Tag: dailyprompt-2121

I first wandered into Greenwich Village with my good friend Bart. He had recruited me to either blow on a kazoo or shake a tambourine for a group he was performing with. I don’t remember which it was, or maybe it was both. The performance was at the sometimes infamous Purple Onion. This was in 1963, and within a year, I became a regular at several of the lower-end coffeehouses in the area. First, I just came to hang out, drink bad coffee, and talk to the other habitues. After several months, one of the managers of the Cafe Why Not recruited me to fill in when someone did not show up. I found myself that night as a folk performer.

Finding

Now, finding yourself is one of the most important things a person can do. Don’t laugh. I’d maintain that many go through their entire life and never find themselves. They settle for an unchallenging staidness. They watch the “found” as though they were in some sort of Parallel Universe, and you could just sit there and watch the show—a television soap opera.

In the Village, they’d drift downtown on the IRT subway. Or in from Long Island on the Long Island Railroad. Into Washington Square they’d pour to listen to the poets, the singers, and the would-be radicals proclaiming the revolution. They’d disperse to the restaurants, bars, clubs, and coffeehouses. Over the evening or weekend, they’d participate in the life of the Village as our customers, audiences, and, unfortunately, in some cases, as victims. Then the tide would roll out, back to Uptown and the suburbs. Once back home, they’d have a story about the weird guy in drag who spouted poetry, the folksinger they’d listened to, or the hubbub on Bleecker Street.

Look at the Tourists!!

We, the habitues, had a joke. As the tourist buses rolled through, the tourists would gawk and point at the “Beatniks”; you could almost see them ooohing and awwing. We’d stand there and point at the bus and holler out with amazement and laughter, “Look at the Tourists!!!” If we were going to be made into spectacle, we’d play it to the hilt. And turn the tables around.

I was sixteen when Bart first hauled me down to the Village, and seventeen when I was first exposed to a coffeehouse audience. At eighteen, all the lure of being “on the road” called me away, and I found an extension of myself. My best friend and road buddy, Bill, joked and termed us Pius Itinerants. We were on the road searching for…well, sometimes that was the question: what were we searching for? Eventually, we just settled for “going to see the elephant.” New experiences, people, places, and curiosities.

On The Road

As Bill and I traveled, my job was to be the entertainer. If we were broke, I’d set up with my guitar, Charlie, and recruit some dollars from passersby. Bill scrounged, found us places to stay, chatted with likely young ladies taken with two scruffy rogues who’d seen the wider world. Importantly, he watched for the Fuzz ( cops).

Living like this, we could cover a lot of ground in a week or two. Then we’d run out of energy and head home to our friends’ Folkie pad on Boston’s Beacon Hill. There we’d recuperate, spin tales of our travels ( in other words, bullshit), and get involved in minor activities of borderline legality. Wearing out our welcome, we’d leave town and do it all again.

Why?

Why the hell am I going on about this idiocy? Well, I’ve slowly been working myself into playing the guitar again. Yes, ten pm, at the dining room table, Charlie, my guitar, and I. Last night I dug through the music and found some terribly dog-eared music from when I performed. Among the torn and ragged sheets were some of Dick Fariñas’ material. I had performed some of his songs in my folksinging days, and I found myself dragged back to the mid-sixties, and when I had found myself. It kind of ripped open a seam or two.

Some experiences have a potency that alters our fabric. And the first for me was finding myself in Greenwich Village. I’ve grown and outgrown lots of stuff. But foundations are foundations.

So what have I found that I’ve kept? Well, the coolest thing has to be those early experiences that set the tempo, melody, and setting for lots of what came after. No, I never became a known folksinger, but the Village left its mark. If there is a sort of parable to the entire thing of the Village/ Pius Itinerant, it has to be exposure to a wide slice of the universe. It’s hard to have tunnel vision when new experiences are constantly churning your perspectives on life. I eventually settled into a nice, quiet existence. After all, how much hubbub can you have? But the foundations got laid, and the structure built on top was not some cookie-cutter design. As we used to say back in the day – “Right on!”