Sometime in New Haven - The Story of the New Haven Berlin Survivors - Part IV
SOMETIME IN NEW HAVEN
Part IV
We walked over to Times Square Café on Whalley Avenue, where Aragon immediately ordered four shots of Jack Daniels and a pitcher of beer. The Jack Daniels shots were catching up to me; my legs were starting to numb and I'm sure my reflexes were shot.
Jack walked over to the juke box, which had everything from “My Way” by Sinatra to “5 to 1" by The Doors.
“Good practice tonight boys,” Aragon said, raising a shot glass.
I knew I would probably regret that shot since I had a serious buzz on, but I did it anyway. Times Square had a cheesy maroon velvet-type of material on the barstools and the benches lining the wall across from the bar.
“You know, Rory, if you look at The Stooges, the Sex Pistols or early Velvets, they only played a few chords,” Aragon said. “It doesn’t matter if you only know a few chords, it only matters what you can do with them.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t doubt that in time we could have played out. Our strength was in what we were saying.”
“As fucked-up as that was sometimes,” Ronnie said.
As we drank the rest of the beer, and pleaded with Aragon not to buy any more shots, it started to hit me that I would miss him a great deal. I knew we wouldn’t continue playing in the same way with him gone because everyone but him seemed hung-up on the fact that we didn’t know enough chords. Aragon saw it as creating music; exploring another art form. Not knowing how to play never held him back. He often said that was the only way he could play. There were no rules for him to follow.
I don’t think I’ll ever meet anyone as creative as Aragon.
I knew Aragon was heading out soon and had to call his girlfriend Cathleen at her sister’s house before too long, so I decided to leave. Besides, it had been a long day. I’d been on the go since 5:30 in the morning. Here it was about 15 hours later and I was ready to fall over.
Monday Night Football was coming on – The Patriots, which was Aragon’s team, vs. The Dolphins – and I didn’t want to get hung up in the game.
“Give me a hug, you fuck,” I said to Aragon. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
“I should have known you would be the first to leave,” Aragon said.
“Fuck you,” I said, too buzzed to come up with any other snappy response. “Keep in touch. I hope everything is perfect for you and Cathleen in Boston.”
“Just tell me that the next time I see you, you will have at least asked Sara out to a movie or for a cup of coffee or something,” Aragon said. “I mean, come on Rory, you are an embarrassment to the male species.”
“Well, when will I see you next?” I asked.
“I knew it,” Aragon said. “You will never ask that girl out. You will never talk to her. I’m amazed. You sleep with some pretty trashy chicks, but she seems like a half way decent girl and you can’t even bring yourself to talk to her.”
“I’ve talked to her, and you know it,” I said. “Besides, there’s a lot to be said about the so-called trashy chicks I’ve hung out with. I dig trashy chicks. I”ve had some fun.”
“Fuck you, you know what I mean,” Aragon said. “Now promise me that the next time I see you, you will have at least asked her out to a movie, or a drink or something. I mean, I’m not expecting to see her in your bed or anything. I just expect you to talk to her.”
“Consider it done,” I said, turning towards the door. “Now you’ll have to come back you fuck. Bye.”
“Good-bye,” Aragon said.
It was hard walking out that door.
The lengthy walk home in the cold air seemed even longer lugging a guitar case. Before I got to Whitney Avenue, Jack caught up with me, so it made the walk go a bit quicker.
“I don’t know if I can keep drinking like this,” I said.
“You know, if we quit drinking, we could probably afford to get a car,” Jack said. “Or, better yet, a couple of motorcycles.”
“Yeah, but what would we have to do to afford the insurance?”
“Fuck it,” Jack said. “So, what do you think about playing with Buddy?”
“Oh, so what’s the deal with that?” I asked, trying to concentrate on walking straight. “Why would he want to play with us? We suck. We don’t know what the fuck we are doing.”
“Well, that’s why,” Jack said. “He needs to shake heroin. Anybody that really knows what they are doing wouldn’t want to play with him. He’s got a bad reputation with most other local musicians as someone who is unreliable. All he wants to do is lock himself in his apartment and play. If he feels like playing the same thing over and over, then that’s what he’s going to do. He just wants to hear some other instruments. He wants some people to play with him.”
“And he’s liable to be a pleasure to be around,” I said. “Why do we want to do this?”
“Because he’ll show us how to play better,” Jack said. “Instead of searching the neck for notes that sound good together, he’ll teach you how to get to the right notes. I’ll learn how to play more chords. I can learn to do some picking. We’ll know every blues scale. It will be a tremendous learning experience.”
“If we do this, when are we supposed to start?” I asked.
“He wants to do it as soon as possible, but at the same time I don’t think he’s in too much of a hurry to shake that shit,” Jack said.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “I’ve got to sleep on it. Actually, I just need to sleep period.”
“Look, what else are you planning on doing musically?” Jack asked. “Neither of us can really do much until we learn how to play. This will be a good opportunity.”
When we got to the house, we went into the kitchen and grabbed a seat at the long wooden table. I was looking forward to one final cigarette of the day. Jack, the non-smoker, had some orange juice.
“You really want to play with Buddy?” I asked, trying to make the ash tray spin on its corner.
“I think so,” he said. “I think I’m going to play with him no matter what you do.”
“So if I don’t play with him, and I haven’t really decided yet, I won’t be fucking you up then?” I asked.
“No,” Jack said.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do,” I said. "But we need to do something. You know, we could pull this music-thing off. We’ve got the attitude. We just have to learn what the fuck we’re doing musically. I just don’t want to play in any Michael Bolotin-type band. And no band where we would have to wear matching jackets. Do me a favor; if I ever end up in a band like that–shoot me.”
“Say what you will about Bolotin, and I don’t really care much for him, but I was pretty impressed with him when we saw him that night at the Oxford Ale House a few months ago,” Jack said. “I mean, after getting like no response to his first few numbers, he realized people weren’t really into his set and he turned to the audience and asked what we wanted to hear. And he played every fucken song people yelled up to him. That band was capable of playing everything: Motown to Zeppelin. That was pretty impressive. He could have just said, ‘Fuck everyone, I’m playing what I want,’ but he didn’t.”
“Yeah, but I’d still rather go see The Dogs than Bolotin,” I said. "Fuck it! I want to be the Kinks!"
“You know, I don’t know why Aragon is so down on New Haven and Connecticut,” Jack said. “There are a lot of good things happening musically around here. There is a good arts scene. And things are happening outside New Haven. Like when we got thrown off the train at Norwalk coming back from New York. There was a poetry reading at a church and that one poet, Henry Lyman, the one who read with Daniel Barrigan, was fucken great.”
“That was definitely cool,” I said.
“And that band we saw playing in Stratford,” Jack said. “The New Originals. They were teenagers, but that guitarist, Matthew, was awesome.”
“So, now it’s our turn; we have to do something,” I said. “We spent the past year just talking about it.”
“We’re not that bad, at least we’ve been trying,” Jack said. “Now’s the time to act.”
“Well, what the fuck have we done?” I asked.
“We have been playing with Aragon,” Jack said. “That’s something. You have been sharing your poetry through the music; that’s something you weren’t doing last year. And people have been digging it. Look, when we moved here, we said we would probably have to take a year to get reacclimated to non-military life. Well, we’ve done that. But we really can’t wait any longer.”
“What was it, 13 months ago that we went to New York City to see the ‘Baby Snakes’ movie?” I asked. “We said at that time that we had to do something within the year. Fuck it, now’s the time. Now we each have to make a list of what we want to do and go out and do it. Actually, I just want to fucken play.”
“Well, what are we waiting for, Rory?” Jack said. “I mean, John Lennon already left the dairy farm. What’s next? We’ve been in New Haven a year. In another month, it will be 1981. The years are just moving along and I don’t want them to move on without me. That’s why I want to play with Buddy.”
“What, do you want to sign a contract in blood that by mid-year we get something done?” I said.
“Would you do that, Rory?”
“Shit, I don’t know. I hate to bleed.” I said.
“Fuck it, I need some sleep,” Jack said getting up from the table.
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
“Look, one other thing to sleep on,” Jack said. “With Aragon gone, let’s stop with this Berlin Survivor stuff. It really makes me uneasy.”
I went upstairs - the turn-of-the-century floorboards creaking with every step – and fell into bed. I wanted to put on the new Lennon album, but I didn’t even have the energy to turn on the radio, as I normally do every night.
I heard a noise in Jack’s room which, for a second, I thought might have been Jack falling over. But I quickly realized that Jack was pulling one of his favorite tricks: taking the pile of music books he has on his desk and throwing them in the middle of the floor. It was his way of reminding himself that he didn’t know how to play as well as he wanted. He would torment himself by throwing the books because he would have to step over them to leave his room. And in doing so he would always ask himself as he was leaving his room if he was going to do something that was more important than learning how to play music.
At one point during the night, it could have been five minutes or five hours into my sleep – I had no idea – I went to the bathroom, which had a large foyer with sinks and mirrors lining one wall. Ken and David, a couple of other housemates, were in the foyer talking although I don’t think they noticed me walk around the corner to the toilet.
“Where was he shot?” David asked.
“Right in front of his apartment building,” Ken said. “I guess he was walking from a cab to his door when someone shot him.”
“Oh shit,” I thought.
“What’s up?” I said as I walked around the corner.
“Somebody shot John Lennon,” Ken said.
“Who the fuck would do something like that?” I asked. “How bad was he shot?”
“Pretty bad,” Ken said. “I just heard on the radio that it’s pretty bad.”
“That’s crazy,” I said, walking from the bathroom in a fog, imagining John Lennon sitting in a hospital bed recovering. “He’ll be fine.”
I figured it would be a switch from when Yoko Ono was in the hospital and there were pictures of Yoko on the bed and John on the floor in a sleeping bag with guitar in hand. I was sure there would be pictures of John on the hospital bed and Yoko either in the sleeping bag or next to him on the bed. How does a peace activist end up getting shot? This could be a cool bed-in for peace on behalf of better gun control, I thought. As I quickly drifted back to sleep, I hoped that Sean Lennon didn’t see his father get shot.
When I woke up and saw that it was quarter after seven in the morning I made a dash to the shower. I was wet before I realized I didn’t bring a change of clothes or a towel. I was also in the water when I finally fully woke up and realized I wasn’t actually late for work because I was off Tuesdays. Once in the water, though, I knew there was no going back to sleep. Still dripping wet and naked, I trotted to my room, hoping no one would come into the hallway. I tossed on some clothes, grabbed my cigarettes and notebook and headed downstairs to the kitchen table.
The house still looked much as it did at the turn of the century, with wide floor boards, tall windows and, if you looked closely, the old boarding house room numbers on the upstairs bedroom doors. I sat at the long, wooden kitchen table and started my morning of smoking cigarettes and doodling in the notebook. I wanted to write but nothing was happening.
I chuckled thinking of a line I heard in a Three Stooges’ flick, “Geez, I’m trying to think but nothing’s happening.”
Since the words were not flowing, I turned on the radio – WPLR in New Haven – and tried to make smoke rings; something I was never able to do. The John Lennon song “Starting Over” was on and I was starting to like it more every time I heard it. It was rock-n-roll. And I liked it.
“What are you doing?” David’s girlfriend Rudy asked as she walked into the kitchen. “Can I bum a cigarette?”
“Sure, go ahead,” I said. “I’m just hanging out. What’s up with you?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “David is snoring away. I don’t know how you can be up and functioning this early. It’s not even 10 o’clock yet. Oh shit, it’s not even 9 o’clock yet.”
“Usually I’m well into my day by now, although I’m not sure how well I’m functioning,” I said. “And I’m trying to write something but it isn’t happening.”
“That’s alright,” Rudy said, brushing the top of my head with her hand. “Something will come to you. Besides, this is a dark day. I think David cried himself to sleep last night. I guess it was rough for you as well.”
Rudy paused to light her cigarette and said, “I can’t believe someone killed John Lennon."
Part IV
We walked over to Times Square Café on Whalley Avenue, where Aragon immediately ordered four shots of Jack Daniels and a pitcher of beer. The Jack Daniels shots were catching up to me; my legs were starting to numb and I'm sure my reflexes were shot.
Jack walked over to the juke box, which had everything from “My Way” by Sinatra to “5 to 1" by The Doors.
“Good practice tonight boys,” Aragon said, raising a shot glass.
I knew I would probably regret that shot since I had a serious buzz on, but I did it anyway. Times Square had a cheesy maroon velvet-type of material on the barstools and the benches lining the wall across from the bar.
“You know, Rory, if you look at The Stooges, the Sex Pistols or early Velvets, they only played a few chords,” Aragon said. “It doesn’t matter if you only know a few chords, it only matters what you can do with them.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t doubt that in time we could have played out. Our strength was in what we were saying.”
“As fucked-up as that was sometimes,” Ronnie said.
As we drank the rest of the beer, and pleaded with Aragon not to buy any more shots, it started to hit me that I would miss him a great deal. I knew we wouldn’t continue playing in the same way with him gone because everyone but him seemed hung-up on the fact that we didn’t know enough chords. Aragon saw it as creating music; exploring another art form. Not knowing how to play never held him back. He often said that was the only way he could play. There were no rules for him to follow.
I don’t think I’ll ever meet anyone as creative as Aragon.
I knew Aragon was heading out soon and had to call his girlfriend Cathleen at her sister’s house before too long, so I decided to leave. Besides, it had been a long day. I’d been on the go since 5:30 in the morning. Here it was about 15 hours later and I was ready to fall over.
Monday Night Football was coming on – The Patriots, which was Aragon’s team, vs. The Dolphins – and I didn’t want to get hung up in the game.
“Give me a hug, you fuck,” I said to Aragon. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
“I should have known you would be the first to leave,” Aragon said.
“Fuck you,” I said, too buzzed to come up with any other snappy response. “Keep in touch. I hope everything is perfect for you and Cathleen in Boston.”
“Just tell me that the next time I see you, you will have at least asked Sara out to a movie or for a cup of coffee or something,” Aragon said. “I mean, come on Rory, you are an embarrassment to the male species.”
“Well, when will I see you next?” I asked.
“I knew it,” Aragon said. “You will never ask that girl out. You will never talk to her. I’m amazed. You sleep with some pretty trashy chicks, but she seems like a half way decent girl and you can’t even bring yourself to talk to her.”
“I’ve talked to her, and you know it,” I said. “Besides, there’s a lot to be said about the so-called trashy chicks I’ve hung out with. I dig trashy chicks. I”ve had some fun.”
“Fuck you, you know what I mean,” Aragon said. “Now promise me that the next time I see you, you will have at least asked her out to a movie, or a drink or something. I mean, I’m not expecting to see her in your bed or anything. I just expect you to talk to her.”
“Consider it done,” I said, turning towards the door. “Now you’ll have to come back you fuck. Bye.”
“Good-bye,” Aragon said.
It was hard walking out that door.
The lengthy walk home in the cold air seemed even longer lugging a guitar case. Before I got to Whitney Avenue, Jack caught up with me, so it made the walk go a bit quicker.
“I don’t know if I can keep drinking like this,” I said.
“You know, if we quit drinking, we could probably afford to get a car,” Jack said. “Or, better yet, a couple of motorcycles.”
“Yeah, but what would we have to do to afford the insurance?”
“Fuck it,” Jack said. “So, what do you think about playing with Buddy?”
“Oh, so what’s the deal with that?” I asked, trying to concentrate on walking straight. “Why would he want to play with us? We suck. We don’t know what the fuck we are doing.”
“Well, that’s why,” Jack said. “He needs to shake heroin. Anybody that really knows what they are doing wouldn’t want to play with him. He’s got a bad reputation with most other local musicians as someone who is unreliable. All he wants to do is lock himself in his apartment and play. If he feels like playing the same thing over and over, then that’s what he’s going to do. He just wants to hear some other instruments. He wants some people to play with him.”
“And he’s liable to be a pleasure to be around,” I said. “Why do we want to do this?”
“Because he’ll show us how to play better,” Jack said. “Instead of searching the neck for notes that sound good together, he’ll teach you how to get to the right notes. I’ll learn how to play more chords. I can learn to do some picking. We’ll know every blues scale. It will be a tremendous learning experience.”
“If we do this, when are we supposed to start?” I asked.
“He wants to do it as soon as possible, but at the same time I don’t think he’s in too much of a hurry to shake that shit,” Jack said.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “I’ve got to sleep on it. Actually, I just need to sleep period.”
“Look, what else are you planning on doing musically?” Jack asked. “Neither of us can really do much until we learn how to play. This will be a good opportunity.”
When we got to the house, we went into the kitchen and grabbed a seat at the long wooden table. I was looking forward to one final cigarette of the day. Jack, the non-smoker, had some orange juice.
“You really want to play with Buddy?” I asked, trying to make the ash tray spin on its corner.
“I think so,” he said. “I think I’m going to play with him no matter what you do.”
“So if I don’t play with him, and I haven’t really decided yet, I won’t be fucking you up then?” I asked.
“No,” Jack said.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do,” I said. "But we need to do something. You know, we could pull this music-thing off. We’ve got the attitude. We just have to learn what the fuck we’re doing musically. I just don’t want to play in any Michael Bolotin-type band. And no band where we would have to wear matching jackets. Do me a favor; if I ever end up in a band like that–shoot me.”
“Say what you will about Bolotin, and I don’t really care much for him, but I was pretty impressed with him when we saw him that night at the Oxford Ale House a few months ago,” Jack said. “I mean, after getting like no response to his first few numbers, he realized people weren’t really into his set and he turned to the audience and asked what we wanted to hear. And he played every fucken song people yelled up to him. That band was capable of playing everything: Motown to Zeppelin. That was pretty impressive. He could have just said, ‘Fuck everyone, I’m playing what I want,’ but he didn’t.”
“Yeah, but I’d still rather go see The Dogs than Bolotin,” I said. "Fuck it! I want to be the Kinks!"
“You know, I don’t know why Aragon is so down on New Haven and Connecticut,” Jack said. “There are a lot of good things happening musically around here. There is a good arts scene. And things are happening outside New Haven. Like when we got thrown off the train at Norwalk coming back from New York. There was a poetry reading at a church and that one poet, Henry Lyman, the one who read with Daniel Barrigan, was fucken great.”
“That was definitely cool,” I said.
“And that band we saw playing in Stratford,” Jack said. “The New Originals. They were teenagers, but that guitarist, Matthew, was awesome.”
“So, now it’s our turn; we have to do something,” I said. “We spent the past year just talking about it.”
“We’re not that bad, at least we’ve been trying,” Jack said. “Now’s the time to act.”
“Well, what the fuck have we done?” I asked.
“We have been playing with Aragon,” Jack said. “That’s something. You have been sharing your poetry through the music; that’s something you weren’t doing last year. And people have been digging it. Look, when we moved here, we said we would probably have to take a year to get reacclimated to non-military life. Well, we’ve done that. But we really can’t wait any longer.”
“What was it, 13 months ago that we went to New York City to see the ‘Baby Snakes’ movie?” I asked. “We said at that time that we had to do something within the year. Fuck it, now’s the time. Now we each have to make a list of what we want to do and go out and do it. Actually, I just want to fucken play.”
“Well, what are we waiting for, Rory?” Jack said. “I mean, John Lennon already left the dairy farm. What’s next? We’ve been in New Haven a year. In another month, it will be 1981. The years are just moving along and I don’t want them to move on without me. That’s why I want to play with Buddy.”
“What, do you want to sign a contract in blood that by mid-year we get something done?” I said.
“Would you do that, Rory?”
“Shit, I don’t know. I hate to bleed.” I said.
“Fuck it, I need some sleep,” Jack said getting up from the table.
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
“Look, one other thing to sleep on,” Jack said. “With Aragon gone, let’s stop with this Berlin Survivor stuff. It really makes me uneasy.”
I went upstairs - the turn-of-the-century floorboards creaking with every step – and fell into bed. I wanted to put on the new Lennon album, but I didn’t even have the energy to turn on the radio, as I normally do every night.
I heard a noise in Jack’s room which, for a second, I thought might have been Jack falling over. But I quickly realized that Jack was pulling one of his favorite tricks: taking the pile of music books he has on his desk and throwing them in the middle of the floor. It was his way of reminding himself that he didn’t know how to play as well as he wanted. He would torment himself by throwing the books because he would have to step over them to leave his room. And in doing so he would always ask himself as he was leaving his room if he was going to do something that was more important than learning how to play music.
At one point during the night, it could have been five minutes or five hours into my sleep – I had no idea – I went to the bathroom, which had a large foyer with sinks and mirrors lining one wall. Ken and David, a couple of other housemates, were in the foyer talking although I don’t think they noticed me walk around the corner to the toilet.
“Where was he shot?” David asked.
“Right in front of his apartment building,” Ken said. “I guess he was walking from a cab to his door when someone shot him.”
“Oh shit,” I thought.
“What’s up?” I said as I walked around the corner.
“Somebody shot John Lennon,” Ken said.
“Who the fuck would do something like that?” I asked. “How bad was he shot?”
“Pretty bad,” Ken said. “I just heard on the radio that it’s pretty bad.”
“That’s crazy,” I said, walking from the bathroom in a fog, imagining John Lennon sitting in a hospital bed recovering. “He’ll be fine.”
I figured it would be a switch from when Yoko Ono was in the hospital and there were pictures of Yoko on the bed and John on the floor in a sleeping bag with guitar in hand. I was sure there would be pictures of John on the hospital bed and Yoko either in the sleeping bag or next to him on the bed. How does a peace activist end up getting shot? This could be a cool bed-in for peace on behalf of better gun control, I thought. As I quickly drifted back to sleep, I hoped that Sean Lennon didn’t see his father get shot.
When I woke up and saw that it was quarter after seven in the morning I made a dash to the shower. I was wet before I realized I didn’t bring a change of clothes or a towel. I was also in the water when I finally fully woke up and realized I wasn’t actually late for work because I was off Tuesdays. Once in the water, though, I knew there was no going back to sleep. Still dripping wet and naked, I trotted to my room, hoping no one would come into the hallway. I tossed on some clothes, grabbed my cigarettes and notebook and headed downstairs to the kitchen table.
The house still looked much as it did at the turn of the century, with wide floor boards, tall windows and, if you looked closely, the old boarding house room numbers on the upstairs bedroom doors. I sat at the long, wooden kitchen table and started my morning of smoking cigarettes and doodling in the notebook. I wanted to write but nothing was happening.
I chuckled thinking of a line I heard in a Three Stooges’ flick, “Geez, I’m trying to think but nothing’s happening.”
Since the words were not flowing, I turned on the radio – WPLR in New Haven – and tried to make smoke rings; something I was never able to do. The John Lennon song “Starting Over” was on and I was starting to like it more every time I heard it. It was rock-n-roll. And I liked it.
“What are you doing?” David’s girlfriend Rudy asked as she walked into the kitchen. “Can I bum a cigarette?”
“Sure, go ahead,” I said. “I’m just hanging out. What’s up with you?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “David is snoring away. I don’t know how you can be up and functioning this early. It’s not even 10 o’clock yet. Oh shit, it’s not even 9 o’clock yet.”
“Usually I’m well into my day by now, although I’m not sure how well I’m functioning,” I said. “And I’m trying to write something but it isn’t happening.”
“That’s alright,” Rudy said, brushing the top of my head with her hand. “Something will come to you. Besides, this is a dark day. I think David cried himself to sleep last night. I guess it was rough for you as well.”
Rudy paused to light her cigarette and said, “I can’t believe someone killed John Lennon."
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