak knowledgeably and intelligently about Marxism, socialism, capitalism, and politics in general. I was flattered by the attention he paid to me, but when the two of us were together, we were too shy to carry on much of a conversation.