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.