My Odyssey Through the Underground Press

Chapter 5: Settling In

CHAPTER 5 Settling In N one of this made much sense to Candy and me as we settled in from the highway, with our carload of household goods, our two cats, our young boyfriend along for the ride (who stayed only a few weeks), and our high hopes. And none of it would be made available to us just yet, either. We didn’t get to live in the houses on Fort Avenue Terrace, or even in the apartments on Fort Avenue. There were other satellite houses and apartments farther away in the neighborhood, and we got to live in one of those. Rachel Brause—a slightly older, frumpy, but creative woman from New York who had somehow become a follower, but not a close friend, of Mel’s—had an apartment a short couple of blocks away, with several bedrooms and a small sleeping loft. This was where we three were installed, at least until a more suitable place could be found. Rachel had endless stories about the Hill and its people, but we soon could see that she was not really an insider. With her house as our base, we set to work on Avatar, to the best of our ability. It was not easy to figure out what our role was. Despite the intensity of community activity on Fort Hill, Avatar was headquartered in an old newspaper office in the South End, a rundown neighborhood of brownstone houses and commercial buildings close to downtown Boston, a ghetto populated mostly by blacks and hippies. Some of the people working on the paper lived in the neighborhood, which made sense to us as it resembled the way we had lived and worked in East Lansing, and some lived in Cambridge, where Avatar had originally been published, operating out of the offices of a music magazine named Broadside, whose editor, Dave Wilson, used to be involved in Avatar as well, but no longer was. We knew from reading the early issues in Michigan that Avatar had been at the center of a huge censorship controversy in Cambridge, another in the now-familiar series of attempts by local authorities to suppress the underground press on the basis of “obscenity.” That attempt had failed here, as elsewhere, but in the process it had made Avatar a cause célèbre, giving Mel the opportunity to vent his literary spleen in wonderfully obscene tirades, and Eben the chance to create a notorious centerfold with the words “fuck shit piss cunt” in giant hand lettering—all these published as challenges to the would-be censors. The notoriety of the fight had helped increase the size of the staff and the circulation; had embarrassed the city fathers of both Cambridge and Boston, as well as 46 | Chapter 5 the governor of Massachusetts, who couldn’t resist getting involved; and had caused the Avatar offices to be moved to Boston in order to avoid the wrathful oversight of Cambridge officials. Now the office in the South End served as a sort of meeting ground for the various communities of folks interested in Avatar. This was an entirely satisfactory arrangement for us, or at least for me, as a newcomer. I felt stimulated by all the different kinds of people who came through the place, and I had fun being in an urban environment close to the center of a city I found very interesting. Wayne set me up in a small office, where I had a rather empty desk and not a lot of responsibility. Avatar was published every two weeks, and all I knew for sure I would be working on was layout. Candy joined the team of typists who split time on a single IBM Selectric, laboriously producing the columns of justified copy for the paper in a tiny typeface. (Ironically, there was a full-scale Linotype machine sitting in the office, sort of a museum piece that, naturally, we didn’t use.) We had plenty of time to explore the geography of the area, and to get to know the people we were working with. One day soon after we arrived, a guy named Abbie Hoffman showed up at the office, full of the idea he was promoting for a Youth International Party that would storm the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago that summer. Most days were quieter than that. But troubles had by now been brewing among the several factions of the...