The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk Page B

pregnancy scares at least twice a month—some girl would come rushing in, grab another by the arm and drag her outside for a consultation.)
    Weekends were the big party nights, especially since a lot of the musicians were still living over in Queens or Jersey. We would start partying on Friday, and it would all kind of build to Sunday. On Sunday we would
crawl out of bed sometime after noon and make our way over to Washington Square. We would play there until five o’clock, when the permit ran out, and then we would grab a bite to eat at Mother Hubbard’s or a place on 8th Avenue that we called “the secret deli” because it had a back room that could not be seen from the front room. Then we would shoulder our guitars again and head over to the American Youth Hostels building on 8th Street, where the old Whitney Museum used to be. Mike Cohen had a job with the AYH, and arranged for them to host a regular hootenanny every Sunday from seven to nine. Mike ran it some of the time, and then Barry Kornfeld took it over. So we would spend a couple of hours there, and then all of us would troop down to 190 Spring Street, in what is now SoHo, where the real party would begin. Roger Abrahams, who would later become a prominent folklorist, had an apartment there, and after a while some other people moved in and it became a sort of rat’s nest of folk singers. (I also remember a Peruvian guy named Inti, who was living there with a pet monkey. God, I hated that monkey.) On Sunday nights we would be distributed through two or three floors. One apartment would be all bluegrassers—the shit-kicker ghetto—and then there would be rooms full of blues singers and ballad people, usually taking turns and trading off with the same guitar. The rooms were small and ill lit, very crowded, and insufferably stuffy, and the music would go on until four or five o’clock in the morning.
    Those Spring Street parties led directly to the opening of the first Village folk music venue, and the beginning of my professional career, but before I get to that I must make a brief digression.
    Much as I loved playing music, it was not earning me a penny. The jazz gigs had dried up and no one was hiring blues howlers from Brooklyn. At this point I was mostly crashing at what we called the Diogenes Club, named for the place where Mycroft Holmes held court in the Conan Doyle stories. A bunch of us from Richmond Hill had chipped in $5 a month each to rent a loft at 350 Bowery, between 3rd and 4th, so we would have a place to hold parties, bring girls, or to crash if we got stuck in Manhattan. We had all brought our record collections and pooled them into a sort of common library; we had a rule at that time that no one was supposed to buy a record that anyone else had bought, thereby maximizing our group purchasing power. Since this was common space, nobody was supposed to actually
live there, but of course a number of us did, particularly me and one of my political buddies, Lenny Glaser. No one cared much, and people like my jazz pals Danny Frueh and Eddie Kaplan were happy that there was somebody around regularly who could keep an eye on their record collections, since after a while, there were a lot of people with keys, and stuff began to get ripped off. So I crashed there, or over at the Libertarian League hall, or with one or another girlfriend.
    I was managing to keep body and soul together, but it was pretty lean pickings, and eventually I decided that I needed a real job. Since I was itching to see a little more of the world, my solution was to ship out with the merchant marine. Mitch Mitchell, whom I knew from the Libertarians, was a member of the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union, and he pulled some strings for me and got me my papers. For a week or two I had to get up at eight-thirty every goddamn morning and go down to the union hall in Brooklyn and throw in my card. Eventually I got a berth on a tanker, and over the next year or so I shipped out twice,