Chapter 8 - Identity Crisis: Were we hippies, beatniks, flower children, or just Lenny Bruce wannabes?

According to Boy: In 1966, anticipating my move to Greenwich Village, I subscribed to The Village Voice, the avant-garde literary organ of the day. It was in the pages of The Voice that I formulated my first views of what I could look forward to. I loved every page of the tabloid.
The Voice was first published in 1955 by an unholy threesome consisting of Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer. Not only did The Voice win three Pulitzer Prizes, it published articles by some of the day’s most prominent writers. These included Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Barbara Garson, Katherine Anne Porter, M.S. Cone, staff writer and author James Baldwin, E.E. Cummings, Nat Hentoff, Ted Hoagland, Tom Stoppard, Lorraine Hansberry, Ron Rosenbaum, Paul Levinson, Jerry Tallmer, Allen Ginsberg, Lester Bangs, Murray Kempton, I.F. Stone, Pete Hamill, Roger Wilkins and Joshua Clover, among others.

The picture painted of the Village at that time was of a bohemian sub-culture in transition. Of course, the theater was the theater—it was what it was. But the Village was changing from the beatnik era to the hippie era; from Lenny Bruce to Bob Dylan. My problem was I did not know where I was going to fit in.

Before I even arrived in the Village, Lenny Bruce died. I had looked forward to seeing him perform, but heroin took him down before I had the opportunity.

Early on, upon first subscribing to The Voice, I thought that the whole Village was beat. That was the logical conclusion to reach, as every aspect of The Voice smacked of that mindset. Most of the articles were beat. Norman Mailer was, in my view, the consummate beatnik. Almost all of the photography and art in The Voice was highly contrasted black and white. If there was a picture of an artist, most often half of the face would be solid black, and the rest solid white.

When I finally arrived in the Village in 1968, I found it to be quite different from what I expected. There were, of course, numerous beatnik artists and musicians. But there was also another group. The members of the new one wore bright clothes—mostly tie-dyed. Like the beatniks, they sported long hair; but they liked beads and bells, and often wore flowers. Beatniks never wore flowers—I think it violated their code.

The shops in the Village often were run by beatniks, or pseudo-beatniks. They (the latter) took the look for marketing reasons. It was, however, common to find a beat artist selling his wares in some of the little shops. They were pretty easy to spot—they looked like they had just walked off a page of a 1966 Village Voice, and they always had an attitude. Also, they generally looked older than their years. I guess a constant frown (and too much heroin) ages a person.

The question I had to ask myself: "With which group was I to identify?"

I had moved to the Village wanting to be beat. But it quickly became apparent to me that the beat culture was dying out. It did not seem like a promising prospect to join that group.

So I took a long hard look at the hippies. I felt like I might fit in there. All the good little clubs, such as "The Bitter End," "The Back Fence," and "The Village Gate," were not beat. They still featured folk music, but not beat folk music. Allen Ginsberg was a bit of a transitional figure, but Bob Dylan did not in any way fit the mold of the beat generation. In no stretch of the imagination had Bob Dylan resigned himself to passivity. He was a mover and shaker. It was, after all, the era of the Vietnam War, and Martin Luther King Jr. It was an era of activism, not resignation.

"So, was I to become hippie?" I asked myself.

I liked the clothes, and the music, but I was not really interested in protest, or drugs.

Soon, the San Francisco influence began to kick in. That was the notion that love, peace and flowers would rule the day. I also liked their clothes, and started wearing the tie-dyes and ruffles. But not everything, in my eyes, was "groovy." Besides, that whole movement was heavily influenced by men such as Timothy Leary, and his drug of choice—acid.

Neither Evie nor I engaged in drug usage. True, we drank too much cheap wine. But we did not smoke Mary Jane, or drop acid. The highest we ever got was from smelling the fumes of the cheap paint our landlady gave us to paint apartments.

We were definitely challenged, tugged from all directions. There were attractive aspects associated with all the countercultures. However, none pulled hard enough on us to entirely win us over.

By 1970 we had made up our mind to simply do our own thing. We would dress up on a Friday night and go out to one of the best restaurants in New York. On Saturday, we would become hippies and wander the streets of the Village. On Saturday night we would burn incense and make love all night long on our water bed.

Then, on Monday morning, I would put on my Brooks Brothers suit, and trot off to work in the Diamond District; while Evie would dress up in her "conservative" mini-skirt, and report for work at the bank.

While we did assume several different personas in New York, we were not suffering an identity crisis. We knew all the time exactly who we were, and were each comfortable in our skin.