Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  out the rent on St. Philip Street. Maybe out of some secret unspo- ken hate, a cruel sense of humor—who knows?—these people left the remains of their shrimp dinner in our sink. It remained there for four days of blistering New Orleans summer. The place had to be fumigated. One day I was walking down Barracks Street when a black Cadil- lac pulled up beside me. The passenger door opened. A well-dressed man I did not at first recognize addressed me cheerfully. “Hey, Stone! Get in.” I got in beside him, and the air-conditioning in his car was very welcome. I saw that it was my landlord, Mr. Ruffino. “What you do that to me for?” Mr. Ruffino inquired. He was refer- ring to the shrimp in the sink. “I ever do anything like that to you?” I was surprised and alarmed. Perspiring heavily all at once, air- conditioning or not, I explained what I knew must be the circum- stances. Somehow I convinced him. Maybe Mr. Ruffino took pity on my recent fatherhood. He was later helpful in getting me into the seamen’s union. He also revived my aborted show-business career by introducing me to his friend Dominick. It was the era of poetry readings to jazz, and Dominick fancied the idea of introducing these items at his Dumaine Street bar. I read some of the pieces I’d read in the Seven Arts. Local talent and people driving in from New York or the Coast or Mexico came through. We passed a glass goblet and split the proceeds. Sometimes, after Tulane football games, the players and their followers would come in and throw bananas at us. This cost them nothing, since the bananas, in bunches off the dock, were hung from the ceiling and the bar pillars. On one occasion Dominick, who was taking increased pleasure in these upscale shows, rented a bunch of avant-garde Yugoslav car- prime green: remembering the sixties 59

  Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

  toons to precede the main event. Drunk partisans of the Crimson Tide, which had prevailed over Tulane that day, disrespected the car- toons and threw bananas at the screen. Dominick stepped forward in front of a phalanx of his heavyset, frowning waiters. He put up his hands for quiet. “Y’all don’ wanna tro bananas at the screen,” he told the cus- tomers decorously. “Don’ do it.” The next show was us. We were reading aloud from “John Brown’s Body.” I don’t remember whose idea that was. Not mine. It is, in fact, a most moderate and open-minded poem, although maybe not a great one. Still, it sounded out of place a block or so off the levee. “Horses of anger...,” we read. The customers began to hoot and jeer. They started throwing ba- nanas again. The well-dressed Tulane alums, the ’Bama dolts, the tourists—all started screaming and throwing bananas. We perform- ers covered up and tried to flee. This only encouraged the mob. Suddenly we heard a body fall. And then another. “Degenerate cocksuckers!” The very words I had in mind! It was Dominick. His rage at degenerate cocksuckers who failed to appreciate Stephen Vincent Benét was uncontainable. In very little time he and his staff had cleared the place. When the last philistine had been ejected, threatened, and booted in the ass, he shook hands with the readers. “Y’all was good,” he said. “We’ll do it another time.” I learned a lot that year in New Orleans. Janice did too. The closer to street level you live, the more you have lessons thrust upon you. One I remember very clearly was an experience I had while taking the U.S. census. It was hot, as it could be only down there. I knocked on the door of one of the decrepit wooden houses on the edge of downtown, in an 60 robert stone

  area I believe has been demolished for the construction of the Super- dome. If the dome builders didn’t get it, no doubt Hurricane Ka- trina did. Inside, half a dozen people were gathered around a bed. Beside it, a single candle burned at the feet of a plaster Virgin. Cloth blinds had been drawn over the windows to keep back the killing sun, and the candle was the only source of light in the room. As I advanced toward the bed, I saw that all the people around it had turned to watch me. Looking over their shoulders I saw that, lying there, with clean white sheets drawn almost up to her chin, was a very old woman. Her skin was a café-au-lait color and engraved with fine wrinkles. Her toothless face was like an old turtle’s. She breathed with difficulty. She was clearly dying. I was delighted to learn that the folks in the room were attendant relatives from two different households. This was a tactical coup, census-wise, and a labor-saving stroke of luck. In my brisk impa- tience to record the statistical details of everyone’s life, it took me a moment to realize that these people were strangely unforthcoming. Looking up from my forms, I confronted their eyes. Their eyes were calmly questioning, almost humorous. I stood and stared and re- turned to my jottings until suddenly it hit me. Someone is dying here. These people have come to attend a death. Perhaps this was not the ideal time for census taking? After this leap of understanding the rest followed unbidden. That had this been a white middle-class household I would never have been allowed past the door. That had this been a white middle-class household I would never have dreamed of entering a sickroom, of approaching a deathbed, asking cold irrelevant questions of people who had come to mourn and pray. prime green: remembering the sixties 61

  That what had happened there was entirely determined by the politics of race and class—how blinding that can be, how dehuman- izing, how denying of elemental human dignity and respect. Walk- ing along Dryades Street in the paralyzing glare, the whole wave hit me. The questions I had asked, one after another, that they had en- dured from me. Place of birth. Estimated year’s income. Mother’s full name. Condition of residence? We didn’t ask that one; the an- swer was always dilapidated and we checked the appropriate square. I thought of that afternoon and those people almost twenty years later, when that house was gone, the whole neighborhood vanished, and the Republican convention in progress in the giant arena that had replaced it. I thought of it again when Katrina came and scat- tered such people, their houses and their graves and their prayers, to the four winds. Just as the unimaginable summer heat began to subside, we started north. Janice traveled on the train with the baby and the French Market cat. I planned to hitchhike. Rides were so bad through Mississippi that I tried a freight train, the one and only time in my life I’ve ever done so. The yardmaster at Picayune, Mis- sissippi, was friendly. He advised me not to ride. Then he reminded me to always put a two-by-four in the freight car door to keep it from slamming shut forever. He taught me a little of the number system that keyed the destinations of freight cars. I made it to Birm- ingham, Alabama, not very far. I was quite happy to get out. Hitch- ing over the mountains, hassled by police, threatened and occasionally befriended, I got to Washington, D.C. It was the day of the first Nixon-Kennedy debate. It was fall, and cool. I headed for the Apple and Janice, wanting nothing so much as to see her again. When you were young in those days and thought you had ex- hausted the resources of your hometown and the landscape that had 62 robert stone

  nourished you, you waited for a green light at the intersection of the great American road. When it flashed go, you went. My bride and I had a problem, native New Yorkers as we were, children of what we never for a moment doubted was the Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem of our postwar world. The problem of course was where, where—since we believed on the assurance of high rollers and Algonquin wits that everywhere outside the Apple was Bridgeport. In fact, I harbored another, a secret conviction: that au- thenticity, whatever it was, resided somewhere else, somewhere that I was not. I’d know it when I saw it, I had even glimpsed it from afar in my travels, but it seemed to evaporate at my approach. Authen- ticity was out there beyond the vast fields of the Republic, eluding me, but I believed in it faithfully, a place, a magical coast, a holy mountain where folk of unsullied unself-consciousness labored at genuinely valid occupations and justified the race and the nation, where dwelt the thing itself, the McCoy. The best and truest thing in On the Road is Kerouac’s description of his hero’s experience of the same longing as he studies the red band of Route 10 winding from Bear Mountain Bridge to Sacra- mento. Naively Sal sets out to follow it and the real America. For Sal it resides in the person of Dean Moriarty—that is, Neal Cassady. From the West Side I knew authenticity was approachable by way of
the bus station in the Hotel Dixie, then under the river and beyond the Palisades, where its lights might be visible on summer nights from Riverside Park. Scott Fitzgerald and young Truman Capote might dream of Manhattan, but that was a dream denied me. The fact that I was there and always had been meant the treasure was buried on a different island. Drifting through the rich, strange, brutal fever dream that was New Orleans fifty years ago I was astonished to learn some things I prime green: remembering the sixties 63

  hadn’t known. As married kids in the middle of the French Quarter, our new baby hidden from the insect hordes under an old prom- night crinoline of Janice’s, we found ourselves surviving. Nor was our poverty a game of la vie bohème; there were no well-off parents to save our skins, no prospect of refugee status and rescue to call on. I doubt either of us then knew what a trust fund was; we might have guessed it was the value of the quarter you owed someone for your most recent slice of white bread and redeye gravy. The city of New Orleans had not required us, neither us nor our new daughter, born with the grudging assistance of Huey Long’s Charity Hospital. It’s so long ago now that I have only fragments of recollection, river mists, magnolia, gardens enclosed in old stone. Also police sirens, and shouts in the street, tambourines and the notes of a clar- inet in the twilight at the end of a blazing day. Recently, the scenes of the city under the fist of Hurricane Katrina brought it all back. It turned out there is nothing like parenthood and a dose of star- vation to still youth’s craving for authenticity. Without intending to, we had placed ourselves in a strange, profoundly self-referential place at a time when history had come to sweep away its revered past. A year there had given me something like a sense of life lived in time, and I began to imagine something like a novel. 64 robert stone

  SIX I went back to New York, my head spinning with the things we’d seen and been. The three of us, Janice and I and our New Orleans–born daughter, settled into an apartment on St. Mark’s Place, off the Bowery. In those days the northern end of the Lower East Side still bore traces of the old German section that had been called Kleine Deutschland. That neighborhood had been demoralized and destroyed in 1904 by the disaster of the General Slocum, an excursion steamer that burned and sank in Hell Gate, taking the lives of over a thousand women and children attending a Lutheran church outing. But the ruins of

  it were manifest if you knew where to look. Across the street from our window was the old German Schutzenverein. Engraved in the lin- tel of its handsome brick building was the motto Einigkeit macht stark, “Strength in union.” The German sporting club had become a Polish club. Another Polish social club down the street, the Polski Dom, often jammed on holidays and for Gypsy weddings, would be transformed into the Dom, center of the Andy Warhol universe. The Polish and Ukrainian dimensions of the neighborhood had expanded and would expand more when new waves of immigration arrived. The huge Ukrainian Uniate church of St. George and St. Basil stood on Hall Place, across from McSorley’s Ale House. A quarter at McSorley’s bought you two steins of the house ale, all that was served. Except for some Cooper Union students it was an old-timers’ hangout. It refused service to women, refused it noisily. The bar- tender, if a woman entered, shouted, “No ladies!” at the top of his voice and rang a deafening ship’s bell until the mortified woman left. My sister-in-law staged a one-girl underage guerrilla raid on the place, darting in, grabbing a full stein from in front of a doddery old boy, and draining it while the bartender clanged desperately and went hoarse with shouting. Sister-in-law had a dazzling smile. The Anderson Theater still gave Yiddish performances, Second Avenue had Ratner’s and Rappaport’s. There was great bread of every kind and ex-speakeasy restaurants. Variety Photoplays near Fourteenth played westerns in triple-feature mode while mice ran over your feet. Tenth Street east of University Place had the small galleries that thrived through the days of abstract expressionist pop- ularity. On University Place itself was the Cedar Bar, where Franz Kline, de Kooning, and hundreds of memorable characters of lesser note went regularly. Janice and I also. At the 302, on Ninth Street, was New York’s best-known trans- 66 robert stone

  vestite floor show. The Hell’s Angels had opened a headquarters on Sixth Street. “Baron,” one of the innumerable types who were known by that name over time, ran his espresso café on Sixth Street as well, and dealt psychedelics ordered from a cactus farm in Texas. W. H. Auden lived in an elegant brownstone at the First Avenue end of St. Mark’s. The number of loft parties increased as the fire depart- ment eased up on artists occupying lofts. Going to one was like go- ing to a party in the subway. The Bowery then had hundreds of flophouses and roach-challenged bars with pressed-tin walls, where you hoped they used soap to wash the beer glasses. The boiled eggs behind the bar were prewar. A strange social development was taking place on skid row, some- thing that might have escaped our notice at a different time. The Bowery was undergoing a kind of race war that it would have been absurdly euphemistic to call integration. Black down-and-outers, whose absence few neighborhood whites had noticed before, began appearing at corners and in the doorways of the chicken-wired ho- tels. In earlier times, the derelict quarters of major cities were segre- gated. The Bowery occupants were overwhelmingly elderly white men, who ranged in degree of poverty from the scrofulous, dying bundles of rags in the gutter to men in dry-cleaned thirdhand suits and clean shirts who drew some sort of pittance once or twice a month. This small sum they would providently turn over to the owners of the bargain restaurants where they ate or to the hotel keepers at their rooming house. The meal tickets and room chits kept them lodged and fed even if they fell off the wagon. Most, though not all, were alcoholics. There were virtually no women among them. Who kept up or enforced the racial barriers? Maybe hard cases who ran the beaneries and hotels. Maybe the police, forcing black prime green: remembering the sixties 67

  paupers up to the skid rows in Harlem. But at a certain point around 1960 changes were perceivable. Things being what they were and are, black men faced impoverishment more frequently and at a younger age than most whites. For the same reasons, larger numbers of poor black men had served longer terms in prison. The black new- comers were often younger and less physically ruined than the white derelicts, more used to more serious fighting than at least many of the whites and, perhaps, more involved with drugs. They were also angry; there were men who had been brutalized and whipped, or served on chain gangs and in turp camps. What began to happen was that the social system recently estab- lished in prisons took over the Bowery. On the most productive pan- handling corners, and in the homeless shelters, the older white men began to disappear. In a way, it was simply a question of the young, in a desperate situation, displacing the old. It went, I think, unno- ticed and unmentioned by the city at large. Older men of all races fled the Bowery and looked for relative safety. But there was no pro- tection for anyone. The Darwinian quality one glimpsed was as shocking as anything I ever saw. Since getting back to New York, I had found a job with an adver- tising company that specialized in promotions for furniture. The furniture was of the sort that was sold on time to poor people. There were three grades of it, and its style was contemporary Scandinavian or American Colonial. Copywriters, such as I was, received the ad layouts with the furniture pictured and the spaces for advertising copy indicated. The game was to supply the words of the ad copy; these inevitably were adjectives and adverbs. “Lovely,” “Exquisite,” and “Handcrafted.” The last term remained meaningless to me. It seemed to make a picture, but a picture which I could never quite 68 robert stone

  visualize clearly. Maybe a graceful, disembodied hand fondling the sensuous curves of an imitation-maple chair back. It was pretty bor- ing work. The mind was a monkey. What was most obnoxious about the job was its aftereffect. As a registered loser on every sucker list in New York, I could be sure of receiving my own overwritten, chisel- ing copy in every weekend mail, pitching myself with my own scam. I began to write about New Orleans, although I found it ex- tremely difficult to write on weeke
nds and after work. I was af- flicted, it seemed, with some kind of pathological laziness. Maybe it was depression. Maybe just bad character. Somehow your worst characteristics stay with you when your good stuff goes. One winter day Janice and I were walking along Washington Square when we happened to run into our old professor Macha Rosenthal. Mack had conducted the one writing class I attended at NYU before I dropped out of school. Since that class I’ve thought about this man continually, and there is no one other than Janice to whom I owe more. His class at NYU was the most fun anyone, cer- tainly I, ever had in a classroom. Outside academia, Mack was a fine poet and America’s foremost Yeats scholar. In our workshops he was a kind and witty critic, who never lost his wry edge or his sense of humor, and his classes were champagne, especially but not only if he liked your work. I never learned much from teachers in my life, but he was one I learned from. On the square that night Janice and I, who had met in his class, were back from New Orleans, parents and no longer students. For the second time since I’d met him, Mack mentioned the Wallace Stegner Fellowships at Stanford University. These were, as far as I know, the only writing workshops at that time that offered paid fel- lowships to writers with no academic credentials. The deal was sim- prime green: remembering the sixties 69