Evoking Christmas in a radical era December 10, 1985

 

 

I took a trip to Manhattan yesterday, ostensively to deliver my underground newspaper, although since I heard about the Rockefeller tree lighting, I figured to take a gander.

What a huge part of Christmas lighting has become to me, having become a tradition simply by repetition from when my mother and her best friend, Selma, brought me there when I was very young – mostly still being carried rather than attempting the feat of walking along the crowed sidewalks.

I remember confronting The Empire State Building on 34th Street on that trip, staring up at what seemed like an endless building which didn’t even stop at the sky, a brick edifice that rose higher and higher into the gray wintery gloom – not quite the Tower of Babble, but close.

Not long after that in the midst of my mother’s madness we journeyed back to Manhattan to 42nd Street for the express purpose of seeing “West Side Story” on a special curved screen – an important element missing from the showing at The Fabian in Paterson which we could have gone to without the expense of the bus ride or the craziness of the Times Square crowds.

After that I didn’t go back to New York until my best friend, Hank, dragged me there in his pursuit of the hippie life, a gap of a decade during which New York became mysterious again. Hank held me spellbound with hippie lore and talk of free love (we always on the hunt for girls and ultimately sex), singing old folk songs as we strolled the sidewalks, Hank already out of school so he became my magical tour guide to the summer of love, both of us unaware that the hip life we sought was already dying.

Hank, a friend of the likes of Abbie Hoffman and other radicals, assumed that society had changed so fundamentally we could invest our futures in that culture, we living too close to it all to realize the clues of its demise were already obvious.

Love beads, sandals, Nehru jackets and bell bottom jeans gave way to cowboy boots, fringed coats, and bomb-making. Peace and love were replaced by “fuck the man!”

The old traditions of Christmas shopping, Christmas Trees, Christmas carols and classic Christmas movies survived the onslaught of a radical agenda, because they were rooted in something more fundamental in our live, a hope for a better world and a society that was more than radical propaganda.

Moving into the East Village was a disappointment because the hippies had turned into junkies and their bodies littered the street wherever we walked. Even Hank got discouraged and later moved back to New Jersey – celebrating his last Christmas with me before he did.

New York had become too dangerous to live in, forcing me to move as well, though later, like yesterday, I made my ritual trip back clinging to the holiday spirit such trips engender.

Lately, Hank has tried to revive our hippie traditions, dragging me to Manhattan to see Arlo Guthrie perform and then Donovan. We even evoked our own routine, singing Christmas carols instead of folk and protest songs as we walked through the streets – although Hank refrained from trying to seduce young Hari Krishna girls the way he once tried when we went to see the Thanksgiving Parade in 1968.

For a few years, I went to New York with my then-girlfriend, Fran, downtown to Mexican restaurants, uptown to see revival films. Those faded into memory when we broke up.

I even evoked the traditional bus ride to New York yesterday, but only because my car – as usual – is laid up in the shop for repair, carrying bundles of my newspaper in sacks. New York is a stark place when traveling there alone without purpose, no toilet to use (unless you’re a customer) and no benches to sit down on for dozens of blocks at a time. Even my visit to WBAI wasn’t comfortable, as their staff wandered in and out barely noticing me as I stuffed a copy of my paper into each staff member’s mailbox, all of the staff looking like the hippies of old, yet not quite, none of them – with their perpetual radical rhetoric doing anything to evoke the Christmas spirit.

 

1985 Menu


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