Excerpt: The Hard-Hat Riot - NYC 5-8-70

  On May 8th in his sophomore year, he went on his first march in Manhattan with Tony. The whole Social Action Club from Central High School went. Mayor Lindsey paid for their transportation to Battery Park in a black hearse limousine. The mayor’s office even supplied the print shop where they could make flyers. What a great mayor! Business people hated him

    A metal-hinged accordion barricade twined  around an open manhole. Its worn bruised circular bars one inch think and unbendable. Three tubes one foot from the pavement soldered smoothly, metal bottoms scratching the pitch black surface. On the manhole itself, three feet wide, a pair of think gray fabric gloves lay atop hefty pliers and a cardboard spool of thick black cable. To the side was a three foot passageway where parked cars had formally been before moved for the march. A heavy yellow metal chest sat on the side closest to the open manhole, the hitch extended out past  the one-wheeled power unit out into the street where marchers marched. One had to avoid it to make his way up Broadway.

      To the left of the work area lay the full breadth of Broadway; four lanes wide without cars parked at meters, thirty feet wide if you didn’t include the obstructive work area with open manhole. The legal march, originating in Battery Park a half mile down the hill at the southerly tip of Manhattan, proceeded by, the noisy procession punctuated by players banging thick dowel sticks on industrial strength white plastic containers punched with holes on either side where a rope strung around the neck of the primitive musicians. It moved on past the Consolidated Edison work-site until he caught it in sight out of the right corner of his eye.

      He held up the right rear of the cardboard American flag draped coffin, moved as briskly up the Broadway as the 60,000 Americans whose death was symbolized by the box of their final resting place.

        “Ho-ho-ho Chi-Min, the N.L.F. is gonna win! …”  bounced off the marble facades of the business towers on either side of Broadway echoing its way up the canyon, clashing with previous and preceding contingents high schools around the five boroughs. The march shouted, the march chanted, and the earnest youth joined to win like Ho would win.

      He could vaguely see, from the right corner of his eye, the work area and uncovered manhole cover which lay at its side, and he knew where to avoid walking. From out of the hole, a light blue hardhat emerged, and then a forehead, black eyebrows, bulbous nose, square opened mouth, strapped under chin, and the whole body of a workman. The face had a smile on it, a middle-aged smile with stubble beard around the lips of unshaven cheeks, a missing tooth around brown abused tiles. The mouth smiled but the eyes stared. That should have been a warning. He smiled back excitedly but he shouldn’t have. Within two feet of the five foot cage, cheeks sucked in, lips puckered, the chest expanded, and a large globule of discharge shot through the air. Solid gray phlegm coagulated by whatever soot the man had breathed into his uncovered blowhole below the street among the serpentine sewers of old New York. The gray matter flew through the air and found its mark like the dart of a cannibal’s straw into his right ear canal and dripped down the lobe like a stalagmite in a cavern. Some dripped down his right cheek and near his eye. Johnny Emerson, hands occupied on the coffin flinched but couldn’t remove it fast enough.

      “That’s for the sign of the American chicken; fuckin’ fagot retard!” said the workman as he continued marching, drenched from the ejaculation.

      “That’s taking one for the movement.”

      “What movement. Bowel movement?”

      “Yeah man; from the fat fool’s shitty gut.” 

       They called it the Hard Hat Riot. While Jonathan Emerson and another one thousand high school students were protesting the killing of four students at Kent State University a few days before, The American invasion of Cambodia, and the Vietnam War, about two hundred construction workers, brought in by bus by the New York State AFL-CIO, attacked them. Union workers from nearby projects and Con Ed workers on the street joined in the feast. He dropped the coffin he'd been holding and fled with the others with tool wielding burly men in pursuit. For two hours, He ran through the streets of lower Manhattan, from Broad Street to City Hall, trying to escape the violence. Escape he did by slipping into J&R Music World on Publishers' Row. He laid low inside, looking at the albums and listening to new releases on turntables in booths in the back rooms. More than seventy protesters were injured, but only four police and a smattering of construction workers who, people said, hurt themselves trying to beat up protesters. 

        What was George Meany, the AFL-CIO President thinking? He couldn't understand how a union man could be anti-communist since communism meant the workers' had taken over the state. Most labor leaders supported the US military involvement in Southeast Asia without realizing American was clearing a path for sweatshop workers to take union jobs away in the new America. Emerson really thought that Con Ed worker coming out of the manhole was there to welcome the protesters, not spit on them! Peter Brennan, the President of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York was at the heart of the betrayal. He became Republican as the skilled labor unions lost their power; he wanted to save his own job so he capitulated. He had heard the pleas "AF of Hell" from Pop. When he was a student at Joe Ettor Junior High in Lawrence, he heard how the AFL-CIO of Gompers had turned their backs on the textile workers of the mills there saying they were un-skilled foreign workers and didn't deserve to be in a union; that's what Pop told him. The AFL-CIO hadn't changed that much in sixty years.

     The rally began at noon. While he was further up Broadway getting ready to march, unbeknownst to him and the people around him, two hundred construction workers converged on the rally at Federal Hall from four directions carrying signs that said "All the way, USA' and "America, love it or leave it." They broke through a skimpy police line and started chasing students. The police stood by and did nothing to stop them.

Mayor Lindsay, who had helped the high school students by permitting teachers to join the rally that day, severely criticized the police for their lack of action. The police leaders later accused Lindsay of insulting their integrity by his statements, and blamed him for being unprepared for the demonstration. Brennan, on the other hand, was welcomed to the White House where he presented Nixon with a hard hat souvenir.  www.readingsandridings.jimdo.com

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Copyright © 2019 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved.

Ch. 7: Introducing Johnny Livewire

Tattered wooden benches lined two sides of "The Square" triangle; only subway riders alighted there and moved on. Old Italians went home at dusk. Pigeons grabbed their last morsels. At dusk, teenagers took over. Psychedelic music took benches facing Ft. Hamilton Parkway and glue-sniffers found the New Utrecht Avenue side by the el more to their liking. Ethnicity determined crossroaders, acid or downers, scouting both sides for friends and dealers. Musicians like keyboardist Jimmy Molica who went on to Blondie, and bass player, David Canola, were Italians with an affinity for pot and Quaalude. Johnny Davinsky was referred to as “Livewire” for his off the wall antics; the only Jew among them, an emissary from the Jewish fringe nearest the Scandinavians to the west, one of the few Jews not afraid to mix in.

Johnny knew every Cream and Doors song by heart; he could sing the words to every one. Jimmy loved Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, and copied Gary Brooker to a “T” when Carl Stein introduced him to a chick from Jersey named Debby Harry. Jimmy later changed his last name to Desdri; ethnicity was not cool. Jimmy’s friend, guitarist Teddy McCracken, loved Clapton and Beck and memorized  their lead breaks. He was introduced to Johnny one night on a run for weed. Vinny Appice played drums like his brother, Carmine, who found stardom in Vanilla Fudge. But Tony Benedeto stopped playing rock after he OD’ed. He had been a local favorite from Pecker Frost; he played with a landsman from Queens named Leslie Weintraub, later called Leslie West, in a band called the Vagrants, later to form the internationally famous Mountain. 

All the musicians played instruments well. Johnny sang, played the tambourine, cow bell, and harmonica. None of the musicians could sing or write lyrics. Johnny Livewire could; he put his poems to the blues music he loved and covered standards like “Born under a Bad Sign.” He started a band with Canola, McCracken, and Palermo named “Holy Shit” because that is what they wanted people to say when they heard them play. Johnny Livewire on vocals derived from hero Jim Morrison, astute lyrics like it was he with them in the beyond of perception. Holy Shit would became the best band in Brooklyn, so he thought, so he felt. 

      Johnny Livewire knew The Blues. He wrote the blues of the day about young men who had nothing in the world, “Brand New Ray” about revenge, “Free Fall” about disillusionment. “Hitch-Hiker Blues” getting away. “Garlic Gargoyle” about liberation through mind altering drugs.

The radio played FM; WNEW, WPLJ. The records were twelve-inch, seven. The revolutions were thirty-three-and-a-third or forty-five. Johnny Livewire was non-commercial, no station breaks. The smoke couldn’t be bought in candy stores. Johnny Livewire and Holy Shit were going to be the hottest band in Brooklyn, Everyone in his high school was talking about them, but you can’t have smoke with no fire; Johnny was hot but not hot enough for a label to handle. 

     The glue-sniffers played cruel jokes against the Jew. “Hey fuck-face, Jimmy tells me that you called him an asshole,” called out his buddy, Tony Gork.

      “I didn't,” Johnny replied. He sensed trouble coming from this worthless junkie.

      “But he says you did, didn’t you tell me that Jimmy?” Jimmy kept a straight face as Tony Gork guarded, in the vestibule of the store front.” Jimmy didn’t mind Gork picking on anyone. 

      “Are you calling me crazy?” Tony Gork and Johnny sparred with words, Jimmy sneaked up behind him with a tin of lighter fluid onto the back of Johnny’s long brown hair. The next thing Johnny knew, his hair was on fire. He frantically patted down his head before the flames singed his scalp. He saw Jimmy with the tin.
        “Get out of my way, Gork," 

      “What do you think you’re doing?” Tony Gork stood in front of Jimmy who cowered in the store vestibule. “You lay a hand on my friend and I’ll kill you.”

      “Get out of my way, Tony.” Tony laughed and dodged Johnny left and right in front of Jimmy laughing.

      “Okay for now,” Johnny was heaving and panting with anger, “but you’re gonna get it, Jimmy. I’m gonna fuck you up some day.”  Some day never comes.                                    ***********************************************                               

        It didn’t take much to break up a band; the leader left saying he didn’t want to do it anymore. Bands were not groups of musicians with equal power. Johnny Livewire found himself the leader of most of the bands he played in; the singer usually was.. The general consensus was that although the musicians made the music, the singer either wrote the music or chose the songs he wanted to sing; he was the leader of the band. Sometimes Johnny would throw his hands up and give up because the other band members didn’t like the music he had chosen or written. “You tell me what you want to play and I’ll sing it!” Sometimes democracy prevailed; each band member chose his own; preferences were so divergent that one couldn’t see doing another's selection. The band that stayed together liked the same kind of music.

One could tell if the band members were right for each other if they liked the same rock groups. Johnny Livewire’s liked Cream, Bloodwyn Pig, Jeff Beck, The Doors. Johnny’s band mates liked that his role model, Jim Morrison. A band would stay together with competency; not only what you liked but how you played your instrument. Longevity hinged on ego-tripping, a chip on a shoulder, a prima donna not wanting to play until he was good and ready. It was then the arguments began. Members took sides, someone quit, and the band fell apart. Sometimes all it took was a girlfriend.

“Go stick a hair in it!” said Pat over the phone to Johnny. “No, I wasn’t talking to you.” She was screaming at her brother. “What did you say?” She wasn’t listening.

Patricia Falcón put Johnny behind her in manage-et-trios, Billy in front. Johnny didn’t know the music was not enough to make it to the top. He found out that Jimmy Molica and other Italians at the Square may have had assistance. If Johnny did a favor for them, he might be in the music business, too.

Johnny met Patricia at The Square. She was a slut, but Johnny would make a girlfriend out of her. It didn’t work. She was dirty blond, pure Brooklyn, with big brothers and a heavy crucifix chains to prove they loved Jesus. Her mother and father talked dirty. Patricia begged to get out of the house. 
“Johnny, take me away from these stugots, marone! She heard the church bells on Sunday but didn’t listen. She was busy banging Johnny, but she used sex to get what she wanted. Her chunk of body, brown to match eyes and hair that thrust wild stuck to perspired face when she pouted and she pouted often. 
“Johnny you couldn’t get dressed and get me a Seven-Up float, could you?” Johnny jumped thinking he'd be rewarded like a dog. “Oh that’s so sweet of you. Here, let me give you a kiss,” Johnny would have taken a long walk off a short pier if she asked him to. 

When he got back to his bedroom, he threw off his clothes, grabbed a bass guitar, amp loud. That’s the kind of girl that loves rock stars, Johnny thought. 

    A high on grass wasn’t the same as falling out on reds and yellows. Johnny was a fifth wheel with his own girlfriend. After a few awkward moments, the two men hugged Pat. If he was a rock star, he had better get used to whatever goes.

      Coming up for air and seeing Johnny on the chair was surrealistic. Pat was better lying down. Weeks later, Johnny called Maimonides Mental Health Center when Holy Shit was playing in their parking lot. He saw a sign: "Encounter group, no pressure." She joined.

      “Johnny, please wait outside,” the counselor said.

      “Yeah, Johnny, I’ll be alright,” whispered Pat as she let his hand go. She was becoming a girlfriend. She’ll stop her drugged-out behavior, but Johnny was wrong not acting like a rock star.

      The next week The Doors at Singer Stadium. Johnny had two tickets, one for him and the other for Patricia, but Pat didn't care by then.

      “I’m going out with Billy; could you stop calling?”

      “Slow down and reconsider, will you?”

      “Okay, but give me some time.

      “We’ll have fun at the concert, you’ll see.”

      “About that concert, could I have your ticket?”

      “What do you mean?”

      “I’m not going with you, don’t you understand? Johnny, could you do me a favor?”

       Johnny gave Patricia his Doors ticket rather than go alone. 

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Copyright © 2019 by David Barry Temple. All rights reserved

Excerpt: Oregano Fields Forever

He liked getting high as a child likes spinning in a playground. The liquor bottles in Mom's cabinet were now more water than booze from all the times he'd sampled and refilled them; Mom wasn't a drinker and neither were her guests. The only thing Johnny hadn't ever done on purpose was sniff glue from paper bags like some of the older boys did in the well of school yard near his apartment. He decided it couldn't be good for you after seeing the gang tripping over themselves and staggering out angrily; How could it be good for you if it made you stagger or angry?

      When his sister, Claire, came home with her hippie boyfriend one day, he had a role model. She had met Moses through a friend at her high school. Scraggly unkempt dirty blond hair past his shoulders must have taken months to get there; he wasn't an overnight hippie. If Johnny started that afternoon, he could look like Moses by the time he entered high school in September. He would have to shuck his white corduroy Nehru jacket though to get that grungy effect. Moses wore what could only be called Indian carpet bell bottoms. Johnny swore he'd seen the same pattern in a store on Atlantic Avenue once when his Mom had brought him to a neighbor's pet shop and they stopped in next door for mahmul and baklava. He could almost smell the incense drifting from Moses' pants, a musty scent he was told, as from the sex glands of a deer. The water buffalo leather flip flops completed the look. The ornamental belt wasn't necessary to keep Moses’ pants up; Johnny was impressed that a belt need not be worn for a function. 

      Moses asked Claire if he could do 'it' there and pointed to Mom's bedroom. Claire said "uh-huh" and went to the bathroom. Johnny followed Moses who removed a baggie from his pocket and waved it in Johnny's face like a hypnotizing charm. The contents were green shredded leaves, not unlike parsley. Johnny was excited about his first experience with marijuana. The 'it' Johnny soon found out was the rolling of a joint on Mom's night table. Moses sat on the bed and poured some of the content out. Johnny knelled at the table a few inches away, so close that Moses jokingly asked him not to sneeze, please. So that's what it smelled like. So that's what it looked like. Soon, he hoped, he would find out what it tasted like and felt like to have tasted it. 

      Almost reverently, Moses rolled yolk-colored paper, the kind of paper Johnny noticed covering tampons. Moses pinched a large amount of the green leafy bits and placed it on the crease of the paper, If Johnny had known about seeds and twigs, he would have been skeptical; there were none in Moses’ stash. Moses rolled and Johnny sat close drop-jawed as he licked the length of the end and fastened it along the side. "Voila," said Claire enjoying the experience of providing Johnny his first experience. 

      "Where to?" asked Moses when Claire returned from the bathroom.

      "We could go up on the roof? It's safe up there," said Claire, wide-eyed with anticipation. Johnny wondered if it were her first smoke, too, the way she acted. "No one goes up there except on the Fourth of July to see fireworks or to adjust their TV antenna."

      "The roof it is. Lead the way." The two pilgrims with their guru took to the stairs that Claire pointed out. Moses led the way. It was a no-brainer to reach the top; all you had to do was go all the way. They walked up five flights. He pulled the latch out of the eye screw in the door to the roof and light streamed into the dark echoed apartment halls. Out the three stepped onto the softened black tar of the heat blisters, careful to avoid wet spots. Over waxy brown wires that littered the roof floor like snakes and connected to primitive aluminum antennas with black electrical tape, antenna all facing northwest toward the Empire State Building in the far distance of midtown Manhattan. The three sojourners found a spot of sandpaper gray, dry roof paper, sat down in a circle. The joint was lit by Moses, puffed, held in Moses’ lungs, and exhaled in a flourish like the blowing up of an invisible balloon. 

      Then it was Claire's turn. Johnny was wrong about Claire. She hadn't smoked before, she indicated, and didn't want to this time, either. “How about you, Johnny?"

      "Sure!" Johnny didn't know how to take the joint from Moses’ fingers so Moses passed the joint, back and forth, from one had to the other, in demonstration mode, until Johnny got the gist of it. 

      "Let's go to Manhattan. There's a groovy place there that has twenty flavors of ices." 

      Moses had a Karman Ghia convertible. Claire naturally sat at on the other side of the stick shift and Johnny squeezed in sideways in the back seat, if you could call it a seat; more like a plank to keep the front seats connected to the back and a space for the lowered convertible top. The weather was fine and the air was a fresh breeze down Ft. Hamilton Parkway along Greenwood Cemetery to McDonald Ave and a right at Bishop Ford Parochial school and onto the entrance of the Prospect Expressway. Everyone's hair blew in the breeze across the Gowanus and Johnny kept on saying, "What will it be; Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, or the Battery Tunnel. Yeah, the Battery Tunnel! Wow, going through a tunnel like this. He had never seen the roof of the Battery Tunnel before and now, for the first time ever, to see it like this; wow! "Take the tunnel, take the tunnel."

      "Sounds good to me," and Moses maneuvered to the left lanes that brought him to the Brooklyn side toll booths. All the cigarettes, alcohol, roller coasters, and even the holding of breath with nose pinched could not equal the phantasmagorical rush of bliss that this was. Johnny’s kept thinking about the Crystal Ship; how it was being filled with a thousand girls, a thousand thrills and a million places to visit. This was the first of a million. Life was all about living to be a million. 

      No music in the tunnel, and what a time to enter. With "Penny Lane" on WMCA just beginning, it was a double Beatles block. Johnny, Moses, and Claire joined in just as Paul sang "…of every head he's had the pleasure…" “…to know," they all continued," and the people that come and go, stop and say hello." Johnny made the noise of the piccolo before the next verse. "…never wears a mack in the pouring rain, very strange." All three went “brump bump bump, Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes." Johnny simulated the piccolo trumpet and they all joined in, in harmony, “there beneath the blue suburban skies....” Three minutes later, the song ended, mid-tunnel, but Johnny was a Good Guy DJ, and he started right in with the second half of the Beatles block. "Paperback Writer," then all "writer, writer…writer…" Claire and Moses were George's guitar as they sang: "Dear sir or madam would you read my book…" Amazingly, they all admitted later at the park, unbeknownst to them, when the signal on the radio returned as they left the Battery Tunnel in Manhattan, what was on the radio but "Paperback Writer" itself! Johnny learned what it meant to be 'tuned in and turned on' that day.  

      The Karman Ghia made a right under the Westside highway and followed Hudson Street to Waverly Place. They parked near St. Marks Place and walked to the ices cart near Washington Square Park. Johnny was amazed how Moses knew how to go everywhere he imagined. He couldn't have imagined better. 

      "Oh, by the way, Johnny, that was oregano you smoked," said Claire in front of Johnny, arm in arm with Moses.

      "What did you say, Claire?"

      "That stuff you smoked on the roof? It was oregano."

      "Are you sure? I got high from it?"

      ""She's sure, Johnny," said Moses talking over the shoulders between them" We weren't sure how you would react."

      "It was a test," said Claire apologetically. “I wouldn’t smoke that for anything.”

      "A test? What kind of a test is that? Thanks sister."

      "Are you okay with that?"asked Moses.

      "Of course I'm okay. What did you think I am; a cop?"

      "Okay okay, we're cool," and Moses reached into a sachet he had over his shoulder. "This one is for real."

      "Don't get hung about it, dude, It's strawberry fields forever for you."

      Johnny went home and started an imaginary radio station.

 He saw Moses after that day; He guessed his sister had broken up with him. He never saw his sister smoke again after that; maybe that's why they broke up. The next outfit Johnny remembers Claire doing something with was the cheerleaders at her high school, her next boyfriend on the football team. Johnny, on the other hand, got off the soul train at that station and never looked back. The tone arm was on the record for good. 

Excerpt: Red Shellac Discs

In his earliest memories, he was dancing around a pole to Yiddish Klezmer ‘78’s in the cellar with Sister Claire. The leathery brown portable wooden record player, looking like Pop’s winged-tip shoes, seemed dug up from a Bolshevik battlefield. With power on to volume, getting electricity though a cracking power cord, the earthed wall replacement plug threw off sparks that threatened a power outage.

A slippery, felt, mustard-colored turntable top spun madly. The original iron tone arm, stiff like Les Paul’s elbow, had a twist screw that locked in place a needle. Sound, through primitive electrical amplification shrieked out from behind an oval, wood-mesh facade covered with course fabric; a speaker still pumping sound after sixty years of wear. Red shellac discs with ancient Hebrew lettering around the center spindle hole were new when first placed there. Like a loyal wife, was laid not on any other spinning table.

Pop pushed the swollen door upstairs open and came down the rickety steps to the cellar; he had to check why the furnace was giving not enough heat. Northern winds swooped down on Brooklyn blowing out the pilot through the chimney. Behind the stairs in the low-ceiling, 20’x40’ cellar space, a sinister-looking shack of grimy nailed hinges creaked open in the darkness of bogeymen where no grandchild would dare go alone.

Jonathan Livinsky and his big sister, Claire, were spinning around, hands-on tight, to a wrought iron support cylinder, in the center of the front room. Pop paid them no mind. In their own merry-go-round, a primitive pole dance, the tossed-back heads of glee and laughter ringing out to a Klezmer instrumental, clarinet honking over a sawing string section; it was spiffy! It was music, and it was Rosetta stone for Johnny Livewire. “Tootsie Mootsie darling dear…” Even the inner grove was danceable. Johnny and Claire spun around the pole after each other until, dizzy, they dripped to the dusty cement floor. They could hear the upstairs door open and a woman’s voice call out:

“Se-dra-ter kinder,” she shrilled. “Shiman, make it slower!” Bubby was not coming down; she had more important things to do in the kitchen. The old house was rocking. Shiman didn’t hear in the noisy furnace stall. Claire obeyed and turned the record player off. Dim light filtered in from the small front cellar window. Bubby had prepared dinner the day before the Shabbos and was going to “bench lich,” light the candles; the food would soon be warmed and dinner ready. Bubby didn’t mess with electricity or music on the Sabbath but it was okay for the kinder to do so, up to a point; no music or TV during candle lighting.

“Oy Rosie, I’m making heat,” called back Pop when the children went to tell him. A few steps across from the furnace bin, there was another forbidden room of darkened planks. Johnny and Claire had a chance to enter and explore it behind Pop. Behind him they slipped in and zipped under his arm. Pop went to get the homemade sauerkraut he had fermenting in a cool jar on a casually made wooden shelf near his workbench.

Saturday evening after a walk through Scandinavian Bay Ridge with Mom; Dad on shift at Idlewild Airport coming later. Leaves on the maple trees in Borough Park had turned golden and fallen well before Rosh Hashanah eve. They passed the row of white stone town houses with high patios, passed the roller hockey rink where the goyum boys made noise knocking their rolls of black electric tape around, across the street from the Monastery of the Precious Blood, a massive medieval church and retreat, a forest of tree limbs over red brick walls, perhaps tainted with the precious blood itself. It was enough to make Johnny and Claire shiver as they skipped and sang, “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.” Down a block of trashy little apartment buildings near Ft. Hamilton Parkway they went and into the Yiddish side of town. Straight from the Lower Eastside, the theater awaited with “Galloping Comediennes” with 78 RPM’s on Bubby and Pop’s Victrola; “The Good Ship Lollipop” with “Peter and the Wolf.” She was eight and he was six, they rode on horses made of sticks. Later, she would laugh and say, “Remember when we used to play ‘Bang Bang’?”

When Johnny slept over, on those rare nights his parents went to an affair, she sang him to bed with a lullaby. “Ahh-ahh-Joniliah,” sang Bubby. In the late afternoon, around tea time, it was Bubby singing “Yisroael, Yisroael, Du vas leban du vas blean…” All he knew is it was a song about Israel. The TV played Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour and Lawrence Welk, and sister Claire took to playing the accordion. There was never any radio on, and only Mitch Miller’s choir singing “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” on a portable record player his aunt had gotten free for opening a bank account at a new branch, but Johnny has music etched into his soul at an early age.

At Shabbos service for children, he lit the menorah candles sang the Hanukkah prayers and songs, though never as well as Claire, and he learned the Hebrew verb conjugations musically at Sunday morning lessons with Miss Greenspan.

Such sad melodies so many of the songs seemed to have. The melancholy melodies were his first blues songs, the half tones of Jewish prayers, the crying voices of the great cantors on those large 78’s, all seeped in. They opened doors in his mind that let the dim light out, but not the bright sun in. Johnny understood immediately his predicament in the world: the blues couldn’t be washed away.

Excerpt: On the Roof With Patti Smith

It was 1973. Johnny and Ferine had been steadily at it for two years. Ferine and Johnny cut out of school and spent the day listening to the Doors on Johnny’s dad’s stereo. It had been a year since Jim Morrison passed away from the stage of life. Johnny was looking at the back page of the Village Voice when he noticed something interesting: Memorial to Jim Morrison, Saturday, on the roof of a tenement on Greene Street in Chinatown. It would be held by someone named Patti Smith.

On Friday, the thirteenth of July, 1973, Patti Smith was giving a poetry reading on the roof of underground filmmaker, Jack Smith’s loft at Greene Street near Canal Street in Chinatown, Manhattan. Johnny went with Ferine to celebrate Jim Morrison on the second anniversary of his passing. Jim Morrison was Johnny’s hero and he was curious to see how another poet would pay tribute to him. Johnny had spent July 3^rd, the day Jim Morrison disappeared (Johnny had refused to believe he was dead) playing every Doors record he had, inviting friends to sit Shiva with him, drinking beer, smoking grass and hash, the way Jim would have wanted it to be.

Johnny didn’t know or care who Patti Smith was; she had yet to record and was not known to anyone but a few underground artists in the Andy Warhol scene. He just hoped she would do justice to Jim and maybe sing a Doors song or two, Instead, Johnny ended up being the star that evening.

Twenty odd people sat on the floor of the hot flat roof. The wait was indefinite as the artist, unbeknownst to all, sat with friends like a spectator, and said nothing. Finally, a man with a camcorder turned the light on Patti. She stood up and started reciting. The camera followed her as she moved laconically around the small roof like she was on downers, occasionally looking up and striking poses. Everyone seemed fascinated watching the tall skinny chick in a death shroud that couldn’t carry a tune when the poems she sang. Did she know someone? Who was this Jack Smith and why would he let her up on his roof? Where did she get the nerve to put on this poetry reading? Johnny and the onlookers were expecting something more, at least a Doors song.

In between poetry readings, a young woman came around the squatting audience with a wicker basket asking for donations, donations Johnny doubted she really needed. He clapped his hands; he started clapping his hands, slowly clapping his hands. Ferine joined in.

“My wild love went riding; she rode all the day-ay, she rode to the devil, and asked him to pay-ay…” Others sitting on the roof joined in clapping along slowly. “The devil was wiser, it’s time to repent, he asked her to give back, the money she spent…”

Patti Smith looked over, hesitantly, and then deliberately paid no attention to Johnny. She turned to chat with a man whom she knew. Johnny later, after Patti became famous, recognized him as her guitarist, Lenny Kaye. It seemed like they were discussing what they could do about stealing back the audience from this young man with long brown hair, in the black t-shirt, black jeans and construction boots.

The camcorder shut down. The light was turned off. Johnny wasn’t filmed or recorded. He remained in the dark, singing with others clapping and humming along with verbal percussion. “She rode and she rested, she rode for a while, then stopped for an evening, and laid herself down…” Patti went downstairs through the tarred roof well, probably to the piss factory. She got back just as the small crowd was applauding Johnny.

Patti graciously thanked the anonymous donor with the impromptu song and went back to her agenda. Someone in the crowd requested that she sing a Doors song or a selection from The Lord and the New Creatures. She relented but refused. “There’ll be a surprise, but wait,” she said, like a mother scolding her naughty children, and she went into a reading of a poem she said she had just written for Jim. The audience behaved, sat back on their graveled tar sheets, and listened politely. Johnny was surprised at how contrived it was, how so non-spontaneous while pretending to be so

Johnny Livewire’s fire was extinguished; all that was left was the smoke. Everyone could see there was something hot there, but the source was snuffed out. Ferine felt badly for him; but life went on.

Johnny had a strange reaction watching Patti Smith that evening. The same way Patti felt in recalling her experience her book, Just Kids, in seeing Jim Morrison for the first time:

“Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyper-awareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can't say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored that conceit. I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence. He exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain, like a West Coast Saint Sebastian. When anyone asked how the Doors were, I just said they were great. I was somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to their concert.” (P.59) Johnny knew just how she felt. 

Ch. 5 Excerpt: Cloud House San Francisco

      “Write about what you know,” said Kush. Johnny asked Kush one evening at a poetry reading. “Write about what you want to know and let the spirits be your guide,” exhausted Kush who blew sage smoke from a pipe filled with vowels, but void of consonants or syllables.   

      Kush could have been related to Bill Graham, the way he looked and acted. He seemed to be a displaced New Yorker of European descent. His five-foot-six compact frame, like a welterweight, kept the vegetarian gleam of nutrition in his mindfulness. His dark bushy eyebrows hung heavily over deep-set eyes. A narrow nose with two gourd-shaped nostrils ended a long suspension. His narrow face almost made his jaw look pointed, an illusion exaggerated by the sucked-in cheeks gripping the clay sage pipe. His short thinning hair, a touch of, gray.in need of a trim, was un-parted and pushed to one side of his brow, covering the tops of his close-headed ears. 

      Kush wasn’t young, but he wasn’t old, either; perhaps thirty-five. Johnny always thought him to be an older brother, perhaps ten years older than himself. He wasn’t a married man and wasn’t necessarily straight or gay; he could have been either, or both. He was ethereal.      Kush was in love with the natural life of indigenous people. It showed in his easy manner, shuffling feet, buffalo flip-flop sandals. He was a hippie at heart who took love and peace seriously. Perhaps he was one of the youngsters of the Family Dog commune. He was not one of the freedom riders who converged on Height-Asbury Street.

      Kush earned his income as a teacher at the California Institute of Asian Studies on Mission Street. He couldn't be called a professor; he had long let go of earthly ambitions. Poetry, to Kush, was a manifestation of the descriptive of life, as it really was, and could be again.

      Two Dykes-on-Bikes poets received applause from the gathering, including Kush’s. There was a feminine strength to their poetry, but it had militancy and spunk. Johnny was to read next in the circle. His poem, called “The Fairy’s Tail,” alluded to the lack of militancy and self-interest of the gay community in the Castro. It was poem that anticipated the ruckus a year later over the murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone. There was nothing wrong with being gay, the poem inferred, so long as one wasn’t a Republican capitalist. Personal freedom, Johnny wrote, didn’t end at the tip of your dick or clit. Liberty didn’t pertain only to bars and bedrooms. The same conservative system that vilified socialism and workers' rights was coming after gay rights, too, unless one acquiesced, joined political conservatives, and gave up the big fight for the rights of all workers, gay or straight.    

       But Kush was no crush when it came to progressive thought; no flower child or political patsy was he. Native American chants played on Kush’s cassette, low, aloud from a room elsewhere, heavy in bass, tinged with treble, somewhere in Cloud House.    

       Emerson took a seat on the fringed rug which covered most of the poets’ room. Only the alcoves on either side of the recessed doorway were bare-floored up to the two picture windows. Two tiers of shelved books and magazines circled  three sides. On the wooden floor, a maroon rug of Mandala design, mirrored the circle meeting in the center, an empty space. The poets started to assemble on it.     

       In walked David Moe who join Emerson, two Dyke- on-Bike poetesses and other poets. Moe greeted Kush who flowed absent-mindedly around the store front room,  pipe in mouth, puffing smoke through every space. Acknowledged, the poet took his place around the perimeter of the rectangular rug. Kush was seated and unfurled his talisman; clay pipes, bandannas, writing implements, charcoal for sketching, hemp-bound pads with exotic covers placed near or between crossed legs, legs held crooked up by the knees, to their chests, clasped hands. The ceremony was about to begin.

      Whoever was there or whoever would come later would know the ceremony had begun because an invocation, a speech on the cassette player in the back room, would be played and all tranquility passed around with a fat joint or two. That’s what Kush did on open poetry reading nights. Steven Kushner lives forever in Cloud House. “Walt Whitman Breathes Here.” Tommy Trantino, Pancho Aguila. David Moe, and Johnny Livewire, too, in small part.

     Starlight was the monthly periodical that Cloud House poets published. Someone published it; Johnny didn’t know who. Johnny figured the donation collected after the invocation was for that publication. He dropped a dollar in the small battered wicker basket passed around not long after the last roach had been extinguished.
      The new issue of Starlight was ready to be distributed and stacks of bundles sat on one side of the Cloud House’s back room. They would be delivered by those present, and others, throughout the Bay Area from Daly City to Sausalito, throughout San Francisco and across the bridge to Oakland, Berkeley, and points south on the mainland up to Haywood. They were put into newspaper boxes on street corners alongside other newspaper boxes; The Tribune, Enquirer, Job Offerings, and The Examiner. Johnny had seen the Starlight cover through the boxes’ transparent plastic covers and thought it was pornography, like Screw, because of the large black and white print of a naked woman with star covered areolas; sticky slick color captions. When a horny customer dropped two quarters into the slot, he anxiously opened the cover somewhere, later on. He would be shocked to see not what they had hoped for, but page after page of poetry with sexy words, if he imagined right.   

     A.D. Winans, editor and writer, produced the Second Coming 180 Poets and Music Festival honoring Josephine Miles and John Lee Hooker. Cloud House was invited to do a segment at the venue, a theater in the Mission District. Johnny Livewire was there to recite his poems. He had already resigned himself to being a small part of a poetry troupe. He spent hours with other Cloud House regulars reading "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman on the steps of the San Francisco Public Library, part of the troupe. Now Johnny was getting a chance to read his own poetry in public. Perhaps one day he would be as appreciated as those he loved to read.

     Johnny wouldn’t make the same mistake Jim Morrison made; rock ‘n’ roll was no vehicle into a poetic consciousness for the people. If attitudes were going to be changed in America, they would be co-opted by record companies long before they made any radical difference, so thought Johnny, serious about helping to make a change in American society. Johnny so wanted it to be a fundamental change and not just a trend. War had to end. Marijuana had to be legal. Wealth had to be redistributed. Poor Patti Smith, so in need of fame and celebrity, went the wrong direction. No matter how much Johnny Livewire had hoped, rock ‘n’ roll bait would catch schools of fish and return errant hippies to dredge public oceans polluted with ruling class interests.         

     Johnny lost sleep staying up nights, smoking weed, drinking tequila, writing and dreaming how he could make it happen. He listened as Patti swam into shallow waters, waters lacking oxygen. It took the death of many of her friends for her to start swimming back to her peers. Johnny would cut straight through the debris; to the poetic hearts of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Whitman, and Blake. 

     Johnny’s role at the Poetry Festival was to walk up one aisle and down the other, like a cloud in the Cloud House troupe, between readings of poetry  from on stage. Bringing life from the boredom of audience seated during intermissions, or leaving for rest rooms or outside for a smoke, Johnny chanted. On a dreary damp San Francisco Saturday in June, Johnny was a heat lamp roaming the audience burning dampness with words of love and wisdom. With verses in hand, Johnny gesticulated the poems meaning and danced up and down the aisles with his long, fiery brown locks, in flight, stopping  to give personal readings to patrons with a love of the poem. He read and gave attention to what he spoke. He read his own poems: “The City of Virginal Sin,” “The Fairy’s Tail," some. Some he sang, put to music by bands he had played with in Brooklyn a few years before  San Francisco. Johnny loved what he was doing; he was a cloudy poem. Johnny Livewire was at home in San Francisco.

Ch. 4 Excerpt: The White Peugeot Bicycle

Ferine could see the reflection of Johnny in the condition of his bicycle. He had escaped on it from the soccer hoodlums at Dyker Park but it was scratched up, the wheel was bent, and the gears no longer worked smoothly. For months he had been taking two buses to Ferine’s home, sometimes walking the five miles and beating the bus there as infrequent as they were. He was even having a harder time getting it up for Ferine, an intolerable byproduct of the depression and drugs.

Ferine had a good idea; an exchange of birthday gifts and a graduation gift for Johnny who was finishing high school. “I’ll buy you a new bicycle and you buy me one, How about that?”

“I want a Peugeot; a white Peugeot,” Johnny moaned.

“And so do I,” said Ferine excitably. She envisioned to him a side by side ride up the Ocean Parkway bike path to the Prospect Park zoo. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful? And we can find a nice secluded spot,” she whispered. Johnny moaned.

“And why wait until our birthdays when the summer will be half over; let’s get them now!” Ferine said and jumped up excitedly.

“I guess we could go to Weber’s and pay on time,” Johnny was lightening up. “Okay. Let’s go to Weber’s this Sunday and put in our order.” To Weber’s they went, Weber, an orthodox Jew with a bicycle shop across from the shuttered Borough Park Theater under the el on 51^st Street. Johnny had seen a white ten-speed Peugeot there recently. There was even a smaller female version with a low bar for a girl to gracefully get on without having to mount it like a cowboy.

By the time graduation day came and school was out for the summer, even forever, the bicycles were paid up, delivered, assembled, and ready to ride. That first Monday with no school, it poured all day. Their side by side ride would have to wait until Ferine got back from a Fourth of July weekend with her family in Red Hook. Johnny had a lot of time on his hands and he couldn’t wait to ride. He would blow a joint and get on that shiny new bike for a ride to Manhattan, Washington Square Park.

July Fourth was one of those special New York City summer days with plenty of asphalt sucking heat and no wind to blow it away, even in Brooklyn. Kids in the neighborhoods knew what to do on such a day: open up the fire hydrants with big old wrenches and dance in the streets in torrents of freezing cold water. Splash the passing cars, whether they wanted a wash or not. Watch the old passengers in buses frantically trying to close their windows before the kids could aim their water at the openings with garbage can lids

Johnny took off for the two hour ride, long wavy hair tied back in a pony tail, short cut black jeans, maroon t-shirt and Converse All-Stars with white athletic socks folded over the laces so they wouldn’t get tangled in the peddles, an official factory-made Peugeot canteen of water in the holder, up the hump of Sunset Park and a right down the slope at Fourth Avenue, a straight four-lane left on Prospect Avenue and into Hamilton Avenue under the Gowanus Expressway; right on Hicks Street. He followed Hicks Street alongside the submerged Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to Atlantic Avenue, left and down along the piers at Furman Street to Old Fulton and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Ah, the gallons of fresh water, a new gush across every cross street, a new gang of neighborhood teens splashing a participating bicyclist with their joyous summer flood, cold Catskill wine and wet again; what a thrill! Carry the bike up the steps and you’re there on the smooth cement path that turns into rickety wooden board that thump in time like music to the ridden over. Ride up the incline and around the anchorage to the main span. What better place to rest and have a smoke than mid-span on a Brooklyn Bridge bench with East River breezes blowing away any evidence? Woodstock was overtaking Altamont again.

Johnny glided down the loose wooden slats on the Manhattan side of the bridge dodging tourists taking photos of the famous Manhattan skyline with their backs to Brooklyn. The boards become cement at the anchorage straight down to City Hall Park, right at Church Street that turns into Avenue of the Americas. At St. Marks Place, turn right and Washington Square Park is right there.

 Johnny was feeling high in Washington Square Park watching folks playing chess, children hopping in and out of the pool around the fountain with parents casually sitting nearby. Elderly citizens sat on benches on either side of the arch near Good Humor ice cream carts, shaved ice stands, fruit drinks vendors, and music, everywhere music, music from guitars, a steel kettle drum, and further out an NYU student practicing clarinet, a Broadway musician playing his violin. The park was filled with smells of incense from Hare Krishna followers and the sweet smell of ganja; not a pig in sight.

Johnny walked his bicycle over to a group of young long-haired men and found a place to sit on the ledge. They passed around a joint casually to Johnny who took it all in then passed it on. He’d just met these young men but already he felt like he’d known them for years; that’s the way it was with hippies and that’s what weed will do to you.

“Hey man, would you like a fruit drink? I know the man. Hey, boss, give my friend here lemonade.” What a contagious scene of love, how bright life was when you were in the Tao, "so unlike the old folks they were," Johnny thought. They were something new. They didn’t quite know what it was or particularly cared; they just ‘did it.’

“Hey man, cool bike,” one of his new friends remarked, Johnny nodding his head, proud that he noticed. “Hey man, you wouldn’t mind if I took a quick ride around the park, would you?”

“Sure, check it out,” Johnny nonchalantly said, then flinched unconsciously wrapping his mind around the phantom idea of communalism for a second. It was natural that everyone brought what they had to share in the Age of Aquarius. He saw the anonymous friend weave the bicycle around the outside paths of the park, out of sight, and then back through the trees to the fountain, and then he weaved out of sight again. It was only a few minutes, he thought and the other young men had moved on and wandered off the ledge It was so peaceful in the city park and fifteen minutes had passed. Johnny stood up thinking he saw the man on his bike talking with someone near a distant tree but it wasn’t him; it wasn’t his bike.

At thirty minutes, the dusk was gathering in the sky, but it was dawning on Johnny, the dream was over. The nightmare was racing in his heart, from Woodstock to Altamont, paranoia striking deep. The shadows in the park met lazy days head on as the last shimmer of golden sun slid from the reflecting town house windows and the children found their parents heading home. Johnny spun around slowly in a 360^o last look, head lowered, walked to the IND subway. “Before wild Medusa’s serpents gave birth to hell disguised as heaven, those were the days.”

At the new college in September, Johnny stood on the quad a week before registration, tossing a Frisbee with friends. A young man on a blue bicycle rode up to the edge of the grass and called out. “IS anyone interested in buying a bicycle?” Johnny paid attention.

“Let me see it,” The young man got off the bike and walked it over to Johnny who looked it over. “How much you want?”

“$50 would be okay,” said the young man.

”Why are you selling your bike?” Johnny asked suspiciously.

“Oh, it’s not mine. I found it in the backyard of a house.”

“Really? May I try it out?” asked Johnny innocently.

“Sure,” said the backyard bike thief.

He never saw Johnny Livewire, or the bike, again.