On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway (20 page)

Finally, we decided Lolly had more balls than Dickey or I, and she completed the dialing.

“
It’s ringing,” she said, looking at us nervously. “What if he doesn’t answer? Do I leave…um, hello.” She paused, giving us the “I’m AWAKE” Big Eyes. “I’m a friend of Eric’s. He gave me your number. My name is Lolly.”

She was doing great, although I would have used a fake name. Dickey and I watched intently.

“
Yes. I was wondering if you were going to be around tonight?” The question came out awkward and unsure. She definitely sounded like a first-timer, which could work in our favor, as he’d be sure she wasn’t a cop. “Yes. I’m at 109
^th
and Amsterdam…OK. Sure. All right. Great. We’ll see you soon.” And she hung up. We were all silent for a moment.

“
Well?” Dickey said, unable to maintain the requisite tension-building silence.

“
He’s going to be at the corner in 15 minutes. He’s in a black Honda Accord with tinted windows. He’ll call when he’s there, then we’re supposed to go out and get in his car.”

“
Are you fucking crazy?” I asked. “There’s no way we’re getting into some drug-dealer’s car. He could rob us or kill us.”

“
Or rape us,” Dickey added delightfully, making fun of my prudishness. “Don’t worry, Randy. I’ll go with Lolly. You can stay here.”

I didn’t argue. I told myself that someone needed to be home in case they were arrested. Always have someone on the outside. That’s a cardinal rule for criminals, and we were now officially criminals.

Our conversation quickly turned to how much we were going to secure and what we thought it might cost. In her haste, Lolly forgot to discuss the business details on the phone (if you could even do that), and we had no point of reference. Getting killed or raped were certainly on the menu of possible outcomes, but getting ripped off was far more likely.

We decided they’d accept 60 bucks. Dickey left his wallet, and Lolly removed her jewelry. They wouldn’t even bring keys, lest the drug dealer/thief/thug took them and helped himself to the contents of the apartment—which included me. If he was going to rob them, he’d get the 60 bucks and that was it… well, the 60 bucks and their innocence, if he so chose.

The phone rang, and we jumped out of our skins. Lolly lifted the receiver.

“
Hello?” she listened for a moment. “OK. We’ll see you in a second.” And she hung up the phone. “He’s coming up the block.”

We all stood up. I gave them each a ceremonial hug and told them I’d call the police if they weren’t back in five minutes. The door closed behind them, and I waited. And waited. And waited.

Twenty minutes later, somebody buzzed. I pressed the “listen” button to see if I could determine who was there. I heard Lolly and Dickey talking. Then, I pressed the “talk” button.

“
Are you guys OK?”

“
Yeah. We’re fine,” Dickey said. “Let us in.”

“
Are you alone?” I asked. I was worried the drug dealer/thief/thug had taken them hostage and was using them to gain entrance into the apartment.

“
Yes, we’re alone. Let us in already.”

Still unconvinced, I opened the apartment door. Dickey lived on the first floor, and you could see down the hallway out through the double-glass doors. There, on the stoop, stood Lolly and Dickey.

“
Open the fucking door!” they screamed when they saw me peeking down the hall. I pressed the door button, and they burst in.

“
What took you guys so long?” I asked. “It’s been, like, a half-hour. I was starting to really freak out.”

Lolly and Dickey were laughing, but I didn’t bother to ask what about.

“
We stopped at Saints for a drink,” Dickey said. “I thought you said you were going to call the cops if we weren’t back in five minutes?”

“
Yeah, well…I gave it a little more time.”

I mean, really. What would I tell the cops? My two friends were trying to buy drugs and got abducted? I could hear the laughter on the other side of the phone.

“
Did you get the stuff?” I asked. Lolly revealed a puffy bag, filled with a quarter-ounce of sticky green buds.

“
You guys are rock stars,” I said. “I don’t want to smoke, but I’ll roll a joint if anyone else does.”

Lolly and Dickey shook their heads. The excitement was in the securing of the substance, not the substance itself, so we skipped getting stoned and got down to work on the play instead.

The first point of business was to get the scoop straight from the horse’s mouth. Since we began the project, I had been in contact with Stew Albert, an original Yippie and a character in Jerry’s book. He and his wife were going to be in town, so we arranged to meet up at Ratner’s, a Lower East Side deli the Yippies frequented back in the day.

When I arrived, I could see Ratner’s days were numbered. The place still possessed a kind of nostalgic charm but was in complete disrepair. I commented on this as I sat down in the booth across from Stew and his wife Judy.

“
I know,” Stew said. “I hardly recognize it. They’ve changed so much around. But it’s been here since 1905. Janice Joplin and the Grateful Dead used to hang out here, so I’d put that hammer away. No nails in her coffin just yet.”

He was a feisty man with wild blond hair that could be best described as a Nordic Jew ‘fro.

We sat down, and I immediately expressed my worries about getting the rights to do the play. I was concerned the publisher, or Jerry’s estate, would sue us for using the book as our muse, and, in some instances, as our text. Stew gave me the contact info for Jerry’s brother, who he believed was in charge of the estate, but told me not to bother with all that nonsense—it wasn’t very Yippie like. Yippies didn’t ask for permission to do things. Yippies just did them.

“
What do you think would have happened if Abbie asked the New York Stock Exchange for permission to drop dollar bills onto the trading floor? Come on! The book is called
Do it!
Just do it. Listen, Randy, this country has got a real problem…”

I wondered to myself how many times he’d said that phrase. “This man that was just selected by the Supreme Court to be our President… This man is going to be real trouble. We all need to do everything we can to let people know that we the people are not going to sit back and watch our country be hijacked by this moron.”

His energy and passion belied his years, and I feverishly wrote notes in my book. I kept asking pointed questions: Did you all become drunk with your own notoriety? Did you ever feel like ending the war was a lost cause? What was the point of trying to levitate the Pentagon? And in each instance, he answered the questions as simply as possible.

“
Yes. No. The point was to call attention to the excessively bloated United States military machine.”

And then, he would launch back into his fears about the growing strength of the religious right and the apathetic youth allowing it. He struck me as a little paranoid. But I suppose as a notorious activist during the ’60s, his paranoia might have been justified. I wouldn’t fully understand this until 2004 when I wrote a political comedy called
Kill the President
that we produced three blocks from Madison Square Garden during the Republican National Convention. Considering a lifetime of paranoia encouraged me to change the name of the play to
KtP
. As determined as I was to be a criminal, I was equally determined to remain on the outside.

Finally, Stew settled into telling some stories of the old days, which was the narrative I was after. For the next hour, I listened and wrote, laughed and learned. As we walked to the front door, Stew and Judy looked back into the deli and picked up whatever fragments of memories they could find in an old haunt clearly about to pass into history. I gave them both my card and promised I’d reach out with news of the show.

“
Does this say
hog
?” Stew asked, as he stared at my business card.

“
No, it says
TBG
. It’s a lower case
t, b
, and
g
.”

“
Oh, I see. It looks like
hog
,” he said to himself walking down the street.

“
It’s just a fucked-up font,” I shouted into the six-story cannons of the Lower East Side.

Meeting with Stew illuminated how political the Yippies were. Like the hippies, they were masters of protest. We’ve all seen the pictures, massive crowds spilling across great green lawns framed by white neoclassical architecture. Hordes of angry people corralled behind police barricades with their fists in the air. We studied the faces of the discontent, read the signs they carried, and analyzed the anecdotes that served as captions. It must have been thrilling to be part of such a large and vocal opposition. We weren’t aware then, but studying this history was preparing us for our own future movement.

Up until now, none of us had ever been to a real protest. To rectify this, all the
Do It!
creatives and my new boyfriend Scott got on a bus to Washington, DC, to protest the inauguration of George W. Bush, an election we all believed was stolen. We weren’t quite ready to start dodging rubber bullets and sprinting through tear gas, so an organized and permitted protest seemed the safest way to initiate ourselves. George W. Bush would be inaugurated to the presidency, and we’d be inaugurated to protest. It was a big day for everyone.

During the whole trip down, Dickey and Harrison made fun of Scott and my kissy-kissy, cuddly behavior. And perhaps we were a little too cutesy, but I never got to be the one making out in the back of the high-school track bus, so I was making up for lost time.

When we arrived, Washington, DC, was cold and wet. We piled out of the bus, cloaked in winter coats and plastic ponchos, and assembled with our group. Despite the cold, we were excited. Something was going to happen today. We would make our voices heard. We took our signs out and began to march.

Now, we may not have known much about protests, but we could tell right away something was very wrong. First, our group leaders
’
order to stay on the sidewalk spread our group so thin we looked more like a parade. And then, the route raised questions. After 20 blocks of wondering through a quiet DC neighborhood, Dickey looked back and screamed, “Where the fuck are we?”

But his cry just echoed through the barren trees as we continued to follow a leader who was miles away for all we could tell.

“
We know what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” we shouted. In this case, democracy looked like a tour group from Santa Fe gazing at DC architecture. Two by two, we wove through lettered streets like a kindergarten class utilizing the buddy system.

Finally, we arrived at the National Mall, a place we recognized, and we broke into a light jog over the damp grass. No longer tethered to the invisible rope of the group, we spread out over the vast green space, working our way toward the Washington Monument. The organizers shouted directions, but we knew our way to the Capital Building. We didn’t need to be told what to do anymore; we were ready to fuck some shit up.

And then, not even halfway to the Washington Monument, we hit a fence. A serious fence. A huge 10-foot high, impossible-to-get-around fence. Is this it? Is this as far as we’re going to get? We turned around to see the rest of our group talking to each other, trying to figure out what was going on.

It quickly became clear that this was where we were “permitted” to be, caged in somewhere behind the Washington Monument. We couldn’t see the inauguration, we couldn’t hear the inauguration, and, more importantly, those attending the inauguration couldn’t see or hear us.

There were no spectators, no cameras, nothing at all. We were just a lonely band of 500 protestors, standing in the middle of the National Mall. Stew was right, we never should have asked for permission. Permits are for pussies. Protests happen when you’re someplace you’re not supposed to be.

I pulled Lolly aside. “We’re not asking anyone for the rights. We’re just going to do it.” She nodded, and then dove into my arms for warmth.

“
It’s not like they’re gonna kill us,” she said. She was right. We’d already tangled with dangerous drug dealers. The worst thing a publisher could do is file a lawsuit, not a scary prospect when you have no money.

So, we began to take more risks—which, thanks to our newly created play development system, were nicely facilitated. At the start of each rehearsal, we’d place a bubble chart on the wall. This chart framed the points of the story we needed to hit, scene by scene. For each moment, someone would throw out an idea, and we’d improvise it. If the idea was good, we’d rehearse and refine it, and then move onto the next idea and then the next bubble.

Sometimes, the ideas were bad. In fact, at first, most of them were. But the more people stopped caring whether their ideas were good or bad, the more daring we got, and the more good ideas came out. After a few weeks, we finally arrived at a truly fearless rehearsal room, and the play started presenting itself through these collaborative improvisations. The less afraid you are to fail, the less you actually do fail.