There was, of course, more to our lives than the folk scene. There is no way I can cover it all, but to broaden the palette a little I append the following vignette.
It was the summer of 1958. Big Judy was off to Provincetown for a few weeks, and her one-room apartment would be standing empty. Good Samaritan that I was, I offered to move in, keep an eye on things, and fend off the burglars. (We knew from burglars; some of them were our friends.) The place was on 12th Street between avenues A and B, in what rent-gouging real estate agents would soon rechristen the East Village, but was then still known as the East Side, except to some old-timers who called it “Mackerelville,” from the French maquereau, meaning pimp. I happily ensconced myself and settled into a routine of uproarious nights at Stanley’s bar down the block and days spent idling in Tompkins Square Park or watching the locals practice their quaint native crafts: there was a chop shop right out on the street in front of my building, where stolen cars were disassembled to be sold off pushcarts. Pigeon rustling was also pretty popular.
Then, early one fine day, as I was sleeping off Stanley’s rotgut, there came an insistent pounding at the door. “Nobody but a cop could do this to me at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning,” I thought. There was nothing for it, though, so fearfully I lurched to the door. “Who is it?” I croaked.
Two names, unfamiliar, but at least they didn’t sound like cops: “Judy sent us.”
“Oh, in that case . . .”
I opened the door, and there before my wondering eyes stood two citizens whose outfits would have raised a double take in the most depraved boho saloon in the Village, or even in a frat house. Specimen A was wearing women’s pedal pushers that were so tight I wondered how he had squeezed himself into them, and filled out the ensemble with a middy blouse, short enough to expose his bare midriff, and bare feet. Specimen B wore a terry-cloth bathrobe, period. “This better be good,” I muttered, whilst fumbling through the routine of building a pot of coffee.
Fortified with their first cups, they launched into the following saga. Like Herodotus, the Father of History, I set it down without comment:
They were characters of a type that has been with us since Caesar was a pup: army hustlers. Until a few months back they had been stationed in Tokyo and Seoul, respectively, and had been running some kind of currency scam involving fluctuating exchange rates between the Japanese yen and the Korean won. I did not understand the details, but I believed them when they told me it was “beautiful.” However the grift worked, it had made them a pile, and as soon as they mustered out, they began casting about for some kind of swindle that would parlay their nest egg into a real fortune.
Now, as it happened, at just about this time the powers and principalities of Japan had decided to demonstrate to the world how progressive they were by prohibiting the manufacture and sale of “green ruin”—absinthe. In the interval between enactment and enforcement, it was possible to buy a warehouse full of the stuff at fire-sale prices, which is what our future tycoons had proceeded to do. They loaded this cargo aboard a Filipino rust bucket, booking passage for themselves on the same ship.
The voyage back to the Land of Opportunity (“where the real money is,” as they put it) was a hairy one. Somewhere in mid-Pacific they ran into a storm, and fearing for the merchandise, which was none too securely stowed, they raced down to the hold, where they spent the better part of two days running back and forth, propping up mountainous stacks of crates with their bare hands while the ship pitched and heaved. To make things merrier, they were seasick the whole time, but they lost only a few cases. What prodigies of fraud and effrontery got them and their cargo of liquid vice past customs in San Francisco I never found out, but somehow they pulled it off and stashed the stuff in a loft somewhere near the Embarcadero.
Personally, I could not imagine a better place than San Fran to unload a cargo of absinthe. The natives there so pride themselves on their worldliness that they would probably drink it even if they hated it. But our heroes decided, inscrutably, that “Cape Cod is where the real money is.” They acquired a used pickup truck, loaded it to the gunwales with samples, and headed east.
The cross-country trip was blessedly uneventful, and once they hit Provincetown, they made the rounds of the tourist bars. Unobtrusively, they buttonholed the saloon keepers, offering them cases and cases of very illegal booze at very reasonable prices. No takers. Universally, the response was “Look—you know what the stuff is, and I know what the stuff is, but nobody else has ever heard of it. Who am I going to sell it to?” Concerned but not yet panicking, they repaired to yet another bar to take council and a few slugs of government-approved solace—which is where Big Judy came in. They got to talking with her, and upon hearing their sad tale, she suggested they try their luck in New York. Helpful soul that she was, she even gave them her address, told them I was staying there, and said I might know someone who would be interested in their wares.
“Right,” they said. “The Big A. Plenty of action. Everybody knows that’s where the real money is.”
After a few more convivial glasses, they hopped into their pickup, which was still piled high with contraband, and took off for 12th Street. They were somewhere on Route 6, outside of Wellfleet, when disaster struck. Two big black cars forced them off the road and four thugs with guns waved them out of the truck. Efficiently they were stripped to the buff and trussed up like Christmas turkeys. The four gunmen then drove off, taking the truck and its cargo with them.
Our heroes felt that this treatment added an unnecessary complement of insult to the injury: “They didn’t have to tie us up and take our clothes. I mean, what were we going to do—go to the cops and say, ‘Some meanies stole our absinthe?’” I explained that these procedures are time-honored, and that hijackers, like any other artists, set high store by tradition. They were not mollified.
It had taken them an hour or so to get un-hog-tied, and then there was the matter of clothes. These were the days before the ubiquitous washer-dryer, so there was always the clothesline option; but apparently it was not wash day on Cape Cod, and the pickings were very slim indeed. The threads in which they stood before me were the very best they could do.
“But how did you get here?” I asked.
“We hitched.”
“You hitched in those outfits?”
“It was easy. We certainly didn’t look like muggers.”
No doubt about that. “But what did you tell the people who picked you up?”
“We said we were Shriners on our way to a convention and had dressed this way on a bet. They loved us.” I had to admit it, these guys were good.
I had no trouble figuring out who Judy had in mind when she said I might know a prospective buyer for their goods. An acquaintance of ours, a low-level associate of George Lefty’s (reputedly the local capo for one of the Five Families), held court at Stanley’s most nights. A word in his ear, and who knew? As a general rule, I tried to avoid getting mixed up in this kind of convoluted skullduggery, but ever since I was a teenager, I had been reading about Lautrec and absinthe, Modigliani and absinthe, Swinburne and absinthe—naturally I was dying to find out about Van Ronk and absinthe. Also, there was the sheer joy of conspiracy for its own sake. What can I say? I have always been a hopeless romantic.
I told them I might be able to set up a meet with some wiseguys I knew. They were ecstatic. “Oh boy! The mob—that’s where the real money is!” One might have thought they had already had one too many meetings with such types, but the boys were so happy that I kept my counsel. It would take a week or two for them to get more “samples” sent from the Coast, and in the meantime I would see what I could do. I lent them some of my clothes, and they went blissfully on their way.
The sit-down was easily arranged: “No harm in talking,” the guy said. “Bring them around.” A couple of days later, I brought them around to Stanley’s, made the necessary introductions, and having performed my good offices as honest broker, discreetly took my leave. For services rendered, I received five bottles of the stuff.
So, what was it like? It is simple to describe: If you subtract the wormwood from absinthe, you get Pernod. It is licorice flavored, sweet, the wormwood gives it a pleasantly bitter undertaste—a bit like quinine—and it is green in color, turning opalescent on contact with water or ice. I drank a couple of glasses, and found that it gave a strangely lucid high. I liked it a lot, though it delivered a hellish hangover. So, that was what all the fuss was about.
The next day my two smugglers dropped by Judy’s place, and over glasses of guess what, I got the discouraging word: my guy had bought a few cases for himself and his friends, but basically his position was, “Look—you know what it is and I know what it is, but nobody else ever heard of the stuff. Who are we going to sell it to?”
“Gee,” I said, “the Mafia sure is hard on honest crooks.”
By way of consolation, I took five more bottles off their hands. Hell, they were selling it cheaper than Irish whiskey. For the next few weeks, the nabe was awash in absinthe. Everybody I knew must have picked up a few jugs. Then it was gone. My dynamic duo had shifted their operation to the Village, I heard. I suppose that was where the real money was.
A couple of months later I shifted my own operation back to the Village. I got hold of a sixth-floor walk-up on MacDougal Street, and took to spending my evenings in the Kettle of Fish, which was right downstairs, and my afternoons down the block at the Figaro.
One fall afternoon I was sitting over coffee at the Figaro when a glassy-eyed derelict who looked vaguely familiar hove into view. It was Specimen A, looking like an advance man for the bubonic plague. He was going from table to table, whispering a few urgent words to whoever was seated there, receiving an emphatic negative, and moving on. Al, the day manager, watched this action briefly and balefully before he swooped. He grabbed the guy by the collar and gave him the bum’s rush right out the door, but not before I overheard the whispered pitch to the tourist at the next table: “Would you like to buy a bottle of absinthe for a dollar?” When we had finished admiring Al’s technique, the rubberneck turned to me and said, “What’s absinthe?”
It must have been about ten years down the line that I happened to be doing a gig in Provincetown, and a publican in Wellfleet invited Paul Geremia (the world’s best blues guitarist and singer) and me to a high-class bash at his Victorian Gothic “cottage.” Paul and I were sitting there jamming, when our host approached us with two glasses of a familiar-looking opalescent fluid. I thought “Wellfleet! Absinthe! Ah-hah!” It was, as Yogi Berra would say, “Déjà vu all over again.”
“I’ll bet you guys’ll never guess what this is,” our host said, as he handed me a glass.
I took a sip, ostentatiously rolled it around my tongue and replied, “It tastes very much like Japanese absinthe.”
“Jesus, how could you tell?”
I arched my eyebrows in my very best William F. Buckley imitation. “To the truly sophisticated palate,” I intoned, “there are no mysteries.”