Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

26. manhattan transfer

Whether the Protestant ethic, so called, is a self-imposed affliction, a hobble, a governor, a kind of chastity belt that limits full enjoyment of life; or, instead, is an indicator of trustworthy character, fidelity, and good moral health, well, that may be a subject for debate. In any case, I myself seem to have been tainted — or blessed — with that set of values at an early age and to this day have failed to completely outgrow that aspect of it that applies to conscientious work habits. Thus, though I’d landed in New York with enough savings to keep me gainfully unemployed for approximately a year (considering that my rent on East Tenth Street was $51.50 a month and I knew how to eat for a buck or two a day), my ethic demanded that I put my nose to the grindstone, although, naturally, not just any grindstone would do.

The task I set for myself to justify a Manhattan sabbatical was to write a book, specifically (having not yet found my fiction voice) a dual biography of two power-packed maverick painters, Jackson Pollock and Chaim Soutine, comparing their lives and their art. Although no critic had ever made the comparison (and still have not as far as I know), the connection struck me as obvious. Soutine (1893–1943) was a scrawny slum-dog savant from Eastern Europe, Pollock (1912–1956) a brawny cowboyish genius out of Cody, Wyoming, and the two never met; Soutine’s paintings featured representational content, Pollock’s major works were wholly abstract; yet there were striking similarities in their approach to life and art, and I maintain that Soutine, whose paintings we know Pollock saw at a New York gallery in 1936 and ’37, was the American dripmaster’s single biggest influence.

Soutine was arguably the first representational painter to completely reject Renaissance perspective in favor of an overall emphasis that, devoid of a recessed background or central focal point, made each and every square inch of the picture plane as important as any other. Emphasis was uniformly insistent from framing edge to framing edge, as it was soon to be in a Pollock, though Soutine’s dense, dark passages of pigment lurched at the viewer in a kind of visual attack, whereas Pollock’s roiling constellations swirled all about an onlooker like debris in a polychrome tornado.

Almost supernaturally connected to their primal unconscious, operating at a pitch next to madness, both men lived turbulent, Dionysian lives rife with instances of bizarre behavior; tortured by rejection, disoriented by success. But this is neither the time nor place to get into all that. Here it’s sufficient to say I spent my days in New York researching Pollock and Soutine, including numerous interviews with people who’d known them well, and while I never got around to writing that book (the Dionysus in my own unconscious began to demand my attention elsewhere), the experience was worth more than a dozen seminars at any graduate school in the land.

The eminent émigré sculptor Jacques Lipchitz had known Soutine in Paris, when he, Soutine, lived coatless and shoeless in bedbug-bitten squalor. That is, until the morning an American collector dropped by his smelly rooms and bought sixty paintings in a single franc-flinging swoop, whereupon the always idiosyncratic Soutine ran into the street, hailed a taxi, and ordered the driver to take him to the French Riviera, two hundred miles away. From that day on, Soutine never cleaned his brushes. When he’d finished for the moment with a particular color, he’d toss the brush over his shoulder and grab a new one from the basketful he’d purchased.

I interviewed Lipchitz at his large studio in Hastings-on-Hudson, high above the river, where, as he was confirming that Soutine, like Pollock, was more interested in the activity of painting (for both it was an act of concentrated frenzy) than in the finished product, I found myself becoming more interested in Lipchitz’s right leg than in his stories.

For working, Lipchitz wore loose-fitting cotton pants, one leg of which had now hitched up to reveal a surprising expanse of bare flesh. The man’s exposed appendage was penguin white, smooth as an egg, and as devoid of hair as a baseball bat. Not a filament, not a whisper of fuzz marred that pristine surface. Neither were there scars, pimples, or evidence of the bulging veins common in men of his age. It was as if he had sculpted his own leg, carving it from a single slab of purest white marble. I couldn’t help but wonder if he might have done something similar with his genitals. What an outbreak of penis envy that could have touched off at the gym!

Then, when he told me that each week Soutine, a Jew, would consult a nun at a convent on the outskirts of Paris regarding her secret remedy for the prevention of baldness, I wondered if Lipchitz had gotten hold of the good sister’s potion and was trying it out on his leg. I mean, he did keep stealing glances at the limb, as if expecting that at any moment a hidden follicle might dilate there and give birth to a perky thread.

Lipchitz was as kind and informative as he was, of course, talented, and even at the time I felt ashamed that I was allowing my imagination to run away with the poor man’s leg.

At the time of his death in a Long Island car crash, Jackson Pollock’s closest friends had been Barnett Newman and Tony Smith. In my several separate interviews with the two artists, I learned that they had a significant connection that preceded their friendship with Pollock. In his twenties, Newman had left his father’s business, intent on becoming a painter, and to that end, he enrolled in an art academy on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. His primary instructor there was Tony Smith.

At one point, Newman, recently married, invited Smith to his apartment to dine with him and his wife. Smith accepted, and they partook of a fine dinner, served on a mammoth old but elegant table. Upon their marriage, the newlywed Newmans’ families had furnished the flat for them, filling it with pieces that had been in their respective well-to-do households for decades. The various tables, chairs, chests, and stands, even the bedstead, were as thick, heavy, dark, and imposing as one of Soutine’s looming canvases.

After dinner, Newman confided to his teacher his ambition to become not merely a successful painter but a painter of consequence. He asked Smith for advice on how to further that goal. Put on the spot, Smith was silent for an uncomfortable minute or two. Then, looking around, he said, “The first thing you need to do is get rid of all this middle-class Jewish furniture.” He turned and left.

Two weeks later, Smith was surprised when Newman once again invited him to dinner. Tony didn’t tell me why he accepted. Maybe he was tired of eating out, maybe he liked Annie Newman’s home cooking. In any case, he returned to the apartment, where his astonishment instantly multiplied by a factor of ten. All of the furniture, every single stick of it, was gone. Dinner was served atop a packing crate. They ate squatting on the floor.

Smith was starting to think this guy was serious. He wasn’t just another dilettante, he meant business. So, when Newman, at the end of the evening, asked again what he could do to make a contribution to the ongoing mainstream of modernism, Smith replied, “Men know a lot about horizontals. They don’t know much at all about verticals.”

He left it at that, but it was all Barnett Newman needed. Newman went on to build a financially and critically successful career exploring the effects on the eye and the mind of strategically (but seldom predictably) placed vertical bars, shafts, or splinters set tantalizingly close to the edges of vast fields of solid color. Far from the autocratic arrangements of traditional painting, in which the viewer’s eye is compelled to focus on one or more images of the painter’s choosing, any of Newman’s giant canvases issues an invitation — or a challenge — for the spectator himself to make what he would of a vertical entity in an expanse of real — as opposed to pictorial/illusional — space. There is no narrative, there is no seduction or pretty plea, there is only a platform from which we can “feel” elementary verticality as it asserts itself convincingly if unexpectedly against a flat ground.

It’s unfortunate that Tony Smith isn’t around and in a position to advise the human race on verticality because as we continue to procreate like adolescent fruit flies, our affection for the horizontal — for industrial, residential, and even agricultural sprawl — is destroying the earth and the Earth. Visionary architects contemplate structures so tall their tops would actually be in orbit, a park on one floor, hospitals, public libraries, sports arenas, and department stores on others: an entire city inside a single building. And think of vertical farms: towering hydroponic greenhouses each producing more corn, more tomatoes than a million acres currently devoid of wildlife and trees, poisoned by chemicals and greed. If we don’t go up we may go down.

That’s the value of artists, isn’t it? Even when they aren’t aware of it, they’re dreaming our dreams for us.

All things considered, I’ve learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy — it’s tough being creative in a materialistic society — but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don’t feel so acutely the weight of language.

The painter Morris Graves, for example, verged on nonliterary eloquence when he told me about being awakened before dawn one morning in India by a strange, beautiful, hypnotic sound, a kind of marvelous chanting. At breakfast, he learned that in that village, as in some others in India, the men and boys have gone out each morning since prehistory to chant the sun up. “Cynics scoff,” said Graves with a smile, “but the villagers point out that in all the millennia that they’ve been chanting, the sun has never failed to rise.”

When NASA scientists invited the mystical painter to Cape Kennedy to advise them on matters about which they were becoming increasingly uneasy — areas where astronomy, theoretical physics, and higher mathematics seemed to be inescapably crossing the line into the province of metaphysics — Graves told them about the Indian chanters, suggesting that NASA might do well to incorporate a similarly reverential, less brutal attitude toward space exploration. Graves found many scientists receptive, even agreeing when he argued that to truly “conquer” space, men need to travel inward as well as outward, and do so with the same focus, seriousness, effort, courage, and determination they would devote to searching for life on Mars or establishing a colony on the moon.

Graves was a master at turning things inward. In what I’d intended to be a hard-nosed interview on the question of form versus formlessness in modern painting, he eventually had me on the floor of his studio tossing Chinese coins, consulting the I Ching. It wasn’t an easy sell. By that time in my life, I’d reached the conclusion that Asian spiritual texts were probably best left to spiritual Asians. The Bible is an Eastern book, pure and simple, and when one considers the many messes, psychological and material, we in the West have made in its name, one shudders to think of what harm might be unleashed from similar misinterpretations (most due to ignorance, others calculated and insidious) of The Bhagavad Gita, The Rig Veda, or The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

I knew that the I Ching was oracular, a book of divination whose system of hexagrams, refined in China over a period of three thousand years, was centered on the concept of the dynamic balance of opposites throughout the universe, and the notion that all events, personal and cultural, unfold somewhat predictably in a matrix of perpetual change. I was hospitable to that concept and curious about its practical application, but I insisted on keeping the same distance from the I Ching that I might keep from a guru’s ashram or an encampment of Gypsies. Morris Graves was, next to Allen Ginsberg, the most charismatic human being I’ve ever met, the sort of man who, if he said, “Come with me,” you’d grab your coat and go because you’d know that wherever he led you, it would be more interesting than where you’d been at the time.

Thus it was that at Graves’s urging I capitulated, posed a question (a rather general one about how to proceed on my life’s journey) and set about tossing the coins (yarrow stalks, the preferred method, being unavailable). I can’t remember the English name of the hexagram I received as my answer, but I’ve never forgotten the explanation of the hexagram, its verbal direction. It was composed in formal prose, stilted, and a little aloof, perhaps as befitting an ancient oracle, but it boiled down to this: “Be careful what goes into your mouth and what comes out of it.”

The advice was so good — so simple, wise, and encompassing — that I’ve never felt the need to consult the I Ching again. It was quite likely the best advice I’ve ever received. I can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if I’d actually followed it.

Gray, chilling, pappy, and blah, Manhattan in March of 1965 had resembled a bowl of leftover mush, the one that, if you remember the fairy tale, caused Mama Bear to exclaim, “This porridge is too fucking cold!” Then one Sunday near the end of the month, New Yorkers awoke to a morning as sweet and fine and budding with optimism as Goldilocks’s training bra. Like some silent yet amplified public-address announcement, the sun called people into the streets, where they were so surprised by the absence of snow and snot that they actually smiled at one another. By Southern California standards, not to mention Hawaii’s, the day wasn’t really all that warm, but it was a change, a definite improvement, and the response was widely mobilizing.

That afternoon, my girlfriend Eileen and I strolled over to Washington Square in Greenwich Village. The change in weather had turned the park into some kind of walk-through jukebox. Every few feet, it seemed there was another impromptu source of live music. There were, as usual, the young aspiring folkies armed with cheap guitars or harmonicas, who stationed themselves here and there in Washington Square on any good day; but that Sunday there also were small rock groups, jazz trios, elderly classical violinists sawing away in front of actual music stands, and men from Russia or the Middle East, individually or in pairs, playing exotic tunes that neither Eileen nor I recognized on instruments we could not identify. A few of the musicians were busking, boxes at their feet into which passersby were invited to toss monetary tokens of appreciation, but most seemed to be playing for the sheer joy of it; a multicultural, nonjudgmental precursor of American Idol; and even as ominous clouds — darker, more imposing than Papa Bear’s big brown butt — lumbered in from the Atlantic, the dozens of mini-concerts continued, as if music alone could hold the new spring in place and keep a resurgence of winter at bay.

Then (it must have been between three and four o’clock) there came a noise — distant at first, but rapidly drawing closer, louder, and louder yet — a sound so potently primal that it resonated not only in the ear but in the gut, in the spine, the groin, and the heart. It was like an excerpt from an opera performed on the Fifth Day of Creation, before the existence of man and woman, when Jehovah was still up to his armpits in stardust, leaving Lucifer, his baton a twisted rod made of snakeroot and mud, to direct the chorus.

One by one at first, then all at once, every singer’s song trailed off, every instrument squeaked to a halt. It had quickly become apparent that the sonar interruption was coming from above, and as if yanked by marionette strings, all heads tilted upward, lifting to see a jackknife of wild geese scratching God’s secret name in the sky.

I’d no idea the migratory path of Canadian honkers traversed New York City. It could have been an aberration, the geese diverted by a storm or an unusually voluminous release of chemical steam from a refinery near the Jersey Shore, but whatever the reason, the mighty wedge passed directly over us, northward bound, flying so low above the city it was a marvel that it didn’t crash headlong into an observation deck or a mogul’s penthouse.

For some in the square, the native-born Manhattanites, it was probably the most direct contact they’d ever had with wild nature. Even transplants from places such as Idaho or Arkansas were visibly surprised, delighted, and moved. And just before the great birds vanished in the distance, just as their primordial barking faded away, the entire population of the park — musicians, tourists, winos, dog walkers, workers enjoying their Sunday holiday, everybody — erupted into spontaneous applause.

And then… and then at that exact moment — and I swear I’m not making this up — the sky split open as if from cesarean surgery, as if ripped by the knife blade of geese, and there was a cloudburst of typhoon proportions. Soaking, blinding, the rain spilled on us in such volumes that within minutes every living soul had fled the park. Even pigeons took shelter. Washington Square was totally emptied. It would take more than a deluge, however; more than the river of time itself, to wash away the magic, the winged reminder that there are wonders in play on this planet whose eerie beauty urban man, with all his ingenuity, all his ambition, all his vanity, can never ever quite match. Not Soutine, not Pollock, not even Graves, who came as close as any artist has to concretizing in paint the hair-raising yet somehow nurturing music of the wild.

I’d been in the Big Apple less than ninety days when I joined New York Filmmakers’ Cinematheque. It was a relatively new organization, just starting to gain traction, and it didn’t matter that I had no intention of making films, I had credentials as a critic (albeit in faraway Seattle), and since the objective of the Cinematheque was to promote experimental artists and their work, the group welcomed any and all support. For my part I’d had a keen interest in noncommercial movies since being introduced to “An Andalusian Dog,” the shocking 1929 collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, at a University of Washington screening the previous year.

One night each month, I believe it was the first Thursday, the Cinematheque would show recently completed films or work-in-progress by such underground directors as Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas. For members only, the screenings were at midnight at the New Yorker Theatre on upper Fifth Avenue, and I was a dedicated attendee; dedicated, perhaps, to a degree that verged on the obsessive if not the silly. What follows are two cases in point.

The vast majority of underground films were short, seldom exceeding fifteen or twenty minutes. Andy Warhol’s movies were the exception — epic in length if minimalistic in content — so when it was announced that the premiere of Warhol’s latest effort would run a mere ninety minutes (his aptly named Sleep, the previous year, had run six hours), Cinematheqies took heart. Moreover, the subject of the new film, its “star,” was the erudite Henry Geldzahler, a highly influential museum curator and gadfly in the NY art world, and legion were those who courted his favor.

A nearly full house gathered to watch Henry Geldzahler, in which the curator was filmed sitting in an easy chair in what appeared to be a sunlit Hamptons beach house, smoking a cigar. And that was it. For an hour and a half. The camera was stationary throughout. There were no close-ups, no long shots, no fades or dissolves — and no sound track. Except for the arm that held the cigar, Geldzahler was motionless. After about thirty or forty minutes of this, I overheard grumbling. Several people seated near me got up and left. Reminding myself that in Zen it is said, “If something is boring for five minutes, try it for ten; if it’s boring for ten, try it for fifteen,” and so on, I was determined to stick it out. For this, I was rewarded.

In an otherwise static film, a couple of things were happening that held my attention. First, Geldzahler, as time went on, was growing obviously, genuinely uncomfortable. He neither spoke nor signaled, and made no move to rise, but his increasingly annoyed expression and rigid body language were those of a man who could barely wait for this experiment to end; and since this sentiment was shared by many, if not most, in the theater, it created in an odd, serendipitous way that sense of audience identification for which great actors and writers so often strive.

Then, there was the lengthening ash on the cigar. If puffed gently and undisturbed, a well-made, slow-burning cigar tends to hold its ash, and this fat stogie, doubtlessly of Cuban origin, burned on and on (on and on), its ash intact. As the ash grew longer, it became, for me at any rate, not just the focal point of the film but riveting.

Next to Geldzahler’s chair was a freestanding ashtray, the kind one used to see in hotel lobbies, and on several occasions later in the film Henry reached down and made as if to knock the ash off into the tray — only to pull the cigar back at the last second, and take another puff. Each time he did this, tension escalated. Gradually, the suspense became as great as anything in a Hollywood thriller. The fate of that long cigar ash — Would Henry ever flick it? Why didn’t it just fall off on its own? — was comparable to the fate of an imperiled Jimmy Stewart or Tippi Hedren in the most spellbinding Hitchcock masterpiece. I was breathing hard and, metaphorically at least, on the edge of my seat. And when at long last the ash could defy gravity no more, its tumble was cathartic, the release very nearly orgasmic.

The film ended. The houselights came up. And I was simultaneously flabbergasted and embarrassed to see that as near as I could tell there was not another soul in the theater! I alone had stuck it out.

Speed-walking for the exit at a pace that suggested the place was on fire, I was convinced that anyone who happened to see me would conclude one of the following: (1) I was the coolest, most Zen dude in town; (2) I was a poser, a phony out to prove that I alone possessed the sensitivity and intelligence to comprehend the meaning of such a challenging film; or (3) I was a naive sucker from the sticks whom the crafty Warhol had succeeded in duping.

On another first Thursday, a month or two later, I attended an opening at a major art gallery, where I chanced to meet a beautiful British film actress, young but already well known. I won’t identify her as she is alive and still acting, often appearing in TV miniseries from the UK as well as episodes of Masterpiece Theater. Our conversation was going so well that we elected to continue it elsewhere, and did so in the bar of her uptown hotel. After two or three drinks, she squeezed my hand, looked meaningfully into my eyes, and invited me up to her room. I glanced at my watch. Oh no! It was well past eleven and the Cinematheque film program would be starting at midnight. Stammering that I was duty bound to go watch some important underground movies, I kissed her on the cheek and fled to the New Yorker.

Now, my all-time favorite accolade from a book reviewer was when Fernanda Pivano, Italy’s best-known critic, wrote in a leading Italian newspaper that “Tom Robbins is the most dangerous writer in the world.” I never read my reviews, even in English, but others sometimes pass choice bits along, so when I had occasion to meet the legendary Signora Pivano at a reception in Milan, I asked her what she meant by that wonderfully flattering remark. She replied, “Because you are saying zat love is zee only thing that matters and everything else eese a beeg joke.” Well, being uncertain, frankly, that is what I’d been saying, I changed the subject and inquired about her recent public denial that she’d ever gone to bed with Ernest Hemingway, whom she’d shown around Italy in the thirties.

“Why didn’t you sleep with Hemingway?” I inquired.

Signora Pivano sighed, closed her large brown eyes, shook her gray head, and answered in slow, heavily accented English, “I was a fool.”

Okay, back to the New York Cinematheque. Why did I choose to go watch a bunch of jerky, esoteric, often self-indulgent 16mm movies rather than sleep with the sexy British actress? Move over, Fernanda, there’s room for two fools on your bus.

So many times and with such vigor did Eileen and I kiss during our months of cohabitation in New York that the sheer number of our kisses would have confounded Carl Sagan; while our osculatory energy, if converted to electricity, might have illuminated Times Square and half of Coney Island. Our mingling of mouth meat, Eileen’s and mine, was so persistent, so manifold that it’s impossible now to single out any of our individual smooches for special attention, which may account for the fact that the only kisses that do stand out, the only two I actually remember from that period, were brief, dry, and devoid of passion (and thus could not have involved Eileen). One was the previously described dumb, wimpy peck of rejection I planted on the cheek of that British actress. The other was bestowed on me by Allen Ginsberg, the only man who’s ever succeeded in kissing me on the lips.

It was a wintry day in 1965, and Ginsberg and I sported snowflakes in our hair and beards as we paraded in front of the Women’s Detention Center on West Tenth Street, Greenwich Village. The march, the first of its kind and none too large, had been organized by “Lemar” (Legalize Marijuana) to protest that the prison was crowded with females of all ages whose sole criminal act was the private, orderly, nonviolent inhalation of tiny plumes of smoke given off by a smoldering weed. From time to time, a girl would appear at a barred window to signal gratitude and encouragement before being ordered — or dragged — away.

Amidst the swirling snowflakes, like the orbs of mad polar bears, flashbulbs incessantly popped and glowed. Obviously, all those cameras weren’t being aimed by the media. Some in our group estimated that at least a half-dozen law enforcement agencies had representatives on the scene. Perhaps to inspire fear and promote intimidation, the various city, state, and federal agents made no effort to hide either their presence or their documentation, and I, for one, was growing increasingly nervous.

My anxiety must have shown in my expression, maybe in my body language as well, because at one point Ginsberg laid a gentle hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about it.” He recognized my callow face from Lemar meetings at the Peace Eye Bookstore, though at that time had not learned my name. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeated, nodding at our swarm of paparazzi. “In the long run, these fuzzy shots in some cop’s folder will do you more honor than your face on the cover of Newsweek or Time.” Then he kissed me lightly, exerting scant more pressure than a snowflake.

My immediate reaction I don’t recall, but on many occasions in years to come I would silently thank him for the perspective: a lesson in attitude made all the more indelible by the kiss.

Such was his calling, I suppose. A hot-wired sutra slinger, a Vendantic versifier, a Wurlitzer of howling meat drunk on holy quarters, Ginsberg — invoking the eternal within the ephemeral; wholeheartedly celebrating paradox and confusion as the fundamental fluids in which the human condition hangs suspended (thereby refining our base dissatisfactions into the more luminous chemistry of acceptance, compassion, goofiness, and grief) — Ginsberg had the capacity to cast a net of enchantment around nearly everything in life, from a busted dusty sunflower to a potential bust by the morality police.

Not long ago, the United States Postal Service issued a series of stamps honoring the greatest modern American poets. The face of Allen Ginsberg was not among them. It figures, doesn’t it?

Eileen and I fled New York in the middle of the night. Our hasty exit, however, was neither as dramatic nor as nefarious as it sounds.

Eileen Halpin, short, brown of hair and feisty of spirit, with soulful eyes and a mouth so sensual it could prompt the pope to dive headfirst off his balcony, was a student in the art department at the University of Washington. We had met in August of ’64 just weeks prior to my departure for New York, when I was still under the sway of the Redheaded Wino, and spent three or four lovely sleepless nights together before I left Seattle. I never expected to see her again, but once I’d settled in what New Yorkers were just beginning to call the “East Village” (having dropped off Susan and Kendall in Richmond and picked up B.K., who found lodging in the tenement house next to mine), Eileen and I commenced a correspondence perfumed with such mutual attraction that not much more than a month had passed before I was meeting her train at Grand Central station.

Ever spunky and independent, Eileen wasted little time in landing a job waitressing at Café Renzi, a popular Greenwich Village coffeehouse, just down the street from where a kid named Bob Dylan was starting to flex his adenoids. Although her earnings were small, they augmented my savings, subsidizing to some extent my research. By late June ’65, however, those savings were so depleted that coffeehouse tips were insufficient to prop them up. And then there was the matter of Ken Kesey and the weather…

June was pistol-whipping Manhattan with a dead flounder; the air thick with heat, humidity, hydrocarbons, and the near-evil effluvia of rotting garbage. Our apartment lacked air-conditioning or even a fan, so to keep cool in the evenings we’d crawl through a window and sit on the fire escape. When Eileen was at work, I’d read out there, straining my eyes in the stray glare of a streetlight. As chance would have it, the novel I’d begun reading that summer was Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, which, set in the Pacific Northwest, was sodden with images of green moss, green ferns, green cedars and firs, cool green drizzle, and cold green rivers: such a saturation of greenness that it would have sent an ol’ desert rat like Gaddafi into shock, causing him to chant “beige, beige, beige, beige, beige…”

One midnight (I’d been splashing in Kesey puddles and, not coincidentally, it was only days before July’s rent was due), Eileen returned from Café Renzi to find me packing my bags. “Get your darling stuff together, little darlin’,” I said. “We’re betraying New York ’ere the cock crows thrice.” Our landlord’s real estate office was on the ground floor of our building and it would be up and running by nine. By the time it opened, Eileen and I and our belongings were crammed in the trusty old Valiant, putting across western New Jersey. As we’d crossed the Hudson, I’d waved au revoir and “later, man,” to the ghosts of Soutine and Pollock, thanking them for their nine months of service to my Protestant ethic.

There’d been another motivation for escaping New York. The area around Tompkins Square Park where we lived had for many decades been a neighborhood of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants. By the early sixties, however, it had become increasingly populated by Puerto Ricans (soon they’d be displaced by hippies, but that was yet to come), and at night, young Hispanic gangs dominated street life. Incidents of violence were fairly rare, though the nocturnal prevalence of knots of young Latin males on corners or on tenement steps created a certain sense of wariness and unease. Walking home late from Stanley’s Bar on Avenue B, I was always alert for trouble, a tiny bit on edge even when accompanied by a muscleman like B.K.

The two rival gangs in our hood were “the 12th St. Boys” and “the Dutchmen.” Why a group of tough teens from Puerto Rico would choose to identify with cheese-making, ice-skating, Northern European windmill keepers, I was never to fathom, but I did learn other things about these Latino Dutchmen and I learned them firsthand.

The competing gangs staked out and defined their territory by chalking their names on every available wall. One afternoon as I was walking up East Tenth Street, I witnessed just such a verbal flag-planting by a party of so-called Dutchmen, observing that they, as usual, were misspelling their own sacred name. The leader of this contingent had just written D*U*C*H*M*E*N” on a brick facade and stepped back to admire his handiwork when — motivated by an uncontrollable editorial impulse, a force that had operated in my life since early childhood — I walked over, demanded the chalk (the gangster was too stunned or, smelling blood, too amused to refuse), seized it and inserted a big chalky capital T. “There,” I said, “that’s how you spell it. D*U*T*C*H*M*E*N.”

It was only then, as I handed back the chalk, that the utter recklessness of my impromptu pedagogery hit me. Good God, Tom, what have you done! As I prepared to sprint for my life, pursued by a pack of urban wolves, the boys nodded. They smiled. They muttered their thanks in Spanish and in English. And I walked away unscathed, resisting any impulse to accelerate my pace or glance back over my shoulder. It had turned out well, after all. It had. But it wasn’t over.

These gangbangers (ages fourteen through eighteen) had a lot of time on their hands. As they loitered in doorways or in nooks of Tompkins Square, they talked. They conversed for hours, day and night, and as I was to learn, they argued; argued about an amazingly wide range of subjects: not merely sports and pop culture, but current events, history, geography, and nature (including human and animal sexuality). You can see where this is going. I, the gringo who had the education to correct their spelling and the cojones to scribble their name (illegally, of course) on a wall, became their trusted arbiter. From that day on, I scarcely could pass a group of Dutchmen without being called upon to settle some debate.

It was kind of flattering, kind of cool, being an oracle to a gang in the mean streets of New York, but I sensed that my position as a one-man ambulatory search engine could only lead to no good. What if an argument grew overly heated and I sided with some younger, weaker member or members rather than the leader of the pack? What if they were to discover that unwittingly or to hide my ignorance I’d given them wrong information? What if the 12th St. Boys had their own mentor, a retired professor or something, and he were to challenge me to a dramatic High Noon erudition face-off? This was before the National Rifle Association helped assure that any hotheaded punk in America could access a handgun, but it was rumored that each and every one of these gangsters carried switchblades. I couldn’t very well avoid the Dutchmen or resign my position. The situation wasn’t exactly urgent, but it did serve as an added incentive to, as Mark Twain, put it, “light out for the territories.”

We not only lit out, we slept out. Financially stressed, we eschewed commercial accommodations, electing to sleep in parks, fields, or, one night in Minnesota, a wrecking yard where the Valiant did not look out of place among the corpses of broken cars. It was summer, nights were balmy, so camping out under the stars should have been pleasant. And it was except for one small fly swimming backstrokes in the ointment: we had but a single sleeping bag.

Each night, a road-worn Eileen would slither into the bag. Then, like stuffing a one-pound sausage casing with two pounds of pork, I’d force my way in beside her, grunting, twisting, and squirming. Once both were sufficiently encased, neither could move. Unable to turn over, flex, or shift positions in any manner, we were plastered against one another, my face to the back of her head because if face-to-face we would have spent the night inhaling each other’s exhalations. Sexual intercourse, naturally, was out of the question. Not even Houdini could have pulled it off, except perhaps if his partner were a yoga instructor. We felt like an Egyptian two-pack in that damn bag: King Tut and his sister Tutti.

In western Montana, as a setting sun turned a placid river into peach juice, we spotted a motel whose clean white cabins were advertised at four bucks a night. Needing a shower, needing to reconfigure our alignment of intimacy, needing to rest muscles sore from reclining on hard earth — and figuring that with a big push we could reach Seattle by the following evening — we splurged.

Scrubbed until we glistened like Liberace’s incisors, we approached the white cloud of a bed with an almost giddy combination of exhaustion and anticipation, feelings that intensified when we noticed that it was one of those newly fashionable “Magic Fingers” massage beds. Once activated by coins in a slot, such a bed would come to life, slowly undulating up and down, side to side, gently kneading the supine bodies of its occupant or occupants. Great! Wonderful! It was an unexpected answer to a couple of weary road warriors’ unspoken prayers.

Well, it might have been bad karma for running out on a lease, it might have been long-distance Puerto Rican Dutchman voodoo, it might have been just one more little joke on the part of the gods (we really shouldn’t begrudge them their fun), but our bed, which was supposed to jiggle for about twenty blissful minutes, got in a groove and wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop! It was as if the thing had been programmed by Bill Haley and Little Richard — “shake, rattle, and roll” — or James Bond’s favorite bartender.

After more than an hour of constant jiggling, massaged within an inch of our lives, we were at the point of bailing out and attempting to sleep on the floor (in retrospect, that junkyard turf didn’t seem so bad) when it finally occurred to our numb brains that the manic mechanical masseuse was an electrical device, and thus tethered to a power source. Like a rodeo rider dismounting a bronco, I tumbled off the mattress, crawled around on the floor until I found a cord, traced it to its plug, and disconnected it. The bed shuddered and fell idle. “Wahoo!” I shouted. By the time this cowboy was back in the sheets, Eileen was already asleep.