Love from New York

“Love from New York” is the collection of stories about my life and times that I wrote when I was in pandemic lockdown. I started with memories of New York City in the old days, my life in Greenwich Village in the nineteen-sixties when I went to concerts at the Fillmore East, saw Jimi Hendrix on the streets and watched Jim Morrison prowl for drugs at Max’s Kansas City. On the first day of the summer of love, I heard the Grateful Dead play their first concert outside of California. I went to Columbia University and I worked as a Ford model. I hung out with everyone, rock musicians, hippies, drug dealers, bike gangs, actors and college friends who called themselves revolutionaries who went on to blow themselves up in a townhouse. I went on stage as a stand-up comic, I was there at the pasture of sodden sheep shit that was Woodstock and when I went to a party at Andy Warhol’s Factory, I stole a can of Campbell’s tomato soup from his kitchen. But as I was writing all this, the reality of my violent family loomed and I attempted to write about them, not an easy task. My father had been a doctor in Minnesota who was so violent the people in our hometown feared he might become a shooter and we were homeless for three years as they ran us out of town in a non-violent vigilante action. My mother’s family had been involved in opening the great Minnesota Mesabe Range to the iron mines that were the basis of the steel that built America. I was horrified to discover that the mines my family had opened, although my family had already sold them, dealt with striking miners by hiring militias to shoot them. My extended family were hugely wealthy and an unmarried great aunt adopted a daughter who turned on her adoptive mother and, allegedly, had her murdered. That daughter went on, allegedly, to take the lives of four other people. Writing about my family has been difficult but I include those stories in my podcasts. Thank you for listening.