school I would travel from Queens into Manhattan with a few other girls. We would gather in front of a midtown hotel and wait for Herman’s Hermits or the Moody Blues to show up. Then we would try to sneak into the hotel. A pack of doormen usually kept us out.
One night, returning from a round of rock-star stalking, three friends and I jumped onto a subway car. The theaters had just got out, so it was hard to find a seat. My friends reached for straps that hung from the ceiling. I was too short to grasp the swaying loops, so I edged through clumps of passengers to the floor-to-ceiling pole between the exit doors. A tall young blond guy clung to the same pole as me. As the train chugged and lurched, my head bumped his shoulder. He looked like Richard Chamberlain, my favorite actor, who starred in the TV series Dr. Kildare. We started talking. Kevin told me he was a musician. When the train stopped at his station in Jackson Heights, I raced out the door with him. My groupie friends looked on, dismayed. Kevin gave me a tour of his neighborhood that night, and within a few weeks we were going steady.
Because I had skipped third grade, I graduated from high school at age sixteen. I found a job as a file clerk for the head office of the Allegheny Ludlum Steel Company on Park Avenue. I was soon promoted to switchboard operator and then teletype operator. After work, sometimes I’d meet my friends in the East Village, where hippies would give us flowers or offer us a joint. While roaming through the area one day, I saw a For Rent sign on the window of a ground-level apartment. I rang the superintendent’s bell, and a scraggly-haired woman in coveralls stumbled out. When I asked her if I could rent the place, she gazed at my work attire and nodded. I exchanged that week’s pay envelope for a set of keys.
Back in Flushing, confronting my parents in the living room, I said, “I’ve got my own apartment. I need the thousand dollars you owe me.” They had held the money in trust from a settlement I had received after having been thrown to the floor in a car accident as a child.
“What? Not on your life,” my father said, making squishing sounds on the plastic-covered sofa where he sat.
“You’re too young to be on your own,” my mother said, also making squishing sounds.
“You told me you wanted me to leave when I graduated. I’m doing exactly what you asked.”
“You’re not getting the money,” my father said. He limped around the coffee table, scowling at me.
“It’s my money.” I backed away from him.
“Not on your life, you little slut,” my father said.
That inspired me. I said, “I need money to buy furniture. I guess I’ll have to stand on a street corner and earn it the way the sluts do.”
My parents gave me the money. In mid-October 1966, two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I moved into the bachelor suite on East 6th Street. I decorated it with a thousand dollars’ worth of furniture. In those days a thousand dollars went far. I bought a table, chairs, dressers, and a convertible sofa to sleep on, and I splurged on a spiffy, curved-front TV, a hi-fi, and even a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I hung hand-printed Indian tapestries on the walls. Kevin came by to help me get organized. Being a newly independent hormone-filled teen, I invited him to spend the night. We fumbled at our early attempts at sex, but my hormones were happy and Kevin didn’t want to leave. I said I had planned to live alone, but he objected. I had been morphing from a miniskirted groupie into a Village-style hippie who wore waist-length hair and tie-dyed shirts. After a few more fumblings with Kevin, I figured I might as well do as the hippies did. Cohabitation was becoming the norm. “I guess we’re living together,” I said, but that didn’t mean we’d have a sexual free-for-all.
Kevin grew up in a Roman Catholic family. He spent time as an altar boy and often listened to priests who railed that sex was for procreation only. He was eighteen when he moved in with me, and the missionary position was his only position.
My parents cooled down and I visited them for Christmas. In January they came to see my apartment. Kevin answered the door. My mother’s face paled and my father’s grew stern. They left without speaking to me. To my surprise, within weeks they were planning a wedding. Kevin and I were relieved. A priest in my Catholic high school had recommended the rhythm method of birth control. Kevin and I had practiced it, but it didn’t work. I had always wanted to be a mom, so I was happy.
Kevin—at first—fulfilled my parents’ key requirement for a husband: he had an income. His band, the Inner Sanctum, was appearing in the musical The Golden Screw at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village and getting union rates as actors. We got married within a month at the famed celebrity hangout Sardi’s and had a write-up in Variety. Around that time, I hit the iron ceiling at the steel company. Only men could be promoted to the sales desk. Thinking The Golden Screw was truly golden, I quit my job. But the off-Broadway musical closed a week after the wedding. Kevin was now an unemployed rock musician with a pregnant wife. We could barely afford the $87 a month rent on our East Village bachelor suite or the $15 a week it took to buy groceries. Kevin said he would sell his blood and contended that I should become a paid donor too.
“I can’t do that,” I said, patting my soon-to-grow tummy. I was seventeen and pregnant. I was relieved to have an excuse.
IN THE 1960s in New York City, people who sold a pint of their blood would receive between $5 and $200, depending on blood type. Kevin discovered he could get $50. Soon, though, he found a job as a shipping clerk with Sun and Health magazine. He spent his work days wrapping and mailing magazines. He brought stacks of them home, where we gawked together at photos of nudists playing volleyball and basking on the sand, wearing nothing but sun hats and sandals. Kevin also began bringing home a paycheck and didn’t have to get his blood siphoned for money.
It might have been good if he had, though. As far as I know he didn’t have hepatitis, and his blood might have saved someone from getting it. Dr. Harvey Alter, from the National Institutes of Health in the United States, explained in a BioCentury TV webcast in 2014 that in those days people who received blood from volunteers rather than paid donors had only a 7 percent chance of contracting hepatitis. Even a 7 percent chance of getting hep would be scary, but it was a lot better at the time than the 30 percent rate for all blood transfusions.
While Kevin worked at Sun and Health, I found a job as a page at MGM Records, where I traipsed from room to room delivering documents. I remember watching Petula Clark stroll down a hallway and seeing Frank Zappa and other kooky rock stars cavort in the employee cafeteria. I loved the job, but in those days, women could be fired for being pregnant. It was the time of loose-fitting sack dresses, so I took to wearing extreme examples of the fashion. Nonetheless, co-workers began to stare at me.
I told Kevin I’d have to quit my job. His job hardly paid our rent, and he again suggested he’d donate blood. Just in time, his agent got the Inner Sanctum a gig opening for the Velvet Underground. Once again there would be no blood selling.
A lot of other people were selling their blood, however. There were countless thousands of paid donors in the sixties, many of them prisoners and those who needed cash to support drug habits. Their blood would kill many future transfusion recipients, whose livers would fail because the donors’ blood carried hepatitis C.
I gave birth to Della two days before my eighteenth birthday. Six weeks later, my doctor suggested I go on birth control pills. That was the first time I had heard about them. I went to the Planned Parenthood clinic and fainted while the nurse was drawing blood.
CHAPTER 3
TAINTED TOOLS
DR. RADEV’S VOICE sounded fuzzy. I stared at
