Hard Knocks

5.

When I told my father I was dropping out of college to bum around the country for awhile, he was surprisingly supportive. A Goldwater Republican, he thought it would do me good to see the world, find out what the real world was like.

My friend Bill from Pine Lake, who now called himself William, had also decided to drop out of the University of Denver and travel with a band he was in. He played guitar. Our friend John Bell from Pine Lake had taught him how to play, and they formed a band with William’s cousin Jeff called The Brute Force Folk Ensemble. They were riding the wave of the folk music revival, and played such songs as “Railroad Bill,” “The Banks of the Ohio,” “Frankie and Johnnie.”

I hitchhiked down from New York and joined them where they were staying and playing at a Holiday Inn between Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia. The band leader, Rick, had a tendency to piss off the management by pushing the envelope. Between sets when they were tuning their instruments, he’d say things like “this is what they call folk-tuning, or just folking around.” There were five of them in the band, and they all wore matching blue work shirts and jeans. William and John on guitar, Jeff on bass, another guy Mike on harmonica and banjo, and Rick on vocals. They were pretty good, drew a strong crowd every night, developed some devoted fans.

I was sleeping on the floor of their suite. The motel management got wind of my presence and decided to use it as an excuse to fire the whole band – they were really fed up with Rick and his forays into obscenity. Mike blamed me for the firing and said I should pay them what they lost, but then the management offered them the gig back if they got rid of Rick. The band refused, and relocated to Virginia Beach, where they found another gig right away.

We moved into the downstairs of a house that was under reconstruction. We slept in cots in a room with a half-completed floor and open walls of 2 x 4s without sheetrock.

There was another guy, Josiah, who lived there in his own room, which had been completed. He was a working class white boy, worked at the local gas station.

I decided to get a job. I started by asking at restaurants along the beach. One Italian guy fired his black dishwasher and hired me on the spot. I washed dishes that whole night. The next day I went back and he told me his partner had balked at him firing the nigger, so he hired him back.

I went to the Virginia Employment Office, filled out the papers, and waited. There were about 20 other men waiting, all black. I was the only white applicant, though of course all the workers there were white. After about 10 minutes, one of the employment counselors came up to me very conspicuously, pointed at me, and said,

“You! Come with me!”

What could I say? I had never experienced overt discrimination like this before. But, I needed a job.

The employment counselor sent me to the local Chevrolet dealership to work in the body shop. I became an apprentice to a lanky, curly headed man, no more than 30. He talked about how the technology had taken the skill out of the job now, what with the fiberglass fillers they used, and body and fender work had become nigger work. I liked the guy though, and made the mistake of telling him I’d been to college. I’m pretty sure he then got the idea that I wouldn’t last at this work and since I wasn’t very good at it, he let me go after about a week.

One night, I decided not to join the band at their gig and stayed home, hanging out with Josiah drinking beer and listening to Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over.” Josiah liked to badmouth the “niggers” a lot, but he had to admit in Dionne’s case, “they sure can sing.”

A bunch of his friends came over and we all sat around for awhile drinking. One greasy looking fellow got the idea, “Let’s go down to Niggertown and stir up some shit!” This idea took hold.

“You don’t want to do that,” I said. They got quiet and looked at me.

“Why not?” the greasy fellow asked.

“They have as much right as we do.”

They began poking each other, laughing. “Who IS this guy?” the greasy fellow asked Josiah.

“He’s a Yankee,” Josiah said. “He doesn’t understand.”

“Let’s help him,” said the greasy guy and he grabbed a can of Josiah’s shaving cream and began to spray me with it while the others laughed uproariously. I tried to be a good sport and laughed with them. They took turns with the can and soon I was covered head to toe in shaving cream. The boys seemed to want more, but Josiah stopped them. “That’s enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

So they filed out of the room and jumped into their good-ol-boy pick up with the confederate flag on the bumper and rode off toward Niggertown, leaving me, a giant abandoned marshmallow, behind.

It had been my first stand against racism, and I felt good about it.

A week or so later, the band was out of work again and tensions were rising between the members. I wanted to move on to New Orleans and I wanted William to go with me. I was jealous of the band and not very aware. Putting my own interests above his, I urged him to leave the band. He did, and soon he and I were off to the land of dreams in his Ford Fairlane station wagon with the fake wooden sides.

By the time we crossed that endless bridge across Lake Ponchartrain into the Big Easy, we were broke. We took the car to a sleazy used car dealer and William sold it for $75. It was doubtlessly worth much more, but we didn’t care. We wanted to be without money. All our lives, we had never wanted for money and now we needed to know what it was like not to have it.

We got a room at the Burcon Hotel in the French Quarter before it was chic, Bourbon and Conti Streets, $5 a night. We slept on a sagging double bed with a pink chenille bedspread, but never considered having sex. Somewhere along the way, William had lost his wallet, so I kept the money. The hotel despite its seediness and putrid coral paint job, had a filigreed balcony right outside our door overlooking a courtyard with a fragrant magnolia tree. I sang that Billie Holiday song to William as we settled into the room:

Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of buuurn-ing flesh…

Lying back on the bed, resting from the long trip, I said to him, “You know, they like to talk about us who know-it-all at 19, but you know what? We do know it all. We know all there is to know: it’s all fucked up.”,

“Exactly, Hank, exactly.” He strummed his guitar. He played “Freight Train.” I played along on the harmonica, my instrument of choice, the one song I had more or less mastered. William’s mother had been divorced twice and was headed for a third divorce from her Pine Lake Brumder drunk. Despite William’s gifts – his blond, curly-headed good looks, his excelling at athletics, his way with the girls, and now his newly discovered musical talent – he was just as confused and unhappy as I was.

I continued philosophizing. “I mean, I’ve learned to really, really not care about anything. But it’s like not a negative thing. It’s a positive not-caring, like not getting hung up on petty things like what people wear or how they talk.”

“I know what you mean.”

During the day, I read Nietzsche and Anna Karenina. When it got too hot, as it inevitably did, I went to the ultramodern main library where they had air conditioning. The second night, William got a gig at one of the French Quarter dives.

“Let me play harmonica with you,” I asked him.

“No. You’re not good enough, Henry.” So much for not-caring.

At the time, the French Quarter was nearly as sleazy as Sculley Square in Boston, but with a lot more old world charm. The white bricks, the high curved windows, the green shutters, the alcoholics and other bums, but most of all the overwhelming sense of ruin and decadence combined with the oppressive humidity of the climate matched our mood precisely.

I went to the state employment agency, but wasn’t as lucky as in Virginia Beach. I had to wait with the others, with the Negroes, and wait, and wait, and wait.
There was a girl named Sam who was an ex-girlfriend of John Bell, one of the band members. She was blond, blue-eyed, with a sweet drawl and a devil may care attitude. William and I met her for drinks, and I promptly fell in love. Given my lousy record at competition, my pattern at the time was to fall for gorgeous women who were self-evidently way out of my league. That way I got to play the role of the perpetually heartbroken victim, and since that’s the way I felt girl or no girl, this attitude gave me a bluesy authenticity. I could tell of course that she liked William – everyone did.

The next day, William simply disappeared. He didn’t come back to the hotel that night. He didn’t come back the next morning. I was sure that he was out with Sam somewhere. By that next night, I was mad enough to take what money we had left and go down to the bars along the wharf near Jackson Square where the big, yeast-billowing Jax brewery was.

I sat at the bar drinking boilermakers. A woman approached, an ugly woman in her 50s at least, missing some teeth. “Buy me a drink, Mister?”
I did, I bought her a bunch of the watered down drinks that the bartender proffered to her. “You want to go upstairs? Ten dollars.”

I gave the bartender our last ten dollars and followed her through a kind of a trap door in the back wall, to a small room with a cot smelling of sex. I tried to make small talk. “Can we do an around-the-world?” I was eager to try sex acts that I’d read about in books.

“No, honey, I just like to fuck.” She quickly stripped off my pants and lifted her dress. She wore no underwear for efficiency sake. She stuck me inside her and wiggled her hips. It was over within three minutes.

I returned to the hotel, satisfied that at least I had gotten my revenge from William for stealing “my” girl.

By the next day, I was worried. I called Sam and found she hadn’t seen him. I went over to the house of a musician friend Eric we’d met our first week in town, a referral from one of the other band members. When we first visited, he sang of one of the songs he had written about “a dark cloud hiding the sun,” – the threat of nuclear annihilation.

“I haven’t seen William in 3 days,” I told him.

Eric took charge. “Did you check the hospitals? Did you report him missing to the police?” I hadn’t of course.

He made some calls and within 15 minutes determined that William was in jail. Eric and I rode the streetcar named Desire to the city jail, where it was inscribed above the door: “We are a Government of Laws not of Men.” A quote I later learned was from John Adams, but at the time it seemed like the coldest proclamation imaginable.
William had been arrested for vagrancy because he had lost his wallet and had no ID. Eric was able to convince the jailer that William wasn’t a threat to society, that he was an accomplished musician, and that we – he and I – were just passing through.
Freed from jail, William now exuded a new level of darkness, like he was beginning to reach the limit of what I called our upside-down status seeking.

When I told him later I had spent all our money on a whore because I thought he was boinking Sam, he just looked at me with a sadness that went down to the bone.
A silence came between us. William wouldn’t talk about what went on in the jail, but I could tell it wasn’t pretty. He was sinking out of my reach.

Eric took us back to his house, where we spent the night, but he was clear we couldn’t stay with him. We were starving the next morning after Eric left for work. We made sandwiches with white bread, mayonnaise, and garlic powder, all we could find in the house.

That afternoon, I answered an ad in the newspaper and found myself in a dingy warehouse surrounded by carts for selling hot dogs and hot tamales. There wasn’t much of an interview. That very evening, I was wandering the streets of New Orleans hawking “Hot Tamales! Get your hot tamales right here! Hot Tamales!” I ate a fair share of them myself, even after a stocky fellow in a dirty Hawaiian shirt said to me, “You know, buddy, I used to sell those things myself. Until I learned they were made out of cat meat.”

I went around to all the bars and made enough money to pay for our room at the Burcon Hotel again. Fortunately, they hadn’t thrown our stuff away when we abandoned the room.

One morning before picking up my cart, I was walking downtown when I saw Woolworth’s. In front of Woolworth’s was a large picket line, made up of mostly Black people. My stomach did a funny turn as I joined them, a giddiness came over me. I stayed about 10 minutes, but I liked the feeling.

On my way back to the hotel, I found myself on a block with one other person, a Black man. I smiled at him, trying to let him know that I wasn’t like the others. He gave me this look of sheer terror and started fast-walking away from me. I yelled after him: “Wait! I know how you feel! I hate all white people too!” He kept on going.

Since being in jail, since my betrayal of him with the whore, a chill had come between us. That night, William confessed, “I can’t do this any more.”

We had come to the end. After two months, we were failures as bums. I called my father and asked him to wire me money so we could come home. We picked up the $50 at the Western Union office. We sauntered down to Jackson Square to bid adieu to the Big Easy. As a final ritual, I took a dollar bill from our stash and burned it.

“This is what I think of your money, Father,” I said. But I only burned one dollar. The rest we took to the Greyhound station and bought two bus tickets home to Pine Lake.

The first thing I did when I got back into the Pine Lake fold was check to see if I had any connection to old friends there. Kathy Hansen came over and we got in an argument about Goldwater. I said I thought he was a fascist.

“I don’t think he’s a Communist,” she said. My mouth dropped. She doesn’t know the difference between a fascist and a Communist?

As she was leaving, she said, “I still love you, Hank.”

“Sorry. Not me,” I said, meaning I no longer loved her.

The second thing I did was get outrageously drunk and go to a debut party with another old friend, Nancy Bugbee, wearing a tux with a sheepskin vest. The private security ushered us out of the party before we could even get in.

The third thing I did was buy the new Bob Dylan album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and play “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for my mother, with the caveat, “Listen to this if you want to understand me.”

My parents were frightened by my new level of anger. To their credit, they gave me space at this point, even as they only partially concealed their disappointment that I was not on the “professional” trajectory they had groomed me for.

The last thing I did before leaving for California where I planned to meet up with Mark was watch the March on Washington, Martin Luther King, I have a dream, and cried my eyes out. The song wasn’t out yet, but the times they were a-changing.

My grandmother sat on the wicker chair on our front porch. She was about to turn 92 and would live for only four more months. “Your grandfather Henry grew up in the South, in Washington, DC, and hated colored people. I wonder what he would think now?”

I rode with the California Winklers, my cousin Fritz, whom I adored, at 3 years younger than me. We just liked each other. And his family, being the liberal wing of the clan, was more understanding and tolerant of the transformation I was undergoing.

I remember the first glimpse of the Bay Area as we rolled through the Altemont Pass and swept toward the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. I kept saying “Wow!” I’d never been swept off my feet by natural beauty before – the dazzling blue of the bay surrounded by golden hills. It was a new day.