Man, this place is getting crazy. Three nights ago I heard a bunch of "pop, pop, pops" up the street. "Man, THIS TIME it's just fireworks.." I said to myself, I said. "The kids bought them for Memorial Day weekend, by mistake. They got mixed up maybe, and thought you shoot them off like you do on the Fourth of July." In my neighborhood with it's ever growing Indio, Ecquadorian and Hondorian population, some amount of cultural confusion would be understandable. I ignored the firecrackers, and went back to channel surfing; trying to decompress after a long weekend upstate with my ex, his girlfriend and their circle of maniac friends. I was clicking dumbly between Law and Order and some nonsense on Court TV. I was alone, having dropped Jess off to meet his girlfriend at the movies downtown in Tribeca. The next morning, at my son's school, where I was prepping for a 6th grade weekly drama class I teach (presently working on a cold reading of Act 1 Scene One of West Side Story, about a murder and gangs in 1950s Hell's Kitchen), I got a call from a friend who works at Child Protective Custody. "Did you hear about your friends?" She says, laughing..(Nini is on some mental pills, anti psychotics and stuff, so she has a tendency to blurt things out and laugh inappropriately..well, inappropriately to me, but she's funny, so I like her)
What friends?, sez I.
Those guys in the commune. That guy Jeff got shot.
Now, I know a lot of people in the commune. They kind of stand out, since they are the only other white folks in the neighborhood except for Mrs. Adams, and she's an octogenarian shut in, and Jackie and Bill across the street, who are old hippies trying to keep the neighborhood a Sesame Street ethnic mosaic. Oh yeah, and Mary the sculptress and her son....Lately, it's become ghettoville, with drivebys and police helicopters with floodlights flying over my house at odd hours.., as corny as the stuff I watch on Cable TV, but I digress..
I know of Jeff, vaguely. I've seen him with the GANAS crew, coming back from a party, or a group outing. They often go out to events together, and came to a gig I had, years ago, at Le BarBat. They also came to All Angels Church once, to hear us sing. I've been buddies with Katie, crying on her shoulder when I was mishandled at the food stamp office, across from their store, and I met with them once, to discuss the possibility of having an open air rock festival on their land upstate. I know several of the other commune people too, cause I used to be a "thrifty", a compulsive thrift shop buyer, cruising old Pucci, Gucci and Fiorucci stuff in their thrift shop. Eventually I stopped the habit: my costume designer friend Maria from Berlin would always mention how used clothes have a sweat smell and aura of the old people who wore them..Even with all that negative persuasion, I remained a thrift store junkie.... I cruised garage sales and auctions until I was so chock full of crazy stuff that I never used that I started a thrift shop of my own, with a mentally ill boyfriend who was impossible with all the schlepping, and haggling and boyfriend stressing, I got sick of old clothes...before going out of business, I sold the rest of the stuff to the Ganas people...and they were very cool. They bought a lot of really nice 70's bellbottoms, patch pockets and corderoy, unworn, given to me by a church member who also was struggling with a buying addiction..which went back to the 70s, he never wore the stuff, just bought everything on sale, just in case...he was raised in an orphanage, and craved new clothes, but went overboard..so they were exchanged hands several times.Lately, I don't do much shopping..so I haven't seen the Ganas people.... I don't have much money anymore, so I don't buy much of anything...but it was strange to hear that one ot them was shot.
Nini said the shooter was a woman, a stalker...an ex-lover of aformentioned Jeff
Shakespeare said "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"...ain't that right?
I bought the paper, and found the article on the front page, all about the Ganas commune, their free love philosophy, their property, and about Stalker Lady. Apparently the cops hadn't followed up on Stalker Ladies' threats...I had a stalker too, when the thrift shop partner/boyfriend decided he was going to either marry me or kill me...and he kept harrassing me. The cops wouldn't do anything about it, either..there's a loophole in the law, because he wasn't my common law husband....Thank God boyfriend gave up after 2 years. He slowed down with the threatening calls and surprise visits to my home and workplaces..but that was lucky. Jeff's stalker was chasing him for 15 years.
Before I read it in the Daily Blues, I had heard that the Ganas people were into free love. This was another reason I backed away from hanging with them. I'd read about the Oneida community and the DaDa community in the 19th century..the former made nice silverware, the latter nice art, but that stuff's not for me....I'm a monogamist or at least a serial monogamist...and don't like open relationships..having been around during the experimental sexual revolution..most of that stuff was ugly..it always gave me the creeps..whether they were alternative hippies, or suburban swingers..yuch..I agreed with Wilhelm Reich and considered Satyr's Disease or Nymphomania forms of mental illness. I had been the babysitter for the head of the John Birch Society in Queens. as a teenager. I didn't know the political platform of the group, but I came to find out that John Birch was close to the Ku Klux Klan as you could get in NYC...I learned that he and his wife were swingers..so I always saw wife swapping as the behavior of the depraved mind...so I have always steered clear of that stuff. Despite all that, some of the folks at the commune were nice, kind people, and I genuinely liked them.
I laughed with Nini.We talked of being women cast aside....I guess some people can't handle that free love stuff....I know I couldn't. Looks like the 10 commandments were right, after all. Nini and I talked of going to the commune to do some Christian preaching....It's just a bitch that we've had shooting number 3 within a 4 block radius of my house (two on my block) within 3 weeks..it seems that the world is getting more violent...and this isn't even Iraq.
