I was a Person of the Village many years ago, when graffiti slathered the subways, fires devoured the Bronx, doggy doo marbled the streets, and a weirdo named Son of Sam ran around killing people, and the city was “broke as a fish,” as my grandfather used to say.
But people were connected, they talked to one another, they weren’t encased in cyber magnets repelling them from one another.
I was a dumb kid in my early twenties living the life of a straight girl even though I was a lesbian, although I could be forgiven for not wanting to be a lesbian in those days since I grew up imagining lesbians to be sick, perverted, stringy-haired women that stood outside of bus stations offering candy to young girls. (By the time I reached my twenties I knew better, but I had not liberated myself from my internalized homophobia.)
I had dropped out of Ohio State to be a writer in New York, and was living with my roommate in a studio on West 15th Street off of Seventh Avenue. (I know, not technically the Village, but…)
I was in an advanced writing program at the New School for Social Research on West 12th Street, and to make money I hustled Fuller Brush products—mops, brooms, air freshener, degreasers, laundry detergent, all that kind of stuff. My territory was a chunk of Midtown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and I worked out of an office full of fortyish Damon Runyon-type guys.
One of them was Coney Island Howie, who ran a dart game in the iconic amusement park. He had a pompadour and wore sharp suits with a flower in the lapel, and he regaled me with his stories about being a kid in Brownsville and rumbling with the Amboy Dukes.
One snowy winter day I arranged to meet Howie after work to get some catalogs from him, but our meeting slipped my mind and I headed straight for my evening class in the undergraduate building on West 12th Street. But first I stopped at the graduate building on Fifth Avenue to buy a soda, and became curious about a group of people around my age, and one older guy, talking intently in a conversation area. I wandered over there and they invited me to join them.
The older guy was presiding over a philosophical conversation, and I must have found it mildly interesting because I accepted their invitation to head over to Chinatown for a bite. In those days I often just went along with stuff. I was a funny combination of rebellious, pot-smoking, hell-raising freak, and a closeted, depressed space case who wanted everyone to like her, which was the person I was that night.
In the Chinatown restaurant the older guy once again monopolized the conversation, and after we ate I felt stuck to this group, so I shlepped with them to this one kid’s apartment.
Once we got inside the apartment things started to get weird. The older guy gathered people into the living room, and he began pairing them off. “Okay Mark you go with Denise, and Tommy you go with Ann and Steven, you’re with Sally” (actual names are long forgotten) and I guess he could tell that I didn’t really want to be paired with anyone. I really had no idea what was going on.
Then he selected one of the prettiest girls and took her into the bedroom. And while I sat in an adjoining room with them, in full view, the couple (and everyone else) proceeded to have sex!
I was disgusted at the whole scene and even kind of bored, but I didn’t want them to think I disapproved, so instead of saying, “OK, I’m outta here,” and leaving, which was what I wanted to do, I just sat on the floor like a stump, gaping at them while they bounced around naked in the living room.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. Sitting on a chaise lounge next to me was this one guy who hadn’t been paired off with anyone, and I thought I should do something to feel part of the group, so I—well, participated.
That’s all I’ll say about it. I thought in those days I was so cool, but when it came to sexual matters, I was a naif, even though I’d lived with a bunch of like-minded freaks at college and was not a virgin by any means. But I had just been acting out a role of a grown sexual woman (until years later when I finally did come out and fell madly in love and became an even bigger fool than I was on that wintery night in the Village.)
After everyone was done schtupping and the cult leader exited the bedroom with his stunned-looking girl, I was invited to spend the night and I crashed out in one of the bedrooms.
I woke up around noon, trying to forget about the absurd drama of the previous night, and I dragged myself to my Fuller Brush office to get some catalogs from Willie Walker, my gnarly, tough-talking manager.
Trouble from Cleveland
Meanwhile, in suburban Cleveland, another drama had been taking place, revolving around my not coming home all night to the apartment that I shared with my best friend from high school, a brilliant, artistic, fun, hilarious girl who was also nervous and edgy (a typical Jewish girl of the time, like I was, but with a different temperament).
My mother had called the night before and Sue told her that I hadn’t come home yet. So Mom called back in a couple of hours and I still hadn’t come home. She told Sue to please have me call her as soon as I got home, no matter what time.
Of course, I didn’t come home that night and Mom, now getting worried, called back sometime around midnight. Sue was now wondering where the hell I was, and she said to my mom, “I don’t understand it – she’s never done this before!”
As though it was so weird for a fun-loving 22-year-old woman to be out past midnight in New York City.
Everyone went into a panic. I’m talking about my mother, my father, both of my grandparents who lived with them, and Sue. And the longer the night went on, the more hysterical they became. They were up all night, waiting for Sue to let them know that thank God, I was home, but I didn’t come home, so in the morning they started making calls.
They called Willie Walker at the Fuller Brush office, and Coney Island Howie happened to be in the office. Willie told them: “Howie said she was supposed to meet him last night and she nevah showed up.”
They called the New School office, who got in touch with my teacher who told them that I hadn’t been to class. Considering the times, if they had known what I had actually been doing instead of being in class they probably would have jumped for joy just to know that I wasn’t dead.
(Well, my dad probably wouldn’t have jumped for joy about the orgy but he would have been quietly relieved.)
So then my parents decided they would CALL THE POLICE!” Can you imagine what the NYPD would have said to some hysterical Midwestern parents asking them to file a missing person’s report on an adult woman who had been out all night?
By that time Sue had dragged herself to work, and she frantically called my cousin Barbara, who lived in Staten Island, and asked if she could go to our apartment and get the bag of pot out of there. (As though the police would bother to break into our apartment to investigate this).
So Barb went to Sue’s office and got the key to our apartment and removed our bag of pot. We did get it back later, which was the good news.
The bigger good news was that my parents ended up not calling the cops.
Because right around the time that Barb was removing “evidence” from our place, I walked into Willie’s office. He stared at me and yelled, “DA WHOLE WOILD’S BEEN LOOKIN’ FUH YA! CALL YA MUTHA!”
I went to a phone booth and called home and my Bobie answered and shrieked that it was me, and my dad grabbed the phone from her and I started yelling at him for overreacting and I knew he was kind of embarrassed but he talked condescendingly to me, and I refused to talk to my mom and I hung up and called Sue, whom I never blamed for stirring up all the panic in the first place.
I told them I had met some people the night before, but I never told them the details, except for Sue (RIP dear friend), and I never even told her the most embarrassing part of the story. I never told anybody that part of it. Until now.
Now that most of the people in the story are dead, and it happened so long ago that I can hardly even remember being that dopey kid that didn’t want to offend some goofy strangers taking instructions from a pervert.
My brother
I forgot to mention the funniest part of the story. At some point my mom called my brother, Bobby, who was majoring at smoking weed at Columbia University, and told him I hadn’t been home all night and Sue was freaking out and had he heard from me?
And my crazy little brother was the only one of them who had the good sense to realize that I was a 22-year-old streetwise girl who was almost certainly very much alive, and he told my mom that he had no idea where I was. And then he yelled at her, “Forget about it, Mom! IF SHE’S DEAD, SHE’S DEAD!”
My brother and I were a couple of young lunatics back then, and now we’re a couple of old lunatics, and sometimes we’ll be talking on the phone, and just for fun I’ll say, “so what did you say to Mom that time that I went missing?”
And he dutifully answers, “IF SHE’S DEAD, SHE’S DEAD!” And as he chuckles on the other end of the phone, I fall over laughing. Lord knows, we can all use a good laugh these days.
I don’t live in the Village anymore, but when I meander through its streets talking to people I still feel like a person of the Village. You can take the New Yorker out of the Village, but you can’t take the Village out of the New Yorker.
