inflection at all: “I never got a tape of yours from Odetta.”
Suddenly I wasn’t high anymore, just tired. I was on my own in a strange city, and the vibes were spooking me plenty. (To keep the record straight, I later found out that Odetta had never got the tape in the first place. My intermediary had blown it.)
So I told him my sad tale, how I had hitched all the way from New York, blah, blah, blah. He heard me out noncommittally. “Well,” he said, “you’ve come all this way . . . Why not audition right now? There’s the stage.”
This wasn’t going according to my script at all, but maybe I could still pull it out. I got onstage and launched into a set of my biggest flag-wavers: “Tell Old Bill,” “Willie the Weeper,” “Dink’s Song,” and suchlike. I could see Albert plainly—the house lights were still on. His face had the studied impassiveness of a very bad poker player with a very good hand. All around me chairs and tables scraped and thumped, glasses and silverware clinked and rattled, but I forged on. This was D-Day, goddamnit, and I was showing this hypercool Chicago hick how we did it in Washington Square.
I’m afraid that’s just what I did.
When I got off, Albert still had not batted an eyelash. “Do you know who works here?” he asked. “Big Bill Broonzy works here. Josh White works here. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry play here a lot. Now tell me,” he went on, “why should I hire you?”
I could have killed him on the spot, but I contented myself with screaming in his face, “Grossman, you son of a bitch, you’re Crow-Jimming me!”
Back out on the street, where I belonged, I made some quick decisions. I had planned to call some friends on the South Side and hang around Chicago for a few days, but I was so bummed out that all I could think of was getting back on the road and holing up in New York until I could find me another ship—Tasmania or Tierra del Fuego sounded about right. A life on the rolling waves was beginning to look good again.
My first ride going east was with a bunch of young guys who were doing some serious partying. A jug of bourbon was being passed around, and I gratefully took my turn when it got to me. Just what I needed—a few belts of that rotgut and I crashed like the Hindenburg. The next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake: “Hey, we’re getting off the thruway; you’ll have to get out here.” Groggily, I grabbed my guitar (I had almost given it to a wino back in Chi) and got out of the car somewhere in Indiana.
There I stood, half loaded and half hungover, coming down off speed in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with my thumb stuck out like a gooney bird’s beak. I stuck my other hand in my pocket—it was chilly—and, sure enough, my wallet was gone. It was a perfect moment.
Now this is the hook: it wasn’t the thirty or so bucks—those would have gone anyway in another few days—but my seaman’s papers were in that wallet. The Coast Guard issues those papers and waxes very suspicious when someone reports them missing. It seems they fetch a good price on the black market, and sailors are not always immune to temptation. I would have to testify before some kind of board, and there would have to be an investigation before I could get those papers replaced. It might take six months or a year before I could get a new set and ship out again, or so I had been told when I first got them. Furthermore, with my politics and all my Commie friends, it had been a small miracle that I was given them at all. Hearings and investigations were simply asking for trouble: the powers that be would probably assume I had handed my papers over to some filthy Red who was on the lam from the forces of freedom and righteousness. A big mess all around. I was on the beach permanently.
So that’s how I became a folksinger. Like most great career choices, it was a decision by default.
5
The Guild and Caravan
F or better or worse,
Suddenly I wasn’t high anymore, just tired. I was on my own in a strange city, and the vibes were spooking me plenty. (To keep the record straight, I later found out that Odetta had never got the tape in the first place. My intermediary had blown it.)
So I told him my sad tale, how I had hitched all the way from New York, blah, blah, blah. He heard me out noncommittally. “Well,” he said, “you’ve come all this way . . . Why not audition right now? There’s the stage.”
This wasn’t going according to my script at all, but maybe I could still pull it out. I got onstage and launched into a set of my biggest flag-wavers: “Tell Old Bill,” “Willie the Weeper,” “Dink’s Song,” and suchlike. I could see Albert plainly—the house lights were still on. His face had the studied impassiveness of a very bad poker player with a very good hand. All around me chairs and tables scraped and thumped, glasses and silverware clinked and rattled, but I forged on. This was D-Day, goddamnit, and I was showing this hypercool Chicago hick how we did it in Washington Square.
I’m afraid that’s just what I did.
When I got off, Albert still had not batted an eyelash. “Do you know who works here?” he asked. “Big Bill Broonzy works here. Josh White works here. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry play here a lot. Now tell me,” he went on, “why should I hire you?”
I could have killed him on the spot, but I contented myself with screaming in his face, “Grossman, you son of a bitch, you’re Crow-Jimming me!”
Back out on the street, where I belonged, I made some quick decisions. I had planned to call some friends on the South Side and hang around Chicago for a few days, but I was so bummed out that all I could think of was getting back on the road and holing up in New York until I could find me another ship—Tasmania or Tierra del Fuego sounded about right. A life on the rolling waves was beginning to look good again.
My first ride going east was with a bunch of young guys who were doing some serious partying. A jug of bourbon was being passed around, and I gratefully took my turn when it got to me. Just what I needed—a few belts of that rotgut and I crashed like the Hindenburg. The next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake: “Hey, we’re getting off the thruway; you’ll have to get out here.” Groggily, I grabbed my guitar (I had almost given it to a wino back in Chi) and got out of the car somewhere in Indiana.
There I stood, half loaded and half hungover, coming down off speed in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with my thumb stuck out like a gooney bird’s beak. I stuck my other hand in my pocket—it was chilly—and, sure enough, my wallet was gone. It was a perfect moment.
Now this is the hook: it wasn’t the thirty or so bucks—those would have gone anyway in another few days—but my seaman’s papers were in that wallet. The Coast Guard issues those papers and waxes very suspicious when someone reports them missing. It seems they fetch a good price on the black market, and sailors are not always immune to temptation. I would have to testify before some kind of board, and there would have to be an investigation before I could get those papers replaced. It might take six months or a year before I could get a new set and ship out again, or so I had been told when I first got them. Furthermore, with my politics and all my Commie friends, it had been a small miracle that I was given them at all. Hearings and investigations were simply asking for trouble: the powers that be would probably assume I had handed my papers over to some filthy Red who was on the lam from the forces of freedom and righteousness. A big mess all around. I was on the beach permanently.
So that’s how I became a folksinger. Like most great career choices, it was a decision by default.
5
The Guild and Caravan
F or better or worse,
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