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into it. Arnie kicked me and I chugged slowly to a stop. Wow, those fingers! The next piece featured me on the vocal.
    Bob, the leader, called “Frankie and Johnny,” an overdone ballad with about two hundred verses. This had never been one of my favorites, and by the time Frankie got around to shooting Johnny I was totally bored and wishing that I was singing “Cake Walking Babies from Home” instead. So I promptly switched songs, changing keys as I went along. Some of the guys tried to follow me, while the rest doggedly plodded on with “Frankie.” The result was the musical equivalent of a three-way midair collision. I was ecstatic, still grinning from ear to ear as I was led from the stand. I had never had so much fun onstage in my life, but those killjoys made me sit out the rest of the set.
    The audience, of course, never noticed a thing.

    As I was rapidly discovering, it is hard work surviving without a steady job. I could usually come up with a floor or a couch to crash on, but food was always a problem. We would have boosting expeditions—I never actually did this myself, but I was certainly party to the proceeds—where a group would go into a supermarket and secrete some small, high-value items such as caviar and potted shrimp about their persons. Then we would go out and shop these things off to our more affluent friends for bags of rice and bulk items that were too big to shoplift.
    We would head out in the early morning on what we used to call the “dawn patrol.” We would hit people’s stoops at about four-thirty or five and get milk, eggs, sometimes even bread, and one copy each of the New York Times. A bunch of us were crashing more or less regularly in a loft on the Bowery, so we got a lot of tips from the local winos. There was a birdseed factory right down the block, and if you got there for shape-up, those fortunate enough to be chosen would have the opportunity of unloading fifty-pound sacks of birdseed. I did that sometimes, and as it happened, the birdseed was marijuana, and in those days they didn’t irradiate the stuff, so among other things we had a little farm going by the stove. Very nice, until one day the cat got at it. Somehow, though, heaving around fifty-pound sacks of marijuana took a lot of the romance out of dope for me.
    I did all kinds of things. I was a bank messenger for a while—an insane business that is perfectly captured in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn —and I did a little factory work. (I used to say that I had an assembly-line job dotting the eyes on Mickey Mouse dolls, which is not quite true, but close enough.) I knew a guy who had a catering service, and sometimes he would hire me when he had a big party, which paid a few bucks and also had some side benefits: there was often food left over, and once the customers got a bit tipsy, we would ferret away a bottle of champagne for every couple we served.
    If worst came to worst, there were always day jobs busing tables in an Automat. However, by the mid-1950s I was getting involved with radical politics, and being a lefty could be an occupational hazard in even the most minor occupations. My friend Lenny was working a restaurant job, and the FBI came around and started asking his boss questions about a suspicious, dangerous character who was waiting tables, and of course the guy fired him.
    There was also the problem of keeping clean. We had to do things like mooch showers. Haircuts were to be had only at the barber college down on the Bowery—either that or we’d cut each other’s hair. We couldn’t afford to get our clothes cleaned. We would gradually get grungier and grungier, and eventually you would be so grungy that they wouldn’t even hire you to bus tables.
    There were compensations, though. Our loft was at 15 Cooper Square, which was right across the street from the original Five Spot, and in those days Thelonious Monk was playing there as sort of a steady thing. We would go over and sit at the