The Lemon-Green Spaghetti-Loud Dynamite-Dribble Day Read online

  And from the way they described it, that production of Macbeth was like nothing else anybody ever saw on land or sea. Four actors on the stage, only one of them in costume, all of them jabbering away in speeches from Macbeth, Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire, Oedipus Rex and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “It was like an anthology of the theater,” Mrs. Scannell said. “And not at all badly done. It hung together in a fascinating way, really.”

  That reminds me. I understand a publishing house is bringing out a book of the poetry and prose written in New York City on this one crazy LSD day. It’s a book I sure as hell intend to buy.

  But interesting or fascinating or what, that oddball show in a professional Broadway theater scared the pants off them. And the audience, what there was of it, scared them even more. They’d walked out and gone looking around, wondering who dropped the bomb.

  I shared my soda with them, using up the last of the six-pack. And I told them how I’d figured out it was in the water. Right away. Dr. Scannell—he was a dentist, I found out, not a medical doctor—right away, he snapped his fingers and said, “Damn it—LSD!” I bet that makes him the first man in the country to guess it, right?

  “LSD, LSD,” he repeated. “It’s colorless, odorless, tasteless. One ounce contains 300,000 full doses. A pound or so in the water supply and—Oh, my God! Those magazine articles gave someone the idea!”

  The three of us stood there drinking our soda and looking at the people screaming, the people chuckling, the people doing all kinds of crazy things. There were mobs now heading east and yelling, “Everybody to Fifth Avenue. Everybody to Fifth Avenue for the big parade!” It was like a kind of magic had spread the word, as if the whole population of Manhattan had gotten the same idea at the same time.

  I didn’t want to argue with a professional man, you know, but I’d also read a lot of those magazine articles on LSD. I said I hadn’t read about people doing some of the things I’d seen that day. I mean, I said, take those crowds chanting like that?

  Dr. Scannell said that was because of the cumulative feedback effect. The what? I said. So he explained how people had this stuff inside them, making them wide open psychologically to begin with, and all around them the air was full of other LSD reactions, going back and forth, building up and up. That was the cumulative feedback effect

  Then he talked about drug purity and drug dosage—how in this situation there was no control over how much anyone got. “Worst of all,” he said, “there’s been no psychological preparation. Under the circumstances, anything could happen.” He stared up and down the street at the crowds going chant-chant-chant, and he shivered.

  They decided to get some packaged food and drink, then go back to their hotel room and hole up until it was all over. They invited me along, but, I don’t know, by this time I was too interested to go into hiding; I wanted to see the thing through to the end. And I was too scared of fires to go and sit in a fourteenth-floor hotel room.

  When I left them, I followed the crowds that were going east as if they all had an appointment together. There were thick mobs on both sides of Fifth; across the avenue, I could see mobs of people coming west toward it. Everyone was yelling about the big parade.

  And there really was a parade, that’s the funny part. I don’t know how it got organized, or by whom, but it was the high point, the last word, the ultimate touch, to that damn day. What a parade!

  It was coming up Fifth Avenue against the one-way traffic arrows—although by this time there was no traffic anywhere—it was coming up in bursts of fifty or a hundred people, and in between each burst there’d be a thin line of stragglers that sometimes wandered off and got mixed in with the people on the sidewalk. Some of the signs they carried were smeary and wet from being recently painted; some of them looked very old as if they’d been pulled out of a trunk or a storage bin. Most of the paraders were chanting slogans or singing songs.

  Who the hell can remember all the organizations in that parade? I mean, you know, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the CCNY Alumni Association, the Untouchables of Avenue B, Alcoholics Anonymous, the NAACP, the Anti-Vivisection League, the Washington Heights Democratic Club, the B’nai B’rith, the West 49th Street Pimps and Prostitutes Mutual Legal Fund, the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, the Save-the-Village Committee, the Police Holy Name Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Our Lady of Pompeii Championship Basketball Team. All of them.

  And they were mixed in together. Pro-Castro Cubans and anti-Castro Cubans marching along side by side, singing the same mournful Spanish song. Three cops, one of them without shoes, with the group of college students carrying placards, “Draft Beer, Not People.” A young girl wearing a sandwich sign on which was scribbled in black crayon, “Legalize Rape—Now!” right in the middle of a bunch of old men and old women who were singing “Jay Lovestone is our leader, We shall not be moved…” The County Kerry band playing “Deutschland uber Alles” followed by the big crowd of men in business suits, convention badges in their lapels, who were teaching two tiny Italian nuns to sing, “Happy birthday, Marcia Tannenbaum, happy birthday to you.” The nuns were giggling and hiding their faces in their hands. And behind them, carrying a huge white banner that stretched right across Fifth Avenue, two grizzled-looking, grim-faced Negro men about seventy or eighty years old. The banner read: “Re-elect Woodrow Wilson. He kept us out of war!”

  All through the parade, there were people with little paint cans and brushes busily painting lines up the avenue. Green lines, purple lines, even white lines. One well-dressed man was painting a thin red line in the middle of the marchers. I thought he was a Communist until he painted past me and I heard him singing, “God save our gracious queen…” as he walked backward working away with the brush. When his paint ran out, he joined a bunch from Local 802 of the Musicians Union who had come along holding up signs and yelling, “Abolish Folk Songs! Save Tin Pan Alley!”

  It was the best parade I ever saw. I watched it until the Army paratroops who’d landed in Central Park came down and began herding us to the Special Rehabilitation Centers they’d set up.

  And then, damn it, it was all over.

  Afterword

  I wrote this in the middle sixties when the world seemed filled with youngsters who smoked pot, dropped acid, and were generally willing to swallow anything that looked as if it might have come from a back-alley pharmacy.

  Two of them, college students, who came to our home for dinner late in that year were astonished to discover that Greenwich Villagers like the pair of us had never so much as turned on in our entire lives. “Don’t you want your consciousness expanded?” one of them asked my wife.

  “No,” Fruma replied. “If anything, I want it contracted.”

  And there it is—the trouble I have. The woman I’m married to. I didn’t want to include this story in my final collection. It certainly isn’t science fiction, I feel, not really. But Fruma said, “It’s a lovely story. Unappreciated.” (That’s an exact quote.)

  So what could I do? I stuck it in. We’ve been married now for almost forty-four years, and I don’t know any other way to handle my problems with her.

  Written 1966 / Published 1967

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