Eleven

“THE Groovy Murders?” I shook my head.

“It was 1967. They called it the Summer of Love. But all that peace, love, and understanding didn’t last long . . .”

Signaling for another cocktail, Madame went on with her story, her gaze going glassy as her thoughts traveled back to the 1950s and early ’60s.

She and Matt’s father were young shop owners, working hard to keep their business afloat in a neighborhood of modest means. Meanwhile, all around them, struggling poets and writers, avant-garde artists, and urban folk musicians were driving the counterculture movement.

Greenwich Village became synonymous with bohemia, birthing experimental theaters and art galleries, radical small presses and cutting-edge clubs.

During those years, Blanche and Antonio Allegro served strong coffee and Italian and French pastries to some of the country’s most influential iconoclasts—from Willem de Kooning to William S. Burroughs; Jackson Pollock to Jack Kerouac; Andy Warhol to Allen Ginsberg; Joan Mitchell to Johnny Allen (aka Jimi) Hendrix and Bob Dylan.

“It was a liberating time, full of new ideas and boundless possibilities . . .” A little smile brightened Madame’s face, but it slowly faded. “By 1967 the culture began to shift. Beatniks, poetry, and bongo drums gave way to hippies, free love, and psychedelic drugs . . .”

In Madame’s view, it was a slow devolution.

“Artists, writers, musicians who came to the Village in the past worked very hard. They took odd jobs to survive while they focused with ferocity and passion on producing and evolving their art. This, my dear, was the hidden bedrock beneath our little bohemia.”

“What do you mean hidden bedrock?”

“From distant shores, bedrock is invisible. That’s why naïve eyes see bohemian life as romantic. While the Village continued to attract serious artists and committed activists, it also attracted those who heard only the siren’s call to mere pleasure seeking.”

She shook her head. “Unfortunately, throwing off societal constraints amounts to nothing if it produces nothing; and a life of aimlessness is far from a triumph of the human spirit. That’s what I’d like you to keep in mind before I tell you what took place that summer.”

“In 1967, you mean? The Summer of Love?”

“‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ became a slogan that lured scores of impressionable young people to our neighborhood. What concerned me most were the teenagers—children, really—who fled middle-class homes to chase the bohemian ideal. By that summer, the streets and parks in and around our neighborhood were teeming with young runaways, drifters, panhandlers, and phony gurus . . .”

Madame’s third Troubled Waters arrived, and she took a melancholy sip. “Some were girls from sheltered families, who made themselves available to men who used ‘free love’ as an excuse to take the worst sort of advantage of their naïveté. I knew the family of one of these young women. By the end of 1967, every New Yorker knew Linda’s story.”

“Linda?”

“She died a teenager in the dingy basement of a Greenwich Village flophouse. But she was born to a well-off Connecticut clan whose great-great-grandfather started a coffee importing business after the Civil War. Antonio knew the owners. Their daughter, Linda, entertained dreams of becoming an artist. She dropped out of an exclusive boarding school to live the kind of romantic lifestyle that she believed would lead to making her great. And so, at eighteen years old, she moved to the Village.”

“Her family allowed it?”

“Linda convinced them she was serious about pursuing her art, and her doting parents sent her money every week. Of course, they had no idea how she spent it. The girl lied to them, claiming she was living with a female friend, ‘Paula,’ but her roommate turned out to be ‘Paul,’ a man, and she had relationships with a number of men. She told her family she had a job when she didn’t. She wasn’t studying. She wasn’t producing any art. Most of the money her parents gave her was spent on drugs, which she shared with friends. In the end, all those lies and all those drugs finally caught up with her.

“One afternoon, Linda took some of the cash her parents sent her, hooked up with a young man—a gentle neighborhood character we knew as Groovy—and together they went looking for drugs in Tompkins Square Park. That decision prevented Linda from seeing her nineteenth birthday. A few hours later, she and Groovy were dead, murdered in the boiler room of an East Village tenement. The papers shied away from the bloody details, but they soon leaked . . .”

Madame suppressed a shudder. “Linda was drugged, sexually assaulted, and her skull bashed by a brick. The perpetrators were a local drug dealer and his accomplice, well-known in the hippie community . . .”

On the river, a barge horn released an unsettling blast, and Madame fell silent. As we both stared somberly at the dark water, I couldn’t help thinking of my own daughter. Despite the pier’s heat lamps, a shiver went through me.

“Linda’s parents must have been devastated,” I whispered.

“They were. We all were. That brutal crime affected the whole neighborhood. It changed the culture.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those murders shook awake the youth camping out in the Village. They were shocked into a realization: Peace and love may be worthy ideas, but the real world is no Garden of Eden. It’s a perilous place with dangerous predators.”

“They didn’t know that already?”

“Not the sheltered ones. To them, ‘concrete jungle’ was a literary term—not a literal one. They came to the Village wanting freedom from rules and expectations. But while conventional living requires standards of behavior, it also provides a blanket of security. Those murders hardened hearts and sent a bone cold chill through most of those vagabond children. They suddenly realized how exposed they were, and they wanted that blanket back. Within a few weeks, most of the runaways gave up on their bohemian playtime and returned to their homes. The drifters drifted, and attitudes changed. The Groovy Murders were the beginning of the end of an era . . .”

As Madame’s voice trailed off, I couldn’t help thinking of ubuntu again, how human beings should treat one another.

“The hippie ideals weren’t wrong,” I pointed out.

“No—but it takes work to make a vision come true. You can’t simply wish things into being.” Madame squeezed my hand. “This phone app culture with its swipe-to-meet ethos, I must admit, is seductive, too. There’s someone out there who’s perfect for you. Someone who will finally complete you, make you happy. You simply have to keep swiping, keep shopping. With all this new technology, and all the potential matches out there, it’s easy to believe . . .” Her eyes shined with amusement. “Even I wanted to believe it of my Silver Snake. But it’s a fad, that’s all. In time, it will float down the river, like all the others.”

“I don’t know. This phone culture is so pervasive. I can’t see how this genie goes back in the bottle.”

“I’m not saying people will stop swiping, my dear. Our modern culture rewards novelty—and, unfortunately, disposability. But as young people age, most of them will grow bored with games. That’s when they’ll stop shopping and start working on real relationships. Sooner or later they’ll understand that shared experiences over time are what create true intimacy and steadfast love.”

The waiter brought the check unasked—a signal that the restaurant would soon be closing. Madame sat back in her chair and drained yet another cocktail glass.

“Perhaps the incident at our coffeehouse tonight will alert a few young people—girls and boys—of the risk they take in too hastily trusting complete strangers. And that’s a start.”

I wished I shared Madame’s optimism, but I didn’t see how one bad date gone viral would change the way millions of people behaved on a daily basis.

On top of that, I couldn’t get the grisly image of poor murdered Linda out of my head. Even now I could almost see her body, lying on the dirty floor of a dingy boiler room, head crushed.

The vision was so strong, I thought for a moment I actually saw a dead woman floating in the rippling waters of the Hudson River.

I sat up in my chair.

My God. I’m not imagining it.

There really was something in the water. Or someone . . .