Alan Brooks Remembers – 3

We continue with serializing “Warts and All” by Alan Brooks, his quirky memoir of New York in the ’70’s and visits and occasional encounters with his famous Uncle Allen

By the spring I was totally immersed in the East-Village/Bowery Soup. Having watched the Bowery Boys-Dead End kids series of films a decade before, it was nearly deja vu. I practiced Leo Gorcey’s malapropisms – “thank you, you’re very mercenary (instead of merciful)” and “peccadillo” (in place of particular). All the sights of the East-Village-Bowery-West Village axis were exciting. Washington Square Park was at the center of the axis, with an arch like the one in Paris.
It was both Romantic and romantic.

At the same time, I was gradually becoming extremely paranoid. The area was a congested slum, not one bit similar to Huck Finn and Tom smoking tobacco on a sandbar-island idyll.
I smoked marijuana all the time, but that wasn’t the main cause of the paranoia. It was the feeling of being trapped, the sensation of being a sardine in a can. One fresh-faced guy from Wisconsin I once met summed it up, summed up the threat, perfectly,  “concentrated people!”

Allen did everything he could do to help, and merely shuttling from the Yippies to him and Peter’s pad alleviated a tad of the ever-growing paranoia. Being at the Yippies also erased any boredom.One day Jerry Rubin called the Yippies to promote his new book Growing Up At 37. Thirty-seven seemed ancient. William Kunstler, the radical lawyer, came to visit.
Living with the Yippies was tantamount to a 24-hour children’s circus. One Yippie said he was so glad he’d changed his diet – then he threw up!  And guess who cleaned up the glop? Well, I had nothing much else to do except read and get high  probably the reason the Yippies let me stay so long was basically because of Allen). Only on periodical-mailing days was the work load in any way hectic. The underground comix were an education unto themselves, transporting a stoned freak out of the Bowery into a world of deformed & depraved degenerates who made the Yippies seem as Ozzie and Harriet’s family. Somehow it all fit into the zeitgeist of the looming Bicentennial. Elton John’s ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ playing from the radio. ‘Skyrockets in flight, afternoon delight’. ABBA.
Late in the summer, Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Edmund Fitzgerald’ wafted from the radio hundreds of times. I’d tune into a station and there it was. About (of all things) sailors in the Midwest!  It brought back memories of Huck Finn and Tom. Slowly my mind was again turning westward.

Allen had taste in music, although he knew as little of music as I knew of literature. At that time he played typically classical pieces, such as Symphonie Fantastique and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny – and  Robert Johnson  (the blues – he loved the blues) – much blues and folk.

I sang Parchman Farm to him once. He yelled “Why don’t you do something with it!”.  He was never shy.

But to do music meant touring around the country to entertain barflies. Plus,  crestfallen, you could listen to a sixteen-year-old in a guitar shop performing like a pro. The odds of making it in music were about that of making it as an actor in Hollywood who slept in his car.
Thus it came down to how the rewards of being a roving musician (whose prime purpose in life is to entertain drunks) were pills, weed, and gallons of alcohol. Was that enough?

As with the Yippies, the best thing at 12th street for me was artwork.  I don’t remember underground comix at Allen and Pete’s, but there were books of Poet-Printer William Blake..
I would get high and pore over Blake’s figures at the gates of Hell,  Glad Day, pastoral scenes, lambs (tons of lambs!), the passion of Christ.
Looking at lamb etchings while stoned galvanized me to raid the icebox for the flesh of a dear critter crucified for our sins, and…

As Springtime went on, the Soup of Downtown NYC got thicker. It was all fresh to me. Morning in NYC. Allen and Pete seemed happier, with a summer in Boulder approaching.
We visited Paterson together once –  only once. Louis was dying. He had been a punster extraordinaire. Two years previously, he’d declared,
“In 1975, I hope I’m alive/ In 1976 I’ll be crossing the river Styx.”
And that is exactly what happened!

“Is life worth living? It depends on the Liver” is how his favorite pun went. Now he was dying of liver cancer. Seeing him slowly dying one sunny New Jersey day ratcheted my paranoia one step higher, but Allen and Peter both took it in stride – they’d seen it all before.
“Strange now, to think of you, gone without corsets and eyes /While I walk…”
Yes, the pavements of – where else? Greenwich Village.