But the guards were there, as well, to keep away any junkies from scavenging for whatever they could carry away — copper wiring and light fixtures, for example. Heroin had begun to sweep through Harlem — a lot of drugs were being sold out of the projects along 124th Street and across the way in the projects of 125th Street and along the sidewalks below 110th, those blocks teeming with young addicts. I can recall accompanying one of the local junkies, a really nice guy, to cop his stuff, always a harrowing experience, what with those assignations held in dingy project hallways and with those dealers and their acquaintances, all of them black, frankly not liking whitey (me). On that end, things had been already changing for a few years; I won’t entertain any discussion of drugs here, or the ethos of getting high — poor and bored kids, without too many prospects, just liked doing it, and there were enough junkies around that the generally safe feeling one used to have about walking around that neighborhood vanished. (An older kid who lived across the way, addicted but a sharp fellow, used to knock on our door, asking my mother for a glass of water, and at first opportunity would manage to walk through the apartment, with its circular configuration, looking around for anything of value to conceivably take — fortunately, we had little worth taking.) Marijuana, by the way, seemed to have crept in on little cat’s feet a few years earlier — kids smoking joints while playing stickball on 120th Street were a common sight. (Most never bothered anyone, just wanting to have their fun, and reefers, at a dollar a stick, were always readily available, just like cigarettes.)
In any event, those demolitions sucked the life out of that street: So many of my neighbors, turned into air. Sure, kids still played out in front, doo-wop singers still managed to get together for their stoop sessions, and I managed to see my friend Richard — who’d moved with his family to a place on West End Avenue in the nineties — but, with so many familiar faces gone, the block often seemed deserted, especially at night, when you’d have to watch your back.
Naturally, during those demolitions, we developed a heightened animosity, as townies, toward the university. I can remember going over to the campus and tossing clumps of dirt and stones in through classroom windows as the students, who had nothing to do with what happened, were sitting for a lecture. (Sorry, my friends.) And sometime later, aside from sneering at any students who crossed our paths, while adopting tough-guy personas, we — I’m talking about myself and a few other local kids — made it a regular practice to head over to the wide street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, by Teachers College, where we’d pass the afternoon prying Volkswagen insignias off the countless Beetles parked in rows out in front: I collected dozens of those things, for no good reason, though sometimes one of us would head down to a pawnshop on 125th Street to sell the medallions for two dollars apiece.
Of course, within a year or so, they had put up the School of International Affairs, right across the street, where Richard’s building, 420, had once stood, and, a block south, Columbia’s law library, massive structures that to me, knowing nothing about modern architecture, seemed to lack charm. Spared were la casa italiana, with the grocers and a soda fountain left intact on that corner, as well as a few remaining buildings on the drive toward 117th Street. Suddenly, students came pouring in through the high glass doors of the new 420 (for that is its current address), and while that was something one came to accept, and even get used to, at night, when the institution closed down, that side of the block became eerily silent and dark. Our apartment, smothered by the shadows of that structure, saw less light during the day. (I’ve often wondered what my father thought about that building; oh, he still sat out on the stoop, smoking cigarettes in the afternoons, and looked out across the street, as those anonymous students made their way to their classes, and while I’m sure he had nothing against them, he probably missed seeing his friend Mr. Martinez, the superintendent, coming up the block, and the opportunity to invite him in.)
It was pretty lousy from our end, though at least we had a friend in the new housing manager that Columbia had appointed to look after the block. His name was Mr. Foley, a congenial older, white-haired Irish man who always spoke with a thick brogue and who, until then, had worked as a janitor for the Corpus Christi Church; we knew him from there and were always kind to him, and that was a good thing, because in the coming years, he’d look out for us and, most importantly, later on, for my mother.
On the other hand, despite our resentments, when the university held its annual spring fair, with its games of chance and food stands selling stuff like cotton candy, as well as an attraction in which one could pay to take a turn going at some wreck of a car with a sledgehammer, all of us flocked there, thrilled, as if a carnival had come to town. And some of the older guys did all right with the college girls, in local bars, though the thing that most impressed me about Columbia, as I’d cross the campus, predating the destruction of my street, were the students I’d see from time to time, sitting out on the steps of Butler Library, strumming folk tunes on guitars. I was probably twelve when I first stood enthralled watching a group that did covers of Beatles hits, performing on a makeshift stage in front of one of their student buildings — I think it was Ferris Booth Hall — and somewhere along the line, with all the crap going on at home, I decided that I would try to learn to play the guitar — a pursuit that turned out, in those years, to be one of my salvations.
I bought my first guitar, a junky Stella, for five dollars from one of my brother’s friends, a dashingly handsome Irish fellow who had sung in the choir with him. On that guitar, warped and never easy to tune, I learned my first chords from a Mel Bay instruction book. On it I played my first Beatles and Bob Dylan tunes. I had my morning job at the laundry, which paid me five dollars a week, and, always working on the side making deliveries for a local printing outfit, I came up with enough bucks to send away for one of those fifteen-dollar electric guitars that were advertised on the back pages of comics. That guitar was also a piece of junk, and I lost heart for a while. (Well, keeping after my father was a part of that loss of heart.)
But then, occasionally, I’d head over to the apartment of one of my school chums, this decent and quiet kid named Bobby Hannon. His mother was Polish, his father an Irish fireman, and they lived down on 122nd Street in one of those cluttered railroad flats that only exist today in the slums. Mr. Hannon, in some ways, with his close-cropped bristled-in-front haircut and etched face, resembled the actor Larry Storch, best known for the TV show F Troop. Like my father, he also liked to drink, but with a difference. He fancied himself a musician. On those afternoons when I’d hang around with his son, he’d occasionally take out his guitar, which, as I recall, was a left-handed F-holed jazz-style Gibson — a beautiful instrument, even to me. Before becoming a fireman, as a young man, he once had a radio show in Pennsylvania, in which people would call in and try to stump him by challenging him to play obscure tunes. So he knew everything of Gershwin, Porter, Rogers and Hart, etc., as well as any number of songs by polka musicians, both famous and lesser known. He had an ear and a half, and once, while reaching over to a table, his guitar on his lap, to get another glass of beer, told me that there was nothing he couldn’t play. “Try me.” Naturally, I was intrigued. But no matter what I came up with — not Cuban songs, but Top Forty hits — he’d figure anything out. Just after I’d whistle, say, the melody of a Beatles tune like “And I Love Her,” he’d not only figure out the chords but pick out the melody (somehow) with one of his fingers while holding on to his pick at the same time. “Kid’s stuff,” he called my choices. He smoked as much as my father, and his face had that same tendency to rawness at its edges. He was burly, most often liking to wear a T-shirt. With stacks and stacks of Les Paul and Mary Ford 78s clustered in the shelves above a console, he’d occasionally put one of them on so that I could hear “real music.”