On Days Like These

On days like these, with the first hint of fall in the air, I look back at my younger days, closing my eyes for a moment and seeing my 19-year-old self, who thought that he was a cross between Kwai Chang Caine from the TV show Kung Fu and Gnossos Pappadopoulis from the novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña, who died just a few days after his book was published.

I did have a vivid imagination. I would pen poems into a frayed leather-bound journal. I carried a guitar that I would strum for the bridge-and-tunnel girls who would visit the Village looking for adventure or Nirvana. A little friendly chat with the long-haired guitar player and the lyrics for a song would come tumbling out. They liked hearing their names sung to them with a blues riff on the harmonica on the corner of Waverly and 10th Street.

I never learned more than a few chords on the guitar, and although I stayed up nights studying the works of Tony “Little Sun” Glover, the bluesman from Minneapolis, my wailing sounded more like a goat bleating than the sounds of “House of the Rising Sun.” But they didn’t seem to mind.

It was the early ’70s, and I had moved from the safety of the Brittany dorm at NYU to an apartment between Avenues B and C on Eighth Street. Old friends called me Danny, but to the rest of the world I was known as Bird.

It was one o’clock in the morning, and I was coming home from a gig at Ye Olde Tripple Inn at 263 W. 54th Street. There was a chill in the air, and the wind had picked up. I had ended my performance with a song, sung a cappella, that I had written about an elderly gentleman I had befriended in my hometown.

And then there’s Francis X,
he’s a friend of mine.
We shared tall tales,
rotgut whiskey and, when that ran out, some wine.

He sheltered in a graveyard
just outside of town,
and in the winter the cops would roust him
and the jail cell kept him warm.

And then there’s Francis X,
he was a friend of mine.
I’ll miss him in the spring
and mourn him now that he’s gone.

New York in the early ’70s was becoming a hard city. Murder rates were rising, and in one year more than 74,000 robberies were reported. Crime was not an abstraction, especially in neighborhoods like Alphabet City and the Lower East Side. But I was nineteen and carried a guitar and a head full of poems, and the city’s statistics seemed to belong to somebody else.

I lived on the second floor of a three-story walk-up. There was a common toilet in the hallway on each floor and a bathtub in the kitchen with a plywood lid over it that we used as a table. The front door was metal and fitted with a hefty police lock, a steel bar that stretched from the door down to a metal ring embedded in the floor. At night you dropped the bar into place and, at least in theory, whatever was outside stayed outside.

I walked up the stairs past the baby carriages and bicycles in the hallway to my apartment and was surprised to find the door slightly open. I pushed it open and found my roommate William in the bathtub, tied up, with a gag in his mouth.

I untied William and got him out of the tub, then helped him to a chair. After his second shot of tequila, he wiped the tears from his face and told me what had happened.

“It must have been eight o’clock. I had finished classes and stopped off to join a basketball game at Tompkins Square Park. I didn’t realize it, but when I left, a couple of guys followed me back to the apartment.

“I had just closed the door when I heard a knock. I opened it without looking through the peephole, and these two guys pushed me to the ground and tied me up. They ransacked the apartment and filled my duffel bag with whatever they were going to take.

“They took one look in your room and said you didn’t have anything worth stealing, then left, slamming the door behind them.”

I poured William another shot and had one myself. Then I walked over to the door and put the police lock in place.

On days like these, when the summer’s heat has fled and the leaves begin to fall, I often think of my time in the Village. The start of the fall semester. Used textbooks bought at the college bookstore. Mistyped words covered with White-Out and typed over again. Late nights out and the occasional gig.

And Bird, nineteen years old, walking home through New York with a guitar on his back, believing the city’s statistics belonged to somebody else.