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Chapter 5: River of Ice
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"How much did that guitar cost?" she asked me once.
"Not much."
"I know, not much, but still something."
"Almost nothing," I said.
She glared at me, cigarette in her mouth. She was always trying to goad me into some kind of argument. My presence was so displeasing to her, but it's not like I'd caused any trouble in her life. It wasn't me who was responsible for the loss of Suze's father or anything. Once I said to her that I didn't think she was being fair. She stared squarely into my eyes like she was staring at some distant, visible object and said to me, "Do me a favor, don't think when I'm around." Suze would tell me later that she didn't mean it. She did mean it, though. She did everything in her power to keep us apart, but we went on seeing each other anyway.
This stifling scene was becoming problematic, signaling to me that I needed to get my own place, one with my own bed, stove and tables. It was about time. I guess it could have happened earlier, but I liked staying with others. It was less of a hassle, easier, with little responsibility-places where I could freely come and go, sometimes even with a key, rooms with plenty of hardback books on shelves and stacks of phonograph records. When I wasn't doing anything else, I'd thumb through the books and listen to records.
Not having a place of my own now was beginning to affect my supersensitive nature, so after being in town close to a year, I rented a third floor walk-up apartment at 161 West 4th Street at sixty dollars a month. It wasn't much, just two rooms above Bruno's spaghetti parlor, next door to the local record store and a furniture supply shop on the other side. The apartment had a tiny bedroom, more like a large closet, and a kitchenette, a living room with a fireplace and two windows that looked out over fire escapes and small courtyards. There was barely room enough for one person and the heat went off after dark and the place had to be heated by keeping both gas burners up full blast. It came empty. Quickly after moving in I built some furniture for the place. With some borrowed tools, I made a couple of tables, one which doubled as a desk. I also put together a cabinet and a bed frame. All the wood pieces had come from the store downstairs, and I fastened everything together with the accompanying hardware-galvanized nails, knockers and hinge plates, 3/8-inch square pieces of wrought iron, brass and copper, roundheaded wood screws. I didn't have to go far to get that stuff, it was all downstairs. I put it all together with hacksaws, cold chisels and screwdrivers-even made a couple of mirrors using an old technique I learned in a high school shop woodworking class using plates of glass, mercury and tin foil.
Besides playing music, I liked doing those kinds of things. I purchased a used TV, stuck it on top of one of the cabinets, bought a mattress and got a rug that I spread across the hardwood floor. I got a record player at Woolworth's and put it on one of the tables. The small room seemed immaculate to me and I felt that for the first time I had a place of my own.
Suze and I were spending more and more time together, and I began to broaden my horizons, see a lot of what her world was like, especially the Off-Broadway scene . . . a lot of LeRoi Jones's stuff, Dutchman, The Baptism. I also saw Gelber's junkie play, The Connection, the Living Theater's The Brig, and other remarkable plays. I went with her to where the artists and painters hung out, like Caffe Cino, Camino Gallery, Aegis Gallery. We went to see Comedia Del'Arte, a storefront on the Lower East Side that was built into a small theater with enormous puppets as big as people that jiggled and swung. I saw a couple of plays, one where a soldier, a prostitute, a judge and a lawyer were all the same puppet. The puppets, because of their size and the small, confining space, were odd, unsettling and confronting . . . nothing like the funny wooden dummy, the tuxedoed Charlie McCarthy, the Edgar Bergen puppet who we all knew and loved so well.
A new world of art was opening up my mind. Sometimes early in the day we'd go uptown to the city museums, see giant oil-painted canvases by artists like Velázquez, Goya, Delacroix, Rubens, El Greco. Also twentieth-century stuff-Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Rouault, Bonnard. Suze's favorite current modernist artist was Red Grooms, and he became mine, too. I loved the way everything he did crushed itself into some fragile world, the rickety clusters of parts all packed together and then, standing back, you could see the complex whole of it all. Grooms's stuff spoke volumes to me. He was the artist I checked out most. Red's stuff was extravagant, his work cut like it was done by acid. All of his mediums-crayon, watercolor, gouache, sculpture or mixed media-collage tableaus-I liked the way he put the stuff together. It was bold, announced its presence in glaring details. There was a connection in Red's work to a lot of the folk songs I sang. It seemed to be on the same stage. What the folk songs were lyrically, Red's songs were visually-all the bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys-all the carnie vitality. Red was the Uncle Dave Macon of the art world. He incorporated every living thing into something and made it scream-everything side by side created equal-old tennis shoes, vending machines, alligators that crawled through sewers, dueling pistols, the Staten Island Ferry and Trinity Church, 42nd Street, profiles of skyscrapers. Brahman bulls, cowgirls, rodeo queens and Mickey Mouse heads, castle turrets and Mrs. O'Leary's cow, creeps and greasers and weirdos and grinning, bejeweled nude models, faces with melancholy looks, blurs of sorrow-everything hilarious but not jokey. Familiar figures from history, too-Lincoln, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rembrandt-all done with graphic finesse, burned out as powerful as possible. I loved the way Grooms used laughter as a diabolical weapon. Subconsciously, I was wondering if it was possible to write songs like that.
About that time I began to make some of my own drawings. I actually picked up the habit from Suze, who drew a lot. What would I draw? Well, I guess I would start with whatever was at hand. I sat at the table, took out a pencil and paper and drew the typewriter, a crucifix, a rose, pencils and knives and pins, empty cigarette boxes. I'd lose track of time completely. An hour or two could go by and it would seem like only a minute. Not that I thought that I was any great drawer, but I did feel like I was putting an orderliness to the chaos around-something like Red did, but he did it on a much grander level. In a strange way I noticed that it purified the experience of my eye and I would make drawings of my own for years to come.
This was the same table that I'd sit at and compose songs. Not quite yet, though. You have to take the lead from somewhere, and there were only a few performers around who wrote songs and of them, my favorite was Len Chandler. But I just thought that was his own personal thing and it wasn't enough to inspire me to do it myself. As far as I was concerned, Woody Guthrie had written the greatest songs and there was no way to top that. Eventually, though, while not trying to reweave the world, I did compose a slightly ironic song called "Let Me Die in My Footsteps." I based it on an old Roy Acuff ballad.
The song I wrote was inspired by the fallout shelter craze that had blossomed out of the Cold War. I suppose some considered it radical to come up with a song like that, but to me it wasn't radical at all. In Northern Minnesota fallout shelters didn't catch on, had no effect whatsoever on the Iron Range. As far as communists went, there wasn't any paranoia about them. People weren't scared of them, seemed to be a big to-do over nothing. Commies were symbolic of travelers from outer space. Mine
owners were more to be feared, more of an enemy, anyway. Salesmen peddling fallout shelters had been turned away. Stores didn't sell them and nobody built them. Houses had thick-walled basements, anyway. Besides no one liked thinking that someone else might have one and you didn't. Or if you had one and someone else didn't, that might not be too good, either. It could turn neighbor against neighbor and friend against friend. You couldn't imagine having to confront some neighbor banging on your door saying something like, "Hey, look. It's a matter of life and death and our friendship ain't worth a bo diddley. Is that what you're trying to tell me?" How you could respond to a friend who was acting like a tyrant trying to force his way in, saying, "Listen I have young kids. My daughter's only three and my son is two. Before I let you close them out, I'll come to you with a gun. Now, quit the scam." There wasn't any honorable way out. Bomb shelters divided families and could create mutiny. Not that people weren't concerned about the mushroom cloud-they were. But salesmen hawking the bomb shelters were met with expressionless faces.
Besides that, the general opinion was, in case of nuclear attack all you really needed was a surplus Geiger counter. It might become your most prized possession, would tell you what's safe to eat and what's dangerous. Geiger counters were easy to get. In fact, I even had one in my New York apartment, so writing the song about the futility of fallout shelters was not that radical. It's not like I had to conform to any doctrine to do it. The song was personal and social at the same time, though. That was different. Even so, this song didn't break down any barriers for me or perform any miracle. Most everything I wanted to say I could usually find in an old folk song or in one of Woody's songs. When I began performing "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," I didn't even say I wrote it. I just slipped it in somewhere, said it was a Weavers song.
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