Volume CXXXIII, Number 19 March 29, 2002 f

To the West coast
LUDWIG RANG
ALUMNUS CONTRIBUTOR

It was three weeks before I could steel myself to go back to the Lower East Side. Coming to pick me up at the Hotel Chelsea, Ron all but had to hold my hand. The whole neighborhood-formerly the Jewish Ghetto, now full of hippies, blacks, and Hispanics, many of them drug users or pushers-for me had something sinister about it.

Actually, I wasn't staying at the hotel anymore (one week there having cost me more than I thought I could afford in view of what little money I had left) but at the friendly night clerk's around the corner, a spacious if simply furnished place shared by one or two others on a temporary basis it seemed.

One of these was an attractive yet slightly strange young fellow just released from juvenile detention center on Rikers Island, who kept saying to me, apropos of nothing, so you're aspiring to higher places, eh?

I suppose he meant higher things, having been told by our friend the night clerk that I was a filmmaker. But immediately the old paranoia returned and I thought maybe he was talking about expediting me to places beyond human recall.

Another new acquaintance I made through the good offices of the kind Englishman (offering me his hospitality without any quid pro quo) was a young singer called Gilbert Price; no relation to Leontyne Price, the black primadonna I'd met while still at Columbia, or in her class, but a former member of the Harry Belafonte Singers.

Gilbert at the time was touring resort hotels in the Catskills, and on one occasion asked me to come along. He sang a medley of Beatles songs that went down very well with the audience of mainly Jewish New York housewives. He was also auditioning, he told me, for one of the leads in an upcoming musical based on the life of Alexander Dumas, for which among others the comedienne Hermione Gingold had already been signed.
This was to have its pre-Broadway try-outs on the West Coast. Being on rather friendly terms with Gilbert by then he asked me to look him up there, if he got the part.

Ron in the meantime had taken himself off to Timothy Leary's open-to-all community in upstate New York to go on mind-expanding trips with the Prophet of LSD that really freaked him out. I tried LSD too, but with results even more disastrous than when I'd taken 'speed'.

It was a real horror trip. Before my eyes, Ron, who was meant to supervise it, turned into a cadaverous little man with wispy Ho Chi Minh beard, frightening me to death rather than providing reassurance.

Not long after this Ron went back to the West Coast. When my new friend Gilbert, having got the part in the Dumas musical, also departed for LA, I was left high and dry in New York. What's more, with hardly any money left in the bank. Believe it or not, I'd gone through 5000 dollars (worth a lot more then) in just under a year. Fortunately I had enough left for a one-way ticket via Greyhound to San Francisco, costing me 99 dollars I think.

Much as I'd loved driving across the continent, this was a hellish trip, sitting up day and night on the bus. Somewhere along the line, in the middle of Iowa, when the driver stopped to drop someone off, I felt like getting out too and just walking away with them, like Charlie Chaplin into the sunset.

But, lo and behold, when coming out of the Bus Depot off Market Street in San Francisco, who should be there squatting on the sidewalk but good old Ron, in colorful hippie garb, selling the rebellious student paper, The Berkeley Barb.

Off we went to Ron's pad on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley: a windowless room where when you turned the light on the walls were crawling with cockroaches, scurrying away as quickly as possible, only to reappear the minute it was turned off. Thank God this infested idyll didn't last long.

Not far away in Fulton Street were the premises of the Vietnam Day Committee, the student organisation that planned most of the anti-war demos in the Bay Area. When Ron started hanging out there with Jerry Rubin, the hippie leader who a year later helped organize the violent demonstrations during the Democratic Convention in Chicago, I thought the time had come for me to take myself off to LA to look up my singer friend.

During rehearsals for what its producers hoped would be a Broadway hit, Gilbert was staying in a studio apartment near Farmer's Market in Hollywood. A diabetic, he had to inject himself three times a day, but occasionally forgot.

Rushed to hospital on one such occasion, without the producer being told, the latter came looking for his missing leading man at the apartment, and not informed as to his leading man's private life either, was amazed to find me there.

It was the summer of '67, and Number One on the Hit Parade was the haunting House in New Orleans. Backstage, in-between matinee and evening performances, we played cards with Hermione Gingold and Gilbert's understudy, high most of the time.

Despite indifferent reviews the show went on to San Francisco. There it flopped, and Gilbert returned to New York, bequeathing me his pad just below Nob Hill, with a hippie girl called Janet for a neighbor. (By all means tune in again next time.)