Another Little Piece of My Heart

by Richard Goldstein

  I raced home from Fire Island and called Janis’s publicist, the only person I knew who stayed in close touch with her. The publicist was a voluble and caring woman. We’d both wanted to be the friend Janis could call when she felt desperate, the catcher in her bottle of rye. But there was no way for us to keep track of her. Pretty much everyone in her circle was in the music business, and, like so many others, they practiced the hip ethic of nonintervention. No one stopped her from skirting the edge of the cliff. Like Don McNeill on the day he drowned, she was simply doing her thing, and, like the guy who left Don alone after seducing him, no one would feel responsible for Janis’s death.

  I’d known many junkies. There was Tom, the woman who had introduced me to the East Village, and the first person in my life to OD. A close friend of mine was hooked on a sedative with the enticing name of Placidyl. He had so much of it in his body that his sweat bore a metallic odor. I enrolled him in a rehab program, to no avail—he eventually put a gun to his head. These addicts were very dear to me. In the days following Janis’s death I thought of them all, along with every rocker whose path to destruction I had witnessed silently, every acid casualty I’d iced out of my life, everyone I’d seen fall by the wayside while I clung on. Why hadn’t I intervened?

  I locked myself in and let the answering machine overflow. Deadlines came and went, but I couldn’t work. I would sit at the typewriter in a state of profound wooziness, so that I couldn’t construct a sentence. The words didn’t come together, and when I finally managed to string out a thought I couldn’t figure out where to go with it, how it fit into a larger whole. I went through a ream of typing paper, five hundred sheets, without producing a coherent piece. I knew then that I would never again write about rock. Every album in my collection carried memories of disillusionment. I would hear a song and burst into tears.

  Writing had been the companion to all my adventures, the thing that enabled me to cope with life since my childhood. Now I had to face the possibility that I might never be able to count on that outlet again. To this day, when I think about what dying would be like—what it will be like—I recall the baffling sense of everything vanishing from my grasp. This was the feeling of writer’s block. It was the real sound of silence.

  That’s when I felt the full weight of my loneliness, the hard truth that emerges in the course of a depression, the sadness that all the obsessive activity had kept from me. I threw away my beads and took my revolutionary posters off the wall. And then I cut my hair.

  Aftermath (or: There’s a Bathroom on the Right)

  I wish I could write a coming-of-age story like Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s frisky tale of his time on the road in 1973 with a rowdy but caring rock band. I’d love to wring that kind of juice out of my life, to tap into the myth of music as a tool for self-discovery and sexual awakening. Well, the myth was true for me, but it was far from heartwarming. There are many reasons why. Crowe’s movie is set in the years when the anguish of the sixties had more or less calmed down. My trajectory was much more traumatic; also more intense. It was all about love and disappointment, yearning and satisfaction that led to yearning again. I learned to take risks and make real connections, but the death and destruction that I witnessed left me with a rueful self-assessment. I would have to learn to live within my means and without my dreams.

  Eventually I found a new subject in the thorny issue of gender, and a new persona through the sex wars of the seventies. It seemed to me that the things I’d always hated—racism, warmongering, police brutality—were all aspects of patriarchal culture, and that the things I loved—such as androgyny in rock—were vectors of rebellion against those structures. I spent a good part of the next twenty years attacking machismo and its symbols, which were easy to parody, as are all forms of arbitrary power. Like any hegemonic class, the whiteboys, as my feminist friends called them, had no critique of their dominance. I was there to provide it.

  I waged this combat on the page rather than in the street, but it was no less aggressive. I wrote with a shiv in my prose, although I had to fight the inner suspicion that I was carrying out a revenge mission on behalf of my own feelings of failed masculinity. Would I have become the sexist enemy I was fighting against if I could have carried off the macho thing? In the corners of my fantasies the question nagged at me. But if we have to wait for activists who aren’t motivated by personal problems, nothing will ever change. Feminism gave me a potent analysis of power, and its love child, gay liberation, allowed me to resolve (at least provisionally) the question of my identity. Am I gay? More or less. Homosexual? Not only. My sexuality has always been a congeries, but I’m satisfied with the shake, full of stems and seeds as it may be. Identity politics supplied two things I badly needed: a struggle that inspired me and a place on the sexual map. It also allowed me to leave behind the feelings of pain and failure that had haunted me at the end of the sixties, culminating in my massive writing block. Janis Joplin’s death was the trigger, but it persisted long after my grief settled into melancholy.

  Years would pass before I crawled out of that hole. I had to invent a new style that didn’t seem stylized, and a voice that wasn’t artificial, as my previous persona of the hip arbiter had been. It was a slow and uncertain process. I learned to tolerate days, sometimes weeks, when nothing I wrote held together. But I pounded away at the typewriter, sitting there all night, crafting a paragraph that felt genuine, and then another. By 1971 I was finally able to complete an essay that had nothing to do with rock or youth culture. The theme was my deep attraction, sexual and otherwise, to WASPs. The piece was bought by Harper’s, whose editor, Lewis Lapham, confessed that he had the same obsession with Jews. I credit him with giving me my profession back, but I still couldn’t turn out copy on a regular basis. And I couldn’t bear to live in New York—there were too many absent faces and aching memories.

  So I retreated to a small town on the Connecticut coast, not far from the Rhode Island border. Judith and I lived in a commune until it broke apart, along with our marriage. I won’t go into the details, except to say that our experiment in free love disintegrated in the usual explosion. At some point I was left alone in the house. That’s when I had my last encounter with someone who reminded me of Groovy. By then he’d become a spirit that popped up in my memory. At odd moments I would think of the stud I met at Tom’s house, who seduced me with the sound of his guitar; or the dude who introduced me to acid in San Francisco; or the kid from California who told me that I was afraid to love. I have no idea what became of any of them, and I suppose it doesn’t matter—Groovy the man wasn’t really what attracted me. It was the type, maybe even the idea. He was the hippie I yearned to be.

  After the sixties ended I didn’t think I would ever meet such a person again, but I did. He was hardly a classic of the Groovy breed: too down-and-out, but by then I was full of self-doubt too. I bonded with him at an event that reminded me of how quickly the recent past becomes the stuff of nostalgia. I’d been sitting around the house in Connecticut, brooding; a college radio station was playing in the background, and the DJ said something about “a blast from the past.” He was plugging an event called Sixties Night. Only two years after the decade ended, it was easy to imagine that it had all happened in a dream, but the need to revisit the era persisted, especially for those too young to have participated in the Summer of Love. They were snacking on milk and Oreos while I was chewing ’shrooms. Now they could experience a simulacrum of, at least, the vibe.

  The venue for this sixties spectacle was a bar in Westerly, a Rhode Island border town so strapped for cash from its only industry, which was fishing, that it called itself the Cat Food Capital of America. But Westerly was only a short drive away from my house, so I decided to check out the gig. In those days, bars in smallish cities might have gay nights or polka nights, whatever brought out a special clientele. The performers often weren’t billed; all that mattered was the theme, and in this case the era was the point. The owner had hung a fra
yed mandala in the window, and I could smell marijuana rising from the small knot of kids in the doorway. In their processed tie-dyes, they looked like mannequins in a retro-clothing shop. A car cruised by; empty beer cans were tossed at the crowd. I screwed up what was left of my courage and walked inside. Except for the bartender, I was the oldest cat in the joint.

  Long hair was no mark of pacifism by then; it had become the signature of young working-class guys, and you never knew, when they raised a fist, whether they were greeting you or getting ready to beat you up. So I wasn’t sure whether the dudes standing around were there to hit on hippie chicks. It would be quite a task for any musician to reach this audience. The amps buzzed loudly. The room was bathed in ultraviolet light to mask the corroded walls. This was the kind of place that paid off fire inspectors. I decided to stay close to the flickering exit sign.

  Then I noticed the high-schoolers gathered around the cramped stage. These were the kids who wished they had been there when it was cool to be a freak. I could tell that they spent a lot of time in their rooms, letting the sound of a reedy voice suffuse their suffering spirits and awaken their deepest recesses of love. It wasn’t all that easy in 1972 to find songs that inspired those associations. Regularity reigned, rhythm passed for blues, and there was no real place for the meanderings of acid rock. This was pure nostalgia for a world that never was but really could have been, and the music was the only part of it that remained.

  Off to the side, I saw the performer tuning his guitar. His glum expression put me in mind of that Creedence Clearwater song about a touring band stuck in Lodi again. This was a guy who didn’t rate a roadie; he had to carry his own equipment. He looked more haggard than hip, with his stringy hair and the makings of creases in his cheeks. Hard living isn’t pretty after the age of, say, thirty-five, and he’d already crossed that threshold. At a signal from the bartender, he slunk to the mike and launched his act. A prerecorded track provided the beat, and he wasn’t even singing a song from the sixties—not technically. This tune had come out in 1970, and it always made me want to shoot up a post office.

  Everybody’s beautiful in their own way

  Under God’s heaven, the world’s gonna find a way

  The set went on for maybe twenty minutes. When it ended, there was wan applause. I didn’t think he deserved a warmer response, but I was well aware of what a poor reception feels like, and it brought out my sympathy. So I dragged myself over to the nook that passed for a dressing room, and introduced myself. I told him that I used to be a rock critic. He summoned a weary smile, as if he didn’t care about my former profession. (That was a good sign.) Then he offered me a deal—if I put him up for the night, he’d take me to Woodstock. I didn’t know what the fuck he meant. I thought it might have something to do with sex. He had the hustler look, though it may have been the desperation of a traveling musician who has to pay for his own room. I suppose that was part of his appeal.

  “Very good stuff,” he said, pointing to his pants pocket. I must have let my emotions show, because he explained that he was talking about LSD. I tried my best to hide my disappointment. Not that I was looking to hook up with a guy, but I was hungry for company. He made me feel the loss of my wife and of the commune we’d joined with so much hope. I wasn’t used to being on my own in a coastal town. I’d never heard anything as isolating as the sound of gulls on a narrow, empty street. I’m sure that’s why I saw an erotic spark in his tired eyes.

  I remember thinking, I’ll take him home, he’ll drop acid, and I’ll watch him trip out. That was all I felt up for. I hadn’t had sex with a man in several years, other than the intoxicated rubbing that took place in the commune as part of our group-love experiments. I tried to control my nervousness as we drove to my place. He gazed out the car window; I fiddled with the radio dial. It was cold for October. There was a coating of frost on the front porch. I grabbed an armful of logs from the woodpile and threw a few into the pot-bellied stove that heated the living room. He plopped down on the couch, stretched his legs, and asked if I lived here alone.

  “Now I do.”

  “Ah,” he sighed, “the changes.”

  He leaned back on the sofa, so that his hair fell against the cushion behind him. “The whole thing sort of slides by,” he said. “I mean, it’s hard. So phony. But … so what. Right?”

  He’d had a promising start, a nibble from a label, but he could never, “you know, grab it.” I told him he was lucky. Everyone I knew who did grab it is gone. Not everyone, of course—not physically. But one way or another.

  It didn’t matter to me whether he’d fallen from the grace of a one-shot song that made the bottom of the Hot 100 charts, or whether he’d even gotten that far. Some people possess the mystery of music, its uncanny ability to put people in touch with yearnings that have no object except for wholeness. That was what it meant for me to be in the presence of a rocker, even one who reminded me of a dog in a rainstorm, soaked and puny. I had to stop myself from trying to fluff him up.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of foil. Inside were two small tabs. I decided to go for it, and we sat before the fire, sipping tea, waiting. An hour later we were lying on the rug. He slipped out of his shoes and put his feet on mine, hesitantly. He slid them gently up and down my legs. I wriggled toward him until our bodies touched. We lay like that for quite a while, communing with the fire log sparking. I heard him breathe deeply, felt the brush of his aspiration against my cheek, caught its odor in my nostrils. He took off his shirt and put my hand on his chest. The hairs were downy against my fingertips. He put my hand on his cock. “Ta-da!” he said.

  And then he kissed me. Lightly, with the tip of his tongue parting my lips and flicking my teeth. I felt a wave of nausea. I was no stranger to blow jobs, but I’d never been kissed by a man. Disgusting, I thought. But a line from a girl-group song reverberated in my mind. “It’s in his kiss, that’s where it is.”

  Somehow we got out of our clothes, and he wound himself around me, grinding slowly against my belly. Soon we were balls to balls. Every now and then I would open my eyes to see the embers in the stove glowing like tiny eyes. A dry radiant heat rose from our bodies and enclosed us. Rabbis in heaven were frowning down on me. I gazed at his black hair, the strands swirling around his eyes. In my altered state, he had Don McNeill’s face, the friend lost to me. I realized that I’d wanted all along to hold Don, to nestle him and shelter him, but I never did, because guys don’t do that—and we were guys.

  I’m not sure how we untangled ourselves. It was daylight when I woke up, and my pal was gone, leaving only the foil wrapping from the acid behind. I raced from room to room, thinking he might be in the attic or even under my bed. Maybe he’d crawled off to sleep in the bath. But he was nowhere to be found. An awful scenario presented itself to me. He’d had a homosexual panic, walked to the end of the spit of land near our house, and plunged into the Long Island Sound, disappearing in the black brine. I flashed on him washing up among the beer cans. I would be responsible for that, forever.

  Then I calmed myself down. There was no evidence that he’d panicked. I didn’t even know if we’d had sex. The whole thing could have been an LSD hallucination, a wish come to life, not just for him, but for contact with what I adored in rock. I couldn’t say that I’d finally fucked a rocker, since I wasn’t sure I actually had. I couldn’t even think of his name. The odor of his body, which lingered in my nostrils, was all I could remember. Hidden desire, repressed queerness, grace—whatever he meant to me, it was fleeting, evanescent, like the music and the emotions it produced. I thought of that Neil Young song about being helpless. Yes, I was helpless before the feeling of love and loss, always would be. Helpless.

  In the Facebookable universe, I imagine, everyone has a page. But you won’t find my Groovy there. I don’t think anybody goes by that name anymore; it’s part of the faded enigma of the sixties. And yet, there are times when I think I see him. Usually it’s just some stringy kid with
an advanced degree in tweeting. I have to remind myself that I’m living in a present that sees the past through a glass wryly.

  The sixties are a blur that comes into focus only in the froggy faces of the rockers who’ve survived, in a retro style more lurid than it should be, in movies awash in historical details but stripped of their true complexity. Also in books that offer rueful retrospectives on the counterculture by those who have nothing but tenure to show for their dreams. In these artifacts, the sixties are seen as either a puff of Acadian smoke or a dangerous diversion. The best defense against such distortions is to insist on radical subjectivity when describing that time, so there’s no pretense of authority. That’s the strategy I’ve followed here, though with some misgivings. I hate memoirs. They mainly exist to cast their authors in an unduly flattering light. I don’t think I’ve avoided that entirely, but I’ve tried to present my motives as they were—ambivalent most of the time.

  Still, few reporters deserve to be the center of the story; that’s why I resisted writing this book for many years. I didn’t want to end up with a spin on Nabokov called Kvetch, Memory. But not long ago something changed my mind. I read Just Kids, Patti Smith’s account of her long relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I was enchanted by her portrayal of their youth in the sixties, set in the bohemian milieu I inhabited at roughly the same time. Her writing manages to convey a sense of tragedy without losing generosity of spirit, a combination I find hard to achieve, partly because I’m not as great an artist as she is, and also because it wouldn’t be true to my own experiences. I look back on my trove of recollections with a mixture of anger and regret, but if I delve beneath the pain I can locate memories of immense pleasure as well as more love than I deserved (though I didn’t think I got nearly enough sex at the time). The transferential power of that love shaped me the way wind and water carve a rock. My inner life is an amalgam of my affairs, including those that ended badly. I needn’t say more, because the pattern of my sexuality that these feelings formed fell into place after the scope of this book.