Melvin

Our apartment house was one of a multitude of pre-war buildings that had been part of the construction boom that occurred in the early 1940s. Originally, it had been surrounded by a two foot deep row of hedges and had a long canopy which stretched from the courtyard to curbside, but by the time we moved in both of these were long gone. The hedgerow had been cemented over and the all that remained of the canopy were the metal rings on the sidewalk where the poles used to stand in support of it. The outside of the building was faced with the deep red bricks which were common to the period. The builder had apparently cut some costs in the construction since quite a few of the internal mechanisms, like the boiler and the elevator were having more than their fair share of breakdowns. But all in all, it was a pretty nice place to live. The hallways were floored with a polished granite-type surface. There was a fire door which separated the two ‘wings’ of each floor.

Our third floor apartment, adjacent to the incinerator chute, had a closet which shared a common wall with the chute and which we dubbed the ‘hot closet,’ since temperatures in this closet were always in the hundred degree range. As you entered the front door, you found yourself in a powder blue foyer which forked in two directions, one leading to the living room, and the other branching off towards the kitchen and my parents’ bedroom. In addition to the ‘hot’ closet, there were two other closets near the entry to the living room which were a his-and-hers arrangement for my folks. If you continued on through the living room, there was a second entrance to my parents’ bedroom through a set of French doors and a vestibule at the far end of the room which turned left into the bedroom shared my brother and myself, and turned right into the bathroom. The linen closet was straight ahead. With the exception of the living room, which was carpeted in a dark green, all the other rooms had a variety of linoleum floor coverings. All these rooms were fairly spacious by today’s standards. While far from luxurious, the furnishings were pretty comfortable.

A four-room flat, it was in the back corner of the building with windows which overlooked a long fifty foot wide courtyard that served as a common service area for three other buildings. In the center of the courtyard, surrounded by a cement sidewalk, was a little arboretum (actually an untended 20 by 30 foot stand of trees and hedges interspersed with numerous weeds). My grandfather also lived on the third floor but his apartment overlooked the avenue just up the hill from the store. It was a pretty convenient set-up for the family.

I had a best friend who lived in the building, Melvin. He lived in the same apartment row as I did and his bedroom was two floors above mine. We used to knock on the steam pipe and send messages back and forth. Eventually, we became technologically more advanced and used frozen juice cans. He would tie a string to a juice can, and lower it to my window and I would attach my can and bingo, we had a working intercom. This step forward into the scientific age was greatly appreciated by the old couple, Leo and Fay Rice, who lived on the fourth floor, between us, since it meant that they didn’t have to listen to the pipes clanging all day and night. Although Leon was quite hard of hearing, his bed was right next to the pipe and he had no trouble hearing our Morse coded messages. (Fortunately, he hadn’t been in the navy) The other four apartment dwellers in our row of pipes were also quite relieved when the primitive communications system was abandoned.

Leo, who owned the grocery store on the corner, moved to the suburbs after investing most of his money in Toyota stock, which cost next to nothing, on the first day of its issue. He told my father about this opportunity, but Dad couldn’t see any future in Japanese cars.

I met Melvin, when we first moved to the building from the Bronx, in 1952. At first, our parents encouraged the friendship, since we were two of the three Jewish boys in the building. The third, Kenneth Weiner, was deaf and dumb and most of the kids were deathly afraid of him. Looking back, I guess we were all scared of his guttural utterings, which nobody could understand but which sounded pretty aggressive. At the age of 5, you enter into relationships without regard for intellectual capacity or good or evil. Such concepts don’t affect your behavior until later on and sometimes, they never do. Socially, we were acceptable to our parents and that’s what mattered above all else. However, ten years later, they discovered that we could cause far more trouble together than we ever had separately. I was basically a prisoner of the candy store. My father knew everybody in the neighborhood and everybody knew me. I couldn’t shoot a paper clip without him finding out. Melvin, on the other hand, whose parents worked in the Manhattan all day, was free to do as he pleased. He could lie to his folks and they would think he was as truthful as George Washington. And lying, it would turn out, was the least of Melvin’s transgressions. In the end, my relationship with Melvin would have a very meaningful effect on my future. But who could know this at the age of five or even fifteen?

God Bless America

Until I was fourteen, the store had an antiquated soda fountain which was fronted by a long pink and white marble counter. By 1961, the fountain was often out of order for one reason or another. We had a half a dozen ice cream bins just below the fountain. If you had to describe the store with one word, that word would have been ‘old’. If you had to use two words, you could have added ‘dirty’ as the overall description. There were six antiquated metal revolving seats which were always being abused by kids who insisted on rocking back and forth while they merrily spun themselves around and around. One of these seats was constantly coming up out of the partly rotten wooden floor to which it was nailed. The linoleum which covered the wood seemed to always be worn out down the center aisle. The store was long, narrow and not quite adequately lit. On the back wall there was an aging Breyer’s Ice Cream clock above the entrance to the rear storage area. Looking up, you would see a drab yellow nicotine-stained high tin ceiling and the rest of the store was always in varying states of disrepair.

My mother was continually asking my father when he was going to either clean it up or leave it to work in what she called the ‘real world.’ She had worked for years at the Quality Toy Company in Manhattan as a bookkeeper and I suspect that this was the only reason our family survived financially. The profit margin in the candy store business was really slim and with a 500 or 600 dollar gross each week, it had to support both us and my grandfather. Finally, he decided to get rid of the fountain and redo the entire place. He signed a contract with Hallmark cards to sell only their products in the greeting card area. We gutted the entire store, added several rows of card display and storage racks down the center of the store and built all the other display areas out of formica covered wood. We got rid of the two display windows that had to be passed by in order to enter the store, thereby pushing the selling area right out to the sidewalk where a new front was installed. He added a humidor for tobacco storage. In just three weeks, we had a brand new, clean card shop. The soda fountain was eliminated and since greeting cards were marked up 100%, the profit margin became more comfortable. We were the only Hallmark retailer within ten blocks and soon the whole neighborhood was buying its cards at our store.

For almost ten years, I spent every Saturday night and Sunday morning working in the store. Each Saturday night, I would put together the Sunday papers, which came in sections that had to be collated before they were sold. I used to help out practically every day and was glad to do it. Sunday mornings were the most interesting. Every hour, as each church mass was finished, the people would all show up at the store for their newspapers. It was amazing to me that so many of these people, who believed they had just spent an hour with God, would immediately arrive at our store looking for the National Enquirer. Usually, the lead story had a headline that read something like, “Baby Born With Two Heads and No Brain” or “Mother Drops Kids in Vat of Acid” or “Is Ed Sullivan Sleeping Around?”.

While I had some obvious anti-Christian feelings, I would like to believe that they were rooted in the post-world war II paranoia which affected Jews throughout the world. My parents and grandparents were acutely aware that the Roman Catholic Church had, for almost two thousand years, held all Jews accountable for the death of Christ. This was a ridiculous notion, if there ever was one. That was like holding all Roman Catholics responsible for the medieval crusades, or for helping the Nazis to escape after the World War II holocaust.

We did not have a very large family by the end of World War II. Our ancestry was geographically located on both sides of the Rumanian-Polish border. Out of more than 400 pre-war members of the family tree, only a handful survived the holocaust. I think two or three escaped to Israel, two made it to Argentina, and my grandparents had immigrated to the United States in the early 1930s. Most of those who died in the holocaust were victims of the atrocities committed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. So, while we were safe in America, the war became a personal tragedy for our family.

Growing Up Short and Dumpy

I wasn’t particularly tall at age thirteen, reaching about 5 feet 6 inches with my shoes on. In fact, I was pretty dumpy looking since I weighed about 160 at that time. However, in the summer of 1960, an amazing thing happened. I grew almost three inches and lost ten pounds at the same time. All of a sudden I went from a plump little kid to a lanky, strapping teenager. Eventually I would grow another three inches and hold my weight in the 160 range. It’s unbelievable what a few inches in height and a few less pounds can do for your self-esteem. Although my upbringing was centered on education and intellectual pursuits, I always felt somewhat inferior in physical activities. In reality, I was fairly coordinated and had excellent reflexes, but my size and shape always seemed to hold me back. When the kids used to choose up sides for the stickball or basketball games (I was never allowed to play football and, in the 1950’s and early 60’s, football wasn’t nearly as compelling as it is today), I usually was the last to be picked. This didn’t please me, but my folks never failed to remind me that education and vocational aptitude were far more important things in life than athletic prowess.

I had worn eyeglasses since the age of 4, when my mother realized that I always wanted to sit within 3 or 4 feet of the television and took me to the optometrist. It turned out that I was extremely nearsighted and had a high degree of myopia. Eyeglasses were a must. While this led to my being the brunt of some common children’s cruelty, I never regarded my glasses as a major hindrance. I could see better with them than without them and that was all that mattered. However, the extra few inches in height enabled me to cut a more acceptable figure than that of a short plump kid with glasses. My self-confidence soared and I now felt equal to any physical challenge that came my way.

There was an Irish punk, Mike McNulty, who used to insult me every chance he got. It wasn’t unusual for him to come running up to me, screaming ‘Four-eyed Jewboy!’ for all to hear, as he proceeded to grab my hat or books or whatever he could latch his miserable fingers onto. Occasionally, he would even punch me in the stomach and I, having no idea whatsoever how to defend myself, would either run away or go home with a bloody nose. Not that three inches is the difference between being a tough guy or a wimp, but I finally decided that I had had enough of this mean bastard’s abuse. One day in September of that year, I was walking through the playground on my way home from school when McNulty came running up to me in his usual fashion and made a grab for my books. Instead of standing stock still, which had been my customary reaction to his previous attacks, I sidestepped his lunge and punched him square in the face, bloodying his nose. Despite the shock he must have felt, he had a reputation to uphold. McNulty put his hands up, palms forward, in a traditional signal of surrender, and then launched a kick straight for my groin. Fortunately, I knew what a rotten apple he really was and had no illusions about his backing off. When his leg began to move forward, I stepped inside the range of his kick, and brought my books up into his unguarded chin, knocking him unconscious for almost five whole minutes. My parents weren’t very happy when they found out about the incident, but McNulty never physically bothered me again. Once in a while, he would yell a religious slur at me but it was always from the other side of the street. When the word of my defense got around the neighborhood, I received a great deal more respect from the other kids. I had found out that, while turning the other cheek was a normal reaction to the religious prejudice most Jews experienced, sometimes it felt far better to smash someone’s face in. It was a lesson I didn’t soon forget.

Crazy Mike

The store was a favorite of the junior high school students from just across the street. However, calling these individuals students was really stretching its meaning. My dad stood about 6 foot two inches tall and plenty of these young men who hung out were at least that tall and some even taller. They had been left back, held back, and demoted so many times that quite a few of them were eligible for military service by the time they reached the eighth grade. It’s not that they were all stupid, though lots of them were total morons, but they were from broken homes with drunken families, with no goals, and no future. They belonged to street gangs like the Astoria Bishops, and were a really tough crowd. If you rubbed some of them the wrong way, they would just as soon look at you as punch you in the face. I remember this one kid, however, Chris Benevent, who was really small. He hung around with the Bishops but was really of such small stature that they considered him to be more of a mascot than a member. He always struck me, though, as a lot smarter than the average member of the Astoria gangs. While not a fighter, he added an element of strategy to the plots that were hatched in the competition amongst the street gangs.

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but after they built the junior high school, our store became the designated after-school (and during-school) hangout. My father installed a juke box which played records for five cents and then the crowds descended. Fortunately, these six foot bruisers all found respect for both my father and grandfather. Probably this stemmed from our extending credit to these young customers. And although they wouldn’t think twice about stealing a car or ripping off a truck, they never failed to pay debts incurred at ‘Little Pops’. While plenty of students were normal kids from normal homes with normal hopes and dreams, there was a distinct profusion of these older kids who were all screwed up. Most of them would wind up either dead or in jail before they reached high school.

Junior High School 204, which was just across the street, was comprised of a predominantly black student population. Although it was located in an all-white area, there wasn’t another school between its location and the Queensbridge projects. This led to an abundance of racial disharmony, or, as most people would call them, race riots. If, for example a white student would call a black student a ‘nigger’ or another racial slur, the lines would be drawn and by three o’clock, the battle would be joined. It was always amazing to me how quickly the students from Long Island City High School would appear to protect their younger brothers and sisters. This protection did not take the form of defensive action however, but rather resulted in plenty of head-knocking violence. The Blacks would assemble in the playground which, in the White neighborhood, was a sort of unoccupied demilitarized zone. Then, at some signal or other, they would assault whatever white student was stupid enough to still be hanging around. Occasionally, they would run up against some of the really hard cases, like the guys who hung out at our store, and it would develop into a real rumble. It was not unusual to see 4 or 5 white kids swinging car antennas and chains, holding twenty or more blacks at bay till the cops arrived. Interestingly, the cops never showed up when the white kids were beating up the blacks but if the situation was reversed, they were johnny-on-the-spot. One time, when things really got out of hand, about five hundred black students, girls included, charged up 36^th Avenue, in a broad front which stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk, towards the corner near our store. We had been told at lunchtime that trouble was brewing and dropped the metal gate that shielded the front of the store. As luck would have it, the alleged perpetrator of the instigating deed was one of the gang who was known to hang out at our store. He and a friend of his had smacked a black kid for some real or imagined insult, leading to the dares and challenges which usually preceded these affairs. So, here comes this mob of five hundred black kids chasing these two white boys who, believe it or not, would stop every so often to take a swing at the nearest pursuer. When they reached the intersection by the store, about 400 whites poured out of the side street and a real brawl commenced. If this kind of battle were to occur today, I am sure that it would involve guns and maybe even an assault weapon or two. But in 1959, except for the occasional knife, these events were mainly fought with more primitive weapons like chains, car antennas, blackjacks, brass knuckles and the like. On this particular occasion, however, a guy named Crazy Mike lived up to his reputation by appearing with a railroad tie which had a handle carved into its body. He almost singlehandedly routed the charging black mob by wading into its midst swinging this fifty pound bludgeon. It was over in about ten minutes but those minutes passed by ever so slowly, with battles raging up and down the avenue. When the cops arrived, after the blacks had been repulsed, they picked up one white kid and about fifteen blacks and hauled them off to the stationhouse. This incident made the papers the next day and for once, we were actually in the newspapers we were selling. There rarely were any serious injuries incurred during these melees and its makes me wonder why, today, every time a bad word is spoken, some poor kid winds up either in the hospital or in the morgue.

Gramps

Anyway, my father and grandfather were partners in a candy store that was right downstairs from our apartment. I spent a good portion of my formative years making egg creams and malteds. Cokes were a nickel and Gus’s pizza place next door sold slices for fifteen cents. This seemed okay to me but my eyes rolled every time my father would tell me about one cent stamps and nickel bus and subway rides. My folks had lived through the Great Depression and I guess anybody who endures something like that can never forget it.

My grandfather was around sixty when I was ten and he was a never-ending source of advice and help. With a full head of white hair, standing a stocky five foot six or so, I can still hear him telling me not to do something because “It doesn’t look good.” Or explaining to me why Frank the Hungarian who lived right above the store smoked four packs of Camels a day. (Frank died of you-know-what before I was twenty.) Or walking me to the bus stop for Hebrew school and making sure I had a bag of french fries to eat on the way. He was as gentle a man as you could ever want to meet. His name was David, but the customers all called him ‘Pops’. In fact the store was known as “Little Pops” since there was a candy store near the church called “Big Pops”. I always called him ‘Gramps’.

My grandfather was a very wise man. He had that quiet self-assurance about his knowledge that only comes at an advanced age. When he said something, he never had to be forceful. He rarely demanded anything of me, but his words held the ring of truth. It was as if he knew that young people had to find out some things for themselves and that, whatever they were told, they would still have to learn their own lessons.

I remember many an afternoon playing chess with my father at the store while he ran the business between moves. I learned to read from the comic book rack and soon moved on to bigger things (like “By Love Possessed” which my mother caught me with when I should have been studying). Mathematics to me meant being able to make the right change or putting fifty pennies in a roll. I’ll never forget making endless stacks of ten pennies each and putting five in each roll of pennies. This may not seem like much but it was a fair achievement at the age of six.

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.