The Street Years: Part Two

Street Magazine was the place where my new life began to come together. Al Nidle coaxed us into his world with visions of building Street into the next Rolling Stone, and we were happy to suspend judgment and come along for the ride. We lived on no money on the first floor of an Alston-Brighton rental house. Every one of us, in our own way, was crazy, although I was probably the sanest of the lot. A lonely old lady lived upstairs, and light brown patches spread across our ceiling from the urine of a hundred cats. Most nights, you could hear her moan and cry.

As publisher, Al was the guy who held the vision, opened the mail, and sold the ads. He was a grandiose narcissist with charisma to spare, and colored in each of the first 2,000 copies with crayon to complete the cover design. Al refused to work, and reserved the right to make his living off of our irregularly published magazine. He had a wife and an infant daughter who would visit occasionally, but was too self-absorbed to be of much use to them.

His forty-something friend David lived in a closet off of Al's living room-office-bedroom. David had a photographic memory, and could quote many of the books he'd read verbatim, but had trouble organizing his thoughts. I came to think of our conversations as intellectual pinball. While David had no formal role in the publication, he more or less functioned as Al's aide-de-camp. With his night-time dish washing job, he was the only one of us with regular work.

Jon was someone I quickly came to regard as an authentic genius. His bedroom was our production center and he'd painted a completely accurate nude self-portrait on his door. At twenty-two or so, he was a wildly prolific cartoonist, an amateur musician, and a talented graphic artist whose idea was to completely redesign each issue of the magazine so that it would never get stale. Jon drank too much and would disappear behind his door for days at a time. His creative jags, too, would go on for largely sleepless days on end. Jon temped a bit, but mostly spent his time working as an artist. A starving artist.

His bi-polar and anorexic mother Collete lived in a small bedroom just off of the tiny kitchen. She had yellowish hair, sunken eyes, and a quick wit, and would go in and out of psychotic episodes. My wife and I spent a lot of time encouraging Collette to eat, and making sure there were food bank groceries in the cupboard so that she might starve a bit less quickly.

Mine was the other room in the front of the house, which might have once been the master bedroom. I had a mattress on the floor and a chair, and kept the few clothes and other things that I had in a couple of boxes. I also still had the guitar that I'd bought in the Air Force, and we all played it. While none of us were any good, Jon had the most talent, and could do a dead on knock off of Devo's Mongoloid. I worked nights as a proof-reader at Stone & Webster, a huge engineering firm located near South Station. This paid better than other temp jobs I'd had, but I only got about twenty hours a week.

The second month we were there, Al took everybody's rent money and spent the $600 on a used Mac Plus without asking. This, with its two megs of RAM and 20 MB hard drive, was our only computer. Up til then, we'd been producing Street by sneaking into the Harvard computer lab. They rarely checked IDs and didn't seem to care if we were students or not. Since we still didn't own a printer, this was where we'd run the pages when we went to press.

After that, I don't think we ever paid rent again.

There was serious discussion of staging a break in of a downtown office that we knew of to steal their state of the art Mac IIci computers and laser printers. The plan involved explosions and flares to distract the police while the rest of us stealthily made off with the goods. Fortunately, we all got cold feet when it came time to actually make the heist.

We were working on our second issue together when, on October 19, 1987, the Dow lost $500 billion in a single day to add up to the biggest stock market crash in history. Our cover became a soup line with Jon's caricatures of various Boston personalities dressed in rags. "We're having a Great Depression" the tag line read.

There was a tent city in Cambridge in a big empty lot near the Necco candy factory on Mass Ave. I'd go there to hang out and got to know a few of the homeless leaders. There was always some sort of a high drama crisis unfolding. I tried to be helpful, but they didn't have much use for me. I was there as press, and did what I could to tell their story.

We saw ourselves as the gonzo documentarians of the impoverished urban lunatic fringe, and were well-positioned personally to understand the subject. Al had this vision of Cambridge as the Haight-Ashbury of the East Coast, but two decades later, and with homeless people instead of flower children.

Jon went to work developing an ad kit for Al, and various other bits of marketing paraphernalia. We had tons of heart, and Al and Jon fed each other's mania, but we didn't have the first idea, really, of what we were doing. Our Ché stickers, for example, invoked the signature likeness and read "Ché led a revolution and never sent a piece of junk mail. We're running a Magazine the same way."

The name of our publication was nowhere in there to be found. As far as we were concerned, branding was something that happened to cows and horses in Montana.

Eventually, an eviction notice was posted on the front door. We studied it carefully. The language was makeshift and it seemed to have been run off on someone's personal printer. If it didn't come from the Sheriff, we decided, we weren't all that worried. By now, it was January. The gas heat was shut off, but the electricity and water, which regularly froze in our bathroom sink, remained. I started spending the colder nights at Carolyn's place out in Jamaica Plain.

By then, we at Street Magazine central were beginning to hate each other. It became clear to Jon and I that what little money the paper raised was going directly to Al, who treated the paper's bank account as if it were his own. We'd spend hours working out decisions between ourselves, and then Al would just do whatever he liked. Slowly, Jon and I moved toward a coup.

The name, we found, wasn't trademarked. There was nothing to prevent us, the editor and art director, from ousting the publisher altogether. I was the primary architect. We plotted in bars and coffee shops, kept our plans to ourselves, and saved the money from our jobs to make first and last month's rent in a new place. Once we located a second floor walk-up near Somerville's Davis Square, we swung into action.

One sparkling blue day in February, while Jon and I were both at work and Al was out of the house, Carolyn and Collette put the Mac Plus in its little carrying case, stuck it in the car trunk, and drove away from the Alston-Brighton apartment for good. Jon and I broke the news to Al. He was off the masthead. His warlock friend Daemon put a curse on us. For all I know, it worked.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Street Years: Part One

Before college, I was a working class vet with no money. After college, I was a working class vet with no money and a degree in social theory. In terms of my overall employability, not much had changed.

As my time at UMass-Amherst drew to a close, I prepared for my move to Boston by unloading whatever I could. I tried selling the diamond ring I'd bought when I almost got married in the Air Force, but no one wanted it. My stereo and the record collection I'd built over the military and college years went instead. I also sold my books.

I scraped together three or four hundred dollars. In Amherst, many of the frats had summer sublet signs in their windows. I started calling around in Boston and soon found a room in a Brookline frat house near BU. Two hundred fifty dollars paid my rent through the summer. I had a roommate. He was an asshole.

I'd hoped, on the strength of having started critical times and my experience at the Student Communications Office, to land a job as a typesetter. That plan didn't work out. During one interview at a mom and pop print shop in Brookline, I proudly showed off what I had done. The owner held the copy of critical times aloft with thumb and forefinger as if I'd just wiped my ass with it and noted that the text wasn't properly aligned across the columns. My pride and joy was "a rag," and wasn't impressing anyone. Worse, it seemed to scare them off.

The one offer I did get, I rejected. A small shop that did specialty printing for the stock market needed a night typesetter. This presented a dilemma. The stock market, as far as I was concerned, was a dark satanic force that dripped with the blood of children. College had ruined me. And yet, I needed work. I hedged that the night hours would be too inconvenient. They countered with a compromise. I said I wasn't really a typist, and they said "no problem, it's really only formatting anyway." I said the pay was too low, and they boosted it up a bit. Finally, I just said no. I wasn't going to "sell out" less than two weeks out of college.

The agency that tried to place me called to follow-up. "Does this have something to do with your major in college," they asked. I said yeah. They stopped calling.

Instead, I worked as a temp at University Hospital, stocking shelves and carts in the warehouse. It was a lot like my pre-college job at Action Crash Parts in Cambridge, except the pay was a little better and the warehouse was cleaner. The difference was that hospitals are all about status, and it was clear that mine was somewhere near rock bottom.

As a cart-pushing, shelf-stocking, order-filling menial laborer, I was beneath the notice of other hospital employees. The only people who talked to me were other cart pushers and janitorial staff. A few of these tried to enlist me in a plan to steal syringes and needles for street sales. This, when I wouldn't do it, placed me on the outs with some of these as well.

I mentioned this to a co-worker — a guy my age from Southy — and he started railing against the "niggers." It was my first brush with the famed Boston racism. I told him that kind of talk made me want to puke. Later, as we smoked some of his pot in a nearby park over lunch, he said all his friends talked like that, and that he didn't mean it. He thanked me for saying something. He wasn't a bad guy. He just wanted to fit in, like everybody else.

I'd listen to the Iran-contra hearings while I pushed pallets around with a hand truck and stacked up bedpans. I stocked carts with bandages and antiseptics and IV tubes and whatever else was on the list and then pushed them around the hospital, utterly invisible in my low-status anonymity. Every hour or two I'd take the elevator to smoke outside. I'd picked that up again at the frat house.

I was living in a rogue house. This is what happens when frats are unable to meet whatever official credentialing is required. I didn't really understand it or much care. All I knew was that while these guys lived in a house that was identified by three greek letters, it wasn't really even a frat.

As the summer boarder, I was an outsider to the life of the house, and didn't really want to know them any more than they wanted to know me. All of my worst preconceptions were confirmed. No one washed dishes. Ever. There was mold in the sink and in the fridge and the kitchen was more or less unusable. If I had to spend time in the house other than to sleep, it was usually on the porch, away from the rotten garbage smell that permeated the first floor.

The guys spent a lot of time watching sports and porn and all seemed to have money. Some more than others. There was one kid who drove a late model jeep and had a cel phone the size of a shoe that decided he was going to be a fish hobbyist as well. He set up a saltwater tank in his bedroom. The baby lobster kept eating his expensive tropical fish, and each time it happened he would come tearing down the stairs in a rage. I thought this was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.

Having money, however, didn't stop them from stealing. During my time there the ring that I couldn't sell in college disappeared from my room, and my bike, the only real thing of value I owned, disappeared from the front foyer. No one, of course, knew a thing.

While I was still in college, I'd found a Cambridge-based tabloid called Street Magazine at Food for Thought, Amherst's radical bookstore. The paper had a sort of a grass-roots hip up-from-the-streets feel to it, and had progressive politics without feeling sectarian or cultish. It was exactly what I wanted to be doing.

I called the publisher, a little guy with tiny oval glasses named Al Nidle, and arranged a meeting. As it turned out, his editor and art director, Tom Bell and Seth Feinberg, has just quit and he was looking for someone new. Unbelievably, I was enough of an idiot to not see that as a problem.

I had company. Seth's friend, Jon Fountain, wanted the art director job. Jon was a recent BU grad who lived in a Cambridge basement near Julia Child's house, caring for the owner's retarded son. Jon's charge, who was a full grown man, had a penchant for shouting "put the Vaseline on your penis" in public, and running off with no clothes until Jon could wrestle him back inside.

Jon's situation made mine look almost desirable. We both met with Al, and started making plans for where we were going to take Street. Al's closest friends were an addled genius dishwasher named David and a hugely fat warlock named Daemon. Al would be the publisher. I would be the editor, and Jon would do layout and art. Seth and Tom tried to warn us, but we did it anyway.

Toward the end of the summer of 1987, we all moved into the first floor of a house in Alston-Brighton to work full-time for free at the newspaper. The hospital temp job ended, and I got a new assignment as a nighttime proofreader at Stone & Webster.

Carolyn returned from Europe. The trip had been harrowing. Toward the end she was reduced to waiting for tourists to leave outdoor cafes so she could swoop on the leftovers. She stayed with me a few days at the frat house before I moved into the Street squat with Al, Jon, and David. We were soon joined by Jon's mother Collette, who was bi-polar with a good bit of psychosis around the edges. Carolyn quickly found a group home job and a shared apartment in Jamaica Plain. It was a new beginning for both of us.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Legend of Mister Butch

I first heard that Mister Butch died when I was at the street paper conference in Portland last weekend. He was fifty-six, and perhaps the most famous homeless person in Boston. I didn't know him well when I was there, although Street Magazine, the first paper I edited after college, did a story on him in 1987. With his wild dreds, crazy guitar, and ad-libbed street poetry, he was irresistible to us.

It's not every homeless guy who has an entry on Wikipedia.

He bought a scooter, and apparently everyone who knew him was worried about it. On July 12, he drove the thing into a pole at 50 mph and was killed. When he died, 1,000 people came to his funeral parade in Alston-Brighton. A friend sent me the above clip from that.

It's something to look at when I need a reminder that people are good.

The clip inspired me to see what else I could find, and it turns out that Mister Butch had no shortage of documentarians on You Tube. I love the two-part Sleeping with Mister Butch documentary because it's about caring for someone — even when they're a pain in the ass — just because it's the right thing to do. We can all learn something about love and community from the tattooed woman.

I included the final clip, because it shows him with his guitar. He first became a street celebrity in the 70s, playing chords on his open tuned electric guitar with one finger. Sometimes, attitude is everything.

Sleeping With Mister Butch (Part One)


Sleeping With Mister Butch (Part Two)


Mister Butch on Guitar