My Odyssey Through the Underground Press

Chapter 7: Time to Get a Life

CHAPTER 7 Time to Get a Life W ith the fiction of working on the Hill’s newspaper set to rest once and for all, it was time for Candy and me to figure out what else to do with our lives. She readily moved into the sisterhood of Fort Hill women, with their flocks of babies to tend and their men to take care of and make fun of. I knew then and know now little of what went on among them, other than that they were ingrown in their little society and traditional in their viewpoint. I found it strange to watch Candy, who had been as rebellious and modern a woman as I had known, relax into traditional roles and dress, but that was the Fort Hill way. The “battle of the sexes” was very much alive at Fort Hill. The men, too, had a tight little society based on traditional roles and expectations, but I found it far from easy to merge with them. I had never had any notion whatsoever of living out a traditional man’s role of any kind, didn’t even have concepts like that in my mind, and certainly had no plans of playing a traditional blue-collar man’s role, performing physical labor and hanging out with the boys, complaining about the women but otherwise accepting my limited lot in life. To a surprising degree, in the absence of the occasional uplift provided by association with some work of creation inspired or produced by Mel, this was all there was to the day-to-day life of the Fort Hill men. I was also surprised to find how much racism was expressed in the everyday conversation of the men—how little regard they had for the black community that surrounded us, and even for the occasional black seeker who would come visiting or looking to join the community. Sexist language was also the order of the day; the standard phrase indicating a tiny measurement was “cunt-hair,” as in “Move it to the left just a cunt-hair.” I had never heard or used such talk. My first real experience with the men’s society had come when I was drafted into working on the stone wall around Mel’s house while we were waiting for the newspaper wars to resolve themselves somehow. I was pleased enough to be learning a bit about cutting and setting stone. I asked one day, during a fairly demanding work session, why Mel wasn’t out there with us, building this wall around his house that he had asked for. The answer, delivered in a tone of condescension, gave me one of the basic Fort Hill truths: Mel didn’t work on these demeaning physical tasks because he spent his time and energy keeping us all together by 62 | Chapter 7 doing his creative work—taking care of our spirits, as it were. Well, that made vague sense to me, but it didn’t tell me much about what I could expect for myself. That lesson was to come in other ways. In the course of working on the wall, I made the acquaintance of Richie Guerin, another of Mel’s closest lieutenants. Richie had come to the Hill as a dropout from architecture school, the son of a construction worker from New York, and a bit of a musician, too. He was young and brash, and talented in both design and construction supervision—a valuable asset to Mel as he imagined rebuilding the row of houses on the Hill into a multimedia production facility. The stone wall was just a necessary preliminary project. Richie was also one of the Hill’s astrologers; when I learned that the graceful hand-painted charts I had seen in a number of people’s private spaces had been created by him, I decided I wanted one for myself and asked for a reading. I found Richie easier to relate to, as a fellow Taurus, than Joey Goldfarb. Finally, we had our evening to discuss my chart. Too Many Planets in Aries I already knew that my sun—representing my essential self—was located in Taurus, a sign that denotes stability and consistency, determination, and earthbound, practical wisdom; and that my moon—representing my personality and my way of presenting myself to others—was in Aries, a sign that suggested inspiration and creativity, individuality, and unpredictability. (Remember, Mel’s sun was in Aries.) This combination indicated an interesting...