In the’60s, the backside of Boston’s Beacon Hill was a sort of working-class neighborhood of hospital workers, refugees from the urban renewal projects in Boston’s West End, and folkies like my friends and I. If you wandered up Grove Street you might find us stocking up on a Friday with cases of Narragansett Giant Imperial Quarts, Pizza, and a bit of Dutchie’s “best” MJ for dessert. On a particular spring evening in 1966, there was a mournful note to all this activity. We were going to have a wake for musician and author Richard Farina. Dick had died taking a motorcycle ride during the publication party for his book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.
Dick and his wife Mimi had been heroic figures at the Folkie den of iniquity we called the Folkie Palace. Their music was frequently playing on the beat-up third-hand phonograph in the kitchen. The music was more than entertainment; it spoke directly to us and to our lifestyle. It was a wake in grand style with eulogies, toasts, and mournful looks on all the participants’ faces. When the book was published it was snatched up and read eagerly at the Palace. There were multiple discussions on its meaning and how it connected with our lifestyle.
A copy of the book soon found its way into the bottom of my pack for repeated reading over the next two years. The high-speed life of Gnossos Papadopoulis reverberated with me. True, the character was a sometime college student, and I was a high school dropout, so on the surface there were lots of differences. But the style of life on the road struck many chords. Gnossos and I occupied a lot of common headspace. My copy became dog-eared and dirty from all the miles traveled in the bottom of my pack.
If you had asked me whose life I’d gladly occupy during this time, I’d have answered that of Gnossos, the protagonist, anti-hero, and rebel of the book.
All that started to change after a 1970 interlude when I was literally on the run in Boston from someone who’d tried to kill me. If you drew a sharp line between the Pius Itinerant I had been and the person I was going to become, that was when it happened. It wasn’t like one day I said goodbye to Gnossos, but the bright colors of a former life started to fade and were being replaced. The book was placed on a bookshelf, and I have no idea where it is.
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I was thinking about that this morning, “Where did that Crystal go, and when did this Crystal begin to arrive?” When you are living it, it is hard to see the line, if there even is a line, that is crossed.
In retrospect it seems like a finely cut line, but it must have been a process. but looking back that transition blurs.