The Story About Jimi Hendrix

One day I was cutting school, as usual, so it was early, like 8 or 9am, and I was just hangin' around the corner of MacDougal and Third streets, as usual, rubbing my eyes and wondering what the day would bring, when this tall, lanky black guy walked up to me, wearing a gaucho cowboy hat and carrying a big, expensive guitar case.

So, I guess he must have seen that I was a hippie kid, and that I was just hangin' around, and he came up to me and said, in this really soft voice, "Hey, I wonder if there's any place around here I could play my guitar?" and I looked him up and down, as any true New Yorker would, and, well, I didn't think all that much of him, to tell you the truth, so I kinda brushed him off by saying, "Well, why don't you try the Café Wha, right down the street?" and he said Thanks, and walked off and I just forgot all about him.

Then, a day or so later, I was hanging around by the chess tables in Washington Square Park, near the corner of MacDougal and Fourth streets, when my old friend Sandy N. comes up to me and says, "Man, you have got to see this guy playing guitar over at the Café Wha! He's playing the guitar with his teeth, man!" and I later found out that that guy was playing there with a couple of guys from my other old friend Alan Wauters' band "The Clouds" as his back-up band under the name of "Jimmy James And The Blue Flames."

They all lived in a building on the Lower East Side, at 211 E. 5th St., and, as the very-well-known story goes, eventually Chas Chandler of The Animals heard Jimmy James at the Café Wha and whisked him off to England and turned him into Jimmy Hendrix, but I was the very first person he spoke to when he arrived in the Village, and I was the one who sent him to the Café Wha, and we can only imagine what might have happened if I had sent him somewhere else instead, he might have given up on music altogether, so, the way I figure it, I am the one who is solely responsible for Jimi Hendrix's career! That's right, ME!!

You're welcome!

Years later, Hendrix opened his Electric Ladyland recording studio on W. 8th Street, near 6th Avenue, and we used to walk by it all the time and would sometimes see his white Corvette parked out front, and one day I had just bought a new album by The Kinks, and the album had come with a big, maybe 6" across, sticker that said, "The Kinks," so I stuck it on the rear window of Hendrix's 'Vette. I'll bet that really pissed him off. Tee, hee! Oh, well, that's the price of fame, right?

And that's the story of how I made Jimi Hendrix famous!

The Story About Sara Gedalecia

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http://SaraGedalecia.blogspot.com/

The Story About Josie and Little Bit

So, back in the mid 1960s, maybe '65, '66 or so, I was a teenager, around 15 or so, and we all used to hang out by the newsstand at the corner of MacDougal and W. 3rd streets in the Village. We hung out on the south west corner of the intersection, where, at the time there was a pharmacy that burned down one day, and that storefront later became a corner pizza joint, and a pretty good one, too.

We used to hang out on the MacDougal side of the corner and we would all sit or stand around a big wooden storage box that was along the side of the newsstand that was there. I think that, like the pizza joint, that newsstand is still there today, although it's no longer made out of wood. Back then the sign over the front of it said, "Sherama With The Hammer" which you can see in the photo. I never found out why, but I always assumed it was because the newsstand owner was named Sherama and if you tried to steal from him, he'd hit you with a hammer? Who knows?

So, there we were, a big bunch of 14 and 15 and 16 year old fresh faced girls and boys from the five boroughs, and we were OK, good kids who just didn't fit in at our various high schools and we all commuted down to that corner every day after school and hung out there, smoking cigarettes, the boys making out with the girls sometimes, and we'd hang out there quite late, too, 'til midnight sometimes. I don't think we were taking drugs yet, then, at least I know I wasn't. That came later.

Anyway, there was this old gay guy, a real old-school hard-core gay guy, named Josie, who was, I don't know, maybe around 40 or so, but he seemed really ancient to all of us kids, who was attracted to our youth and vitality and beauty, I guess, but he was so incredibly socially awkward, and so, well, nutso, that he had no idea how to relate to us like a real human being, so he would just hang around and listen in to our conversations and occasionally interject weird double-entendre sexual innuendo comments when we were talking, like, if someone said something like "So I put it in the back," he'd burst out with "Oooh, that's what HE said!" really loudly, and in a very, very gay tone of voice, too, positively mincing.

The worst thing about Josie was that he liked to grab you from behind, in a really big, rib-cracking, bear hug, whenever he could sneak up on you and do it. So, one minute you'd be standing there, like always, and the next this maniac old faggot would throw his arms around you, pinning your arms to your sides, and pick you up off your feet and hug the very breath out of you and plant big, wet, sloppy kisses on your cheek, and even lick your face. It was really weird, but we all just put up with it for some reason. I mean, what are you going to do, the guy was a nuisance, but he was basically harmless, really.

Anyway, Josie had a sidekick, this tiny little, really skeevy, little black girl with bad teeth and horrible hair, called "Little Bit," and she was his "straight man" so to speak, always feeding him lines and pointing out unsuspecting guys he could grab in his trademark bear hug and the two of them were inseparable, wherever you saw Josie, it was guaranteed that Little Bit was somewhere very close at hand. Sometimes, when Josie had you in one of his trademark bear hugs, Little Bit would run over and grind against you. It was like they were double-teaming you in a professional wrestling match or something. In any case, it was really disgusting and getting grabbed and hugged and kissed by Josie was always a must-to-avoid.

Then, later on, we got older and the kids stopped hanging around that corner so much, and I became a junkie and had much more important things to do, like getting high all the time, so, I lost touch with a lot of those kids and I never saw Josie and Little Bit again.

In preparing this entry, I did an online search for the terms "josie and little bit" and, much to my utter surprise, came across someone else's blog entry of pencil drawings of two dogs named Josie and Little Bit!! There's little other info on the page, but I have to assume that whoever owned those dogs must have known them too, it's just too ridiculously great of a coincidence otherwise!

And, so, that's the story of Josie and Little Bit.

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The Story About The Figaro Cafe Basement

When I was a very young teenager, maybe 14 years old, I started going to the downstairs basement at the Figaro Cafe at the corner of Bleeker and MacDougal Streets in Greenwich Village, which they had set up as a sort of a bar or nightclub for teenyboppers, a "discotheque," if you will.

I mean, in other words, the owners of the venerable Cafe Figaro, which closed a while ago and is now currently a Mexican restaurant, took one of the rooms downstairs in their basement and slapped a coat of paint on the walls, and put in a few tables and chairs, and put in a few blinking colored lightbulbsm and a DJ station at the back of the room that was manned by a tall, thin, lanky, very cool, light-skinned black guy named "Hud," and served non-alcoholic drinks and sodas to legions of wannabe hippie teenagers in the early-to-mid 1960s. I don't know how long it had been open like that before I started going there, but I started going there when the big, brand-new record album of the day was the Beatles' Rubber Soul, so I guess that would have been 1965 or so?

We LOVED that album, it was, like, just the greatest thing ever, and, nowadays, anytime I start to make fun of kids today, and the way they worship, say, Justin Beiber, or whoever is hot this week, I have to stop myself and remind myself that we did that, too, the exact same thing, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, too. I mean, when the Rolling Stones were in New York City to play the Ed Sullivan show in the mid-60s, I was among the dozens of kids who spent the night hanging around all night on the sidewalk in front of a mid-town Manhattan hotel, (The Americana?) just waiting for a chance to catch even a glimpse of them, so I can't make fun of kids today, 'cause I did it, too, god help me.

I must say, however, that the MAIN reason I was hanging around there was all the cute hippie girls who were there. I mean, don't get me wrong, I was a rabid Rolling Stones fan, too, but the fact that there were all those pretty girls all hanging out all night long, on a cold night, too, which meant that they might want to snuggle up to keep warm, was the real reason I was there!

Anyway, back to the basement of the Cafe Figaro... So, they had this little room all set up as a little club for teenyboppers, and you entered from the sidewalk, not through the cafe, they had just opened up those big steel sidewalk basement doors you see everywhere in New York, and let us all go down there.

So, they played all the latest rock and folk hits of the day, like Bob Dylan and The Byrds and The Animals and The Beatles and stuff like that, and they sold us sodas, and they were weird sodas too, not Cokes and Pepsis and Seven-Ups, but these odd fountain-mixed Italian sodas, like Orzata (almond flavor) and Tamarindo and like that, for far too much money, maybe a buck each, which was a LOT in 1965, and we all bought them and hung out there and thought we were cool. They had waitresses serving us, and, in retrospect, I feel SO sorry for them because I'm sure that not one of us ever tipped any of them, ever... we didn't have any money, and, frankly, we were just kids, so we didn't know any better, either. I recall that Hud would play the Bob Dylan song "Like A Rolling Stone" every night as the very last song of the night to let everyone know that they were closing and to this day I can't hear that song without feeling a little sad, like the night is over.

I was all of 14 years old in 1965 and I just loved this. I honestly don't remember how I managed to spend all my time there like that, whether I went to school during the day and went there afterwards, or what, but it was just great, I had found my "tribe," which, I realize in retrospect was really just a bunch of scruffy hippie kids from Queens and Brooklyn who hung out on the streets taking drugs and making out and generally causing trouble. I mean, we all thought we were just the coolest thing ever, but I look at pictures now of what we looked like then and I'm just appalled:

I mean, we just looked like a bunch of thugs, really, and yes, I'm in that picture, third from the left, in the jacket with the fake sheepskin collar!

And that's the story of the Figaro Cafe's basement!

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The Story About The Broadway Central Hotel

There used to be a hotel in New York City, on Broadway, down near Bleecker Street, called the Broadway Central Hotel.

It was pretty much of a dump, though it was not at all as bad as the flophouse hotels that you'd find over on The Bowery, but still a pretty crappy hotel. I lived there for a few months with a kid I knew named Joe L*b*ll, who was later known as "Joe L." but that's a story for another day.

Anyway, Joe and I lived there for a few months, and I think that I must have been around maybe 18 years old, no, maybe younger, but anyway, I think that my parents were paying for the room and he was just staying there with me for free. Anyway, I think we were both junkies then, and we lived in that hotel, which had a bathroom down the hall, not in the room itself, as I recall.

So, there are a few incidental stories about the Broadway Central Hotel that are not connected really, just memory flashes from here and there, like the time I really, really wanted a pack of cigarettes, I think I smoked Camels back then, and the only money I had was an old 1890s silver dollar that I had gotten from my grandfather, that was it, so I really, really wanted those cigarettes, and I went to the little cigarette and newspaper stand in the lobby of the hotel and bought a pack of Camels and paid for it with that antique silver dollar, and the guy at the newstand couldn't believe that I was going to pay with it 'cause it was much more valuable than a pack of cigarettes, so he made me take a little bag of potato chips, too. I guess it made him feel better. I didn't care, I just wanted those cigarettes, that's all, and I didn't care what I had to do to get them.

It's like the time I sold an old antique Dobro resonator guitar (that looked sorta like this one), which must have been worth a couple hundred bucks at the time, to a guy in a guitar shop on W. 4th St. for just $30 bucks, which was the cost of a "deck" of heroin (six 5-dollar bags) at the time. The guy in the shop couldn't believe it, he even actually asked me several times if I was SURE that I wanted to do this, and, of course, I was sure, I just wanted that smack, no matter what it took.

How I got that Dobro was a funny story, too, I was sort of seeing this tall, skinny, hippie girl named Vina, which I'm sure was not her real name, and we were at a bar we all used to go to on Bleeker St. called "Nobody's" (which is a chinese restaurant now) and she told me that there was a guy selling a guitar out on the sidewalk, probably another junkie, and that her friend, Edgar Winter, (yes, THAT Edgar Winter) wanted to buy it, but he didn't have enough cash on him to pay the guy. Well, being a bit of an amateur guitarist myself I went out to check it out and, to make a long story short, I wound up buying it myself! So, yes, I "stole" a great guitar deal out from under Edgar Winter and funnily enough, wound up selling that guitar as a junkie, too, just like the guy I bought it from. Maybe it was cursed!

Anyway, getting back to the Broadway Central Hotel, so, me and Joe L*b*ll were living there and another funny story I remember was the time this really gorgeous junkie girl we knew from around the neighborhood ripped us off, and we let her do it because she was just SO pretty. I don't remember the details, either we were selling some smack to her, or she was selling some to us, but either way, she stole our money and we knew it was happening and we were so smitten with this pretty girl that we just watched it happen, with big ol' stars in our eyes as she took our money, or our smack, and left. Idiots.

The other thing about the Broadway Central is that apparently the hotel had actually been a grand hotel once upon a time, back in the 1860s, and I vaguely remember that it had something to do with the invention of basketball or something, because there was a plaque on the building that told the story of, like, how basketball was invented there or some shit. Maybe it was baseball, not basketball, like, maybe the National League was founded there or something?

Anyway, it had been a really grand hotel back in the day, so it had an old abandoned ballroom in the back of the building and this guy, Harvey Something, I cannot remember his name, maybe it was Kramer?, but, anyway, he was a famous old art hippie dude who I really didn't like at all, and who is now deceased, got permission from them to use it as a music venue. Then, later on, after that proved to be a success, it went on to become the Mercer Arts Center, full of theaters and suchlike, and it was very hip for a time, with the artist crowd from Max's Kansas City hanging out there and punk bands, like the atrociously bad, but nonetheless legendary, NY Dolls and the like.

Then one day it collapsed, the whole building just collapsed and killed four people, and that was it, it was over.


Then NYU bought the site and demolished the ruins and put up a dormitory building there, and that's the story of the Broadway Central Hotel.

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The Story About Dee

So, there used to be this girl named Dee who hung around with all of us hippie kids on MacDougal Street way back when in the 1960s, and I never really thought much about her. She was not pretty at all, had a kind of a long face and a sullen kind of look, and although she really wanted to hang with all of the cool kids, she was too shy I guess, so she always hung around the perimeter of the bunch of us, so I never really knew her. One thing I do remember about her is that she always wore this really dumb white knit newsboy cap, kinda like the one that guy in the band Vanilla Fudge wore, only in white knit. I hated that hat, but at least every time you saw it coming you knew that Dee would be there under it.

Anyway, for some reason I cannot remember, I wound up staying out all night one night, which, considering I was a teenager and lived at home with my parents in New Jersey, was actually quite something at the time, not going home at all. I really don't remember how it happened, I guess that for some reason or other I must have missed the last bus home from the George Washington Bridge bus station and wound up staying out all night long.

So, it was chilly out, not cold, but chilly, definitely pea coat weather, and I was walking all around the east and west villages, wondering what to do and wear to go, and somewhere along the way I ran into Dee. Now, as previously stated, she and I hardly knew each other, and weren't friends at all, we just knew each other on sight from hanging around the hippie scene in Washington Square Park and MacDougal and Bleeker Streets, and I have no idea why it was that she was staying out all night, too, but, believe me, I was very glad to see her 'cause I was all alone and had nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to do it with.

So, as I recall we hung out for a while, maybe had a slice of pizza somewhere and a soda or something and at some point she said that she knew a guy who'd let us stay with him if we went over there, and since I literally had nowhere to go and nothing to do I said OK. So she drags me all the way over to the Bowery, which, back then, was a legendary shithole, full of winos and junkies, and she takes me to this classic Bowery Bum flophouse hotel, where these winos and skeevy characters could get a room for a few bucks a night, which they could scrape together by panhandling during the day.

So, she takes me to this miserable shithole hotel and, sure enough, she finds the guy she's looking for, who turns out to be this older, and by older I mean that he might have been thirty-something, but to me, at, like, 16 or so, he seemed "older," black guy, who's all glad to see her and whatnot, and, after talking with him for a few minutes, she tells me that it's OK, we can spend the rest of the night in his hotel room upstairs.

So, I've got nowhere to go and nothing to do and it's cold outside, so I agree, and we go upstairs in a rickety old elevator with the cage door that you have to pull shut, and we go to his room, which is not much bigger than the bed that's in it. So, we talked for a while and then, and I swear I do not know how this happened, he tells us to lie down on the bed and make out, and we do.

Yes, that's what I said, somehow or other, he directed us to lie down, face to face and kiss, and I went along with it. I really don't know or recall how it happened, and I really don't know why I became so docile and pliable and directable. It's weird. I mean, I doubt that if he had told me to slit her throat or stab her or something, that I would have done that, but for some reason this old black guy told us to lie down and make out and we did.

Anyway, so, we were lying down on the bed making out a little bit, and bear in mind, this was with a girl who I did not think was pretty at all and didn't really like at all, either, but there I was kissing her, and the old black guy lays down behind her, so that she's kind of sandwiched in between us, with me facing her, kissing her, and him behind her facing her back, kind of spooning her, and he starts fumbling around back there, which, since I was such an innocent kid, I really, honestly didn't fully understand. I mean, I knew something wrong was happening and I realize now, years later that he was jerking himself off, of course, but at the time it was just weird and kind of dream-like, like I imagine it is for victims of a crime who say things like, "it all seemed like slow-motion," or whatever.

So, this all went on for what seemed like hours, although it probably wasn't even ten minutes and my memory of the details is very fuzzy at best, but somehow we made it through the night until daylight and the next thing I knew it was light out and we were outside the hotel and Dee and I went our separate ways, and the next time we saw each other, hanging out on MacDougal St., we went right back to our previous distant relationship and never spoke of it, nor even ever spoke to each other at all, ever again.

And that's the story of Dee.

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