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Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side

First Love, Part 6

Thus fueled, we drove out to Princeton to visit Sid's brother who was studying mathematics, and to freak around in the snowy woods. In the spirit of the Magical Mystery Tour and the Electric Koolaid Acid Test, Arden videotaped the entire odyssey. Back on the road, we made it to Penn State by midnight. Sid's sister was a student there. In fact Sid seemed to have siblings and cousins spread out in various colleges and universities all across the country.


Inevitably we made the obligatory stop in Goshen. By this time the initial frenzy of adventure had worn off and I was on an hysterical down. Like the prodigal son I trooped back to my parent's house and had an emotional breakdown, wailing about my lost love, my nascent hippie life, and my confusion about my academic career. The parents sent me off to consult with Willard Krabill, the sympathetic white-haired campus doc. Pulling myself back together, I decided to at least finish the semester before choosing between poetic glory and a bachelor's degree from Goshen College.


A refuge during this emotionally overwrought time was my job as a dishwasher downtown at Minelli's steakhouse. Reputedly run by a mafia family from South Bend, Minelli's was exotic enough to provide a satisfying contrast to Mennonite campus life at GC. It was also a satisfying work routine. Every evening at five I'd report for work, smoke a cigarette, drink a cup of coffee, and wash up the lunch dishes. The chef was an old sailor named Eric who wore a tall white toque and swore like a navvy at the waitresses. He was a heavy drinker and by the end of the night was frequently passed out on the floor behind his stoves.

-- Amos Stoltzfus

First Love, Part 5

The center of the Mennonite colony in the East Village was an old five-story walkup tenement at 524 E. 13th St., between Avenues A and B. Marge and her husband Blackie lived on the first floor apartment to the left as you entered, and served as the superintendents of the building. Aged and toothless, but talkative, these old heads had accumulated decades of dust, and what appeared to be layers of chicken feathers, on the floor of their apartment. The rear apartment was occupied by Skinnie Lennie and his bride Joanne, who had met at Goshen College and become an item during the long weekend of campaigning for Gene McCarthy in Racine.

Various Hochstetlers, Smuckers, Yosts and a variety of Stoltzfuses occupied the railroad apartments, characterized by the elegant clawfoot bathtubs in the kitchen, that led up to the fifth floor. Some of the smaller flats had no bathrooms in the apartment itself, and the tenants were served by cramped toilets in closets in the hallway. The most popular and friendly tenants were up in 5D on the fifth floor, proprietors Sid and Arden, I-W boys at NYU hospital. They had constructed several sets of bunk beds to house wandering hippies, and the floor of the living room was often knee-deep in transient Mennonites who had found the address in the unofficial oral Mennonite Your Way directory. I recall once counting sixteen people on the floor and in various combinations in the bunkbeds upon awakening one morning in early spring.

Scarcely had I arrived than Sid and Arden informed me that they were about to drive to California in Sid’s fire-engine red Triumph sports car, and asked if I wanted to go along. I had always wanted to see Haight-Ashbury, so I squeezed myself into the rumble seat in back. Arden had thoughtfully prepared a tray of hashish brownies which he kept in the glove compartment, doling them out when things got dull. Of course he had consulted the famous Alice B. Toklas Cookbook recipe, but had modified it using the standard Mennonite Community Cookbook instructions for whoopie pies, substituting a chunk of Afghan hash for the block of dark chocolate.


"Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties.... It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green."

-- from the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 1954

Death of the Hippie

October Sixth Nineteen Hundred and Sixty Seven

MEDIA CREATED THE HIPPIE WITH YOUR HUNGRY CONSENT. BE SOMEBODY. CAREERS ARE TO BE HAD FOR THE ENTERPRISING HIPPIE. The media cast nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV, your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am. Narcicism, plebian vanity. The victim immortalized. Black power, its transcendant threat of white massacre the creation of media-whore obsequious bowers to the public mind which they recreate because they too have nothing to create and the reflections run in perpetual anal circuits and the FREE MAN vomits his images and laughs in the clouds because he is the great evader, the animal who haunts the jungles of image and sees no shadow, only the hunter's gun and knows sahib is too slow and he flexes his strong loins of FREE and is gone again from the nets. They fall on empty air and waft helplessly to the grass.


DEATH OF HIPPY END/FINISHED HIPPYEE GONE GOODBYE HEHPPEEEE DEATH DEATH HHIPPEE

First Love, Part 4

The spring of 1969 was an unsettled time, to put it mildly. Although the great wave of the hippie movement was yet to crest at Woodstock, the Diggers had proclaimed the Death of the Hippie at the end of the summer of 1967, staging a funeral and burying a hippie effigy in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Political polarization had reached a violent climax with the police riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August of 1968, where the nascent Yippie Party of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman had run a pig for President.

DeAnne was ill at ease in the dormitories of Goshen College, which were still strictly segregated by gender. When she moved into Coffman Hall she immediately put her mattress on the floor, which earned her a strict reproof from the residence authorities. We fantasized about starting a commune in the rambling old Spouter Inn over on College Avenue. I was gaga about her, adolescent passion having hit for the first time. Combined with my heady enthusiasm for a youth movement which I sensed was initiating a massive change of consciousness and the vibes of a peaceful revolution, this was first love with a vengeance. We went about stoned, dreamy, and in a trance.

For two weeks I was at the extreme of ecstasy. Soon, however, DeAnne found Goshen as completely wearisome as I did, and she began to fret for her friends back in the Haight. She scraped up the money for an air ticket back to San Francisco and made plans to return without her parents discovering and preventing it. Some other guy drove her up to the airport in Chicago.

I was crushed and desolated. Within days I had determined that I could not possibly stay in Goshen a moment longer. Leaving a note on the dining room table to the effect that I had hitchhiked to New York to become a hippie poet and telling my parents not to worry (I was still living at home at the time), I packed a small bag and a friend dropped me off at the rest area on the Interstate. My first ride came from a surprisingly friendly state trooper who pointed out that hitchhiking was prohibited on the highway itself. He dropped me off outside the toll booth entrance to the turnpike. Fortunately within minutes I had my first ride, a young guy driving a pickup to western New York State.

It was my first experience of hitchhiking, but at that time people were still casual about giving rides. It was part of the zeitgeist. I rode with a middle-aged black couple, a grizzled old trucker, and a Vietnam vet. By about 3 am I was at a truck stop in Breezewood, in central Pennsylvania. It was snowing lightly, and I discovered a Greyhound bus was leaving soon for New York. I had some money left and opted to ride the rest of the way in comfort, feeling that I had done my requisite time on the road. Arriving in the city, I made my way down to East 13th Street and crashed in the apartment of some friends, former Goshen students doing their I-W work at New York University Hospital.

-- Amos Stoltzfus (to be continued)

Fly Translove Airways, Gets You There on Time