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.