The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Another event signaling that the rapprochement of black and white bohemians in the Village—including Hettie and LeRoi Jones’s marriage—could be fragile was the March 1964 production of Jones’s play Dutchman at Cherry Lane. Written, he later recalled, in a single blazing night, the one-act portrays a sexually fraught encounter between a white female bohemian type and a young black man on the subway. She comes on to him and teases him in a half-crazy, half-mocking way, until he roars at her, “You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away you’re an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is.” She stabs him to death, then calmly searches the subway car for her next victim. Jones followed it later in the year with The Toilet and The Slave. The latter is set in a near future when a black man formerly married to a white woman has become the leader of a violent black revolution. Hettie, and all their downtown friends, clearly saw herself and LeRoi in those two characters. The Toilet is about a gay white boy dragged into a men’s room and beaten by a gang of black youth. Jones seemed to be working out some complex ambivalence in it regarding his relationships with friends like Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers, who designed the set. On a larger scale, obviously, the white characters in these plays are all representatives of liberal white America, seducing black Americans and clasping them in an embrace that can be broken only by violence and revolution. Ironically, liberal white America hailed Jones as a new voice of black rage. Dutchman won that year’s Obie for best new play, and the author was showered with writing offers from mainstream media.

  Jones’s relationships with his white wife and friends continued to deteriorate. In a panel discussion with Rivers and others at the Village Vanguard in March 1965—one month after the assassination of Malcolm X—he shocked Rivers by accusing him of oppressing blacks both as a white man and as a Jew. They didn’t speak for twenty years. A couple of weeks later Jones appeared on a panel at the Village Gate with D’Lugoff, Hentoff, the pianist Cecil Taylor, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) leader Bob Gore, and Paul Krassner as moderator. With Jones leading the way the debate quickly descended into name-calling and insult, with much shouting, jeering, and cheering from the audience. Jones attacked the whites in the room at the root of their cherished belief, or hope, that as bohemians, jazz fans, liberals, outsiders themselves they were not part of the oppressive white establishment. He called D’Lugoff “just a shopkeeper in a very hip ghetto situation,” told one white woman in the audience that she was “disqualified from humanity,” and called another a “rotten fruit.” D’Lugoff fired back that Jones was “a racist and bigot” and told Hentoff, who’d tentatively risen to Jones’s defense, that he was an anti-Semite and a disgrace to Judaism. At the end of all the yelling, Jack Newfield wryly noted in the Voice, audience members were handed “leaflets written by Jones asking for contributions for his Black Arts Repertory Theatre.” That same night the quintessential example of white people embracing black culture, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, played a gig at the Gate. Jones left Hettie that year, left the Village for Harlem, and became the black revolutionary Amiri Baraka.

  BESIDES COMPLETELY RENOVATING JAZZ, PART OF BEBOP’S LEGACY was the rise of heroin as the ne plus ultra of cool, outlaw hipster drugs. The previous generations of jazzmen had been pot smokers. They’d brought marijuana north with them from New Orleans and made it the hip drug of choice of the 1930s. Through the Depression pot was closely associated with jazz and vice versa. “Teaheads” and “vipers,” as smokers were called, congregated where the jazz clubs were—in Times Square, on Swing Street, and in Harlem’s “tea pads.” The boppers smoked plenty of tea themselves but many of them also turned to the hard stuff. Heroin use exploded at the same time that bebop did; in New York City, heroin busts increased tenfold between 1946 and 1950, clustered in the same neighborhoods where pot had been prevalent in the 1930s and for the same reason: it was where the jazz was. Smack was in effect the avant-garde of drugs, the ultimate high, the total rejection of the square world and its bustling work ethic. When Miles Davis came back to New York after a sojourn in Paris in 1949 he found that many of his jazz friends were “deep into drugs, especially heroin. People—musicians—were considered hip in some circles if they shot smack.” And since so many of the boppers, including Davis, did it, many of their fans, admirers, and wannabes did too.

  It was no coincidence that jazz and heroin appeared in the same places. The common factor was the Mafia, who both ran the international heroin trade and owned or backed many of the jazz clubs. In the Village, where recreational heroin use (“joy bangs”) had mostly been a working-class pastime in the 1930s, it spread in the 1940s and ’50s among the bop-loving hipsters, bohemians, and Beats. They in turn enhanced its allure among their fans. When LeRoi Jones came to the Village he was introduced to the speedball, a combination of heroin and amphetamines very popular with local hipsters. Heroin’s reputation as the coolest complement to the coolest new music would carry through the rock and punk rock decades.

  BY HAPPENSTANCE, ANOTHER ULTIMATE HIGH MADE ITS FIRST INROADS into hip culture in the Village of the early 1950s. Years before Dr. Timothy Leary’s name became synonymous with LSD, an obscure character named George White was secretly dosing Villagers with it.

  White had been a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent since the 1930s and a spy during the war for the Office of Strategic Services, which later evolved into the CIA. As an OSS agent, White worked for a program to develop a “truth drug” that could be used on enemy spies. OSS scientists extracted THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, as a test truth serum; white went around New York City handing out THC-laced cigarettes to suspected enemy agents, including scientists working on the Manhattan Project. In 1952, when the CIA wanted to test the mind-control potential of the relatively new drug LSD, White was given the job and a supply of the drug to use. White and his wife lived on West Twelfth Street and fit right in with the shadowy side of Village life. He was an alcoholic, and he was into kinky sex. He liked to be punished by women in stiletto heels, he liked to dish it out as well, and he and his wife liked to throw swinging orgy parties with friendly couples in their apartment. He was friends with Gil Fox, who published his fetishist Vixen Books (with titles like No Holds Barred, Chains of Silk, and Carnal Cargo) out of his apartment on Christopher Street, and the fetish artist John Willie, who put out a magazine called Bizarre and is best known for creating the bondage cartoon character Sweet Gwendoline. According to Fox, White showed his sadistic streak by secretly spiking friends’ cocktails with LSD and coolly observing their confusion and terror. One young woman he dosed this way developed permanent psychosis and ended up in a mental institution.

  In 1953 the CIA, convinced there was a mind-altering-drugs gap with the Soviets and the Chinese Communists, started the supersecret MKULTRA program “to develop drugs that would enable the CIA to discredit friends and foes alike, and that could be delivered clandestinely and kill without a trace.” Using a CIA bank account and adopting a false identity as an artist, White rented an apartment in the nondescript building at 81 Bedford Street and outfitted it with an air conditioner, a two-way mirror, recording equipment, Toulouse-Lautrec posters, and a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Through 1955 he dosed unsuspecting people with LSD in this phony artist’s pad and watched the results. Some were brought to him by hookers he paid for the service, others were acquaintances he or Fox lured there, an assortment of Village types—aspiring young actresses, young swinging couples, the occasional West Side hoodlum. It’s unclear how much of this was useful research as opposed to White’s simply entertaining himself at others’ expense. The whole program almost blew up when a CIA scientist named Frank Olson was secretly dosed—not by White but by another MKULTRA researcher in a D.C. suburb. Olson went on a prolonged bad trip and was sent to New York City to see a CIA-connected psychiatrist. Evidently the shrink was no help: Olson hurled himself out the window of his room at the Statler Hotel near Penn Station and died.

  IN THE 1960S AND ’70S FOLK AND
ROCK DREW HORDES OF YOUNG listeners to the Village, much to the disgruntlement of some ’50s holdovers. But even though the audiences for live jazz diminished, there was still a good deal being played in and around the Village. On a single weekend in the summer of 1963 you could hear Archie Shepp at the Take 3 on Bleecker Street, Herbie Mann nearby at the Village Gate, Gerry Mulligan at the Vanguard, Zoot Sims at the Half Note on Hudson Street, Steve Lacy at Phase 2, and Monk over at the Five Spot. Amram, the multi-instrumentalist and budding internationalist, loved the diversity of musical styles in the neighborhood. Within a few blocks’ walk, he remembers, you could hear jazz in one spot, folk in another, Middle Eastern music at Cafe Feenjon on MacDougal Street, and Mongo Santamaría at the Village Gate. “That’s how I learned so many different kinds of music and felt comfortable with them,” he says. “I’d go sit in with Mongo, or play with Dizzy or my own group, then go down and play with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott or Odetta, then sit in with the Middle Eastern guys all night. I was just an underground scholar with an open mind and an open heart. I’ve always been drawn to things of beauty. If something touched my heart I’d say, ‘Man, I gotta get close to that.’ ”

  20

  The Beat Generation

  HOLD BACK THE EDGES OF YOUR GOWNS, LADIES, WE ARE GOING THROUGH HELL.

  —William Carlos Williams

  I’M A RECORDING ANGEL. WE’RE ALL ANGELS . . . WE’RE ALL IN HEAVEN NOW!

  —Jack Kerouac

  BEAT WRITING ENTERED THE POPULAR CONSCIOUSNESS WITH the publications of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (by City Lights in San Francisco) in 1956 and even more so with Jack Kerouac’s widely heralded and denounced On the Road (by Viking in New York) in 1957, followed by a tsunami of Kerouac titles in the three years that followed. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind appeared in 1958 and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (titled The Naked Lunch by its first publisher) in 1959. Ferlinghetti and Burroughs were older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and neither ever called himself one of the Beats, but fans and the press did anyway. In 1958 the San Francisco columnist Herb Caen coined the diminutive “beatnik,” combining Beat and Sputnik, and the Village, along with San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood and Venice Beach in Los Angeles, filled up with bearded, beret-wearing clones. By 1959 parodies littered the mainstream media, from countless editorial cartoons of stereotypical beatniks (the guys in berets and goatees, the girls all in black looking like Morticia Addams) to Roger Corman’s genuinely funny A Bucket of Blood, a comedy-horror movie set in Venice Beach–style bohemia and advertised as “The Picture That’ll Make You . . . sick sick SICK with Laughter!” That same year television got its first resident representative featured on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Portrayed by Bob Denver, who would later play Gilligan, Maynard G. Krebs was all cliché, from his goatee and frayed sweatshirt to his hipster slang, his love of jazz, and his instinctive abhorrence of work and commitment.

  Maynard may have been a stereotype, an exaggeration, but by 1959 Village coffeehouses were crowded with weekend and wannabe beatniks acting almost as ridiculously. The novelist Herbert Gold dismissed them with the nastily apt analogy that they were to the truly hip as a box of cornflakes was to a field of corn. David Amram likes to say that the beatniks had no more to do with Kerouac’s work, his own, or their friends’ “than The Beverly Hillbillies did with William Faulkner’s writing.” Tour buses clogged MacDougal and Bleecker Streets, packed with families hoping for “authentic beatnik” sightings, which local businessmen happily provided. That year the Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah ran a small joke ad in the paper for a service called Rent-A-Beatnik. Surprised by the positive response, he enlisted the jazz poet Ted Joans, who made his rent money for a while going around to squares’ parties and playing the role for them. In September 1960 came the inevitable MAD parody feature, “Beatnik: A Magazine for Hipsters.” It offered a glossary of square terms and a “Dear Daddy-O” column of “Advice for the Love-Bugged,” and it took pokes at Kerouac (through a “part-time intellectual” named Kerr U. Ack) and others. An unintentional parody came out of Hollywood that year in The Subterraneans, a terrible film loosely based on the novel, with George Peppard as the Kerouac figure. By then many of the artists and writers who had generated all this interest had fled the Village and North Beach, abandoning them to the tourists and fauxhemians. The cycle from the original, “authentic” phenomenon to a crassly commercialized mass fad—one that bohemian enclaves go through so often it seems inevitable—was complete.

  The Beat Generation, as Kerouac had almost inadvertently dubbed it, had been around for nearly twenty years by this time. In December 1943, Allen Ginsberg, a nerdy seventeen-year-old Columbia University freshman from Paterson, New Jersey, made his first trip to Greenwich Village where, as he wrote, “all the fairies were.” His father, Louis, was a respected lyric poet and high school teacher. His mother, Naomi, was a card-carrying member of the CPUSA. He describes her long struggles with mental illness, culminating in the prefrontal lobotomy that reduced her to a zombie, in his elegiac “Kaddish.” Worried that his homosexuality might be a symptom of inherited madness, Ginsberg remained a closeted virgin until he was twenty. For several years he tried to cure himself of it by dating women. He had come to Columbia and quickly fallen in love with Lucien Carr, a fellow freshman, originally from St. Louis. Falling for bright, handsome, and potentially dangerous straight males was to be a recurring theme of Ginsberg’s romantic life.

  Ginsberg met Burroughs through Carr. The history leading up to this meeting is serpentine. Back in St. Louis, a man in his early twenties named David Kammerer had become obsessively infatuated with Carr while directing the boy in an elementary school play. When Carr moved to Chicago and then to New York, in part, supposedly, to get away from Kammerer, Kammerer followed. By the time Ginsberg and Carr were students at Columbia, Kammerer had an apartment at 44 Morton Street in the Village. While Carr portrayed himself as the victim of Kammerer’s unwanted stalking, the two of them frequently socialized and, a few days before Christmas 1943, Carr took Ginsberg on that first trip down to the Village. They drank at the Minetta Tavern and went to meet Kammerer and his friend Burroughs. (Burroughs, who’d been friends with Kammerer in St. Louis, had also recently moved to the neighborhood, taking a room at 69 Bedford Street.) The four of them drank heavily that first night, and Carr’s behavior soon turned bizarre. As Bill Morgan relates in The Typewriter Is Holy, Carr bit through his beer glass “and, bleeding badly, challenged David to do the same. That prompted Burroughs to bring a tray of razor blades and lightbulbs from the kitchen ‘as hors d’oeuvre.’ ” It was not Carr’s only bloody display. Around this time, he and Kammerer were drinking in the Village studio of a portrait painter when Carr became violent, trashing the studio, biting Kammerer on the shoulder, and biting off a part of the painter’s earlobe.

  Late on the night of August 13, 1944, Carr left a Morningside Heights bar where he’d been drinking with Kerouac. He ran into Kammerer, and the two of them took a six-pack into Riverside Park. According to Carr, Kammerer made sexual advances, and when Carr felt overpowered, he pulled out his old Boy Scout knife and stabbed Kammerer in the chest. He then bound the limbs with shoestrings, weighted the body with stones, and rolled it into the river. That morning he told Burroughs and Kerouac what he’d done, then gave himself up to the police. Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses. Burroughs and Carr were soon bailed out by their wealthy families, but Kerouac languished in the Bronx County jail. He was allowed out, in handcuffs, to marry Edie Parker at City Hall, after which she posted his bail. They later had the marriage annulled. At his trial, Carr’s lawyers portrayed him as an innocent college boy who had simply defended himself from a predatory homosexual. The media ran with this version; the Daily News called Kammerer’s murder an “honor slaying.” Convicted of manslaughter, Carr would be out in two years, with even his friends conceding he’d gotten away with murder.

  The incident shocked a
nd atomized the group for a while: Burroughs went to stay with his parents in St. Louis, Edie and Jack with hers in Detroit. By 1945 they were all back in New York.

  Their circle widened to include Joan Vollmer Adams, a bright and restless young war bride; her Morningside Heights roommate Edie Parker, a wild child who’d escaped a boring upper-middle-class suburb of Detroit; and Edie’s boyfriend Jack Kerouac. Ruggedly handsome (Ginsberg fell for him), of French Canadian parents, Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, still the working-class town where the Wobblies had organized mill workers back in the 1910s. He’d learned English as a second language and always spoke and wrote it with a musical lilt. He’d come to Columbia on a football scholarship, fought with his coach, and dropped out. He’d joined the Merchant Marine and then the navy, where he lasted only a week before getting a psychiatric discharge. He was by this time living with his parents, who’d moved to Ozone Park in Queens to be near him. His mother never liked his friends. “Don’t let those bums in New York talk you into anything,” he records her warning him. “They’ll destroy you if you let them! I don’t like the funny look in their face!”

  The group shuttled between the bars of the Upper West Side and the Village. In the girls’ fifth-floor walk-up they smoked pot and learned how to extract the Benzedrine-soaked strips from asthma inhalers for a speed kick, on which Joan got hooked. They talked long into the night about a “New Vision,” which Ginsberg described in a journal: “Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.” This notion would become the driving impulse of the Beat lifestyle and literature. Defending Kerouac from his legions of critics in 1958, Ginsberg would explain his friend’s writing as an attempt to “discover the rhythm of the mind at work at high speed in prose.”