Free A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo Page A

once the two lawyers had deducted their fee of one-third from both of us. This provoked a comment from my mother about the possibility of there being some truth in the stereotype of lawyers as sharks. The check arrived sometime in the fall of 1964, more than three years after the accident.
             
    T hough my mother did not want to move back to Queens, she changed her mind once she was out of the leg cast. Many things needed doing. Eventually she planned to move into Manhattan and possibly share an apartment with her brother, Val’s soon-to-be ex-husband. It was a scary time because she had no money except a small sum from a life insurance policy; she no longer worked full-time for Dr. Rosen. I have no idea how either of us got by. I was seventeen and overwhelmed by my life, so I did my best not to think about anything. My escape was to read books and to draw. But I needed to earn a living.
    It was easy to find a job as a waitress or what was known as a girl Friday, which meant you were a girl and you could file, answer telephones, type, make coffee, and run errands for the male boss. Before I found the job at the Book-of-the-Month Club in the fall of 1960, I had searched the want ads for the most mindless jobs I could find. I remember getting work for two weeks in a dingy warehouse somewhere in Midtown counting coupons that people had mailed in for rebates. I knew I couldn’t go that route again and still have a will to live.
    After I left the apartment of my surrogate family, the Ehrenbergs, on West End Avenue, I stayed at my sister Carla’s apartment on Perry Street. It was a small railroad flat that was fine for short stays. We had a tempestuous relationship at times, and neither of us wanted to hedge our bets and live together in a small space for an indefinite period. She could be bossy like an older sister, but she was generous and protective, too. I was welcome there until I found something of my own.
    As it turned out, a couple my sister knew who had an apartment on Waverly Place just west of Washington Square were going to England for a few months and wanted someone to house-sit. It was perfect. The Waverly Place apartment was within walking distance of every bookstore, coffeehouse, and music club in the Village. Whatever job I had during the day gave way to nights with good music and good talk. I began to accumulate some possessions again.

    Artwork on a blank album
    I shopped along Fourth Avenue, at the many secondhand bookstores with great selections and great prices, and in Midtown, at a record store somewhere in the Forties with bins and bins of long-playing records in plain white card-board covers with a hole punched in the upper corner. It was possible to find all kinds of music at unbelievable prices. I bought all of the Harry Smith recordings of American old-time folk music, one at a time. I would paint or draw my own cover art.
    Now all I needed was to find a way to earn my living, something more solid than the odd freelance jobs I’d taken at strange places around the Village that never paid much or involved seedy characters doing shady things. Or maybe that was just my imagination.
    I answered the telephone for a man who ran a mail order business and was a follower of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian scientist and psychologist who believed that the cause of all sickness (physical and psychological) was failing to achieve true orgasm. Reich claimed to have discovered an energy called orgone that was the “basic life-stuff of the universe.” He developed and marketed something called the orgone box that could cure all ills if you sat in it for a certain amount of time each day. The man I was working for had an orgone box somewhere in the back of his home office that he would go into on lunch breaks. One day he came out wearing only a towel and walked by me, letting it slip slowly to the floor as he passed. I was out the door in no time.
    I found work making puppet body parts in a loft near