Whatever one’s age, Thanksgiving is a day heavy on reminiscences for most of us. Thoughts of home, memories of family and friends, many now gone to that Great Repast in the Sky, impose themselves. We are happy for the present day but also a little bit melancholy for our losses. Remember Nan, baking away like there was no tomorrow, accoutrements piled everywhere? Remember Ted Hansen, come over to throw the football around with Danny? How about that time we drove over to the beach, Queenie, when nobody was left in Gainesville but the two of us and there wasn’t an open restaurant in St. Augustine to be found? We had to drive all the way to Daytona for dinner. Some first date.
So we celebrate those who remain, especially the old friends, scattered hither and yon though they be, Jack in Laguna, Tom in L.A., Marty in Seattle, Bill in Kentucky, Leslie in Portland, Irana in Boca, others wandering in the mists. We may not be blasting through the acreage on motorcycles anymore or experimenting with the new batch of LSD that Claudine just copped, but we are here, making the best of it, dealing with the plethora of doctors, fitness parlors and rehab clinics that this New Life demands, and, for the most part, smiling through it all. For the Old Guys, and that is what most of us are, the time is winding down now, the days more precious, not to be frittered away on foolishness. Oddly, we are happy in the face of it, satisfied with our lot, accepting of what life has wrought. Do we still have dreams and ambitions? Sure, a little more realistic, perhaps, than the ones we once had but dreams nonetheless, and we’ll get on with them tomorrow. Today, we’ll savor the moment and be grateful, think of all the things we have to be grateful for. Which, on a personal level, are things like:
The Big Apple
I have never been to London or Paris or Rome or Zurich and I’m sure they are all spectacular places that I would enjoy very much, but there can be no place like New York and I am grateful for every millisecond I spent there….and there were a lot of them. Yes, yes, I know, I am an unreconstructed fan of the Boston Red Sox, not to mention the Celtics and Bruins, and the hated enemies of those teams all happen to reside in The Big Apple. Makes no difference. The City is a singular place, radiating with an incomparable energy not apparent elsewhere. I have often arrived there tired and bedraggled, only to dump my baggage in a hotel room and immediately bounce out into the streets of New York, bolstered by its signature buzz, looking for new adventures.
I was nineteen the first time I went to New York and I lived there for just a short time. My residence was a fleabag dump called the Hotel Lindy, just north of Grand Central Station. And yes, we called it “Station” then instead of the newfangled “Terminal,” and I’ll be calling it “Station” for the foreseeable future, if you don’t mind. I think my hotel rent was in the neighborhood of $100 a week, not a neighborhood most people would be comfortable hanging their hat in. There were positive and negative aspects to the Hotel Lindy. An irritating negative was the necessity to carry my bathroom mirror down to the second floor to shave since the hot water was not provided with any incentive to rise to the fourth floor, my level. On the positive side, there were daily battles on the stairs between the homestanding hookers and their curious cast of johns, some of whom were so ungentlemanly as to try to avoid payment for services rendered. The girls were very polite to me, always interrupting their colorful speeches to say, “Oh, hi Bill!” as I passed on the stairs.
Most people who have never been to New York think it an impossibly expensive place to visit and if you don’t stay at the Hotel Lindy this is not too far from the truth. Everything is expensive. But what most of them fail to realize is that The City can be enjoyed on the cheap just by walking through its endlessly fascinating streets and neighborhoods. You don’t have to spend a nickel navigating through Central Park or dressing down for a visit to never dull Greenwich Village. You probably don’t have the wardrobe to dress down enough for the East Village, beyond seedy but extremely colorful and inventive. And Times Square provides the cheapest entertainment in the world with its extensive battery of street preachers, wacko entertainers and flim-flam men all encompassed within a few blocks of one another.
I used to travel to The Big Apple (a nickname popularized in the 1920s by John J. Fitz Gerald, a sports writer for the New York Morning Telegraph) between two and four times a year in Subterranean Circus days, prowling around the Village and the Fashion District looking for new things to sell. As hippie emporiums began to proliferate in the late seventies, manufacturers of products suited to these nefarious outlets needed a place to display their wares, thus appeared the mind-boggling, dope-infested National Boutique Show at the Hotel McAlpin in Herald Square. The McAlpin, now a residential building called the Herald Towers, was the largest hotel in the world when it opened in 1912. By 1968, it had regressed enough to offer a twice-a-year home to the unconventional cast of characters who sewed, carved, hammered or otherwise dreamed up hippie stuff. Thirteen of the hotel’s 25 floors were filled with “booths” of all descriptions, the majority of them representing the thread trade, but plenty of others peddling bongs, rolling papers, roach clips (remember them?), incense, you-name-it. The twelve upper floors served as sleeping quarters for this motley crew, guaranteeing that the party never stopped. It is probably safe to say that no place on earth contained more marijuana and cocaine in a one-square-block area at any time ever than the National Boutique Show. And that includes federal drug lockup compounds. At night, participants would be found passed out in restaurants and bars all over the city and ferried back to the McAlpin to work again another day. I don’t know how long the Boutique Show lasted, indeed if it endures still, but in its time it had no equal for uninterrupted criminal activity. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
During these Boutique Show visits, our crew often topped off the day with a trip to the movies, most often the trio of theaters across from Bloomingdale’s on Third Avenue. Like L.A., New York often got films in two weeks ahead of the rest of the country. We saw Easy Rider there, glum and concerned at the finish. We hooted along with the natives as Charles Bronson avenged his family in Death Wish. And we saw New Yorker Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Annie Hall there, which is only fitting. These Third Avenue theaters, by the way, also offered appetizers. While you waited in line to get in, street perfomers proffered their wares. You got clowns, jugglers, fire-eaters, sword-swallowers and acrobats tumbling for a buck. One night, while visiting Irana in the hospital (Irana’s second home), I was prowling through the newspaper when I came across an enticing ad for something called Star Wars. The movie was in its first weekend. When we got to the Times Square theater—which held about 3000—the klieg lights were sweeping the sky and the lines were eternal. Somehow, we got in, complete with our big blue May The Force Be With You buttons. When the screen lit up with the first image, the crowd went crazy and sustained the enthusiasm throughout the movie. It was a singular experience. Which, of course, brings up another thing we are grateful for:
1914 Postcard Photo Of The Hotel McAlpin
The Silver Screen
The first movie I can remember attending was called The Boy With Green Hair, which my mother took me to when I was seven. I thought Wow! Everybody sitting in the dark, eating popcorn. What a concept! After that, I can remember Custer’s Last Stand, shocked that the good guys lost one. In Lawrence, where I grew up, we had a ton of theaters. Four of them were in the same block, on Broadway of course, and one of them, The State, made a point of showing horror movies starring Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, Dracula Meets The Wolfman, The Wolfman Meets The Mummy, The Mummy Meets Dracula and, inevitably, the whole bunch of them, separately and in tandem, meet Abbott and Costello. It made sense at the time although you hardly knew whether to laugh or freak out. Movies were twelve cents back then, six cents if you went to the vilified Premier Theater, which everybody said had rats (I never saw any). It was at the movies we discovered the impenetrable Jujubes, small candies which were absolutely inedible but good for throwing at moviegoers seated in front of you. Oh, and we had balconies back then, the better to dump your coke from on the unfortunates below. I can remember when the balconies were full and we were forced to sit downstairs, the first order of business was to eliminate all rows in which we might be subjected to attacks from the balcony. We kept the ushers busy in those days and I don’t mean with seating people.
The scariest movie I ever saw when I was a kid was The Thing, with James Arness, before he became Marshall Dillon in Gunsmoke on TV. The movie was set at a desolate research facility near the North Pole which had no hope of assistance should adversity arise. Which it did one day when a gigantic flying saucer crashed through the ice and snow. The scientists went out to take a look but could barely make out the thing buried in the ground. They decided to measure the periphery and eventually formed a very very very large circle on the ice. They looked at each other, worried. We little kids in the audience looked at each other, worried. And we all had plenty to worry about, for as the movie wore on people—and sled dogs—began showing up dead. The scariest thing about the movie, however, was that you never actually SAW The Thing for more than a couple seconds when he suddenly and quickly offed some poor schlump. My pal, Paul Carroll, eventually climbed under his seat during a critical moment. “I’m too scared to watch any more,” he said, terrified. When I chastised him, he had an appropriate response: “Well, I’m only eight and you’re ten!”
Back in New York, during the hippie days, our little band saw advertised a movie called Zachariah (The First Electric Western), which obviously called for the ingestion of LSD before watching. Rick Nihlen, his wife Lynn, Harolyn and I always tried to fit in with the program so we dutifully took our acid and went to the movie. It was great. The most spectacular scene involved a group of bandits chasing a stagecoach. You’ve seen this one many times before. No matter how inspired the stagecoach’s brave horses and sharpshooting drivers, they are invariably overwhelmed by their pursuers who have, after all, no stagecoach to lug around. But not this time. In a chase that went over the meadow and through the woods for what seemed like forever, the speedy stagecoach began gradually pulling away, eventually leaving the bandits in its dust. The perplexed and exhausted outlaw chief pulled up his tiring mount, raised a hand to his slowing compadres and remarked, “Fastest damn stagecoach I EVER saw!” On the way home, our wily taxi-driver recognized our compromised condition and decided to floor his cab when we hit the lights of Times Square, earning him his best tip of the night—a giant slab of hashish Rick had sitting around in his pocket.
Who can forget the very first James Bond movie, Dr. No? Or the subsequent Bonds with Sean Connery? Or the clever and campy Indiana Jones films with Harrison Ford? Everybody remembers Hal and 2001. He’s not for everybody, but Woody Allen is a big favorite with me. And I thought some of his early films were shallow and ill-written. As time went by, though, Woody morphed into a dependable writer, actor and—best of all—director. His recent April In Paris was terrific. I also like a lesser known Woody film (and Siobhan’s favorite), soon (March, 2014) to open as a Broadway play. It’s called Bullets Over Broadway, and deals with a fundless moviemaker who is forced to borrow from the Mob to finance his film. The Mob boss agrees to this if the borrower is willing to include the boss’ untalented girlfriend (Jennifer Tilley) as his star. Then the boss inserts a minder in the person of Chazz Palminteri to oversee the operation. Chazz is perfect as the mobster who begins to appreciate the process and develops a concern for the quality of the film, injecting his own ideas and arguing for script changes, often at the expense of his boss’ protégé. It’s ingenious and very funny.
For several years, Siobhan and I, eventually with our neighbor Allen Morgan in tow, ventured out on Friday evenings to whatever we perceived to be the best movie of the week. We had our share of disappointments but we didn’t miss any good ones. The last couple of years, we find ourselves going out a little less as more and more films seem directed either to teenage minds or imbeciles….but we haven’t given up. Thanksgiving and Christmas nights are also dedicated to moviegoing, so tonight it’s the Dallas Buyer’s Club, with Matthew McConaughey in what critics rave is his best performance.
We’re grateful for many things and these are but a couple, neither requiring vast riches or special talents, readily available to one and all. Maybe we’ll expand on the subject in the future. For today, though, warm wishes to all of you out there who have been with us for this whole trek—the entire 35 of you—or who have signed on somewhere along the line, bringing the readership to 300 last week if you include the Malaysians, and why wouldn’t we? We have no idea who most of you are and you obviously have no intention of telling us, so we’ll let it go at that. For the regulars, drop a line now and then so we’ll know you’re still alive. And tell us what you’re grateful for. We might want to come and get some.
That’s all, folks….
