Hank as Peter Pan Jan. 30, 1986
There comes a time when people seem different.
Not because they have changed drastically, but because of
how I’ve changed, and have come to look at them differently.
This was particularly true with my relationship with Hank.
I thought Hank had changed utterly from when I first met him
in 1967 to what I thought he became in 1973, when in truth, I’m the one who
changed, having grown up, gone through experiences I hadn’t had before. I was a
naïve redneck when I met him at the theater, and he was so avantgarde, someone
who seemed to have landed on my world from Mars or beyond.
I was utterly impressed, and took to the streets of
Manhattan with him, in search of a Greenwich Village that hadn’t existed since
the 1950s, but we both ached to find.
It never occurred to me he was a lot like Peter Pan and I
was too consumed by pixie dust to notice just how selfish he was, and petty,
much like the generation he ached to be a part of, excluded from the cool club
in school so as to make up for it by being hip, seeing the right concerts,
wearing the right badges, protesting against all those evil things are elders
stood for.
If you weren’t burning down some institution, you weren’t
with it, man.
But during my trip west I got to see just how phony all that
was, and how pathetic these so-called justice warriors were, needing to feel
important, claiming they had truth and justice on their side when they were
just as bad and pathetic as the people they hoped to bring down with their
protests.
Most of the hippies I met along the way had become drug
dealers or prostitutes or worse, blowing up things because they claimed they
were opposed to capitalism or the war, when in fact they just loved blowing
things up.
Hank never blew up anything, but our friends in the Weather
Underground did, even blowing up the building they were making their bombs in,
with me hiding the sole survivor in my East 6th Street apartment for weeks so
the FBI couldn’t find him.
Somewhere half way between 1967 and 1973, I came to realize
how full of shit all my social justice warriors were, and how little they
actually stood for. Hank never caught on, living out the hippie dream long
after the summer of love and Woodstock nation faded into shortages of gasoline,
beef and other commodities, and it became clear all these people wanted was a
free ride, when all I wanted was a job and decent enough pay to make rent each
month.
What Hank loved about the 1960s was the sex.
He took free love of the 1960s to heart and fucked as often
as he possibly could, a precursor to the future social justice warriors, for
whom sex was the ultimate attraction, mouthing whatever propaganda they needed
to in order to impress willing girls. I saw much of the same thing in LA, San
Francisco, Portland or wherever hippies gathered, almost mindless obsession
with balling.
Hank never got over the urge, simply transferred his point
of access to local clubs, where he would pick up whatever was available, a real
turn off for me, when after having lived through all that crap, I wanted mostly
to be left alone or if lucky, find one person to be with.
Yet, Hank insisted I accompany him to every strip joint,
rock club, or sleezy bar in North Jersey or New York in his constant hunt for
new prey. He had moved beyond just getting his social justice merit badges or
trying to impress naïve girls about how much he cared about the environment, he
had become a shark prowling the waters for anything that moved, and wanted me
to be just like him.
I spent a lot of time pretending I wasn’t home when he came
knocking.
Part of the problem is that we just saw too much of each
other, working the at the same job together, handing out at the same bars,
following the band on those weekends they played. I began to notice all the
annoying things I had missed when we were young, the selfishness he embraced –
a common feature among the radicals, who professed to be fighting for social
justice when they were actually in love with their own importance. Hank,
thankfully, was a piss poor social justice warrior, merely mouthing the proper
slogans, using Nixon’s name as a curse word the way all good radicals did, but
did nothing to help anybody else, not even bothering to show up for protests unless
he thought he might pick up a girl there.
This constant rubbing the wrong way eventually led to
serious friction between us so that by the late 1970s we hardly interacted at
all except when associating with Pauly and other members of the Garley gang.
I recall one of the last trips we took together to Middletown
New York on my birthday. He knew of a bunch of bars there where he was sure we
could score. I wasn’t in the mood, but went along with him, and watched him go
through his routine until I left the bar and took a walk, only to have him come
howling after me asking me what the fuck I thought I was doing, how he had arranged
for us to hang out with two women at their place, but I had blown it by
wandering off.
I told him to fuck off. He drove off. I took a bus to New
York City, and then one from New York to the Montclair rooming house where I lived.
I didn’t see him for a year after that, and only saw him
later when I heard about a play, he was performing in. After that, I went back
to college, met other people and Hank faded into the background, still there, sort
of a friend, but not what we had been.
Yet looking at him now and even then, in the 1970s, I
realize, he hadn’t changed at all, he was the same loose canon I knew and
admired in 1967, a perpetually childish Peter Pan. I was the one who had changed,
maybe not for the better, but different with different world view.
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