The Tree

These days, more and more people are trying to get farther and farther out. I mean, especially fellows who are like over 18. When I was that age back in West Virginia anyone who smoked or drank or made out once in a while with a girl from the West Side was pretty hip. But today everyone smokes and drinks and makes out, so if you want to move you have to really reach. Like growing beards isn't much now, or wearing red shirts or dirty jeans. Or digging Zen or slow jazz or making scenes. None of that is really and truly cool. It doesn't represent any kind of rebellion anymore, because all the nervous types are latching on, and the real and true hipsters know it. But they keep reaching and trying. Sometimes they go over the edge. Like what happened to Shelley Kahn.

Shelley had a pad near Fourth and McDougal. He'd been living in the Village ever since he got out of high school back in Buffalo. He'd tried beards and jazz and beer, but he had true instincts and nothing got to him. Pot always made him sick to his stomach, and that bugged him for a while, so he finally began concentrating on women. The high point of this was one time he made out with a dyke in the afternoon. He spent about a year working on a poem about it, but eventually no one wanted to hear the poem anymore, and he started saying, "Who am I?" and "What the hell?" -- you know, sort of probing and trying to analyze seriously his life philosophy, and he decided he had to go. Like even farther.

So one real neat, early spring day he was hanging around the fountain in Washington Square and he got this crazy idea. It wasn't an idea like he had planned it. It was just this wild feeling. I guess it really happened to him. He fell in love with a tree.

It was a pretty ordinary-looking tree, one of those elms with little leaves and sort of scrawny branches. It was all right, you know, but nothing special. The other kids that hung around at the White Horse and the Figaro couldn't see what he dug in the tree, but they were happy for him. You know how it is, they figured it was time he settled down. And they were sort of proud of Shell too. No one had ever got hung up on a tree before that anyone could remember. There was a little piece about it in the Voice and Shell gave up his part-time job at the motor scooter garage and spent all his time hanging around the park picking bugs off the tree and digging it.

Naturally, at first, some problems came up. He got pretty jealous of a boxwood bush he thought was growing too close to the tree and pulled it up and almost got busted by Tommy, the park cop. And he had an awful lot of beefs with dog-owners.

Along about the end of June, Shell began to brood, and one afternoon he got everyone together and explained that the tree was being persecuted. You see, he'd been to City Hall to see if he could take the tree back to his pad with him, and they said "No," and he had this theory that the Park Commission was keeping the tree like in slavery, because it couldn't vote or get any education or fulfill itself. It sounded sort of goofy, but Shell was very sincere, and he got everyone to join a committee -- they're all big liberals down there -- and they started getting up petitions to have the tree integrated.

Nothing much was going on that spring. Some marines had landed in the Near East, and there was some fighting in India and France but nothing anybody was interested in, so they got a lot of action out of the petitions. Some of the Madison Avenue types who come down to the Village on weekends got in on it, and they made a tie-in with the Conservation League and got some sort of form letter from the Department of the Interior endorsing the plan. Other committees began to form as far up as 92nd Street. They got out pamphlets attacking Robert Moses, who is in charge of parks, and tried to see the Mayor and had meetings around the fountain.

Shell would make little talks at the meetings and at the bongo-parties people threw to raise funds, and he was really sincere, no question about it. One night when the Gypsy was trying to be funny and asked him if he was sure whether it was a girl tree or a boy tree, he got sore and punched her. Then everyone went over to the Voice and Shell gave them an interview saying he was ready to get a job, so he could take the tree out to Long Island where he could look after it. Charley Rasputin drew up some crazy engagement announcements, and Little Bird promoted a big wine party at the Gate. It was a ball.

But right after that the publicity got out of hand. Life did a story on it and counter-groups started to form. You know, squares who were against the tree. Nuts, mostly. They'd send Shell letters saying he was a pervert, but Shell was a free-thinker and this kind of stuff didn't bother him. And more and more people signed the petitions.

Then some rich industrialist square, some old guy who wasn't in favor of anything, gave the anti-tree groups some loot, and they got organized with an office and a weekly newsletter written by Joseph Kamp. They hired a hall and invited John Kasper up to address them and had loud-speaker trucks all over the Village hollering out slogans like, "would you want your daughter to marry a tree?" and "trees have aphids." Inflammatory stuff like that.

This way they got more loot and had arm bands made and got more members. They'd hire buses and bring members in from New Jersey and crazy places like that, and they'd roam around making threats against the tree. Shell's group had to stand guard over the tree night and day, and they started carrying switchblades and tire chains. This way they got the younger kids interested and on their side.

The World-Telegram ran an editorial saying the tree was underage and that Shell should be arrested as an example. Then the New York Post sent reporters down and wrote a series of articles about how well trees were treated in Israel and how our State Department didn't care. And the Hearst papers had page-one stories pointing out that George Washington didn't like trees.

This was the tip-off that political pressure was being exerted. And sure enough, the next day, on orders from someone higher up -- no one would ever say who it was -- the police arrested 12 trees for loitering in Central Park. And the traffic detail towed away all the trees along East 78th Street and impounded them in the city garage for overtime parking.

This gave the squares who were against the tree more confidence, and they organized night-rider groups and they'd go around wearing sheets and masks and chop down trees after dark. In three weeks there wasn't a tree in New York City outside of Washington Square. Birds started building nests on people.

And then a third group sprang up, a bunch of real cukes who called themselves the "Arboreal Neo-Atavists" or something like that, and had a religious cult. They were a lot of geeks and old ladies and they were against everyone. They wanted to take the tree off somewhere, so they could worship it. When it came to troublemaking, they were the worst. What can you do in a rumble with old ladies?

But the liberals and all the teenagers were guarding Washington Square like crazy. Every night there'd be rumbles around the park and speeches all over lower Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. Finally, on the second day of September things got out of hand. There was this gigantic rumble by the Arch. It was a real riot, like with TV cameras and cars getting turned over and even a couple of cops got in the hospital. The next day the President sent in paratroops, and that night he made a little speech on all the TV networks and was very cool about it and grinned a lot and sort of put things in their proper perspective.

The President said that although he wasn't familiar with the tree situation in New York, not having had time, that is, to study all the details, his advisers had briefed him, that is, they had filled him in on the big picture, and he felt that the trouble, or rather the disagreement which was in the American tradition of everyone having his say, that is, being able to speak his mind freely as opposed to the Russian Communism system which repressed free speech and religion, he felt, he said, that the situation would work itself out, in other words, would resolve itself in The American Way if it was just left alone. He went on like this for a few minutes and ended up saying some nice things about the enlisted trees in World War II. After that, public opinion began to swing toward the tree. The Vice President made a statement saying he was categorically and definitely neither for nor against the tree. The Governor came down to the park and had his picture taken with it and said he was pleased because he had never seen a tree close up before. And the Saturday Evening Post sent a fellow around looking for Shell to get him to write a story called The Tree and Me.

For about three weeks no one could do enough for the tree. Ed Sullivan sent a remote camera crew down and introduced it on his program. There was movie interest in doing its life story. The Ford Foundation set a fund to replant all the trees that had been cut down in New York. Tourists were all over the Village; they came to get their pictures snapped beside the tree, and business was great.

But while all this was going on no one saw anything of Shelley. During one of the early rumbles he tripped over a bench and hurt his knee and sort of cut out. He didn't really split. He just withdrew. He was sensitive and could see the whole thing was getting pretty general. He was having to go to meetings and stand guard at night just like everybody else. It was getting to be a drag.

Worst of all, he realized he was beginning to lose interest in the tree. He still liked it, you know, but he wasn't hung up. He didn't feel fulfilled and figured it was a weakness in him, so he started to think again, Who needs it? What the hell? and like that. Probing.

Right about then -- it was the day after the President's speech -- this cat from the Saturday Evening Post found Shelley in his pad and offered him $500 cash as an advance on the story, The Tree and Me, if he would tell it to Gerold Frank. Well, Shell took it, and the Saturday Evening Post cat got him to a phone and had him talk to Gerold Frank a couple of minutes and give him the first three or four chapters. When he left, ol' Shell got all confused. He wasn't (concluded on page 115)The Tree(continued from page 48) used to being so heavy with all that gold, and he sort of flipped. Like he went on a binge. He made a big tour of all the coffee houses, buying for everybody, picking up checks, and he didn't stop spending for four days. When he finally snapped out of it, he only had $460 left, and he decided right then that he needed help.

So he goes to see this therapist who has an office on Bleeker Street over the Casa Bartolotti. The therapist explained things right off to Shell about how it was OK for him not to accept responsibility because his father had projected his own guilt feelings about being a chicken plucker onto him. And he explained that his ambivalence toward the tree was because the tree represented his mother. All basic stuff, you know, but sound.

This therapist wasn't a Freudian. He liked to do most of the talking himself and he was a great one for non-repression. Like if Shell suddenly felt an urge to dance, the therapist would rhumba with him for a while -- nothing faggy, you know -- he was just showing Shell what freedom was.

Pretty soon Shell began to get the message and was able to function again. He called Gerold Frank on the phone and gave him some more chapters and the Post sent him another $2000 as final payment on the story, and he started getting cool. The turning point was when he went uptown and bought some T-shirts at Brooks Brothers. Right after that he had a big fight with the therapist and refused to pay him, so he knew he was off the hook.

In the meantime, the paratroopers had pulled out and people were starting to forget about the tree. There was an airplane crash and a big murder in Queens, some 19-year-old shot eight people, and that started the liberals agitating against the death penalty and for more mental health. They formed new committees and got out posters with this kid's picture on them saying, this child needs help, and the first thing you know the Saturday Evening Post canceled The Tree and Me, the American Civil Liberties Union postponed action on the tree and the whole thing just blew over.

Right after that I got a ride to the West Coast and didn't get back to the Village for about a year. First thing I noticed was that the tree was gone. The tourists had whittled it away for souvenirs. And I didn't run into Shell anywhere either. Then one night in the Cho-cho San, Ira told me he'd seen him on the subway a couple weeks back. Shell had taken the money he got from the Saturday Evening Post and had married a skinnay chick named Shirley and had opened up a butcher shop in the Bronx.

Just goes to show that in spite of all the jazz about Shell's generation being "beat" and "non-conformist" and all, they still have a sense of direction and the old American pioneer spirit and the drive to go out and get what they want. Once they make up their minds.