Vietnam, Eggs and Marijuana

During the time I spent at Bronx Community College, from 1965 through 1967, the action in Vietnam started to become much more intense. The ‘police action’ was beginning to feel much more like a war. Our country was drafting more and more young men, sending them off to Southeast Asia, and there was no real end in sight. I found myself, at first, torn between my natural patriotic feelings and the suspicion that this war had nothing to do with patriotism. In fact, as time went on, I felt that it might be more patriotic to try to end our involvement, than to enlist and fight for Uncle Sam. Although I refrained from joining any of the on-campus anti-war organizations, because they were much further left-leaning than I believed myself to be, in mid-1966, I did show up at a protest outside a marine recruiting station on the Grand Concourse and began picketing the place. A crowd gathered and before long, the fifteen demonstrators, me among them, were bombarded with an assortment of items varying from tomatoes to eggs. I could see that the passions on both sides of this issue were going to be expressed with extreme intensity.

That term, I was taking a night course at the college annex which was located in the Bronx High School of Science. One of the protestors from the recruiting station, David Fleischer, turned up in my class and we used to talk politics while walking to the subway after class. He was espousing what sounded to me like a ‘party line,’ which seemed to welcome an American defeat in Vietnam rather than the cessation of fighting that I favored. On a cool night, while arguing some point or other, he produced a corn cob pipe and asked me if I’d like to smoke some ‘pot.’ I had been offered the opportunity to indulge with increasingly regularity lately and in fact had tried it twice with no apparent effects. I figured this would be just like those other times so I joined him in smoking his pipe. I just took two or three puffs, but by the time we reached the train station, I was having difficulty focussing on conversation. In fact, it seemed that there were five minute pauses between responses. The train was delayed, and we sat there for an hour, waiting on a bench. Finally, it arrived and I began the long trip home. Usually, the ride took 45 minutes if you made good connections but was unlikely to take more than an hour if you didn’t. The train seemed to take forever stopping and starting at the stations along the way, and I was really afraid of what my dad would say when I staggered in the door, more than two hours later than expected. Finally, I arrived at my home station and walked to two blocks home. Amazingly, he couldn’t see anything wrong with me and I actually arrived home only five minutes late. The entire delay had been an illusion, an effect of the cannabis. The next day, I expected to have a craving for drugs, the beginning of a dreaded habit, but I could discern no after effects whatsoever.

A Real Pisser

One other thing that came out of my relationship with Peter L was Sandy M. I met her at one of the campaign rallies for Roy Goodman. She lived on West 86^th Street and her father was the Horowitz of Horowitz and Margaretten Matzohs. This impressed Peter to no end and to both our surprise she accepted my invitation to see a movie. My parents were thrilled that I should be dating a girl with such obvious links to the upper social classes, and one whose name was revered throughout the Jewish community. Well, matzohs or no matzohs, Amanda was one weird girl. I mean she was pleasant company and all that, but there were some aspects of this girl’s behavior that really shocked me. First of all, I wasn’t all that sophisticated in these kinds of relationships. Therefore, on the first date, when she excused herself three times to go to the ladies room during the movie, I didn’t think much about it but rather was focused in on her willingness to smooch and rub her body against mine. In fact, it wasn’t until a month or so later, on our fourth or fifth date, that I realized she had some physical or psychological problem with her urinary tract. I had been ignoring the obvious problem when one evening, in the dead of winter, with the temperature below zero, she insisted that I stop my car on the Bronx River Parkway so she could run into the woods. I think that was the straw that broke the camel’s back because I had this vision, while she was off in the woods, of what it would be like to live with a person who had to piss every half hour. I dropped her off at her plush apartment house and headed east to Astoria where, while the girls weren’t even close to being in the ruling class, they had firm control over their bladders.

College Journalism?

My stories were apparently first-rate since I was given the opportunity to write my own column in my second semester on the paper. I now had a forum from which to opine on any subject that struck my fancy, or at least those that didn’t upset the faculty advisor, Mr. Wolfson. There was quite a battle going on that year for the presidency of the student council. The outcome of these elections was generally decided by a small percentage of the votes cast and therefore the opinions expressed in the school paper weighed heavily in the balance. One candidate, Peter Lesser, was really leaning on the editorial board and the columnists to gain their approval. He told me he had political ambitions and connections which he would use to help me in the real world if I endorsed him in my column.

Peter was a tall fellow with fairly short black hair which he combed straight to one side. If he had a mustache his haircut might have been reminiscent of Hitler. His face was highlighted by his bushy black eyebrows, and a thin, hawk-like nose which pointed straight ahead like a one-way traffic sign. When he spoke, Peter always seemed to me to be talking out of the side of his mouth. It was funny because he was doing this literally and figuratively at the same time. He was always running after money and power. His brother had married some girl from Chicago whose parents owned half the city. He used to say they had so much money they couldn’t count it. Anyway, he figured he could use his brother’s good fortune to further his political goals. One of these was to become governor of New York by the year 2000. However, Mario Cuomo has nothing to fear, since Peter has long since vanished from the New York area.

One thing which came out of my relationship with Peter was my getting involved in several political campaigns in 1966. Peter and I worked together to help get Roy Goodman elected to the State Senate in the Silk Stocking District. He indicated that by working in the political arena, we might get advance notice when any Army Reserve lists were opened up in the New York area. This would presumably enable us to avoid duty in Vietnam and at the same time get credit for having served our country. (I guess Dan Quayle was thinking along the same lines.) In any case, Roy Goodman was a good man, and I never regretted working for him. The other campaign was a little more dicey. We went out to try to elect a Black republican, Eugene MacIntosh, to the state assembly. The district included most of north Harlem and Washington Heights. He was running against a Jewish democrat who was strictly a ‘Tammany Hall’ type of politician. I remember gathering up a bunch of friends from school, convincing them that Harlemites would be better off with a Black republican than a Jewish political hack and organizing them into a group we called ‘Students for MacIntosh.’ We spent many a night walking the streets of Harlem, talking to voters and imploring them to vote for Mr. MacIntosh. One of our brighter ideas was to make a stencil that read “MacIntosh for Assembly” and paint the letters into crosswalks with Dayglo paint. We figured that people always look down as they step off a curb and therefore they couldn’t miss seeing his name. After all, name recognition was touted as the battle that wins these kinds of wars. Apparently we were right in half our assumptions. Everybody who crossed the street read the signs but the reaction was decidedly anti-MacIntosh. These were the days before graffiti was in vogue and MacIntosh received about two hundred angry phone calls complaining that we had defaced the streets. This may have been the first organized graffiti spraying in New York City history but obviously that milestone went unappreciated at the time. Shortly, we were sent out with cans of black paint to eliminate the stencilled messages. Frankly, the bright colors that we had used went a long way towards sprucing up an otherwise dirty and dreary locale, but I guess the residents had other ideas. Ultimately, it didn’t matter anyway since MacIntosh was a Lindsay republican and Harlemites were traditionally democratic voters. I think Eugene got about 20 percent of the vote.

I did finally endorse Peter, but it was because his opponent was both a real jerk and a TMF member, not because he tried to bribe me. In fact, he won the school election by a slim margin when his girlfriend, a student at the nursing division, managed to stuff the ballot box on his behalf and at his behest. Peter is now a District Attorney in Dallas and recently ran for mayor. I understand he went to Texas after failing the New York Bar exam three times. New York’s loss is Texas’ gain. Hooray for politics.

Bronx Community College

Bronx Community College, unlike Stuyvesant High School, was a co-educational institution. In simple terms, this meant there were people of the female persuasion in my immediate proximity. I felt like a kid in a candy store (a feeling with which I was quite familiar).

Also, I found interests in extra-curricular activities, like the college newspaper and literary magazine. I soon became a reporter for the Spectator. The paper was put together in a room in the basement known as the Pub. This room, which was no wider than fifteen feet and certainly no longer than twenty, had five desks, seven file cabinets and a closet which was converted into a dark room. Within the walls of these close quarters was assembled the weirdest combination of intellectual misfits I think I ever met.

Neil Lichtman, whose father we were encouraged to believe worked for the CIA, was the managing editor. Neil, secretive but quite eloquent, had us convinced that the world revolved around concentric conspiracies. Byrne B, whose appearance resembled that of a Jewish Lee Harvey Oswald, was the news editor. The last I heard of Byrne, he had graduated and taken off for Flint, Michigan, where he had a job selling new Cadillacs and then working for MCI. Bob Mc, all three hundred pounds of him, was the photo chief. Also in the running for the obesity title were three or four others whose names escape me but without whom, the Pub office wouldn’t have had the same aura. Vivian Something (who is probably now glad that I could never remember her last name) was clearly in the lead as office slut. Skinny, she was not. Her legs were like highway pillars, and the roadway they supported was often traveled. Irene F was the warm innocent motherly type, whose every written sentence came out like a confession extracted under duress. There were a few normal types there, like Joan C and Ann D, but they were the exceptions. Me? I was probably the weirdest one of all but nobody realized this because I was great at hiding my true feelings.

The guys at school, regardless of their politics, intelligence level, type of weirdness or lack of same, all had one thing in common. They possessed the much sought after 2-S draft status. The conflict (it was, after all, a conflict, not a war) in Vietnam Of course, there were groups at school that absolutely supported the effort in Southeast Asia. Among these were the TMF Club. The TMF was purported to stand for Truth, Morality, and Freedom, but in one of my more aggressive moments, I told everyone who would listen that they were really the Tough Mother Fuckers. This pissed them off mightily. They managed to chase me for a few blocks but I escaped easily. They were very Tough Mother Fuckers, but not very Fast Mother Fuckers. I wasn’t very tough, but I wasn’t very slow either. was heating up in 1965 and not too many of us were anxious to join the fray.