Greenwich Village: Bowls of Rice & Bowls of Hash

I read Joey’s letter over and over. As a journalism student in NYC I became acutely aware of the horrors of the war in Vietnam, but with Joey’s letter it came crashing home with a fury.  It wasn’t just some film footage on the evening news anymore. It was now real. My best friend was in the mire of the quicksand caused by politics in the Beltway of D.C. I started keeping a journal from that day forward. Today also contained another element that was to change my life forever. My parents back in Detroit  had received my draft notice. I hadn’t bothered to leave my forwarding address with the draft board.

It read in part TO: Mickey Cusamano 3484 Three Mile Drive, Detroit, Michigan. You are hereby directed to present yourself for Armed Forces Physical Examination...blah, blah, blah.”

I was living in an old loft apartment in the Village, close to campus with my girlfriend, Myrika Christie, a young German immigrant student, artist and musician who in addition to being a songwriter, also sang at the various coffee houses on MacDougal Street which was the Bohemian center of the folk music scene in New York and the epicenter of the cities left wing politics. It’s also where we saw Lenny Bruce perform on one of his last “concerts” before he OD’d and crashed dead onto the bathroom floor

The Cafe Wha was her favorite showcase as it was the folk Fort Knox of the  folk music scene at the time. On Sunday’s we would spend time at Washington Square where all the budding musicians and poets and bards and artists and yes, this journalism student would venture to and spend the day, sharing the sunshine discussing music, the war,  Civil Rights, politics, and the draft while the sweet smell of marijuana would fill the air as pamphleteers would pass out mini manifesto’s produced on beat up Gestentner machines. They were from various groups from the SDS of which I was a member to that weeks copy of The Guardian, a radical leftist independent weekly newspaper published  in the city. They were attacked by the hardhat generation for having Communist sympathies or worse.

At the time I was also writing about the music scene and the musicians who would perform in the clubs for the Bleecker Street Free Press. It didn’t pay much, but for Myrika and myself it helped pay for the apartment, (mice and cockroaches were free), our bags of Basmati rice (We could stretch rice meals from the artist lofts of  NYC to the slums of Delhi on the Yamuna River). Rice with vegetables, rice with cheap grade hamburger, and of course rice with more rice, to go along with a cheap bottle of Night Train or Boone’s Farm wine to go with the seeds and stems in our bag of marijuana.

It was a great scene for two young radicalized lovers. The Sixties were  a plain brown bag holding a cheap bottle of wine that spilled out onto the streets of the south as the Civil Rights movement went on the march and opposition to the war in Vietnam was exploding  there was no turning back...the point of no return had been crossed. In Greenwich Village in hard concrete gray New York, folkies were sounding the alarm through thought provoking lyrics set against an acoustic background soon amplified.


Folk music was not about flowers and clouds anymore..now they were laced with doses of lyrical protest. The Eve of Destruction dawned across the land, you know, the land that is my land, your land, made for you and me.. Folk music blended with poetry in the coffeehouse circuit of the East Village in New York to North Beach in San Francisco.

Folk music was now making statements with music and lyrics. Tame at first in the Fifties, by the Sixties, the merely pleasing vocal harmonies of folk groups were changing, The bards and the poets of peace, love and understanding were on the march for civil rights in the south, against American involvement in Vietnam, wanting to ban the bomb and nix the nukes. Women’s Liberation was in full bloom and bras were burned joining the raging bonfire of draft cards and American flags.

Myrika was frightened I would end up in Vietnam. I was scared shitless. We didn’t want to lose each other.  So that night we made a fateful decision...if we had to we would head as far as we could from Detroit’s induction center at old Ft. Wayne and New York where they would be sure to find me eventually. We had an old VW car that was given to us by a friend and musician who was drafted and answered the call. Hopefully it would take us out of the vortex where my options were to wear the green and pick up a gun and join the fun in Vietnam; go to prison or get our asses north to war resister friendly Canada, or even out west to get lost in San Francisco’s post Beat solar system.  

I wrote to Joey and told him our plans weren’t set in stone as fixed as the sword of Arthur’s Excalibur nor was I Merlin. I could however, make myself disappear. That night Myrika and I  sat down, and over our bowls of rice and a bowl of hashish, set about planning our grand getaway….beat up VW, writing journals, Myrika’s two guitars, and enough internal fear to fuel our journey to hell and back...or at least to San Francisco or Toronto!