Instant Karma Nearly Got Me, Part III

Let that which stood in front go behind,
let that which was behind advance to the front,
let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions,
let the old propositions be postponed.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx- Walt Whitman

I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn..
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx- The opening lines of Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

To be honest with you, peering into the kaleidoscope that was The Sixties is not all that easy. People, places and events seem to shift and blur in the mind's eye when you try to zero in on them; details and timing are notoriously difficult to pin down, especially since, during much of that time, time simply did not exist.

Truth be told, by the end of my travels in that wonderland, I had lost my way; and from my present, slightly more peaceful, sanctuary it is growing ever more difficult to retrace my steps. But since I lived to tell the tale, the tale must be told. I will do my best to line up those fragile moments, like so many dominoes, and hope to finish before the first one falls.

Some of those moments will never disappear, though; like seeing the face of God in a glistening slice of ripened orange, or sliding through the sounds, smells and sensations of the memory of my own birth, tumbling out onto the living room floor in stunned silence; stars criss -crossing the bejeweled skies like so many flaming rocket ships - what adventurous soul could resist such delights? It was like tumbling down the rabbit hole.

I'll tell you how it was, straight up: we had somehow managed to throw what was arguably the greatest party in history, and actually believed for a while that it would never end. Not only would it never end, but it would eventually encompass all of spaceship earth. And by the way, all that outer space stuff? That was for sissies; the real action was inside your head. We were time-travelers; pioneers on the frontiers of human consciousness. We were kicking the old evolutionary can down the road.

















In the end, though, all the nascent beauty and shimmering symmetry of those days began to slip away, almost unnoticed; morphing, ever so slowly, into something more than vaguely grotesque. It became a carnival on the edge of town, with nothing left but the freak show. The world's biggest party was now a million private versions of hell; and, just as in Sartre's play, there was no exit. It was a house of mirrors.

But I'm getting ahead of myself; this is supposed to be the part of the story where I'm still falling. I hadn't painted anything in months, I was drifting deeper and deeper into depression, becoming more fragmented, more disoriented. I was on acid much of the time, floating through the city as if in a dream, the background ominously dark even in the middle of the day. Robbed three times in the past month, struggling to keep my head above water, but what to do? Where to go? I couldn't seem to focus long enough to make a decision.

Many of my friends had seen it coming and had already left town, heading for places far from the war zone; places like Africa, Nepal, Morocco. My dreams of becoming an art star had slowly slipped through my fingers like sand in an hourglass, and just to escape the deafening silence of my studio I'd ride the canyons of the city in the mother ship, looking for adventure; kicks, as Dean Moriarty would say. In New York, there was never a shortage of kicks.

In those final weeks, for instance, my cab had been hit by a city bus as I pulled into traffic after dropping off a fare on 2nd Avenue. His back bumper hooked my front bumper and dragged me down the street for a few dozen yards before he even noticed, and once he saw that it had done nothing to his bus, he just drove off, leaving me with my bumper sticking straight out into the world like Don Quixote's lance. With no windmills in sight, and having no desire to be charged for the damage, I pulled into the nearest side street, found an abandoned building, threw her into gear, and drove straight into the stone facade. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. Fastest damned body shop in the world.

I had also developed the habit of leaving some of my fellow New Yorkers sputtering at the curb as I cruised the streets in recent days, a bit gun-shy since the sweating junkie incident. It didn't always work, however. A few days before catching that bus, I picked up this guy at La Guardia who had just arrived from somewhere in the Middle East and he hands me a note written in English, directing me to one of the piers on the upper East Side.

When we drove out to the end of this desolate wooden structure, I began trying to explain how much the trip from the airport cost in yankee dollars, when he suddenly began screaming at me in Arabic. Within seconds, my cab was surrounded by a half dozen of his blood brothers, who had sprung out of a nearby wooden shed, their faces up against my windows, angrily accusing me of trying to rip him off. I told this guy to get the hell out of my cab, and split the scene, almost taking one of those dudes with me on my front hood. An early al-Qaeda cell, perhaps?

On one of my sweeps south on this particular Saturday morning, I was heading down 7th Avenue toward 42nd, trying to catch a break in one of the taxi lines in front of the hotels. There were only a few lined up at the Taft, so I pulled in. As I sat there daydreaming, it crossed my mind that somewhere up there, in one of those rooms, country music legend Jimmie Rodgers died of TB back in '33. He was in the city to raise money for his medical bills, and had just made his final recording the night before. He was 35.

Bone-weary after a long Friday night, though, I leaned back on the seat and shut my eyes. I only had to be conscious enough to notice when the lead cabbie picked up a fare and pulled out into the midday traffic. Within a matter of minutes I was in front of the hotel door.

"Howdy, Mister," this big Texan fella barks at me from halfway across the sidewalk as he strides towards the cab wearing a dark pin-striped suit and a white ten-gallon cowboy hat, a ragged leather briefcase at his side. He's well into his monologue before he even climbs into the back seat. As I sat there waiting for him to finish his Texas ramble before asking him where he wanted to go, I noticed a man's head bobbing and weaving through the midday crowd on the sidewalk across the street. Right behind him, a policeman in hot pursuit.

"Looks like trouble over there," I say, pointing, and the cowboy's ramble stops mid-sentence.

"What the hell..."

As the bobbing heads reach a spot directly across from us, the first one, belonging to a big, seedy-looking guy, bursts out of the crowd and starts bolting across 7th Avenue toward the line of cabs. Behind him, the cop yells from between two parked cars, Stop! Give me back the gun! The guy stops in the middle of the street, turns around, and fires at him. The cop, clutching his throat, falls backward toward the screaming crowd, dead before he even hits the ground.

The cowboy and I sit in stunned silence as the killer now turns and starts running toward my cab. Waving the gun in the air, he curses at the lanky Texan in the backseat and lunges toward the taxi behind us, opens the rear door, climbs in and shouts, Get the fuck outta here! Now! As the driver begins to pull out, he opens his door, drops onto the street and rolls under my cab. The getaway car rolls to a stop no more than a dozen feet from mine. Then all hell breaks loose.

To the sound of sirens, screams and gunfire, I dive for the illusory safety of the front seat as the cowboy hits the floor in the back. After a few rounds of gunfire, curiosity overcomes fear, and, lifting my head above the front seat, I see a cop making his way to the rear of the getaway cab in a kind of sideways crawl. He fires off a half dozen rounds into the rear window, which is already shattered. Unbelievably, return fire knocks him to the street.

Stunned by what is happening and expecting bullets to rip through the door at any moment, I lie back down on the seat as the gunfire intensifies. In the background, over the din of a fusillade of bullets - I kid you not - the sounds of the Carter Family singing, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? on WBAI, emanate from my portable radio, now lying on the front floor, intermingled with the prayers and curses coming from the seat behind me.

Finally, a pause in the hellfire. Outside the window an army of cops advance toward the bullet-riddled cab. With a flourish reminiscent of the slo-mo finale of Bonnie and Clyde, they shred what remains of the back door of the getaway car. Once the silence seems to hold, the cowboy and I get out and walk around, adrenalin-charged, gunfire still ringing in our ears, like two soldiers climbing out of a foxhole, exulting at the simple fact that we're alive.

The street suddenly comes back to life as others emerge from their hiding places, crowds of onlookers now standing in clusters around the windowless, bullet-riddled cab. The cops open the door with guns drawn, two of them reach in and jerk the guy unceremoniously out onto the street. Justice had been swift. Blood is pouring from every part of his body.

As we help the other cabbie out from under my cab I notice two bullet holes in my trunk. Not bad, considering this was Bonny and Clyde Redux. After dropping my favorite cowboy off at his destination, I drive back to the garage, turn in my keys, and leave New York for good. Like my father before me, I'm headin' west. No way it could be as wild as this.

To be continued.....

Author's note: The story of this shootout can still be found in the archives of the New York Times, where it appeared on the front page the following day, March 1, 1970, under the headline, Gunman and Policeman Die in Times Square Area Battle, written, oddly enough, by a reporter named Thomas Brady. The policeman who died in the line of duty that day was 29-year old Michael Melchiona, leaving behind a wife, two children and a two-week old baby. The gunman, a drifter named John Girgosian, had disarmed Melchiona in a nearby subway station, and attempted to flee. The cop who fired into the rear window had also been hit the neck, but survived. Several pedestrians were also injured in the shootout, during which, by some estimates, as many as a hundred shots were fired. The photo of the aftermath, above, is from the Times article.