Freak out on East Sixth Street March 1, 1986
The year 1971 began when Hank, my best friend, moved out of
New York City, a place he had ached to live in from the day I met him at the
Fabrian Theater.
We had come back from the West Coast to be with him, and
after only a few months since our return, he and his girlfriend (Peggy or Laura,
which ever name she was using then) decided to relocate to New Jersey.
Hank had been mugged once too many times and had developed a
mythology about his own superpowers and defense stories which would get
exaggerated as years went on.
For a long as I can remember, Hank ached to live in The
Village, as a musician and a hippie, ultimately proving he could be neither –
not in lower Manhattan anyway nor on the Lower East Side.
I was changing jobs at the time from one that I loved at the
Mercury Messenger Service to one I came to hate at Service Hardware near East 90th
Street.
Louise was still pregnant despite our hopes that our child
would be born around Christmas, a fulfilment of our Bethlehem fantasy, I
suppose, which had been bubbling around inside my head from when we first
learned of her pregnancy out in LA. Since all my friends were Capricorns, I
vaguely hoped my daughter would be also.
Losing Hanks was a blow since he and I had shared the same
dream of living in the Village as teens, and the fact that for a brief time in from
Labor Day 1970 to when he left in January 1971, we had managed to accomplish
that.
We had made other friends in the Village including a family
that lived a block away on East 7th Street near Thompson Square, the son of a Brazilian
general who had married without his father’s approval and whose wife was also
expecting a child, He had come to America to prove that he could make it with
the privilege of being the son of a military man, although within weeks of his child’s
birth, they would move back to Brazil – apparently after having won forgiveness
from his father.
Mone, a local black prostitute that lived on East 6 h Street
a few doors down from us, had become the self-declared godmother of our as yet
to be born daughter. She had adopted us and served as our protector in the
still dicey area east of Avenue A.
This came about at the time when we moved from our one and
half room $80 a month apartment (with falling ceiling) at 518 East 6th Street
to the monstrously expensive $125 ground floor apartment a few doors away,
making it impossible for me to keep working as a messenger since the job paid
too little. But we needed more room for when the baby came.
Mona helped save me from the first of my two freak outs on
LSD.
. Hank showed up at with a Great Dane he was caring for
making the whole moment bizarre to say the least, giving me a send off with a
humorous moment that would later evolve into living hell.
While I had taken LSD a number of times while in LA, I hadn’t
during the trip up the west coast to Portland and then across to New York, and
not for the five months living there. In LA, I had built up a tolerance for the
drug and so needed more to get off, a tolerance that had evaporated in the
interim. New York had a shortage of LSD, and while I could find smack, downs,
speed and such, I could not find the drug or how little tolerance I had.
While contemplating how to find some, Hank showed up – just prior
to New Years and his move – led by a massive Great Dane that was too large for our
small apartment.
When he was gone, Louise and I went across town to La Grocia
in the West Village for dinner. Louise ached for Italian food, while I sought
out the dealers in Washington Square Park, hoping to finally get some LSD, and
remarkably I did, and used to the dosage I took months earlier in LA, I ingest
a four-way tab, rather than just one quarter of it.
During dinner, I had a few drinks during dinner, then made
our way back to see George, who lived in the same building we would move into a
short time later. George, a stage hand at the Filmore later went on to
questionable fame when he was stabbed to death at the infamous performance
space. He was a Dead Head, who was almost constantly stoned, and often held
court in his apartment playing Dead, Jefferson Airplane and The doors getting
stoned. We toked a little with him and his friends. I kept thinking how the
Sunshine must have been bad because I wasn’t getting off.
At that point, I really wasn’t thinking straight. My head
went boom!
Quicksilver was playing on the stereo when outside a cop car
rushed by with light ablaze and siren wailing. At that point, the LSD hit, and
I hallucinated a street full of cop cars all stopped out in front of the
building I was in and cops with shotguns charging through the front door and up
the stairs to come get me.
I leaped to my feet to escape only to discover that nobody
else in the room had moved
“What’s the matter, Al?” someone asked.
I knew then that I was in deep trouble and over the next
twenty four hours I would see, hear and feel things so horrible I still shutter
all these years later thinking about them.
We went back to our place, but it was no good, the whole
world melted around me, and Louise knew I needed help. She took me to Mone’s
place. She greeted me, laid me down on the red sheets of her bed, and then went
out and got the drugs I needed to bring me down. But it took time and the hallucinations
got worse, so that at one point, I thought I was in a hospital, and it was two
years later, and my daughter was visiting me.
I later learned that Mone had held up her own drug dealer at
gun point to get me what I needed.
I should have been a lesson learned, but it took one more a
few months later for me to learn it, after
Mike Day, who we had met in Colorado and lived with for a
time in LA, showed up at our old apartment with a batch of Orange Sunshine, and
I took it, little realizing that once you freak out, it’s difficult to have a
normal trip again. But alas that’s a whole different story.
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