Things changed drastically in the second half of 1968 into the first
half of 1969.
Jimmy quit the job at the laundry to go to art school in New York only
to get there to realized just how full of shit the professors were.
He and Ritchie Haas sat there, listened, looked at each other, then got
up and went for pizza across the street, never to return.
It was one of those moments when the whole future Jimmy had foreseen
ceased to exist.
Frank, meanwhile, fell in love again, first with a girl named Angel,
and then with Angel’s best friend, Laurie, a woman who claimed to be a white
witch, and who had become pregnant thanks to a member of a national motorcycle
gang called The Pagans – then at war with a club on third street which would later
become the east coast chapter of the Hell’s Angels.
Frank adopted Laurie, and eventually moved in with her in her East 5th
Street flat, and he got involved with Abbie Hoffman’s Renaissance Switch
Board -- which dealt with numerous
hippie issues like finding free food, connecting people with crash pads, and
helping young runaways.
Jimmy met Frank at the switch board one day and when everybody was
busy, answered the constantly ringing phone.
“What’s that?” he asked. “You want to run away? Are you out of your
mind? Stay home. You don’t want to come to a place like this.”
As Jimmy sought employment, Frank continued to work at the Little Falls
Laundry, making the trip from Manhattan to Little Falls and back again each
day, staying over at his parents’ house on those days when he was too weary to
commute.
When I called Frank’s house to find him, I learned that he was in New
York somewhere. When I called Jimmy, he said he’d been to the apartment only
once and gave me a vague direction that it was somewhere southeast of Cooper
Union.
Oddly enough, it was Chris Andreas who told me how to get to Laurie’s
apartment, but he either gave me the wrong number or I misheard him, because
when I tried to find it I had to stop at the East River, thinking Frank
couldn’t have moved to Brooklyn.
Jimmy finally arranged for me to meet Frank at the Port Authority, and
when I got there, I found Frank, and we both found Laurie seated on the floor
chanting some spell. She was very pregnant. And I spent the night at their
apartment listening to them make love in the other room, while I fought off the
armies of roaches that infected the apartment.
Jimmy had warned me about the roaches, telling me the story of one
visit he had paid to Frank a short time earlier with Alf, Garrick and Bob.
“I warned Alf not to ever open the fuse box,” Jimmy said. “Alf thought
I was joking and opened it anyway. He got covered with a shower of roaches, and
then blamed me.”
For the most part, we all waited for the baby to arrive, but I went
into the army before the baby came.
I heard about the birth via phone call, not from Frank, but from Jimmy,
who told me Frank and Laurie had moved again to a new apartment on East Fifth
Street, and the first chance I got I went there dressed in my uniform to show
off. But I couldn’t find this either.
Later, when I was on pass at home in New Jersey, Jimmy called me to
invite me to some kind of party and told me to make sure I wore my uniform.
When they picked me up, Jimmy informed me that we were going to meet a
bunch of girls and that we were supposed to bring wine, and since he and the
rest of the Garley Gang were still underage, they needed me to buy the alcohol.
“But I’m underage, too,” I said.
“Yeah, but you’re a soldier,” Jimmy said. “Just tell the store clerk
that you’re going off to Vietnam shortly and need this wine to have with your
girl before you get shipped out.”
“But I just finished basic training,” I told him. “I don’t know where
they are going to send me yet.”
“It could be Vietnam, right?”
“I hope not.”
“But it could be?”
“I suppose.”
“There! See. You wouldn’t by lying.”
“What happens if the clerk won’t sell it to me?”
“He will, believe me.”
And Jimmy was right. The clerk did.
The party, as it turned out, was held at the apartment of a woman named
Ann, a chiropractor who was someone connected to Ginger, Jimmy would later fall
in love with.
Ann appeared to be well-to-do and the buffet included black Russian
caviar which I had only heard about from movies, never tried, and nearly choked
when I did, searching around for some place to spit out what I had ingested and
dump the cracker I had overloaded – eventually finding a safe spot under a
cushion of one of the chairs.
I apparently wasn’t alone. Bob found another place to dump his. Alf as
well. Frank and Garrick apparently were
as appalled by the taste as I was but somehow managed to digest theirs without
needing to puke it out in the bathroom.
The one good thing that came out of the affair was that I learned the
right address for the apartment in New York where Frank and Laurie lived.
No comments:
Post a Comment