First Love, Part 5

The center of the Mennonite colony in the East Village was an old five-story walkup tenement at 524 E. 13th St., between Avenues A and B. Marge and her husband Blackie lived on the first floor apartment to the left as you entered, and served as the superintendents of the building. Aged and toothless, but talkative, these old heads had accumulated decades of dust, and what appeared to be layers of chicken feathers, on the floor of their apartment. The rear apartment was occupied by Skinnie Lennie and his bride Joanne, who had met at Goshen College and become an item during the long weekend of campaigning for Gene McCarthy in Racine.

Various Hochstetlers, Smuckers, Yosts and a variety of Stoltzfuses occupied the railroad apartments, characterized by the elegant clawfoot bathtubs in the kitchen, that led up to the fifth floor. Some of the smaller flats had no bathrooms in the apartment itself, and the tenants were served by cramped toilets in closets in the hallway. The most popular and friendly tenants were up in 5D on the fifth floor, proprietors Sid and Arden, I-W boys at NYU hospital. They had constructed several sets of bunk beds to house wandering hippies, and the floor of the living room was often knee-deep in transient Mennonites who had found the address in the unofficial oral Mennonite Your Way directory. I recall once counting sixteen people on the floor and in various combinations in the bunkbeds upon awakening one morning in early spring.

Scarcely had I arrived than Sid and Arden informed me that they were about to drive to California in Sid’s fire-engine red Triumph sports car, and asked if I wanted to go along. I had always wanted to see Haight-Ashbury, so I squeezed myself into the rumble seat in back. Arden had thoughtfully prepared a tray of hashish brownies which he kept in the glove compartment, doling them out when things got dull. Of course he had consulted the famous Alice B. Toklas Cookbook recipe, but had modified it using the standard Mennonite Community Cookbook instructions for whoopie pies, substituting a chunk of Afghan hash for the block of dark chocolate.


"Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties.... It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green."

-- from the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, 1954