A strange adventure of youth, recalled. From the Village Voice, 1977.
I spied my old fat friend Bart the other day. Like old times, he was sitting in a snot-green foreign car eating a brownie and swigging milk from the quart container in front of Cakemasters on Thirty-fourth Street. For eight years of no see, Big Bart could have looked worse. The car was an improvement. Big Bart used to drive a Corvair that had holes in the floorboards. He heard that Ralph Nader said Corvairs were killer machines, moving time bombs, that they could go off the road, smash right into a crowd of unsuspecting shoppers, with a single nudge of the wheel. So Big Bart went out and got one with no front alignment. He was that kind of guy.
Big Bart was one of those bald-spot-in-the-middle/long-greasy-hair-on-the-sides type of hippies. Now the bald spot has grown like a spreading Rorschach blot, but the grease remains the same. So did the chub. We had some info that Big Bart was married to a woman who had a snake tattoo on her tummy who put him on a yoga diet. You'd never be able to tell.
Back then, in 1969, when we shared a seventy-dollar-a-month pad on Hillside Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard in Queens, there was a saying that Big Bart either had the lowest-cut pants or the highest-cut ass in town. The crack was always visible. Big Bart used to come out of his room naked. (The room was painted orange and black: Mr. Rotherstein, our landlord, railed, "You painted this wall psychodeckic. Psychodeckic is not in your lease." But we were the only whites in the building, so we got over.) He'd lay that hairy ass on me and my former wife. Moon over Miami, Big Bart called it. We hid under the covers hoping it would go away. But every time we peeked out it would still be there, shining on.
I was with Big Bart the last time I took acid.
Those days Big Bart played drums in bar bands on Long Island. If the joint was past Exit 51, Big Bart played it. For a sweating slob in a flannel shirt, Bart was immortal, in that Island rocker kind of way. He twirled his sticks better than Sal Mineo in The Gene Krupa Story. He knew the Young Rascals' greatest hits better than Dino Danelli. When Big Bart beat out "Can't Turn You Loose" on his meaty thighs, it could be magic.
On this particular night Big Bart was moving uptown. He had a gig in a church basement on Lexington Avenue and Twenty-second Street, borough of Manhattan. The City! Man, this was the big time. But the show wasn't until ten o'clock. We had eleven hours to kill and Big Bart had two yellow pills shaped like pumpkin seeds he said would do the trick. I had my doubts. I had just returned from California and was skeptical of what the potent combo of pumpkin seed acid and the Big Apple might foment in my increasingly pock-marked brain pan. Up in Tilden Park in Berkeley you could look at a tree for six hours, say "Oh, wow," and incur minimal permanent damage. New York was another story.
But after Bart dropped, there wasn't much choice. What was I gonna do, spend eleven hours watching him take acid? Everything was cool as long as the sun stayed up: we made faces at the gorilla in the Central Park zoo, acted unruly on Park Avenue, stared at the guy blowing smoke on the Times Square Camel ad, watched the buildings weave like in a Stan Van Der Beek underground movie. For a kick, we bought some Gypsy Rose, the cheapest rotgut available, and went looking for our buddy, George Washington Goldberg.
G.W.G., as he called himself, spent the majority of his time in Washington Square Park, where he had achieved a modicum of fame for once making his way up into an NYU biology lecture room. Pushing his way by the professor, George erased the diagrams on the blackboard and told the hundred students, "Okay, now G.W.G. is gonna tell you what biology is really all about." The Wackenhuts carried him out. A star, G.W.G. He'd see you from a distance, stand up, bow, and say, "Oh, finally, a better class of people … would you guys like a job, Sonny Liston is looking for sparring partners." This time, though, we blew G.W.G's mind, pulling out our bottle of Gypsy Rose from the brown paper bag and handing it to him, as a present.
"Unopened," George said, tears welling up in his eyes. "The seal not even cracked. No tooth marks. I'm overcome."
Later Big Bart and I went to Hong Fat on Mott Street to giggle over the bacon-wrapped shrimp with the rest of the hippies. Bart ordered his usual: curry beef, superhot extra sauce, five Seven-Ups. He ate the slop in sweaty spasms, banging his chest like a doctor gunning a pacemaker. And said, "Good!"
What a day we were having! Big Bart said there was only one hassle. For Big Bart, any time you had to do anything, it was a hassle. The hassle was that Bart had to call Ben the bassist to tell him where the gig was. Bart went off to find a working phone booth while I sat on the curb of Elizabeth Street staring at the streetlamp. It could have been the moon. Bart returned with a look of horror on his face. He was pasty white. Ben the bassist couldn't make it. He was sick. The only other bass player Bart knew was Lou, the crazed 650-Triumph freak who lived in Bensonhurst. There was something wrong with Lou's phone. We'd have to go out there.
Oh shit.
The N train, what the fuck do we know from the N train? We're from Queens. Brooklyn is a dark and scary thing. The subway map. Fuck. Some Puerto Rican wrote on it. In, like, Spanish.
Journey to the end of the Nightsville. Drunk on the subway, okay. Glue on the subway, ride it out. But acid on the subway, yaaahhh. Big Bart and I held on to each other. All we knew was: Bay Ridge Parkway, get off. The train is packed. Across the way a pizza-faced white guy in a pea coat is playing 45s on a portable turntable. Like life or death, Big Bart dives at the guy's leg and asks, "Do you have any Chuck Berry?" The kid pulls "No Particular Place to Go" out of his pocket. Saved. Thank you, Lord! Saved again. The people on the train are going nuts. Half of them want the kid to turn it up, the rest want to kill him.
Somehow we found Lou, a husky weight-lifting type, communing with the television in his mother's living room. The mother, a Jewish-Italian widow lady, came to the door, took one look at our faces, and almost broke out crying. It was easy to see why. Lou was taking acid too! He was nearly catatonic. Big Bart and I breathed relief: Here, at last, was someone we could talk to.
Lou indicated, sure, he could play the gig. Only problem was he worked for Grand Union on Eighty-sixth Street and had to make his deliveries first. He said it would go faster if we came along. Eighty-sixth Street has an elevated train running over it. Lou shot that Dodge Tradesman between the subway pilings like an amphethamined slalom skier. Big Bart broke into a box of Oreos as we rolled around in the back of the van trying not to barf into the bags of groceries. How Lou had a nice smile for all those Italian ladies when he brought them their Ronzoni is an unsolved mystery. How we got to the gig is another event lost in the mists.
Talking in front of Cakemasters on Thirty-fourth Street, Big Bart and I agree that we can't remember much more of that day—except that the priest at the church smoked pot to show he was hip. Outside of that and a couple of questions about how our respective parents were, there wasn't all that much more to talk about, even if Bart did play "Can't Turn You Loose" on his leg for old times' sake. Bart has been in half a dozen bands since those days. Once he was supposed to go out on the road with Don Covay, author of Chain of Fools. But it fell through. Now playing in bands is just a job. Big Bart works in an auto parts store during the day. I remember when Big Bart slept all day. But what are you going to do when you're married and have three kids? Bart hasn't taken acid since that night either.