*** Gypsy Love In The Summer of Love, Circa 1966

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

This was the way it started with Gypsy Love and me. “Hey Mister, do you want to buy some flowers for your girlfriend?” And just then, girlfriend-less and walking alone, I started to say no but something, something from deep inside me, or maybe in my reaction to her, made me say this, “Sure, but since I don’t have a girlfriend  I will just buy them and why don’t you just keep them and wear them in your hair.” Something about that sentiment struck a chord in her as well, as she flashed that beguiling smile of hers that I can still see in the mind’s eye all this time later. So we continued to talk, talk a lot for the next several minutes even though many people, many potential customer people, lots of young men and women in every type of garment, from square madras Bermuda shorts to buckskin jackets and bell-bottom trousers to wispy billowy long dresses, and nobody thought anything of one particular costume over another, as befit the times, out on dates or just goofing, were walking by on this moonless night, this moonless Boylston Street 1966 Friday summer night that I am thinking about.

We talked the usual “who are you?, where are you from?, why is a delicate flower like you selling flowers on the streets on nice summer night?” talk (as she put my flower gift in her hair making her even more beguiling). We talked some more, maybe about the weather, or about the latest Rolling Stones album or about the huge influx of young people coming from hither and yon to encamp in Boston and try do a version of their own jailbreak from suburban square life. She mentioned that in her own case she was trying to break out on her own to from her Nashua, New Hampshire home and pursue some kind of art career. She was taking classes part-time at the Museum School and was working the flower- strewn streets to make rent money and maybe a little food. I mentioned that I was finishing school but was in no hurry since “uncle” was ready to call my draft number to go fight his nasty little war in Southeast Asia anytime I decided that school was a drag. We talked, as I got slightly panicky that she would drift away to sell her flowers, to make her rent money. We talked until we ran out of strangers in the night generic talk, and, as we laughed about it later, stuttered some stuff out at times to have reason not to part ways just then. After a while I told her that I would sit on the steps of the Public Library until she finished selling her flowers and then maybe we could go up to the Unicorn coffeehouse and talk some more. She didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no so I apparently had to take my chances. So I sat on those steps hoping, hoping for about a half hour and then she came up behind me and placed the last couple of unsold flowers in my getting longish hair. And that is the way it started, I swear.

Of course Gypsy Love was just the pet name that I gave her a little later, and it is better for all concerned that we just leave it like that, although not for any particular privacy, things better left unsaid, or let sleeping dogs lie reason. It wasn’t like that with us in our time, the time of our time together, other than Gypsy Love says more about her, about me, and about what happened to us in those days that I want to tell you about than her real name. Naturally, naturally unless you might want to think otherwise, she was no more of a gypsy than I am. Long, flowing blonde hair, fair almost alabaster white skin, flashing blue eyes, bedroom eyes we called them around my old neighborhood, my old Hullstown neighborhood in my old high school days corner boy-sizing up the girls days a few years previously, kind of thin, kind of hadn’t had a good meal in a while thin, and wearing no make-up, as was the fashion in those days was not my picture, and I am sure not yours either, of a dark-skinned, dark-haired, dancing-eyed gypsy girl with a rose in her teeth doing the tarantella, or something like that.

No, the gypsy part came in because of the flowers. Right that 1966 minute you could not go down any city street, any decent-sized city street on a Friday night, a boy and girl-filled Friday night, and not have some enterprising real-live gypsy girl, maybe twelve or twenty, who knows, trying to sell you some woe-begotten, faded, wilted, or worst, plastic, Christ, plastic rose, a single rose, by the way, for your girlfriend. All the while she cheapskate embarrassed you when you sheepishly blustered out "no thanks." Or she would direct you, no steer you, to some Madame LaRue ancient gypsy-mother in the window fortune-telling lady. An ancient gypsy mother woman who would, for small, very small, change, and knowing whom to pitch her spiel to, start running life’s wheel of fortune, to tell you of just ahead glad tidings. And then having exhausted her magic, would add “But wouldn’t the lady also like to know love’s fortune?’ for an extra thin coin at you. And then, always, always looking into her crystal ball, or the cards, T.S. Eliot’s dread tarot cards, and, whee, thankfully predict love’s delights. And that is the long and short of it for the gypsy part. The love part is self-explanatory, is stuff that has been going on so long it need not detain us, or should not, and if it is not you will catch the drift as I go along.

Let’s say in 1962 or 1963, on some other moonless Boylston Street night, some high school moonless night looking for one of the latest, cheap date, coffeehouses that dotted the street and were the rage those few years back that real gypsy girl would have been left by me to ply her trade, her rose-pedaling trade (maybe an older sister might have been working some other, more adult, scheme, but in that boy and girl-filled night I was not noticing that scene since I was girl-ed up and working, or trying to work, my charm on said girl) and would have had no fair-haired gypsy love girl competition.

See in 1966 all hell had broken loose in the land. There had been a jail-break among the young, among some of the more adventurous or alienated young, who had decided, and rightly so, that suburban, white picket-fence, college, then graduate school, then a respectable profession, and then, yes, then, then, then a straight line replication of dear mother and father was not in the cards. And one did not need a fortune-telling lady, ancient gypsy-mother or not, tarot cards reading or not, to know that death-strewn street. So some, and Gypsy Love included herself among the some as I did, decided that the jail-break was worth the risk, worth the risk for a little while anyway. Then let’s see what happened. The stars were aligned or at least I, we, were going to grab the ticket, and ride the crest of that max daddy wave.   

But jail-break or not, picket-fence security or not, squaresville or edge city, you still needed dough, dough to keep off the “hairy (term of art meaning scary),” not woman friendly streets, dough to keep body and soul together, hell, dough for the yarn to start up that shawl-making business she told me about later that was the direct reason that Gypsy Love was selling flowers to get some seed money to sell them in furtherance of her art career. She was not selling suburban boy and girl in town for a weekend to look at, maybe seek, the hippies night roses, and certainly no gypsy plastic throw-aways, just cut flowers suitable for hair from the wholesale Flower Exchange (Gypsy Love had some business sense too), and medieval garlands to prance around the Boston Common. Although like I said before when describing my first look at her, she was obviously not getting enough business to keep her from being not enough to eat thin. After all that was a summer of love, not the 1967 “officially” proclaimed one, proclaimed from this Atlantic shore to San Francisco but still a summer of love and every unattached (and maybe some attached, who knows), fair-haired, alabaster white-skinned fairy princess was also selling flowers, or something, to keep the wolves from the door.

So, naturally, once I knew the score, from that talking several minutes (and later) that I held Gypsy Love up (although, as it turned out, she was more than happy to be talking rather than selling flowers) made me feel guilty and I offered to spring for a little dinner for her rather than some cheap jack cup of coffeehouse coffee. Either out of hunger, or some spark between us that she also felt, she said yes, an empathic yes, or at least that is how I am going to tell it. So, "old pro" Boylston Street denizen that I had become we went into the Olive, a cheap old time caboose diner that served light meals, light meals in the dark, ambience they called it. So we ate some supper, not too badly served that night. A not drunk chef must have been on duty that night or something, and then left after Gypsy Love had had enough to eat (and asked to take the leavings home, something I never would have thought of and was not commonly done then). And then we headed, kind of ambling, stumbling and both a little shy about it, for her garret over on Commonwealth Avenue.

Yes, it was certainly a garret no question. I had been in enough such places before that, no problem, I was, if anything, no snob when it came to other people’s living quarters.  I had my own roommate- shared small apartment over on Westland Avenue next Symphony Hall so I knew the drill. What I didn’t expect, didn’t expect when she invited me over was that she shared the place with about six others, boys and girls alike, some paired, some not. And that was also okay, or rather it turned out to be okay, because among the denizens of that place was a guy, no, a gallant, who knowing that he could not compete with the Gypsy Love flower-sellers of the Boston night sold dope instead. And good stuff too, primo Acapulco Gold and Columbia Red that he got from some Spanish girl, no that is not right, some Mexican girl, some sunflower sunshine Juanita girl connection that he had met over in Cambridge Common where he hung out during the day. And he was not averse to sharing some of his own stash with his roomies, and their friends. Yah, it was that kind of time, unlike later when guys would try to sell you oregano or something like you were some nowhere clown.        

So that night, that moonless Commonwealth Avenue garret summer night, Gypsy Love and I got “high,” 1966  high, not old-time alcohol-induced twenty college generations before Saturday night fraternity row beer-kegged, not old-time alcohol-induced whiskey, whiskey with a beer chaser like my father and his working- class cronies over at some local Dublin Pub, not rye whiskey with a water chaser like I used to like to drink before that became passé, not scotch neat, martini dry, manhattan on the rocks Mayfair swells high like the squares out there with the picket fences, not oblivion, forget, remember to forget, raging against the day, against the night high, but mellow, insightful high. And this stuff was so strong, so laced with whatever chemist’s knowledge-laced, and with whatever nutrient rich volcanic ash grown side of some desolate latin mountain that we really couldn’t sleep. Maybe Gypsy Love couldn’t sleep because, like I noticed when I first started talking to her, she was so thin and the good non-drunken chef food earlier and then this laced-primo dope kept her up, and I was up because she was Gypsy Love and I was too busy drinking her in for the first time to waste time on sleep.

So we “split” (left the premises, or went out, for the squares, okay) the scene at the walk-up garret with its menagerie of humanity, also all laced- high as far as I could tell as we closed the door behind us, around two o’clock in the morning to “goof” on (not make fun of, not serious, hurtful make fun of anyway, but more like let’s let the dope take its course, observe the late hour night life, again for the squares who don’t know, and again okay, okay) the Boylston Street scene. Strangely, most of my late, late night, improper Boston late night scene really wasn’t spent in Boston, but rather in Cambridge, in Harvard Square, specifically since about 1962 at the all-night Hayes –Bickford right up from the subway station, kind of a budding literary hang-out place but in any case a long way refuge from bad high school home scenes, and later to soak in the night life, and catch a few ideas, if only by osmosis. All for the price of a refillable watery dregs cup of coffee and maybe a soggy Danish or stale three o’clock in the morning yesterday muffin.

But this Boylston Street scene was something else, 1966 something else. Something at once more alive, more viscerally alive than the, when you really thought about it, staid and now well-worn late night Bickford literary scene with its ritual low important conversation hum, its frantic writerliness, and its slow drum tattoo beat to define “cool.” And, at the same time more destructive, not Vietnam War nightly television waste destructive that the mad daddies in D.C. had already cornered the market on, and were not letting go of despite many anguished cries, but more the sense that this was the last chance for happiness, or sanity, or some such thing and we had better grab it now before it blows away with the winds, or we get tired of riding it and go back to the cocoons. A madness scene, and let’s leave it at that, leave it at that until the dope wears off.

Sure, there were the jugglers, juggling all improbable combinations of materials from bowling pins to ninja sticks, and clowns, Charley Chaplin tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, Disneyland clowns, squirting, spraying, belching, bellowing, bestriding bicycles, bouncing balls and baby cars, and whatever seven other things clowns do, were out in force. No hip town, no college night town from east to west, from Cambridge to Berkeley, Ann Arbor in between, no cultural oasis town from the Village to Venice Beach, Austin in between, America or Europe, continental Europe Paris the hub, London in between was “hip,” (not squares for the squares, got it) without a plethora of those brethren.

Or the one-trick pony Monte guys sitting at little tables or on benches “organizing” a game, cards, walnut shells, peas-in-a pod a specialty, acrobats, maybe some circus castoffs or Olympic failure cases, bouncing off each other, sparkling uniforms making an arc to off-set the trickiness of the action, and maybe in a couple of years Vegas in the big tent, into the dead air night. And anyone else with any talent, any mimic money, spare-change, put the dough in the hat right in front of you, please, talent to keep the wolves away from the door.

And sure too a zillion guitar players, and some nights in Harvard Square a few years previously  that might have been a low-ball estimate, now electric, electrified in the post-Dylan night, and diehard acoustics, trads, trying to maintain but losing the battle in the sound night and have the empty hats to prove it. Plugged in or on the edge though, singing, crooning, bleeping, basheeing, bahai-ing, rama-ing, hari-ing, and just plain old-fashioned vanilla screaming, along with tambourines, kazoos, wash tubs, triangles, oboes, hautboys, water glasses of various sizes, anything that could, or would, or should, make music, enough music to keep those ravenous wolves away from that damn door.

Guys and gals, angel love guys and gals, hop-headed or harmless, bejeweled or buckskinned, selling every kind of dope from every arm, reaching into every pocket for a pill here, some tea leaves there, more rare, an eight ball of this, and rarer still then although after a while I heard about it more, maybe a girl-boy (coke, H) combination for a permanent float. And every kind of kid (mainly), some college preppie out on the Boylston Street night, maybe tired, too tired from that fraternity beer-keg and some lame three hundred freshman in a telephone booth, or a Volkswagen joke, some suburban high school break-out kid looking to forget the corner boy action, or the last dance, last high school dance failure, and didn’t want to go home, some car-full of girls (always a car-full, never less) from a different suburb, looking, well, looking for those “hippie” guys that look kind of cute now, now that mother and father don’t approve of hippie guys, and streams of boys and girls in all colors and shades and all uniforms just getting in from the long bus ride from Bangor, or Montpelier and intent, seriously intent , on breaking out of that hayseed world, buying those fifty-seven flavors and smoking, dropping, or swallowing it right there on the premises, the street premises and wilding out (going crazy with joy, ecstasy, fear, freak-out) before hard dawn hits the streets.

But also every 1950s hipster, dipster, grifter, drifter and midnight sifter who had enough sense to catch sleep during the day and come out at night and do his or her rube-taking madness. Some bad ass madness, some not from the suburbs, not now anyway, madness, police-worthy-of-notice madness. The clash between the dope-infested madness and the lumpen-greed head madness, the known world’s madness in new form, would define that summer, for good or evil. But right then for the good, for the good Mexican night dope that was just beginning to wear off and let sleep take its course. Then dawn came, or just that few minutes before dawn, when heavy, lumpish human outline figures started to take distinctive shape, and Gypsy Love and I could look over on Boston Common hill and see the outline forms of hundreds of sleeping bags, tent city resident pup-tent, oddly Army surplus, homemade lean-too dwellers, park bench newspaper-pillowed sleepers, whatever, sheltering the summer of love refugees against that moonless night. And just at that pre-dawn moment I knew that Gypsy Love and I were solid for that moment, and for some other moments, and for a while beyond that too but I began to wonder when the cold winds came, when the skies turned granite grey in revenge, when the yellowish, brownish, orange-ish leaves started falling would we have been done with our moment.