Punk Avenue: Inside the New York City Underground, 1972-1982

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU

Phoenix, November 1972

FOR MY EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY, I WAS transferred from the juvenile detention center in Phoenix, Arizona, to the federal penitentiary in Florence, Arizona.

In the car, handcuffs on my wrists, I asked the cop behind the wheel how long I was going to have to stay in that jail.

That’s gonna be for the judge to tell you, kid, but you can bet your ass it’ll be at least five years, he said, laughing.

Five years in jail. It was with that in mind that I walked into the prison’s main building, where I was told to strip before being searched butt naked, then sprayed from head to toe with lice killer. Pointing out that I didn’t have lice didn’t turn out to be such a good idea.

From now on you only speak when a guard asks you something, that fat sweaty pig told me before spraying me right in the face with his fucking powder.

From now on your name is 419031 and you better remember it if you’re called, said the other creep at the counter where I got my uniform: jeans, a pair of white socks, white underwear, white sneakers, and a gray T-shirt with my new name, 419031, printed across the back.

Then, escorted by two armed guards, I had to walk down this long corridor in front of all the cells where my new neighbors, most of them heavily tattooed Mexican murderers, were held. I only got a few steps down that hellish hallway before they all started screaming, "She’s mine! Hey, bitch, you my new whore?" and other such warm greetings.

Though I’d turned eighteen that very day, I looked more like fifteen. I wasn’t shaving yet, had hair down to the middle of my back, and my face was covered with white lice-killer powder. They liked me.

I’m dead meat, I told myself, trying to keep my fear from showing too much. Fortunately, I got locked up some distance from those friendly fellows, in a large dormitory with about thirty losers who weren’t quite as dangerous. That’s where they kept guys who hadn’t been sentenced yet, which meant they were all on their best behavior, hoping to improve their fates.

The non-sentenced block. Thank God!

As soon as the huge automatic metal door shut behind me, I heard a familiar voice call me by my old name:

Philippe?

It was Bruce, my traveling companion. We’d been busted together a week earlier.

Bruce! It’s so great to see you, I shouted out, at the last second holding myself back from taking him into my arms. Maybe this wasn’t quite the right time. …

I had met Bruce eight months earlier in Holland, where I was hanging out instead of attending my drawing classes at the Academie Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where I grew up.

Bruce, an American of Italian descent, always wore white shirts with the collar buttoned up all neat. He was six years older than me, had very long hair, and had already graduated from Boston University where—thanks to his grades, popularity, and unbeatable stamina—he’d been elected Student Body President, a title usually reserved for future prominent lawyers, judges, or presidents of the United States.

He had just finished crossing Europe on a motorcycle with a head full of dreams and a back pocket full of acid, when I met him, under the pouring rain, on the steps of the Paradiso in Amsterdam. He turned me onto one of his little pills, some Orange Sunshine, and we spent the following weeks watching raindrops exploding into rainbows on the pavement of the old port, listening to After the Gold Rush. Bruce lived with a Dutch girl named Marion, though he spent most of his time fucking a German girl named Astrid.

He came back to Paris with me. I put him up in my room where we spent most of our evenings smoking hash, listening to records, dreaming of adventures, and eating the hundreds of strawberries and cherries that we stole, by the crate-load, from the sidewalks in front of the neighborhood grocery stores at five in the morning, stoned out of our minds.

You could never be bored with Bruce. He was completely unpredictable.

One day, for example, we were peacefully walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse when he suddenly walked into a beauty parlor, snatched a blond wig from the head of a mannequin in the window, and came right back out laughing his ass off and with the huge barber chasing after him. Fortunately, we were faster than he was, and he gave up on us after a few blocks, completely out of breath. The wig ended up on a skull we stole from the catacombs at Denfert-Rochereau.

We were tripping on acid almost every night in Paris—like the time we went to see T. Rex and ended up in the meatpacking district at Les Halles at 5 a.m. With our getups, we were not well received. It started with one over-excited butcher throwing a piece of meat at the back of my head and it got worse from there. We had to run like hell as about fifty of them started bombarding us with chunks of meat. It was flying in all directions and was terrifying—especially on acid. Suddenly escaped from that hell, we decided to step into Notre Dame. It was still early in the morning and the cathedral was completely empty. Bruce must have thought he was the Pope, because he decided to go sit in the huge throne on the main center stage. This must have been strictly forbidden, as we were run out of there too—this time by an old priest, mad as hell. But at least he wasn’t throwing chunks of meat at us.

In July, Bruce decided to go back to the States, and he invited me to come along. He arranged it so that his dad took me on as a student au pair, meaning I could get a visa. My parents, always cool, paid for the plane ticket to make me happy, although they probably weren’t thrilled with the idea of their seventeen-year-old son leaving for the States with some hippie freak, without even having graduated from college.

I’d never been on a plane before, so that alone was exciting.

Of course, once in Boston, we didn’t stay at Bruce’s dad’s for more than five minutes. Instead, we bought a badly beat-up Ford Econoline van from a Hare Krishna for a hundred bucks. We equipped it with an eight-track tape deck in the front and a huge mattress in the back, and we hit the road, the big one: Route 66. We were beside ourselves to be starting our grand adventure, our epic journey, our Easy Rider by van.

I couldn’t believe it. California, here I come!

First we went up north, to Maine then New Hampshire, passing by the mountains of Franconia where Bruce had a splendid idea.

We could climb up a mountain while smoking joints and watch the sun go down once we get to the top.

Why not?

After an hour or so of relatively easy climbing, it suddenly became much harder. We’d already gotten quite a ways up when we found ourselves at the foot of this huge cliff. We should have stopped there, but after smoking another joint, we decided to keep going. We figured once we made it to top of the cliff, we’d be on top of the mountain (super cool), and once up there we’d be able to find an easier way back down. Yeah, right.

I went first. Grasping the cracks of a near-vertical rock wall, we slowly made our way up. We must have been about halfway up the cliff when suddenly it all went wrong. A few feet below me, Bruce was starting to panic. He was drenched in sweat and shaking like a leaf.

Holy shit, I’m gonna let go. I can’t go up or down, I’m losing my grip. Below him, the big void. … It was terrifying.

Just above me, I saw a little niche in the rock, and I climbed in and sat, trying to figure out the best way to get back down to help him. I was starting to sweat now, too. I was wearing sneakers, the rock was wet, and my hands were damp, and the indentation where I was perched was slanted. Slowly I was sliding toward the edge of the cliff. I was trying to hold on to the rock but it wasn’t working—there was nothing I could do. As my shoes slipped over the edge of the cliff, I remember saying in a trembling voice:

Shit! Bruce, I’m sliding, what should I do?

Sticking out of the rock a few feet to my right were thick tree roots, and in a last desperate effort I jumped toward them, grasping for something solid to hold on to.

I missed by only a couple of inches and plunged into the void.

In the end, Bruce was able to make his way back down without my help. When I woke up, he was kneeling in front of me, crying from joy because I wasn’t dead. I’d fucked myself up pretty badly, though, with a cracked jaw, the skin on my knee and my hip ripped to the bone, and holes just about everywhere in my body. After landing on rocks then trees then rocks again, I had fallen over a hundred feet—the equivalent of eight stories. I sat up, my face covered in blood, and told Bruce in French:

Don’t cry, try to sleep, before promptly passing out again. Seeing that my back wasn’t broken, he lifted me onto his shoulders and carried me down to our van. It took several hours and it was nighttime when we finally got there, completely unaware that forty-five forest rangers were searching the woods for us, because someone far away had seen me fall and called for help. I was bleeding pretty badly and was still unconscious. Bruce had been ripping up his shirt to make tourniquets, and when we stopped at the first restaurant on the road, he was wearing only his collar, perfectly buttoned up as always. Somebody called an ambulance while a girl claiming to be a nurse came to the van to see what she could do. Unfortunately, she passed out too.

When I woke up at the hospital the next day, I couldn’t remember a thing. We stuck around for a few days while I convalesced and then we hit the road again. In our van, the Stones cranked up all the way, me with bandages everywhere and smoking joints between the metal wires holding my teeth together, we laughed our asses off ’cause we’d taken off without paying.

We got back on our way to California, going south this time: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York. New York! Wow! We came down through Harlem at night. It had just rained and the sidewalks glowed under the streetlights. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. Everything was broken: shattered glass everywhere, turned-over trash cans, skeletons of abandoned cars, and especially graffiti—tons of it, covering more graffiti, which covered even more of it. As we passed in front of the buildings, we could see it was the same story inside. This graffiti was made up of tags, signatures and logos from each kid trying to identify himself in this urban wasteland. Each tag systematically indicated the name and street number of the artist—never anything else. It wasn’t Joe loves Mary, or Free our nation, it was Dog 132, Killer 156, Apache 149. There were also initials to mark each gang’s territory, such as DTKLAMF, which meant Down to Kill Like a Mother Fucker.

It was very hot. Everybody was on the street, standing in groups on and around each stoop. They wore white tank tops with tennis shoes or tight Bermuda shorts with white socks pulled up knee high, under which you could make out their packs of Kool Menthol cigarettes. Most of the women were enormous, their hair in huge Afros with white plastic combs stuck into them. Most guys wore do-rags, women’s stockings they wore on their heads to flatten down their hair. Amazing!

From inside the van, I felt like everyone was looking me right in the eyes. I discreetly locked the door. …

We stopped near Columbus Circle, where a friend of Bruce’s put us up for the night. When we came out the next morning, we found that our van had been vandalized. A window was broken and, worst of all, our cassette player had been stolen. Welcome to New York. Now get the fuck outta here!

We continued our journey: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, where we made a quick stop in Ann Arbor, home of Iggy Pop and the Stooges and the fabulous MC5. I knew a girl in Ann Arbor: Susie Kaminsky. I’d met her the year before on the banks of the Seine, serving as her guide/French kisser during her week in Paris. She had written me from the States, and I still had her address.

Susie looked like a Robert Crumb drawing. She was as nice as one could possibly be, and I wasn’t surprised that she welcomed us like kings, even when we arrived on her doorstep without any warning. Immediately she took me into her arms shouting, Phiillllliiiiipppe!!

We spent the next few days at Susie’s place. She and six roommates shared one of those gorgeous, classical, two-story wooden houses typical of suburban Michigan, with a large fireplace and a porch facing the street. There was a huge American flag hanging on the living room wall and posters everywhere: Angela Davis, Lennon, Lenin, Karl Marx, the Marx Brothers. … Susie would change my bandages as her freak brothers—radical students from the town—rolled hash-oil joints while educating me on Mao, Nixon, Vietnam, and others.

After giving Susie a big kiss we got back on the road. We went west a little: Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma—where we bought a new cassette player, completely sick of the radio—New Mexico, Arizona. While the scenery was becoming spectacular, the van was becoming something of a tea parlor on wheels. We transported dozens of hitchhikers, who paid us in gas, sandwiches, or pot. Once, an adorable little hippie girl was even glad to make love to me, bandaged as I was, while we were rolling down the highway. What a feeling, fucking while passing other cars.

Almost every night we found drive-ins on the side of the road. I had never been to a drive-in before, and it was fabulous to watch old horror movies under the stars. We would park the van backwards, open the back doors, and watch the movie lying down on the huge mattress that filled the back of our van. Smoking joints all the while. Since our budget was limited, we usually snuck through the back once the movie had already begun. We only got caught once.

To keep the van running, we siphoned gas from other cars, squatting on all fours behind some parked car at four in the morning, sucking on a plastic tube to get the gas to come up. We’d stick it in our tank as soon as it started flowing. I did swallow a few gulps of gasoline, which I didn’t really mind except one time when I got too much of a mouthful, and I started puking all over the van a few minutes later.

We often ate at Howard Johnson’s. Their billboards advertised All You Can Eat Chicken—thinking, of course, that no one would eat more than two or three servings. Naturally, we went in equipped with a plastic bag, and after finishing our first serving, we would start to discreetly slip everything straight into the bag and then order more. We would leave with about a month’s worth of chicken for the price of one serving. One time, after five or six free servings, the bemused waitress asked: You eat the bones too?

We stopped at the Hog Farm, in New Mexico—a hippie commune notorious for having succeeded in getting an actual pig on the ballot for the national presidential election. We took mushrooms, psilocybin, ate peyote in the Arizona desert while gazing up at the Milky Way. We were as free as the wind in the desert night, and really getting our kicks.

At each stop, there always seemed to be at least one girl wearing plastic pearl necklaces and a whole bunch of scarves around her neck, ready to welcome us, to roll us joints, make us dinner, and …

The pill already existed but AIDS didn’t yet. American girls were liberating themselves, and I was happy to help.

A young Native American girl from a reservation in New Mexico gave us a few dried-up plants. She told us it was Datura stramonium, also called Jimson weed, promising us a fantastic trip, a mystical experience.

A few days later, in a motel in Flagstaff, we made ourselves tea with the funny-looking spiked plant. The smell was unbearable. After drinking this disgusting elixir, our mouths were kind of dry, but that was it, and after about an hour without anything happening at all, we concluded these plants had no effect whatsoever.

Somebody knocked on the door. It was a girl in a white dress with completely white skin and hair too. An albino, but with piercing blue eyes. She was strange and beautiful and was holding a white rabbit. She stepped into the room and sat on my bed.

Meanwhile, Bruce really had to pee, but he claimed there was another girl, a black one this time, in the bathroom. I