The Children of Hamelin (6 page)
The ruins of the Golden Age: funky little coffee-houses turned into rock joints, Art Kaiser’s Jewelry Shop now a poster-and-button store like the old Folklore Center and a dozen other remembered shops, the ethnic little Italian sausage-and-pizza stands chromed and aluminized, the double line of parked cars that clogged the street and made the sidewalks cozy now banished for efficiency’s sake, making the street seem twice as wide and half as warm, and all my friends gone and the ruins overrun by teenybopper barbarians from the northern wastelands—
And in between these bookends of time, the Age of Decline, when MacDougal meant trying to scrounge together $3 in small change with Anne and whatever other junkies were freaking out in front of the Night Owl and frantic phone calls from the booths in the Village Drug Store to connections who never were there and the dirty old shakes at 3 in the am walking blearily down MacDougal to Bleecker and Snooky’s, the junkie’s terminal graveyard—
“MacDougal Street wears ruts in everyone’s head,” Robin said. “Dig it on acid and get a free roadmap.”
“I don’t know... some pretty heavy things....”
“Fear is the mind-killer,” she said, and, recognizing the line from a book I didn’t believe we could’ve shared, I felt suddenly closer to her as she said: “Trust me, baby.”
And she took my hand again and led me up MacDougal toward Bleecker past the solemn quiet tenements with their empty stoops, upstream against the waves of memory that seemed to fade into mist as I remembered what I had told myself when I dropped the acid a geological age ago: if you want to walk through the fire, you’ve got to step into the flames.
Time had dissolved into an illusion by the time we reached the Empanada stand tucked into a hole in the city wall between the Hip Bagel and the old Figaro just around the corner from Bleecker. Nothing had changed in this cosmic corner since the early Jurassic; same unobtrusive funeral parlor and tiny Italian coffee house across the street, same smell of the summer of the mind drifting down MacDougal: coffee and sausage and pot and human heat. Yes, Figaro’s had existed in its own separate time-stream since the Dutchmen conned the Indians out of Manhattan; it was like the Eiffel Tower or St. Peter’s Cathedral or Niagara Falls. The prototypical Village coffee house, the archetype; its existence was so bound up with people’s memories and tourists’ expectations that the image shaped the substance and preserved it in amber as it had been in the Golden Age as it was now as it would be when tourists from Jupiter would mingle unnoticed with tourists from the Bronx: a corner of picture-postcard Paris Left Bank bohemia plunked down in New York replete with weathered-brown sidewalk tables, glassed-in porch and entrance foyer, walls papered with old French newspapers, ornate espresso machine, and everything, including the clientele, aged in the wood to the color-texture of old bourbon.
Figaro’s was the cornerstone of the Village in space and time: fronting on Bleecker and looking up MacDougal toward Washington Square Park, it was the southwest pivot of the street scene that boiled along MacDougal—the flow of motorcycle gangs, Jersey hoods in hot-rods, teenyboppers, locals, rubbernecking tourists, that promenaded down MacDougal to Bleecker, turned east at Figaro corner, then north up Sullivan back to West Fourth, meeting itself again at the West Fourth head of MacDougal and back into the cycle again. Existing as it did as the materialization of an image that belonged to no real Village era, Figaro stood outside all eras, timeless and unchanging, projecting into the nows of all Village time-loci but contained by none of them like the Rock of Eternity. Because it was always an anachronism, it would never be an anachronism.
And standing there in its nontemporal aura, all my MacDougals, past, present, and future, were one, existing in memory and anticipation, outside of time.
“This is the space-time navel of the Village,” I told Robin, trying to explain the inexplicable.
She looked at me with warm but opaque eyes. “Oh yeah,” she said.
Could she really understand what I meant that I had found a place to stand on this corner, some kind of common ground with the strangers in the street, with the kids from the Bronx and the tourists and the local Siciliani and even new generations of junkies yet unborn; that all this corner was a Hollywood Village set on which we were all extras. I could stand here forever and never get older like someone in a twenty-year-old stock shot of the Village reincarnated in a hundred B-movies....
After a second or a century, I felt Robin tug at my hand. “Let’s go to the circus,” she said. She pulled me across Bleecker and back into the time-stream, the now of MacDougal Street that unfolded like a carnival midway before us as we seemed to float up the street on our private magic carpet past savory hero-and-pizza stands, poster shops, timeless Italian groceries, the Kettle of Fish, tiny candystores selling Zig-Zags and poisonous black Italian cigars, the Caricature, feedback whining and shrieking from hole-in-the-wall rock joints, a clot of skeletal speed freaks outside Rienzi’s, Japanese sailors gawking at two sixteen-year-old chicks freezing their tight little asses off in out-of-season miniskirts, two old Eighth Street fags walking arm-in-arm, a bull dyke in a motorcycle jacket, a man in porkpie hat being walked by a shaggy brown Irish Wolfhound as big as a pony, an uptight Irish cop rousting three stoned heads off a tenement stoop, a Bowery bum bugging a bearded 1950’s Village poet, four savage spades with port-reddened eyes: Villageland. The Disney version. Prop reconstructions of colorful old buildings.
A street scene in which at least half of the people weren’t real. You could tell by their eyes, by the way they held themselves. They were part of the set, costumed extras: teen-age chicks in hippy costume courtesy of Fifth Avenue or girls whose faces reeked of uptown bread in last year’s Levis and raincoats from Army-Navy stores; soulful CCNY students with long hair and beards down on weekend pass from the Bronx; Harlem spades carrying bottles of cheap wine in paper bags who had been told they could come here and fuck a lot of crazy white chicks; the aforementioned crazy white chicks who came from posh private high schools or had run away from Scarsdale for the weekend and had worms in their heads and Cuban Superman notions about black dick. The local color.
And digging these quaint natives in their accurately simulated natural habitat were the tourists:
gringas
from Moshulu Parkway and Flatbush with enormous asses; sailors from the Bolivian Navy; genteel retired ex-hookers; feed and grain salesmen from Council Bluffs; Herbert Hoover’s third cousin; inebriated specimens of the Loyal Order of Moose; several Dirk Robinson fee-writers and the Vice Chairlady of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dope Fiends. Welcome to Disneyland East! See Teenybopperland, Junkieland, and the Needle Park of Tomorrow, folks! Watch the Fearsome Nigger make the Beautiful White Girl two pm every afternoon, extra performance on Sunday! Lookit all the creeps walking around STONED ON DRUGS!! The clientele.
Ah, but while these shadows were chasing each other up and down the street, you could see the
real
Villagers skulking around the fringes: a little clot of young kids with wasted pimply faces and rotten teeth fawning over an older cat sitting on a stoop who was obviously their connection; a good-looking hard young waitress from Figaro’s who had just left her shift; a young longhair in Levi jacket and black chinos dragging his guitar and amplifier into the
Blue Goo;
The Old Dope Peddler Spreading Joy Wherever He Goes; Big Brown, world-famous pseudo poet; a real poet with a real beard; a bull dyke arguing with her fern; two tweedy old respectable faggots; Allan Block, the famous sandalmaker and fiddler; a cat smoking pot in a corncob pipe...
And Robin and me standing on the corner of MacDougal and West Fourth looking back and digging it all stoned out of our minds on acid.
“Hea-vy!”
I sighed.
“Yeah man, what a zonk!”
She didn’t seem to get the point; how could she? She knew which scene was hers because she had known no other, but I had made it all three styles. I had first come to the Village as a CCNY student looking for Village Adventure and some of the fabled easy pussy and I had come out the other end of the long gold summer as an authentic Villager with a smack habit to prove it. And just now, today, hadn’t I started down at the other end of Clown Alley like one of the weekend costume extras: the Superannuated Village Expatriot out for a sentimental visit to the old country on Dr. Timothy Leary’s eight-hour round-trip excursion tour?
So where did that leave me now?
I could hardly become a tourist again after having been a native; could I really be a costumed extra after having paid junkie’s dues to the scene?
Did that mean that once a real Villager, always a real Villager? Once a junkie, always a junkie? But I was off junk; had been for a long time and no urge to score. Yeah, but I was on acid, wasn’t I? Didn’t someone once say it came in all shapes and sizes? Wasn’t that someone me? Was this place, this street, this freakshow, something that got inside you like a tapeworm you couldn’t get rid of?
Did I really want to blot out my past? If I did, why did I let Robin drag me here?
Heavy, indeed! Like some Catholic spent his childhood in a Jesuit parochial school bummer, turned eighteen, got laid and gave the Church the back of his hand walking past St. John’s and feeling he wants to go in, knowing what was done to him, but wanting to go in anyway, and wanting not to want to go in, and so finding out that he’s got a need something outside him has put inside him that he’s no longer dumb enough to feed, but the monkey’s still there on his back whispering sweet nothings in his ear.
Sure,
baby, that’s what I needed, to see the Village with kaleidoscope eyes!
Robin was tugging at my hand. The light was green. She gave me a warm, concerned look, maybe picking up the vibes of my feelings but certainly not what was really inside my head, said: “Don’t look back, baby.” And steered me across the street and up the next block towards Washington Square Park like a tug guiding a wallowing liner in a storm.
Don’t look back—something may be gaining on you.
Don’t look forward—
you
may be gaining on
it.
Don’t look now—you may be there.
“And how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t
see...?”
But where in the hell was that answer that was supposed to be blowin’ in the wind? Not here in the dead calm of the Horse Latitudes. How about on the path between the leafless trees across the next street in the Park leading, like all Washington Square paths, to the fountain at the center—was the answer there? What was the question?
Staring up the path, gray concrete under a slating-over November sky, I clocked the contents of the benches under the bare spectral trees, got an awful flash: there they sat, young bodies in traditional Village garb—ponchos, old coats, war-surplus combat boots, faded Levis, brown chinos, sandals—young bodies with old faces, speed freaks with sunken cheeks and ruined eyes, skeletal young junkies, chicks not out of their teens who had already fucked themselves into old hookers’ faces, the flotsam and jetsam of the Psychedelic Sargasso. And staring up the Desolation Row, I could see the puke-filed doorways, deadly bars and endless flophouse barracks of the Bowery and
these same faces
but now with bodies to match flopping in doorways with their flies open, lying maybe dead in the gutter unnoticed with the rest of the garbage, bumming quarters off each other, gibbering in the afternoon sun, pissing on parked cars, puking casually on stoops. Yeah, the same faces, the same clothes, and only the bodies aged an instant from today; their heads were already a million years old on Terminal Skid Row.
I knew I had shuffled a long way down that road once; had I gone so far that I could never get off the Bowery Inside?
And then we reached the big open space at the core of Washington Square Park: the dry circular concrete-and-stone fountain and around it a wide asphalt-paved clearing with the pseudo-Arch-of-Triumph (over what?) at the north entrance to the Park—the hub on which the Park’s radial paths converged.
Yes, this was the core of the Hip Stellar Phoenix, the heart of the Village fission-fusion-fission reactor that powered it all. Young kids fissioning off from the Bronx and Brooklyn and the Midwest grooving on the flash of freedom seated on the curved lip of the fountain rapping with each other and full of high-energy hope; lurking spades from Harlem radiating hot gamma rays of madness; uptight old Sicilians walking quickly past with glances of the Evil Eye; innocent holy refugees from Bible Belt mindlessness; the hot unstable elements of American’s Periodic Table drifting into the imploding stellar heart of the Other America. Forming the rich nuclear soup of the Village in which a few dynamically stable elements—a tweedy couple tossing a frisbee back and forth, an old man with a neat white beard and cool calm eyes, a neat young Black and a sunny blond-haired chick pushing a baby carriage together—evolved and remained viable. But most of the human fuel finally ejected as radioactive waste-products, deadly, ashen, and leaden, spewed out of the central core through the sewer-pipe conduits to the Boweries of the mind.
The whole Village was a big pulsing pump that sucked in youth and spit out derelicts and let a few of the lucky ones bask in the sun at its heart, warming themselves in the glow of burnt-out youth force-drafted from the husks crowding its peripheral slag-heaps.
We crossed the open space headed northeast, and then up another path under more skeletal trees lined with still more burnt-out Village slag heaped on wooden benches.
I couldn’t take the terrain inside my head much more; I tried to get outside by concentrating on the girl at the end of my arm who seemed off on some private head-trip of her own.
“Where are you at?” I asked.
“Just grooving,” she said dreamily.
“Grooving!
On what? This fucking garbage-heap? This sewer? This Bowery annex?”