A Freewheelin' Time (12 page)

Huddled in doorways, sprawled casually in the gutter or on the litter-strewn sidewalks, hugging their booze bottles, they commented lazily or enthusiastically—depending on their level of alcohol intake—as people passed by. One evening I was engrossed in conversation with Mell Bailey while Bob and Lillian, trailing behind us, were talking together head to head as we made our way along the Bowery. A silhouetted figure of a man, using a building wall for support, watched us pass. Well, I’ll be, he said, if that ain’t integration, I don’t know what is!

W
e didn’t have parties at our place on West Fourth Street. The apartment was really small, and Bob didn’t want a constant parade of people coming and going, like Terri and Dave had. We both liked privacy. One evening, however, there were many people at the place and much booze and wine, along with something to smoke. I don’t remember who was there, but that might have to do more with what happened to me than with the passage of time.

After everyone left, I started feeling very strange. I had smoked and drunk some but not excessively. Suddenly I couldn’t stand up; I felt as though my arms and legs were being yanked away from my body. My surroundings were barely recognizable. Light was strobe-like and ghosting and sound was echoing and coming at me from all directions. I sat on the floor trying to hold on to my legs, wrapping my arms tightly around them. I tried to explain to Bobby what was happening. I think I was crawling around—rolling.

He was terrified. He held me, trying to help me feel safe. I saw he was in a state, because somewhere deep down and distant a part of me was calm and collected. I observed the other part of me that was intensely occupied with the task of maintaining my body as a single unit with limbs attached. This continued for the rest of the night, but I had no sense of time passing. Bob telephoned Charlie Rothschild’s brother Ed, who was a doctor. Ed told him not to worry, that by morning I should be OK.

As dawn was breaking, I stretched out my legs and arms. Whatever it was, it was over. We both fell asleep, exhausted. Someone had put something in my drink, as they say. We never found out who would do such a thing. I never voluntarily took LSD. That was it for me.

In the folk music world in the early days, it was a slow lope into marijuana use, and drug use in general. Booze was still it with the older crowd, and we were emulating them, but eventually drugs got equal billing. By the time the next group of Village explorers came on the scene, booze was on the way out, particularly with anyone who had been to college.

Downtown

The Off-Broadway theater
called One Sheridan Square was located in the basement of the building where I had lived for a time with my mother and Fred before they got married. A production of the Irish playwright Brendan Behan’s play
The Hostage
was playing at the theater and enjoying a long run. My sister Carla worked lights for the production and I had a job running the concession stand that was open before the show and during intermission. It was a great location, just up the street and around the corner from where Bobby and I were living on West Fourth Street.

I was standing in the back of the theater watching the play one evening when Behan himself wandered in. If Behan happened to be in the city where one of his plays was being put on, he had a habit of showing up and joining the performance. It made for interesting theater at times, especially when he engaged the actors in some improvisation. But he was a bit of a drinker and could completely disrupt the play if he was in his cups. I ran to the phone and called Bobby at home to tell him Brendan Behan was at the theater and he should come by.

Behan was very drunk. Listing left and right, he wandered onto the stage and, waving his hands about, made an incoherent speech to the actors. Then he abruptly teetered off the stage and out the door. He staggered up the stairs of the theater with Bob right behind him. Bob followed him to the White Horse, hoping for a conversation, but Behan was in no shape for anything remotely resembling talk and eventually passed out.

The rest of the evening and into the night at the infamous White Horse Tavern was as raucous as ever. The White Horse is known as the pub where, as legend has it, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas drank himself to death in 1953 by consuming something like thirty-two shots of whiskey in one go. He performed this feat after being told by his doctor that even a single shot could kill him.

I first went to the White Horse with my older friend Pete and then hung out there on and off for many years after. At the White Horse I was introduced to the paralyzing effect of Irish whiskey when I drank Irish coffee, Ireland’s cappuccino. Paddy, Tom, and Liam Clancy, the Irish folksingers who performed as the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, occupied a table in the back room most nights. Already very well known, they sang and told stories and had a good time along with everyone else who ended their evenings at the White Horse. Tom Clancy chased my sister home one night all the way down Perry Street declaring his undying love. They were friends and she usually knew how to handle him, but he was particularly out of it that night and required some big guys from the bar to calm him down.

Most of the women at the White Horse knew that was the risk of staying too long at the bar when Tom Clancy was nearby and drinking heavily. He was the wildest of the brothers, and they were a wild bunch. Liam had the gift of a fine tenor voice and he truly knew how to use it. He could make you weep when he sang a ballad. Tom and Paddy were dramatic and forceful singers. Tommy Makem’s liquid baritone had a tremulous vibrato and he carried the same kind of magic as Liam when he sang. I really liked Tommy. One of the songs in his repertoire that could hypnotize an audience was “The Cobbler,” which began, “Oh, me name is Dick Darby, I’m a cobbler.” Makem would put his foot up on a stool on the stage and proceed to rhythmically mime sewing a sole onto his shoe as he sang the song a cappella. It was mesmerizing. Together as a group the four sang traditional ballads, drinking songs, and Irish rebellion songs that made you want to take to the streets. These guys made singing a theatrical event: above all, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were actors who sang.

I
used the Eighth Street Bookshop, at MacDougal, as a kind of library, reading books a little at a time, going back every few days to sneak in a few more chapters of a book I didn’t have the money to buy. The very thin books of poetry were an easy read in one short visit. The Eighth Street Bookshop was known as the best bookstore in the neighborhood for new books. If you were buying old books or searching for bargains, the thing to do was to hunt and peck at the secondhand bookstores and stalls along Fourth Avenue.

This was a time when bookstores weren’t chain stores and had no chairs—let alone cafés—where customers could linger over books and magazines. Instead, people would lean against a shelf with a chosen book and try to be inconspicuous. I would squeeze between display tables and scrunch down on the floor to read, hoping no one would notice. My friend Janet Kerr introduced me to
The Diary of Anaïs Nin,
and I read the first volume at the bookshop along with some Henry Miller novels.

Anaïs Nin kept a diary from childhood and wrote in it throughout her life. She lived in Spain, France, and the United States and recorded her many affairs, including a long liaison with Miller and his wife, June. She alluded to an incestuous relationship with her father. For Janet and me, she was a revelation. We were in awe of her feminine voice, an internal one that was mysterious, sensual, and tantalizingly illicit. We drank from it.

Janet and I met early on when she was going out with Johnny Herald, a good friend of Bobby’s who was the lead singer and guitar player in the Greenbriar Boys. Johnny was lean, with chiseled features and black hair. For a city boy he had a true high lonesome sound—a gorgeous voice. “A leather-lunged tenor,” said
New York Times
music critic Robert Shelton in the same article that placed Bob Dylan on the fast track to fame and fortune.

The September 29, 1961,
Times
review of Bob’s performance at Gerde’s was over-the-top exciting. We got the early edition of the paper late at night at the newspaper kiosk on Sheridan Square and went across the street to an all-night deli to read it. Then we went back and bought more copies.

Though the photograph was unflattering, the article wasn’t by any means. The review was glorious, a true coup. Robert Shelton had been around the clubs and bars for ages, seeing every new and old performer, but he’d never written a review quite like the one he wrote for Bobby. “Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik” and “bursting at the seams with talent” were highlights. “Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up” was another insightful line.

Shelton’s breakthrough review

The Greenbriar Boys were the headliners at Gerde’s, and although they were very favorably reviewed, clearly the article’s focus was on Bob. Nearly all of his pay for the two-week gig went right back into Gerde’s coffers, however. He had one hell of a bar tab, and now it was obvious he was going to have the money to pay it.

J
anet Kerr had left Seattle for New York City sometime in the late 1950s, and although she was in her early twenties when we met in 1961, she’d already been married and was in the process of getting a divorce. She had blond hair and jewel-like bright blue eyes with thick black lashes. Unlike the other girls around the Village, Janet wore red lipstick and blush on her cheeks in addition to the eye makeup we all wore. She invited me to her apartment on East Eighty-first Street near her job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was really impressed with her creativity. She’d crafted a lovely home for herself out of odds and ends that she’d found on the street or had made herself. A short time later she moved to Johnny’s apartment in the Village, and since Bobby and Johnny were pals the four of us went around together. Or the two guys would go off someplace, and Janet and I would go someplace else. Then we’d all meet later.

Janet Kerr

One night Johnny, Janet, Bobby, and I were at the White Horse when Bob Shelton, who had a penchant for protesting that “it is the shank of the evening” whenever there was a sign of things winding down, invited everyone back to his apartment on Waverly Place. The four of us finished our drinks and managed the walk from Hudson Street to Waverly Place without incident. Once there, despite the state we were already in, we accepted the offer of more to drink. Bobby, clasping the stem of a full glass of wine in his hand, slumped on the couch and within minutes fell fast asleep. The party went on around him, with everyone speculating as to when he would let go of his glass. When he woke up some time later, the glass was still upright in his hand and not so much as a drop had spilled—a remarkable sight to all assembled. I stared at him in amazement. What? he mumbled as he took a swig.

The Greenbriar Boys played a lot at Gerde’s so Janet was around for the music as often as I was. She sang and knew how to play the autoharp, but back then she didn’t let on that she could. Janet was inventive with clothing the way I was and we used to haunt the thrift shops looking for interesting stuff to wear. We both made our own clothes and we’d often roam the fabric stores in search of good remnants. We didn’t really like to sew per se, but we loved making things.

The dusty secondhand bookshops and the junk stores along Canal Street were great places to find inspiration and precious treasures. Eventually we made and sold art-to-wear jewelry that we constructed out of bits of our cut-up paintings, papier-mâché mounted on tin can lids, and other found objects. We came up with the idea of making jewelry that would clip on and then dangle from the tops of our boots. We called our line Suja-baubles, from Suze and Janet.

We printed up business cards and made portable display cases for our wares out of old file boxes. It was a little too soon for stores to contemplate a line of hippie or bohemian clothing, let alone jewelry of the handmade sort. We were thrilled when we managed to get an appointment with the accessories buyer for Bloomingdale’s. But the woman did not bother to hide her disdain as we earnestly showed her our jewelry and demonstrated how to dress up a pair of boots with a Suja-bauble.

Offended that someone in her position could be so blatantly rude, we left the store and headed back downtown to think of other stores to try. We managed to make a little money here and there, but it certainly wasn’t a living, which is what we were hoping for.

We did have fun trying though.