SOMETIME IN NEW HAVEN
The Story of the New Haven
Berlin Survivors
Part I
The alarm clock going off at 5:30 in the morning was like a knife cutting through my chest. Especially since I only set the alarm a few hours earlier when I finally dumped my drunken body into bed. I knew if I hit the snooze button I would never make it to work, although thoughts rushed through my mind of things I would rather do than cook for some Yalies. But I needed to make some money. I knew the longer I stayed in bed, trying to focus on the exposed beams on the ceiling in my room, the more likely it would be for me to drift off back to sleep. So, almost without deliberate thought, I shot up, grabbed my towel, and ran to the bathroom.
As I stood almost motionless in the shower with the water beating down on me, I tried to think if there was some way to stop my head from pounding. I tossed back quite a few beers (and a few shots of Jack Daniels if I recall correctly) as part of a roaming going away party for Aragon, one of my closest friends and band-mate who was moving to Boston. We hit the best gin mills New Haven had to offer.
The new John Lennon song “Starting Over” was running through my head as I showered, so I had to put it on the stereo as I got dressed for work. I loved John Lennon’s music although the new album, “Double Fantasy,” still had to grow on me. I had personally hoped for something that rocked a little more, especially when I had heard prior to the album’s release that a couple of the guys from the band Cheap Trick were playing on it, but, like most other Lennon fans, I was just thankful for a new album after a five year wait.
Besides, for my rock fixes, I could turn to the new albums by Jim Carroll, X, The B-52s, or John Cale, who just released an album that included an absolute blazing song called “Ready for War.” But on this morning, it would be a few songs by Lennon.
As usual, there were some classic Lennon lines that stick with you on the “Double Fantasy” album, like “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans” on the song “Beautiful Boy.” It’s a typical Lennon line; an obvious observation that kind of grabs you by the collar and smacks you in the face.
As usual, I barely made the bus heading downtown on Whitney Avenue and, in what has turned into a ritual of late, planned to have my first cigarette of the day once I got downtown. As the bus pulled away from the bus stop and I grabbed a seat towards the rear, I looked back at the former Eli Whitney boarding house, which six of us rented, and watched it get smaller as the bus traveled away. I wished I was still inside, lying naked on my bed, listening to the bus fade away instead of sitting on the bus and watching my breath cut through the chilly December air. I loved New Haven just after dawn, though.. The buildings and churches surrounding the Green were all so quiet.
I got off the bus at Grove Street so I could take a few minutes and collect my thoughts while walking to Fitzwilly’s Restaurant. The majestic architecture of sleeping Yale University was always sort of intimidating as it surrounded me–it always made me feel so small–and I always felt like I just discovered a castle whenever I approached Woolsey Hall during the empty mornings. It was like an abandoned city, except for the occasional car or bus passing. There were usually a few people roaming around, a drunk person stumbling home, a person or two collecting cans and bottles from the trash or a jogger or two. I cut through a Yale courtyard and passed a few closed Broadway restaurants and shops that just hours earlier were alive with people. But now, at 6:45 in the morning, they were just empty rooms waiting for someone to come in and clean up so they could open for another day. Between cigarettes, I kept my hands tucked into the warmth of my pants’ pockets. Every once in a while, when mornings got chilly, I would question whether I should cut my shoulder-length hair since it took forever to dry and I always felt it freeze in the cold. Inevitably, I always figured I’d give up showering first. But I never did either.
Fitzwilly’s was a three-story brick building, a former firehouse, on the corner of Elm and Park streets. As a testament to the owner, the name of the restaurant is not on the building, so it fits in well with the row of historic houses, the church and elm trees lining the street. When you walk in the front door, you are greeted by a grand stairway between the bar and dining area, and a lot of brass, plants and antiques. The natural wood and brick walls give the place a comfortable feel.
What is on the front of the building, though, is iron lettering that states “This is a Restaurant,” apparently a response to some zoning regulation requiring owners to have something on their buildings informing people that “this is a restaurant.”
At 6:55 a.m., though, you don’t use the front door. Instead I walked past the dumpsters and through the back door where I took the concrete steps to the downstairs prep kitchen.
“Hey, I can get some acid, you want to drop some?” asked Ronnie, one of my fellow cooks and another band mate, as he greeted me in the kitchen.
“When?” I answered although I wasn’t really convinced acid was a good idea. “We have our final jam tonight with Aragon. Things are likely to get crazy enough.”
“Right,” Ronnie said. “Tonight the television goes! But I still might drop the acid.”
Aragon, who worked at Fitzwilly’s and, like myself considered himself something of a poet, was moving to Boston with his girlfriend Cathleen, although I think he wanted to stay in New Haven now. He made plans to leave before he thought our band, or more accurately our musical experiment called “Sire,” could actually have played in public somewhere.
I thought that was impossible, though, since only Jack, who played guitar, knew anything about playing music. Jack knew a bunch of chords while Aragon knew maybe three or four –although I’m convinced the three chords Aragon knew were different than the ones Jack knew. I somehow knew how to pick notes on my black Rickenbacker bass that blended in with what Jack and Aragon were playing. I couldn’t play without the “Mel Bay Beginner Bass” book opened - and hidden - in my guitar case. My black Rickenbacker bass, which I always thought looked cool and sounded even cooler, was my prized possession. I bought it when I was discharged from the military and moved to New Haven about a year earlier.
Aragon would play his guitar for hours each day, usually with professional wrestling on the television in front of him with the sound turned off. But he didn’t practice playing chords. Instead, he knew how to get just about any sound possible out of his white Stratocaster (a tribute to Jimi Hendrix) and Pignose amp. The noises always fit in well with his Keroac-like writing about life and the events that turn normal circumstances into twisted situations. We knew we didn’t write “songs.” We made sounds, musical sounds we hoped, to serve as a backdrop to our writings.
We started playing together shortly after I met him, when I first moved to New Haven. I told him I had a bass guitar and also wrote poetry. We picked up a cheap, used sound system and a couple of amps. We’d each keep a notebook of our writing on a nearby stool whenever we played. Whatever mood we would create with the music, one of us usually had something written to compliment it.
Aragon was the valedictorian of his high school class but dropped out of college when he realized that it was more relevant to know Lou Reed than Chaucer. According to his writing, I don’t think his family quite understood that move.
I, on the other hand, barely got out of high school and joined the Air Force. After five years in the service, and one failed marriage where I almost ruined a poor girl’s life, I got discharged and decided to start a new life, and the 1980s, in New Haven. I hated the military so much that even on chilly December days I wouldn’t wear the heavy, green and probably warm military-issue field jacket I still had in my closet.
Ronnie, a black, vegetarian, Dead-Head hippie, joined us with his incomplete drum set. He had a bass drum, snare drum, and one chipped cymbal. Ronnie would boast, in a soft spoken voice, that no one would ever be able to find him wearing anything made of leather. No dead animals could be tied to Ronnie, either through his diet or dress, he would say. He would also create star charts for his friends - charts which some claimed would have an amazing ability to correctly tell the future - and he would sit and review the charts in painful, time-consuming detail with whoever he made them for. He never did a chart for me. I was only in town for one birthday, and I kept that a secret from everyone. I guess I was afraid of something that could tell me my future. I didn't want to know in case it was bad.
The only native New Havener in the group, Ronnie had a basic backbone style of playing, almost tribal, which fit in well with what we did, although Aragon always joked that Ronnie was not really one of us because he wasn’t a Berlin Survivor.
In order to be a Berlin Survivor, someone had to have a few drinks as well as some weed or a favorite narcotic, and listen to the Lou Reed masterpiece “Berlin.” You had to listen to it uninterrupted and, of course, you had to be alone.
Then you can say you survived Berlin.
The harshness of the lyrics and music does not allow “Berlin” to fall into the category of a “feel-good album.” The reality of savaged personal relationships and betrayal doesn’t feel good. The song that usually trips-up everyone, though, is “The Kids” about how some “slut” loses her children because she’s not a good mother. Even if the story line of the song makes sense, the song is sung with a frustration that makes you think it is still painfully hard for the storyteller, who could be the poor sap, cheated-on husband. But, as the song comes to a close, it is topped by the heartbreaking cries of children calling for their mother.
One friend, coming down from two days of speed and nursing a Southern Comfort hangover with more Southern Comfort, actually turned over a table while that song played. Not everyone is a Berlin Survivor.
After work, I planned to meet Jack, who was yet another Fitzwilly’s cook, housemate and band mate, at the bar. I met Jack while we were both stationed in Germany in the Air Force and, both being from Connecticut, he from Branford and me from Stratford, and both hating authority, we hit it off right away. We both found ourselves in trouble more often than not while in the military. Once while the base was on “alert” status, which required everyone to wear combat helmet, canteen, and side-arm, we walked around with cowboy hats and sheriffs’ badges we bought for two dollars in the base exchange. I thought rebelling was fun, but Jack believed he had a duty to rebel! Jack had that “different drummer” thing going, although he would disagree with that assessment. “I don’t really care for drummers,” Jack would say. “Give me a percussionist any day.” When Jack isn’t working, he spent his afternoons sitting in on Yale classes and hitting the Yale library.
Sometimes I would ask him why he bothered to sit in on the classes, and actually do the homework, if he wasn’t getting credit for the classes.
“Hey, I’m getting a Yale education,” said Jack. “That’s far more important than having a piece of paper.”
As smart as he sounded, Jack surprised people at a few parties by wearing a dog chain around his neck and saying only “Woof” whenever anyone talked to him. Jack and I each planned to save a little cash and go to Southern Connecticut State College in a year. . . or two. But for now, we were enjoying a life of little responsibility, few demands, and a lot of partying.
Jack would sit in his room, which had only a mattress on the floor and wood table that he would use as a desk, and play his guitar for hours. We sometimes called him Gandhi because of the way he intentionally did not surround himself with belongings. His was one of the smaller rooms, but it had the best view of the historic Eli Whitney Barn, which was only a few yards from the house, so Jack insisted on the room.
Although Jack knew some guitar chords, his forte seemed to be picking odd, Robert Fripp-type licks that he would play in repetition over Aragon’s guitar noises. Jack had a Gibson “The Paul” guitar, which was a Les Paul-style with a solid-wood body. It sounded great, but I think one of the main reasons he had it was because it was the same style John Lennon played prior to his five-year retirement. Jack loved music, but he often seemed to hate playing because he was not yet perfect at it. I sometimes wondered how he put up with the rest of us.
When my day of making soup, sauces and prepping various dinner specials was done, I signed out, grabbed my jackets, ran up the back stairs and darted out the back door. I always looked forward to a cigarette and taking a minute to lean against the side of the building and bask in the sun, rain, snow, winds, or whatever weather there was outside at the end of my shift. It seemed to help me in the transformation. It was like shedding skin.
Aragon, Jack and I wrote regularly, but rarely shared what we wrote with anyone but each other. Aragon saw the stuff I thought would go well with music. Jack and I would share our writings while hanging out in the kitchen. But we each had notebooks full of writings that none of us figured would ever see the light of day. Sometimes I wondered how good any of us really were. We certainly were never going to find out at the rate we were going. But, for the most part, we acted like we didn’t give a shit what anyone thought. The words we put to music were only heard whenever there was a party at our house while we practiced, which actually seemed to be often during the past few months. Everyone would end up in the front room to hear us.
I figured I would find out if I could really write once I went to school and studied the real poets.
For now, though, I basked in the thought that maybe I was.
After work, to kill some time before I met Jack, I walked over to Toad’s Place on York Street to help Roger unload equipment. Toad’s was the premiere music club in Connecticut, and probably the entire east coast, because of the high-end sound system and garage atmosphere.
“We got Bill Bruford tonight,” said Roger, a former Fitzwilly’s dishwasher who hit the small time as a member of the Toad’s home crew. Of course, Roger also had to mop floors and clean bathrooms, but he was close to music and that’s all that mattered to him.
“I’m glad you’re here,” said another Toadie. “We only have a few people. If you help unload the equipment, you can stay for the sound check.”
“I’m in,” I said.
The dark, wood walls were lined with posters of the bands that have played there. The Talking Heads, Television, Iggy Pop: everyone who was worth a shit it seemed. It was quite impressive.
Moving Bruford’s equipment was pretty cool because the band name “YES” was still stenciled on many of the drum cases. I wondered if he used the same drums while recording “Close to the Edge,” a Yes album that was a favorite in high school because it helped guide a few of us through some acid trips that could have easily put us on the endangered species list. Members of Bruford’s crew were on the truck outside and scattered along the path to the stage to make sure everything was moved safely, and I could appreciate that.
“Thanks for the help,” one of the Bruford crew members said as I headed to the door. “You can stay for the sound check, you know.”
“Thanks, but I gotta run,” I said.
I had to be back at Fitzwilly’s by 4:15 for my daily ritual.
