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.

Stepping Up....

About a year after Larry joined the Air Force, while walking over to Broadway for a bite at Dave’s Delicatessen, I ran into Danny Cohen. If he hadn’t called out to me, I never would have recognized him. He had grown a full beard, and was wearing old army boots below what looked like clothing bought from a Bowery bum. (In those days, we called them ‘bums’ whereas today they are politely referred to as ‘the homeless’.) “Hey man, how’s it goin’?” Now Danny had never been the ‘Hey man, how’s it goin?’ type. He was more of the ‘Hi guy. How ARE you?’ type. He was also one of the best dressed friends my brother ever had. Larry and the whole crew used to defer to him on what was proper attire wherever they were off to. Anyhow, Danny, who never had much to say to me when my brother was around, invited me up to his apartment, saying he had some music he wanted me to hear. I had no problem with that and went along. It turned out that the music was folk music and the singer was some guy named Bob Dylan. It was, after all, 1963, and Bob Dylan wasn’t exactly a household word at the time. Manny had bought a guitar and had become pretty proficient with it. He could really play nicely but he couldn’t sing at all. I guess Bob Dylan was his hero. But unlike Danny, Bob Dylan had a message for all that cared to listen. The words were important, not whether he could sing them or not. In fact, his style of singing almost forced the listener to hear his message. His songs seemed to raise issues that were important. I hadn’t thought very much about whom the “masters of war” were or that the U.S. government was supporting dictatorships around the world. Dylan spoke to the conscience of my generation and the rest is history. Danny, being four years my senior, had been one of my role models when he and Larry used to pal around. I was both shocked and impressed to see him transformed in such a radical fashion. He had long hair down to his shoulders in addition to his beard, and no longer wanted to be an English teacher. Danny asked me if I’d like to see some folk music in the village and we made a plan for the weekend. I also noticed that Danny had started smoking cigarettes. But they didn’t smell like the ones my father smoked and he explained that he liked to ‘roll his own’.

The raw nature of the folk sound, not just that of Dylan, affected me in a radical fashion. It wasn’t long before I discovered Phil Ochs, Patrick Sky, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and a myriad of other artists whose music held more than a beat and a message of love. These people were writing and singing songs which cried out for listening. Whether they were singing about war and peace, riches and poverty, segregation and integration, love and hate, or just about children and the things they do, these artists captured both my imagination and my intellect. But the message in the music was only a catalyst for the reaction I experienced.

When I went down to Greenwich Village with Danny, I discovered a different side of myself. Instead of being the child of my family, I discovered that I was a member of a generation. I’m talking about the Baby Boomers. Everywhere I looked, there were people my own age, and they weren’t even close to the mold that the parents of that generation had hoped to shape. Somewhere along the line, the rules that I was brought up to obey ceased to relate to the substance of my life. I guess that the music elevated my consciousness and made me question who I was living my life for. The answer was obvious. And, oh yeah, the music led to some other hobbies too.

Where Were You When?.....

In the fall of 1963, preparations were underway for the annual football clash with DeWitt Clinton High School, Stuyvesant’s arch-rival in the New York world of scholastic athletic competition. Traditionally, the usually sedate studious nature of the would-be scientists at the school would throw off the yoke of their studies for a week and galvanize into a supportive pillar for the football team with rallies held on a daily basis. Usually these rallies would culminate with some prank like the overturning of a Volkswagen beetle or the stopping of traffic in Union Square on the Friday before the big game. That year, however, as the rallies increased in intensity day by day, until on Thursday a thousand cheering students burned an effigy of DeWitt Clinton in Union Square Park, the faculty became quite apprehensive of what would occur on Friday. Preparations were made, with plans for a massive display of vitriolic splendor directed at our opponents. After all, Stuyvesant wasn’t particularly noted for its athletic leadership, but rather for scholastic achievement. Thus, the rally assumed more importance than the game itself since everybody assumed we would lose the game no matter what happened on Friday or Saturday. However, on this particular Friday afternoon, there was to be no rally. At 12:30 or so in the afternoon, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot down in Dallas, and all thoughts of athletics were suddenly banished from the world.

One day, in my senior year, while I was working on a term paper in my bedroom, I needed to ask my Mom a question about some obscure historic fact. She was cleaning the house as usual on Saturday (since she worked during the week), and I went looking for her. I found her collapsed in a reading chair in my parents’ bedroom, dead or about to die from a massive heart attack. She was 47 years old at the time and her heart attack was not entirely a surprise. Mom had had rheumatic fever as a child and was always aware that she had a heart condition stemming from this illness. She was a very courageous lady who gave birth not once but twice after being told that she would probably shorten if not lose her life in the process. Of course, at 17, I didn’t appreciate that and actually felt that 47 wasn’t so young anyway. Nonetheless, I was really surprised by my lack of emotion at the time. I knew I loved her deeply and could only imagine what life would be like without her, but I protected myself by relating to it as a ‘bad break’ and concentrated on how ‘life goes on’.

Shortly after her death, I graduated high school. My grades weren’t strong enough to get me any scholarships for college. In fact, they weren’t even strong enough to get me into a regular four-year college. However, I did gain entry to Bronx Community College as a non-matriculated night student. Probably I was more affected by her passing than I realized, since in my first term at night school, I managed to finally hit my stride as a student, receiving A grades in both my courses. In my second term, I was allowed to matriculate and attend the day session. This was important, since it not only meant that I wouldn’t have to spend four or five years getting a two year degree, but I could get my higher education for free. The City University of New York, in the middle 60s, was a terrific place to get a college education. For the first time, I was allowed to pursue my own scholastic interests, and this was reflected by my actually learning the subjects I registered for.

Easy Money Part 1

While I was not a stupid kid, I wasn’t such a great student either, and for some reason which I still don’t understand, I was accepted to Stuyvesant High School. This was a special advanced high school which had a strong educational emphasis on math and science. My parents were adamant that I should take the test for the school and, unbelievably, I was chosen. The system must have recognized something in my ability that my teachers did not. I soon discovered that I hated math and science but loved English and history. Out of a class of 699, I ranked 672 at the time of my graduation. This wasn’t too surprising to me, since I simply didn’t have any interest in the required curriculum. My folks were really disappointed as each year passed and my grades were consistently poor. I think ‘pissed off’ would more accurately describe their feelings. After being told that I had a very high IQ, they figured that I was on the road to a wonderworld of scholastic endeavor that would be followed by a huge income and galactic recognition.

On my first day at Stuyvesant, I was surprised to see a familiar face from my neighborhood. Chris B had apparently also been accepted to the school and we immediately began to spend time together. The school was loaded with all sorts of exceptionally brilliant kids, most of whom qualified as being typecast as original nerds. About halfway into the first term, I had a major disagreement with one of the guys in the lunchroom and he challenged me to a fight after school. Happily, this was a whole different atmosphere than I was used to in Astoria. However, at precisely three o’clock, with mounting apprehension, I marched to my fate at the rear entrance to the school. Chris and I had fallen in with a crowd of street-wise guys. They were all offering advice as to how to deal with this fight, but I was basically pretty scared since I had never taken part in any of the riots back in Astoria. A crowd gathered and this kid, who was three or four inches taller than me, appeared right on schedule. He then proceeded to announce to me and the audience how he knew karate and was required by law to advise me that his hands were considered lethal weapons. While he was saying this, he began to remove his overcoat. As soon as his overcoat was half off, I charged him, tackled him, pinned his arms in the coat, and began banging his head against the sidewalk. He never threw a punch, and nobody was too anxious to fight with me after that.

Melvin was attending Long Island City High School while I was traveling each day to school in Manhattan. In the middle of our sophomore year, he was sneaking around in the basement of his school and discovered a box of keys in the janitor’s office. Among these keys was a grand master key for Sargent locks. As it turned out, these Sargent locks were the standard used throughout the New York City School system. Armed with this key, Melvin was able to penetrate the various offices at his school and abscond with a horde of other items which were used all over the city. There were passes of all description, from elevator passes (which were used primarily for handicapped students and faculty), to guidance passes (which were sent by school monitor to classrooms as a summons from deans and guidance counselors for individual students to appear in their offices forthwith).

Chris and I arranged a plan where he would show up at my classroom posing as a monitor, show the pass to my teacher who would then release me from class to answer the summons. Chris would then enter his class a little late, and after a few minutes I would perform the same charade for his teacher. This scheme led to a virulent class-cutting binge where we found ourselves doing a brisk business as the passes proved to be a valuable commodity. We had been rubber-stamping the passes with the signature of Dean McGowan, a tall, red-faced, rotund alcoholic who served as the Dean of Student Behavior. (Through connivery and by using duplicates of Melvin’s invaluable grandmaster key, we had been able to steal one of Dean McGowan’s rubber stamps and have it duplicated.) Our success, however, soon turned to greed, as we found ourselves selling the passes to our friends and anyone else who would pay the fee. Ultimately, one of these customers had a problem which led to his appearance before Dean McGowan. He spilled the beans to the Dean who, in a fit of rage, went personally to my classroom only to discover from the teacher that a monitor had taken me to his office earlier. This confirmed the story he had been told leading to my immediate suspension and requiring my mother’s appearance for an audience with Dean McGowan. During this meeting, I was repeatedly asked to inform on my source for the illegal passes and key, but I just couldn’t bring myself to implicate Melvin. After some well-deserved punishment, coupled with a multitude of promises of good behavior, I was reinstated and allowed to return to classes.

My Brother Before I Really Appreciated Him

My brother, Larry, wasn’t such a great student, but what he lacked in academic endeavors didn’t extend into his social life. He had girls by the carload. One day I ran across a little file box that had at least a hundred cards in it, each with a girl’s name, address, nickname, how far she would go, when she went that far, and with which one of his friends she had gone. He and his friend, Danny Cohen, seemed to outdistance their other two pals, Lenny Weinberg and Leon Klarman and Carl Eisenberg in this regard. Danny’s father was an accountant, and he wanted to be an English teacher. Lenny’s parents owned a candy store, much like ours, on the next blocks and Leon’s father had one on Broadway (four avenues away). They were quite a wild crew or so it seemed to a rather naive twelve year old.

They were definitely, for Jewish kids, a crazy bunch of guys. Lenny wasn’t all that bright and was affectionately nicknamed “The Dope.” One night, all four of them were out in Danny’s car and were pulled over by the cops when Larry leaned out the window to grab some girl. The cop, a big Irish bruiser, stormed up to the car and asked Danny, who was driving, what they had in the car. These were not the days of drugs so I guess he was looking for beer or hard liquor. Danny, smartass that he was, pointed in the back seat to Lenny, and told the cop that the “Dope” was in the back. They all wound up spread-eagled against the wall while the cops ripped the car apart looking for heroin (in those days, nobody but the ghetto kids and artistic types used marijuana or other drugs.) The guys all told this tale as though they had robbed a bank or something. I thought it was funny, but I wouldn’t realize just how funny it was until a few years later.

But as fate would have it, Larry did poorly in high school, and, pressured by our parents to continue in college, he managed to do poorly in college as well. I do remember him, however, camping by the mailbox for days when the college marks were due and substituting postcards with Bs on them for the Ds and Fs which he was really getting. This was only helpful in the short run because how was he supposed to explain to Mom and Dad why he was drummed out of school with such great marks? Shortly after his college debacle, Larry decided that the only way to get out of the house was to join the Air Force. He was successful in that regard and wound up in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas or Florida We were only semi-close before he left and afterwards, for many years, it seemed like we were from different planets.