Notes To My Attorney

Growing up in Astoria in the 1950s was, at its least, a microcosm of middle class urbanity. Ethnically, the neighborhood was as mixed as my mother’s chicken a la king. There were lots of Germans and Italians, almost as many Greeks, Irish and Hungarians, plenty of Polish, with fewer Chinese (and practically none of the other Oriental (Asian these days) nationalities). In terms of religion, it was mostly Roman Catholic but there were plenty of Protestants and Jews. Since no mosque was in the area I doubt there were many followers of Islam. There probably were Lutherans, Episcopalians, and maybe Baptists as well, but to a Jew like me, Protestants, Lutherans, etc., were all Christians who thought the Jews killed Christ.

I remember being about seven years old and this nine year old kid, Raymond came up to me with his friend Dennis and said that I was lucky the Catholics let me keep breathing. Anytime they wanted to they could just put my lights out. It was an experience that I didn’t soon forget. It also reinforced the persecution stories that I had been hearing from my parents and grandparents since I was old enough to understand the spoken word. I think Raymond became a Burns guard, after being turned down by the police department.

It was a section of Queens which, in the 1950’s, was in transition from a neighborhood of row houses and vacant lots to a teeming industrial area with apartment houses and housing projects of all types. In 1954, there were so many vacant lots that you could see ten blocks from my third floor window. By 1960, within three blocks of my house, they had built an elementary school, a junior high school, a bowling alley, three warehouses, a factory, and plenty of attached two family houses.

The Ravenswood projects were intended to house the lower middle or upper lower class families. They were six blocks away. Plenty of people scammed the housing authority and wound up with new apartments that cost them a fraction of what they would normally have had to spend for those accommodations. These were the days when a housing project was a nice place to live whether you were poor or just pretending to be poor. The 20 or so buildings were all six story maroon brick structures with playgrounds, benches, flagpoles, working elevators, heat that actually warmed the apartments, hot water that never ran out, and just about no violent crime except for the occasional domestic dispute.

The Queensview development came a few years later and was more of a middle and upper middle class development. The buildings were ten floors high (really tall for those days), and the apartments were larger and brighter than those in Ravenswood. Professional people were happy to get apartments in Queensview. It seemed that most of the Jewish people at the Astoria Center of Israel, my synagogue, lived in Queensview (although I’m sure that plenty did not).

Just about all these nationalities, religions, and classes of people had a similar preoccupation. They all wanted to make improvements for themselves and their families. It was, like all middle class neighborhoods, a place where people dreamed of better lives.

Also, lest I forget, there were the Black (in those days ‘Negro’ or ‘colored’) sections. In addition to Ravenswood and Queensview, there were two other projects within this melange of humanity. The Astoria and Queensbridge projects were built in the shadows of the two bridges that seemed to enclose Astoria. The Triborough Bridge towered over the Astoria projects and the 59^th Street Bridge ran right above the Queensbridge projects. These were both places that I was told to avoid. I guess they were also places where people dreamed, against far greater odds, of attaining better lives.

And, as in most mixed neighborhoods, there was plenty of ethnic, racial and religious prejudice. Most Whites wanted to keep the Blacks out of their part of the neighborhood. The Italians stayed away from the Polish. The Greeks were a community unto themselves. Everybody kind of ignored the Chinese. And the Irish just got drunk and hated everybody. Nobody liked the Jews either. All in all, it was your average urban middle class mixed neighborhood where most people worked hard to get what they wanted and fought just as hard to keep it. Now you might accuse me of stereotyping these people and I am sure, for example, that all the Irish people weren’t getting drunk all of the time, but I lived there and that’s the way I remember it.

I Open My Own Candy Store...

This digression coincided with my engagement to Cheri. I was saving up to buy her an engagement ring but it was taking a long time. I wasn’t a math genius but I knew more from less. I could buy a pound of pot for $130, divide it into 16 ounces, sell the ounces for $15 each and make $100 on top of whatever I smoked. So… I took the ring money, bought a pound, and discovered a few things very quickly. First, 15 ounces were gone as fast as I could weigh them. Second, my $130 was suddenly $220. Third, the stuff was much better than anything Tom had been smoking. A week later, I had Cheri’s ring, my original $130 and more smoke than I could use in a month. From little things, big things are born.

http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22/whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html

Okay… getting back to 1969… So I was working at the paper, engaged to be married to a terrific young woman, smoking my way through a happy little life when things started to come apart. I had the ring, was doing a good job at work, and suddenly a lot of things stopped making sense. I was making nearly $20,000 a year which, in 1969, was actually a lot of money for a 22 year old kid from Astoria. The rent on the apartment was only $85 and I was splitting it with Tom. I had bought a brand new, bright yellow, little Fiat 850 Spider for $2100. I had gotten my BA in June. And then there was a change of philosophy at the Times. Instead of promoting from within the ranks, they began to hire laterally, bringing in prize-winning talent from other papers. This meant that I was an extreme long shot to become a reporter at the Times.

Now the New York Times was then and probably still is the pinnacle of printed journalism. They had the highest pay scale and the most respect of any newspaper in the world. In the normal world, an aspiring journalist would start at a small town paper and work his way through the ranks, gaining experience and following a career path. But this wasn’t the normal world. I had started working there while I was still at City College and been promoted several times. I was writing the weather, the Sunday society blurbs and the obituaries on occasion. But now the promotion to reporter was unlikely. As Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters were hired from other papers, I realized that I was looking at a long-term future as a News Assistant. And I looked around the newsroom, seeing a host of disillusioned people. There was a good reason why most reporters kept bottles of scotch in their desks. The world was passing them by, both literally and figuratively. They were at the center of the most renowned newspaper in the world, working for more money than they could ever hope to make at another paper. Those who were married with families were basically locked into dead-end journalism jobs. There were more copy-editors at the Times than most papers have reporters. Hell, there were more Editors at the Times than most papers have on staff as reporters. If I wanted to become a reporter somewhere else, it meant moving out of New York, making less money as a reporter than I was making as a News Assistant, and leaving the New York scene.

And as the weeks went by, and I became more and more involved in the after hours scene, it became harder and harder to come to work each day so I could edit the casualty lists. The people I was hanging out with were just as interesting as the ones in the newsroom.

So I gave Cheri the ring. We set a date. And I just kept partying on. In the back of my mind, remembering Beanie, I really wanted to go to Jamaica for a honeymoon. Sure… whatever you want Steve… We’ll have a great time…

In the meantime, Tom and his friends kept asking me to get them smoke. Even though there wasn’t a drought anymore, they wanted my pot for a simple reason; it was just better. Before I knew it, I was bringing home a pound from school, heading off to work, and would eventually come home to a small pile of cash. Tom would weigh it, give it to his friends and leave me a little bag with an ounce and a few hundred bucks to boot. A month later, I was making the same $350 a week at the Times but making another $350 for basically doing nothing.

I remember the first time I drove home a pound. I went up to Kenny K’s apartment in the Bronx. Walking in, I saw people hanging out in a smoky daze all over the place. Kenny brought out a duffle bag, dug in, and filled a bag with the stuff. He had an Ohaus Triple Beam Scale and when he hit 454 grams, he sealed it up and gave it to me. “Look around.” He said. “This stuff is much better than anything you’ve ever had.” And I looked around, and saw that everyone was dazed. “This stuff came back from Nam.” And “Don’t smoke too much at once.” And “It comes on long after you stop.” And “Don’t smoke it now because you have to drive home with it.”

So I paid Kenny, slipped out for the drive back to Astoria. I put the bag in my trunk and get into the car. The second I pull out of the spot, a police car comes down the block and is behind me. I’m freaking out. Oh my God… Oh my God… Please don’t bust me…

And, when I got to the corner, turned right, the cops kept on straight. Now all the way home, I’m thinking about this. If I don’t tell anyone that I have something in my car, what are the odds they could figure it out? Have I ever been stopped before? No. Why should I be stopped now? No real reason unless I screw up. In other words, I was in charge of what happened. It wasn’t about the cops, it was about me. Just be cool and this didn’t have to be dangerous…. After that, I stopped taking the stuff home on the subway.

I Figure Some Things Out...Or Not...

I think I’ve posted this next thing before but it’s totally appropriate at this juncture. When you’re in school, in your teens or even your 20s, your whole life can change for the most seemingly inconsequential decision or even for no reason at all. Life-changing things can happen because of who you sat next to on a bus or in a class. At that point of your life, everything that comes after can be completely changed because of something you read or someone you met or even something you misunderstood. When you hit 30, you have the benefit of another ten years of experience and can look backwards and forwards and either keep going or decide to make a change. At 40, you can still change but you’re pretty much set and it takes a major event to reroute your direction in life. At 50, deciding to change is rarely an option and your future is less a part of your life than your past. 60? Well thank god for wisdom… Now I can tell my wife that I am loaded with wisdom while she makes sure I feel like a complete idiot.

Anyway, while I was ripe for the plucking, that trip to Miami was a life-changing moment for me. I had no way of knowing it at the time but the next 30 years would be directly attributable to the happenstance meeting with Beanie. And... he never knew it, doesn't know it and might not even be alive today.

So here it is, August of 1970 and I head back to New York to a life I had envisioned as a budding journalist but that is totally upside down in the midst of a crazy generational rebellion against the entire foundation of my youth. My peers were either fighting a pointless war overseas, hanging on desperately in school to avoid the draft, turning on in increasing numbers, tuning in, and, more significantly, dropping out. From protesting a war, protesting civil rights inequities, the protests expanded to include women’s rights, gay rights, free speech and the whole concept of ‘big brother’. And I can’t understand why marijuana is illegal. I do a little reading and find out that it was legal up until 1937… which, not coincidentally, happened to be the year prohibition was repealed. I drink and I can’t stay awake or control myself but I can smoke and drive… smoke and walk a straight line… smoke and see everything differently… I’m smoking joints in the morning when I wake up, on the way to work, grabbing a hit on my break, smoking while I’m walking… and nothing bad happens. Why is this stuff illegal? It’s fun and the biggest problem is the law, not the physical effects of it.

Now just to be honest, it’s not like I had never smoked before. I had smoked occasionally in my first year of college and never stopped using. After my mom died, my father remarried and moved to Orlando, and I was left with the two bedroom apartment I had grown up in. I had been something of a loner but I took in Tom as a roommate and he ran with a really big crowd of freaks. Tom worked at Time Magazine as a researcher and we got along great. We worked different hours so we weren’t always in each other’s way. Plus, his whole crowd was into smoke so I never had any trouble getting it. Until one day, Tom comes in and tells me there’s a drought. He’s out of pot and has tried all his sources and can’t find any. I was still going to City College at the time so when I get up to school, I ask a friend and he says, ‘Drought? What drought? How much do you want? What kind do you want?’ And right there, at that moment, another epiphany occurred. I realized that I was connected to something. I could get something that Tom and his entire crowd wanted but couldn’t find.

1969 --- A Seed Takes Root

I was in the Times newsroom for some amazing moments. I was there when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. It was a strange event in that place. The Times newsroom was filled with people who were trained to NOT be affected by what was happening and to totally focus on its newsworthiness and to be witnesses to history. The credo was that the Times was supposed to be recording history as it happened and should do so in the same academic fashion as a history book would be written. The room was filled with young idealistic people, veteran reporters (notorious drunks), copy editors who were more interested in how many words a story ran than how many deaths it talked about, reporters who had seen it all, and editors who were always ‘above’ the news. But when Armstrong stepped out onto the moon, the entire room hushed and people were blown away. It felt like the world had changed irrevocably in that moment. I’ll always remember being there for that.

And there was the only time they ever literally ‘stopped the presses’. Generally speaking, since the Times went to press in prime time, speeches were pre-distributed to journalists so they could write their stories before the actual events. And when LBJ sent around his speech on the afternoon of March 31, 1968, it was no different. The story was written and the paper was sent to press at 9PM as the President began to speak. Except, in this case, not only did the President change the language but he changed everything. I recall the editors sitting around the television in the center of the newsroom as LBJ began to speak. And a few sentences in, they began to look back and forth at one another. Head were shaking and faces were turning purple as he went further and further from the distributed text. Finally, when he announced that he was withdrawing from the election and wouldn’t seek a second term as President, they had to stop the presses and redo the entire paper. It never had happened before and has never happened since. A memorable madcap moment that saw the entire place go from dead stop to frenzied madness in the space of about 10 minutes.

http://millercenter.virginia.edu/scripps/diglibrary/prezspeeches/johnson/lbj_1968_0331.html

Henry Kamm was one of the many Times reporters who covered the War in Vietnam. I recall sending him the nightly cable one day relaying a request that he provide a map that showed where My Lai was. This was a typical Times attempt to cubbyhole a story. There had been a massacre at a Vietnamese village named My Lai and the Times wanted to show the readers exactly where My Lai was. Never mind that most people didn’t have a clue where Vietnam was except some vague notion of ‘Asia’. The Times had to show everyone where it exactly was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai

So… Kamm responds to the cable in the most incredible language, suggesting that they are out of their minds to ask for a map like that. He says that there are similar massacres happening every day and in every corner of the country; that there are about 10 or more villages named My Lai and that they are pretty much all gone, either burned up by napalm bombs or torched by troops. He then sends an articulate map, giving map coordinates of half a dozen different My Lais, explaining that he was sorry that he couldn’t send pictures but that they were all gone and the people were all dead. He further suggested that they come see what was happening over there before they sent any more inane and ridiculous requests. Kamm was my idol after that. The guy actually had a moral compass and wasn’t afraid to let it show. There were a few reporters like that. John Kifner, Michael Kaufman and Henry Kamm were the most notable although I’m sure there were others.

Okay… so one day in 1969, flush with money and likely stoned (still working at the Times), I decided to take a week’s vacation to Florida. I was engaged at the time but that’s a whole other digression and Cheri didn’t come with me so I’ll just say Cheri ended up becoming collateral damage from this trip. I stayed at the Doral Beach Hotel and the first day there, I wound up at the pool, sitting next to this freak from Philadelphia named Beanie who had hair to his waist and a guru-type grin that he perpetually wore on his face. In the course of the week, I spent a lot of time with Beanie, discussing so many things in so many obtuse ways that my head was spinning at ridiculous speeds. Between sharing joints and opinions, Beanie ripped away any remaining objections I had to leaving my life and starting again. We talked about everything from the war to the cost of pot. He also happened to have a fifth booze bottle that was filled with coconut oil that he had brought back from Jamaica (along with a whole bunch of other ‘stuff’). Beanie showed me the virtues of coconut oil as a sun-tanning device and how to roll a huge spliff and by the time the week ended, I knew I wasn’t long for the New York Times. I wanted to ‘Be What I Could’ and not ‘Be What I Was’. And thus began a long journey that was unimaginable at the time but, looking back, was probably inevitable.

All The News... Part III

Where was I... Oh yeah... something completely different... Well before I get into that, I remember a few things that happened while I was at the Times...

New Years Eve, 1969... Now one of the chores of the job was to go out each night around 11:30 and get the Daily News (which was publishing across town) as well as coffee and stuff for all the shift reporters and copy editors. Either a News Assistant (which I was) or a Copy Boy (which I started as) would go out and do this. The idea was that the editors wanted to see what was in the competition before the late edition was 'put to bed'.

So on this particular night, the Copy Boys and News Assistants decided to celebrate by taking some bright orange pills (some ersatz chemist named Owsley had created an LSD pill that replaced the original sugar cubes).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley

Now anybody who has ever turned on the television on New Years Eve knows what madness there is in New York’s Time Square. It isn’t unusual for a million people to turn out and watch the ball drop at midnight. The Copy Boy who was sent out to get the Daily News and the Coffee was Kenny Kessler, who was a really bright overweight guy who always dressed sloppily. This chore normally took about 45 minutes and in the hallowed world of the Times, nothing… absolutely nothing… should ever interfere with or come in the way of the daily production schedule. I think mentioned that the clerical staff was on acid that night. So off goes Kenny and the rest of us are walking around in our own little dazed states.

This particular New Years, the paper was expanding into another building, The Paramount Building, which had a lot of frontage on the Square. The building was under renovation and there was nothing to keep me from wandering into it and checking out the madness of the moment outside on the street. The newsroom was on the third floor and the office I found myself overlooked Times Square on 3 sides. So I looked out, saw the throngs, and totally spaced myself out. Next thing I knew, I had opened the windows to the fullest on all 3 sides and was standing there listening and watching the million crazy people. And then I began to hallucinate that I was the Pope and they were all there to see me! The sound of the mass of people was an electric undercurrent as the clock approached midnight. And at about five minutes till, I began to pray for them all and give my blessings. When the ball fell, they were all cheering for me and I had an acid-induced epiphany. I didn’t have to be a part of something to experience it. And the experience was whatever I chose to make it. At that moment, I realized that I was the one who could make things happen and not be the one who things happened to.

Anyway, about a half hour later, I closed the windows and managed to find my way through all the construction and get back to the newsroom. All the Copy Editors were clamoring for their coffee and cakes and stuff but Kenny was nowhere to be found. The Editors were freaking out that there might be an important story in the Daily News and the Times could be scooped. And the entire cadre of Copy Boys and News Assistants were all totally and irrevocably smashed on acid, smiling at everything and everybody. 1:30 rolls around and in staggers Kenny grasping a shredded copy of the Daily News and a now-empty ripped, wet, brown paper bag that must have had the coffee and stuff in it before Kenny tried to negotiate his way through a hundred thousand drunken revelers. His shirt was open, his pants were ripped, his face was flushed and he was completely wild-eyed. He had what I can only describe as a classic 'bad trip.'

All The News That's Fit To Print, Part II

It was both a sad and a glorious time. On one hand, countless friends were being drafted into the Vietnam War and more than a few came home in coffins. One of my jobs at the Times was to edit the casualty lists for the nightly paper and several times I found people I knew and would never see again. I was ‘on the inside’ of the establishment journalism and got to see firsthand how slick the censorship was engineered. I also got to send the daily cables off to each foreign reporter to tell them how their stories were handled, where they appeared in the paper, and what the competition (like the Washington Post, Newsday, and other papers were running with. At 5PM each day, the editors held a meeting where they decided on the placement of each story in the paper and how much space would be given to each of the news divisions. The main groups were Metro, National and Foreign News and they always competed for the best spots and most column inches in the day’s paper. My job was to write a summary of each reporter’s story in their own writing style and send them to the Foreign Editor who would bring them to the meeting to support the request for placement and size. This was actually not an easy job since many of the reporters were given their jobs based more on their ability to get the news than on their ability to write about it. We had a reporter in the Middle East named Dana Adams Schmidt who couldn’t write a complete sentence if his life depended on it. Whenever he filed, the word went out… “…another load of Schmidt…”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503E1DD1039F935A1575BC0A962958260

There were street protests happening all the time about all kinds of things. Anti-War, Civil Rights, Free Speech, etc. You name it and there were 30 million passionate young people out there screaming for justice. And the amazing thing was that even though the society was polarized, even those trying to maintain the status quo knew right from wrong. The last straw for me came when there was a protest about a park, People’s Park in Berkeley, California. There was a dispute going on over who and what was permissible in the park and the California National Guard was called in to restore order. This happened a year before the Ohio National Guard killed several students during a famous anti-war protest at Kent State University. Anyway, the soldiers were ordered to use force to restore order and John Kifner (NYT Reporter) led off his story with the fact that this was the first time in US History that a large unit of guard soldiers had refused to obey an order. I watched as the story was filed, sent to the editing desk and ultimately looked nothing like what he had sent in. It was clearly the most important story of the day and deserved to be placed on the front page. His filing went to a copy editor who rewrote his lead paragraph to simply relate the protest and put the Guard’s refusal to obey down into the 4^th or 5^th paragraphs. Then, when the story was placed on the front page, those paragraphs were too far down to be there but were to be included in the continuation of the story inside the paper. Now… remember that the news divisions are allotted a specific amount of space in the paper each day. They always sent more than they were allotted and what wasn’t used was regarded as ‘overset’ and discarded. Guess what wound up as ‘overset’ and never even made it into the paper?

Although I loved the job for its excitement and meaningfulness, in the end, I left. I’m not sure if I left cause I was too high, too moral, too young, or just too full of myself but I spent a lot of time thinking about the casualty lists, the life I was seeing every night in Manhattan, and the opportunity to do something ‘completely’ different.

More on that later…