It's a good thing you're 21 only once: Christmas 1968 in dirty, snowy, brilliant New York City
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Fillmore East
13 min read
The legendary rock concert venue mentioned as being near the narrator's location was central to the 1960s counterculture music scene, hosting iconic performances that defined an era
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Abbie Hoffman
16 min read
The Yippie organizer and radical activist discussed in the article played a pivotal role in 1960s protest movements, and the story includes specific details about his hepatitis infection from a police blood test
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Ed Sanders
13 min read
The poet who ran Peace Eye Bookstore and founded The Fugs was a key figure in the Lower East Side counterculture scene where this Christmas story takes place
Tonight on Christmas Eve, I’m reprinting a story I published in Salon in 2022. Tracy and I hope you have a wonderful Christmas!
Christmas week in 1968, I was a cadet at West Point with no place to go. My parents were stationed in Hawaii that year, and I couldn’t afford the airfare to fly from New York to Honolulu. A trip to Colorado hitchhiking on an Air Force cargo plane, like the one I had taken with a friend the year before, was out, because the military brass had cut back availability for such flights for some budgetary reason I can’t recall after all these years.
And so, I called a girl – a young woman, I should say – I had met at the Village Voice Christmas party earlier in the month and just came right out and asked her if I could spend Christmas with her in New York. She was a nurse at Bellevue Hospital on First Avenue, and we had taken to each other at the party with a, shall I say, certain youthful fervor, and she quickly said yes. All I had to do was take the bus down to Port Authority, shoot across to Grand Central on the shuttle, take the Lexington Avenue line down to Bleecker and walk across to her pad on East 2nd Street, in the middle of a bombed-out block of abandoned tenements and empty lots where the hulks of burned-out cars competed for bragging rights with dead sofas and piles of household trash.
But the Fillmore East was a few blocks away, the Five Spot was up on St. Mark’s Place, Stanley’s Bar was straight up Avenue B, the jazz club Slugs was just around the corner on East 3rd Street, so the location was more or less in the red hot center of everything cool that was happening on the Lower East Side. I’ll never forget that walk down East 2nd Street a few days before Christmas. There wasn’t a single twinkling light or even a scrap of a pine bough all the way from the subway station to her building. Instead, there were boarded-up windows covered with sheets of tin, most of which, on the ground floors, had been peeled back with crowbars so junkies could get inside and disassemble window trim and baseboards to make fires in the kitchens hoping the building wouldn’t burn down,
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