A Freewheelin' Time (7 page)

Sideswipes

My mother was
doing better. We had a few normal telephone conversations, and although I don’t remember any details, I am sure we saw each other at Christmas. She had been working on a plan to move to Italy and since I was still a minor she would take me with her. It seemed like an interesting idea. I wasn’t planning on having a career as a clerk at the Book-of-the-Month Club, and all the people I used to hang around with were away at college. I applied for a passport and gave notice that I would be leaving my job around mid-March 1961. My mother had friends in Rome who would help us begin a new life. I hadn’t lived with her in a while, but I wasn’t overly worried because living in Rome would be a completely new situation. She seemed to be her old self again, and even though that wasn’t necessarily reassuring, at least as her old self she was familiar.

She was still living in the Queens apartment and I said I would come and stay to sort through my things and pack away what I wanted to keep, which would be stored at the home of a relative on Long Island who had offered space in her basement. But when I got home, to my shock my mother had already gone through everything and had gotten rid of things I wasn’t ready to part with. You just could not trust her, really. After she died one of her oldest friends said of her: Mary was a great friend to be with because she was entertaining and fun, but she wouldn’t be there for you. You would be there for her. She was my good friend, but not a best friend.

My mother did not spare the rod, especially with my sister, who challenged her. I watched and learned that survival meant silence. I learned where to and how to hide myself for protection. Once when I objected to something or other, she said, No, don’t you start. Not you, too.

I had nightmares about her in her red bathrobe, black hair flying about her face as she hurled her rage at us.

No one is ever just one thing, though. My mother had a magnetic personality, intelligence, beauty, and convictions. She was a great storyteller and had many friends who adored her. I always understood and forgave her. From early on, within the turmoil of our family, I had the temperament most similar to that of my quiet, thoughtful father. My mother and sister were more volatile and often entangled with each other. After his death I was heir to his role as peacemaker, although I was hardly up to the task. Still, it was better than succumbing to chaos. As the years went by, however, I began to feel more and more like the English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain before the outbreak of World War II.

A
s we got closer to the date in April when we were to leave on a passenger ship bound for Italy, I had a dream that was very perfunctory: we could not get on the boat. Something was wrong and we weren’t able to board.

Toward the end of March my mother and I drove to my grandparents’ farm in Connecticut, where we stayed a few days before continuing on to Boston to say good-bye to the rest of the family. Everyone felt it was the right choice for my mother to live in Rome and an excellent opportunity for me. We had a nice sendoff. My mother was relaxed and in good spirits. After passing a tollbooth on our way back to New York City, I had a vision—there is no other way to put it. I saw in front of us the little gray Renault car we were riding in. I watched us in our car, clear as a bell, driving ahead of ourselves on the highway. The sight gave me a very unsettled feeling, because we looked so small and vulnerable. But after a minute it was gone, and the road in front of me returned to normal.

It was a long drive from Boston to New York. We had left early in the day in clear weather and now it was heading toward dusk, with a light rain falling. I must have dozed off, and when I woke up I heard a voice saying, Just cut her clothes off. Just cut them.

Through what seemed like dirty eyeglasses, I could make out someone wearing a mask, peering into my face. I remember thinking that I didn’t really like the pants I was wearing, but I was sorry about the sweater. And then I thought of something my aunt Val had laughingly said to me when I showed her the red satin bra I had bought: You better think about where you are going when you wear that. If you’re in an accident, someone might get the wrong idea. I wasn’t wearing the bra that day.

We had been heading south on the Hutchinson River Parkway in a lot of traffic with low visibility. A woman driving a big white Cadillac had missed her exit and decided to back up and across four lanes of highway to return to it. She never saw us, in our little gray Renault, and my mother never saw her. Now we were in a hospital in the Bronx lucky to be alive since the Renault was crushed like an accordion. Back then, in 1961, there were no seat belts. My mother’s kneecap had smashed into the steering wheel post and she needed an operation to have her kneecap removed. She had a small crescent-shaped cut on her forehead. I had crashed into the side window of the passenger seat and my right eyelid was lacerated. I couldn’t move my left side and we both had broken ribs and concussions. I later learned that the young doctor in the emergency room that night had stitched the area around my eye together by matching eyebrow hairs.

I was ready to be sent home after three or four days wearing a neck brace and a bandage over an eye, which I later covered with a black patch. My mother was still in the hospital recovering from the knee operation and in a full leg cast. I went to stay with the Ehrenbergs, family friends who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and my mother eventually moved in with friends who lived a few blocks away.

Mike Ehrenberg and my mother had met as teenagers in Boston. He was the friend on the sailboat when her first husband drowned. Our families grew up close; their children and my sister and I were part of the red-diaper baby bond that originated in Sunnyside, Queens.

After many trips to specialists and neurologists, I was told I had suffered severe whiplash, but because I was asleep and my body relaxed at the moment of impact, my spinal cord hadn’t been damaged. I was extremely lucky though I had to wear the neck brace and go to physical therapy. My eye was another matter: the cuts had severed nerves that might or might not grow back, and I could neither open nor close my eye all the way. The thirty stitches across my eyelid and eyebrow would leave a scar that would fade over time, but once again I had been lucky, because my vision was not affected. A half-lidded eye with a jagged scar made me look dangerous in a monster-movie way. And a black eye patch wasn’t a bad accessory.

Annie, Mike’s wife, was working at the Metropolitan Opera Guild and she could get free tickets. Deciding it was time I left the house, she gave me a ticket to see a matinee performance of Alban Berg’s
Wozzeck.
She knew I was self-conscious about going out in a neck brace and eye patch, so she lent me a long, flowing chiffon scarf and helped me wrap it elegantly around the brace as she pushed me out the door. I will never forget
Wozzeck.
I was an Italian kid brought up on Puccini and Verdi. I never knew an opera could sound like that! To my ears, accustomed to the melodic drama of lyric opera, this music sounded like moaning; it was guttural and slightly menacing and it was thrilling beyond words.

Thanks to Annie, the ice was broken and I began venturing out beyond visits to the physical therapist and to my mother a few blocks away, miserable about being immobile in a full leg cast for six months. She told me that she never lost consciousness during the accident and would forever be haunted by the sight of me crumpled in the car with my face covered in blood. I know she didn’t mean it that way, but I felt as if I had done it to her on purpose.

Fortunately Pete called and took me for more car rides and eventually, when I looked better, to Gerde’s Folk City.

After Effects

The plan to move
to Italy was put on a back burner and I soon forgot about it. My eye had improved, and I had graduated from a neck brace to a foam cervical collar that I wore to alleviate the pain from a pinched nerve. A lawsuit was in the works, but there was no way to know how long it would take to sort it out. A great deal depended on whether the insurance companies involved would settle or go to trial. The outcome seemed obvious, but the companies still had to duke it out.

My mother’s lawyer came up with a strategy that he felt would benefit me, the passenger. He suggested I sue my mother (in actuality, her insurance company) in a separate suit. We’d go after the insurance company of the woman driving the white Cadillac in a separate legal action.

This scheme was legally possible because, although a minor, I was living on my own and was financially independent of my mother at the time of the accident. An innocent young passenger on the witness stand with a scarred eye and nearly broken neck would pull on the heartstrings of a jury, said the lawyer. And he insisted that my separate suit would not mean that my mother was at fault. This was a common tactic, he assured us, used in civil suits that involved insurance companies suing each other.

No one liked this notion, particularly my mother, who felt horribly guilty about the accident. But in the end she deferred to the professional. Didn’t the lawyer handle things like this all the time? About a year or more later, the case went to civil trial. During the voir dire process, each prospective juror was asked whether he or she objected to a daughter’s suing her mother. It was not legally permissible to say that it was really about suing her insurance company. My mother and I had to sit there and listen to the majority of them respond with disgust. One man even made an indignant What is this world coming to? speech for the occasion.

Uh-oh. I was put on the witness stand to describe the pain from the pinched nerve and the various effects of the whiplash, which limited neck movement and sapped my overall endurance and strength. The cross-examining lawyer stunned me by saying that none of that seemed to hamper my ability to participate in political protests in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, to work at places like CORE and as a waitress carrying trays, to attend art classes at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts, and to live the life of a beatnik in Greenwich Village (hippies hadn’t been invented yet). The cultural divide of the 1960s was already evident.

In the end I was to receive something like $7,000 and my mother about half that, once the two lawyers had deducted their fee of one-third from both of us. This provoked a comment from my mother about the possibility of there being some truth in the stereotype of lawyers as sharks. The check arrived sometime in the fall of 1964, more than three years after the accident.

T
hough my mother did not want to move back to Queens, she changed her mind once she was out of the leg cast. Many things needed doing. Eventually she planned to move into Manhattan and possibly share an apartment with her brother, Val’s soon-to-be ex-husband. It was a scary time because she had no money except a small sum from a life insurance policy; she no longer worked full-time for Dr. Rosen. I have no idea how either of us got by. I was seventeen and overwhelmed by my life, so I did my best not to think about anything. My escape was to read books and to draw. But I needed to earn a living.

It was easy to find a job as a waitress or what was known as a girl Friday, which meant you were a girl and you could file, answer telephones, type, make coffee, and run errands for the male boss. Before I found the job at the Book-of-the-Month Club in the fall of 1960, I had searched the want ads for the most mindless jobs I could find. I remember getting work for two weeks in a dingy warehouse somewhere in Midtown counting coupons that people had mailed in for rebates. I knew I couldn’t go that route again and still have a will to live.

After I left the apartment of my surrogate family, the Ehrenbergs, on West End Avenue, I stayed at my sister Carla’s apartment on Perry Street. It was a small railroad flat that was fine for short stays. We had a tempestuous relationship at times, and neither of us wanted to hedge our bets and live together in a small space for an indefinite period. She could be bossy like an older sister, but she was generous and protective, too. I was welcome there until I found something of my own.

As it turned out, a couple my sister knew who had an apartment on Waverly Place just west of Washington Square were going to England for a few months and wanted someone to house-sit. It was perfect. The Waverly Place apartment was within walking distance of every bookstore, coffeehouse, and music club in the Village. Whatever job I had during the day gave way to nights with good music and good talk. I began to accumulate some possessions again.

Artwork on a blank album

I shopped along Fourth Avenue, at the many secondhand bookstores with great selections and great prices, and in Midtown, at a record store somewhere in the Forties with bins and bins of long-playing records in plain white card-board covers with a hole punched in the upper corner. It was possible to find all kinds of music at unbelievable prices. I bought all of the Harry Smith recordings of American old-time folk music, one at a time. I would paint or draw my own cover art.

Now all I needed was to find a way to earn my living, something more solid than the odd freelance jobs I’d taken at strange places around the Village that never paid much or involved seedy characters doing shady things. Or maybe that was just my imagination.

I answered the telephone for a man who ran a mail order business and was a follower of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian scientist and psychologist who believed that the cause of all sickness (physical and psychological) was failing to achieve true orgasm. Reich claimed to have discovered an energy called orgone that was the “basic life-stuff of the universe.” He developed and marketed something called the orgone box that could cure all ills if you sat in it for a certain amount of time each day. The man I was working for had an orgone box somewhere in the back of his home office that he would go into on lunch breaks. One day he came out wearing only a towel and walked by me, letting it slip slowly to the floor as he passed. I was out the door in no time.

I found work making puppet body parts in a loft near Delancey Street for Peter Schumann, master puppet maker and artist, who’d just started his Bread and Puppet Theater. A very sincere and committed man, Schumann was a true visionary. At that time he was using a product called celastic to make the heads and hands for his oversized puppets. Similar to papier-mâché, celastic was mixed with an acetone solvent and layered in strips over a mold until it hardened. When it dried, it was lightweight and very durable—perfect for theatrical use. The smell was intoxicating and probably toxic.

We worked hard but happily. The pay was nothing much, but living in New York City in those years was very cheap and working with Peter and other artists was certainly worthwhile. Unfortunately the work ended when the puppets and props project was completed. Not long after, Peter moved the Bread and Puppet Theater to Vermont.

Sometime in the spring I began working at the New York City office of CORE. It was a markedly different time from two or three years earlier, when we were picketing the Woolworth stores around the city, protesting their policy of segregated lunch counters in the South, and collecting money and signatures door to door for the marches on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the Integration of Schools.

It was 1961, the year of the first Freedom Rides and the expansion of sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Pure, unadulterated white racism was soon to be splattered all over the media as the violence against civil rights workers escalated. White people were looking at themselves and what their history had wrought, like a domestic animal having its face shoved into its own urine.

Exposed for all to see was the ugly and misshapen reality of two societies, separate and unequal. Voices coming to the fore to speak out on these things were many and emanated from everywhere. Cases were being brought before the Supreme Court that would change the laws of the land and the culture of the country.

The New York CORE office was at 38 Park Row in downtown Manhattan, across from City Hall Park. Facing the park from the opposite side on Broadway, always in view as I crossed the park on my way to work, stood one of New York City’s architectural beauties, the Woolworth Building, built in 1913.

My recollection of the office itself was of a not very big main room at the end of a dark corridor with a few dusty windows on the far wall that looked out on the narrow street below. Desks and chairs were set up wherever there was a need for them. I think there might have been only one room with a door, which was used as a private space separate from the main office.

Meetings and consultations took place spontaneously. It was a heady time. It was necessary to keep track of the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides in order to get information to the news media. Staff made fund-raising calls and organized fund-raising events. I worked with a few others sending out mailings and cataloging the donations that were coming in. Those cumbersome old black telephones rang off the hook, lights flashing on the row of buttons below the round rotary dial. CORE field-workers were calling in from all over, reporting on the latest beating or the latest actions. The violence in the South was terrifying; all of us working in the New York office were in a constant state of tension. The media weren’t that interested initially in the random acts of violence aimed at civil rights workers, but when the Greyhound bus carrying the first group of black and white Freedom Riders was firebombed in Anniston, Alabama, a rest stop on the way to Birmingham, the press came to full attention.

Jim Peck, a committed pacifist who had worked since the 1940s with James Farmer, the founder of CORE, was on another Freedom Ride bus when it arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, May 14, 1961. Peck was a tall, thin, middle-aged white man. When he and the others sat down at the Trailways lunch counter in the bus station, all hell broke loose. A group of white men ripped them from their stools and savagely beat them with lead pipes as the crowd, spewing verbal abuse, egged the attackers on. There was no police presence at all. It was Mother’s Day and the police were all visiting their mothers, was the explanation given by the local police chief.

With the scene captured on film, the story went around the world. Over many years we have become accustomed to seeing such things, but at that time it had a chilling effect. Whites were bound to pay attention now that a white man was in serious condition after being viciously beaten by a mob.

On Monday the CORE office was in a frenzy of activity. With everyone now frantic with concern over the condition of the Freedom Riders and the future of the rides, the climate at the office was altered. You just knew that the civil rights movement had gone to another level—at last attention would be paid. So it was, and the rest is history.

Civil rights was on everyone’s mind. It was part of the conversation of our times, along with the fear of nuclear war and the recent revolution in Cuba. Hope lay with John F. Kennedy as the new president, the first one to be born in the twentieth century, who might really do something about the horrors happening in the South and bring a sense of vitality and hope to a country that seemed to be stagnating. There was a fascination with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who had made the revolution in Cuba and were challenging the monoliths of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union, with their dashing, rebellious thumb-in-your-eye-plague-on-both-your-houses behavior. Not to mention the contrasting philosophies of Martin Luther King’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s militance. But nothing was ever publicly discussed about women, black or white, being at the bottom of the pecking order of society. That would come later.

D
uring the height of the civil rights era Bob wrote, among other songs, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “The Death of Emmett Till,” “The Ballad of Medgar Evers,” and, of course “Blowing in the Wind,” which became a kind of anthem. These songs are not just newspaper stories rewritten in rhyme; they speak to the human condition, and to human conditioning. That makes them timeless.

I met Bob Dylan on a hot day at the end of July 1961 at a marathon folk concert at Riverside Church in upper Manhattan, a big, all-day music festival organized to launch a radio station dedicated to folk music. Most of the musicians from the Village clubs were scheduled to play or to be part of the audience. It was a big deal. Dave Van Ronk, the Greenbriar Boys, Tom Paxton, Cynthia Gooding, and Bob Dylan were just a few of the people in the lineup. Pete had a car and drove a group of us uptown. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott also performed that day. Jack was already a legendary troubadour, the first to follow in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps before Bob Dylan came onto the scene. In fact, he had a reputation as “the son of Woody Guthrie” since he’d traveled around with Woody for some time and reproduced his style flawlessly. Since he and Bob had a good rapport, some friends called Bob “the son of Jack.”