I made a fairly reliable part-time salary (if to work twenty to thirty hours a week is “part-time”) in and around the neighborhood. I won’t bore you with the details, but on and off for about three years, aside from working as a messenger, I spent my weekdays — and the occasional Saturday — working the afternoon — evening shift at a Columbia University library in Uris Hall, where the business school was located. I mainly tended the front desk or passed my time in the zombie tedium of shelving cartloads of books, all for the regal sum of about $1.35 an hour. We had two bosses, a sanguine and somewhat dissipated boozy gent of late middle age who, white haired, thin but possessing a goose’s flaccid neck, liked to hire young boys, and below him, a former undergarment industry manager who, changing professions in midlife, became the subject of an article in The New York Times, though I mainly remember him for the fact that his daughter dated — later married — the actor Dustin Hoffman, who, in the wake of becoming known, dropped by the library to say hello to her father from time to time.
In those days, I also had hoped to make a few dollars by putting together a bar band, though my pop’s death had turned my hands into lead and my knees so earthbound that it was enough, at least in the beginning, for me to muster the energy to get out of bed.
I’m not quite sure what I did with the money I earned. I suppose I gave some to my mother, though I think that stopped when both our Social Security benefits — which came to about four hundred dollars a month — started arriving, with half of that coming to me, until I’d turn twenty-one, as long as I went to college.
Living at the far end of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, my brother sometimes drove up to check in on us and help keep the peace, but he had, in any case, his own ongoing concerns, while I, as a newly graduated public high school student, had only some minimal ambitions about going to school — mainly to acquire the Social Security money, though I sometimes told myself that I was honoring my father’s wish for me. (He seems to have once told me, in one of the few direct pieces of advice he ever gave me, “If you don’t want to end up an elevator operator, go to college.”) Having barely graduated Brandeis with an academic diploma, I wouldn’t have gotten into any college at all if not for the fact that the CUNY system had in those years begun to experiment with an open admissions policy, through which they hoped to draw in and improve the future prospects of even the dregs of the New York City public high school system and, as well, the latest generation of immigrant kids, their grades, at least at that point, not seeming to matter as much as their potential.
Thanks to its often criticized open admissions policy, I was accepted in my senior year at Brandeis into Bronx Community College, on 184th Street and Creston Avenue, near Jerome. That would be the beginning of my sojourns through the city system, for in the next six years, I’d also attend other subway schools: Manhattan Community College, Lehman College in the Bronx at night, and, eventually, the mecca of CUNY, City College, up on 137th Street.
I had, by that point, become quite careless with myself, as if, in some ways, I simply didn’t care about anything at all. A story: I sometimes did favors for friends — particularly my friend Richard’s older brother, Tommy. I’d cop five-dollar bags of marijuana for him when he happened to be in a pinch. Okay, it was not the smartest or most noble thing to do, but after I’d make my purchase in a hallway at the far end of those stone pathways leading into one or the other of those Grant Houses projects along 123rd Street and Amsterdam, I’d usually head back up the hill, safely enough, and catch a downtown train at 116th Street. One night, however, I’d gotten out late (because my mother, still as a statue, had refused to move from a chair in the kitchen for an hour or so, until I had finally kissed her cheek, at which point she magically awakened) and, copping the stuff, had left the housing projects on Amsterdam, and feeling lazy or out of plain stupidity, I crossed the street and took a shortcut through the housing projects playground on the other side of Amsterdam toward Broadway, where in the darkness, not even midway, a pack of black kids, about twenty or so, as I can remember, came swooping down upon me from behind their hiding places, the bushes ringing the lot, and, surrounding my sorry ass, proceeded to put a beating on me, all the while going through my pockets, tearing off the peace symbol amulet I wore around my neck, and, having taken my nickel bag and a pack of cigarettes, a few did their best to concuss my brain, kicking away at my temples with the full force of their Converse sneakers. It was as if they gleefully wanted to kill me and they might have were it not for one of them — I suppose you might say he was my counterpart in that crowd, the sensitive “nice” one, a somewhat stocky fellow with rolled-up cuffs on his jeans, which were too big for him — who urged his brothers to be cool and leave me alone (“Hey, we got what we need”), and just like that, as quickly as they appeared, they vanished off into what I conceived in my head as some urban Zululand deep within the winding hallways and basements of that maze of project buildings.
Somehow, I dragged myself up from the asphalt and, I think, somewhat in a daze, walked all the way downtown to Richard’s place on West End Avenue, where I found Tommy hanging out with some of his pals in a room down the hall from his brother. Rich had by then gone into the army, having been drafted by lottery. (He was probably the most brilliant soldier in Vietnam and probably the least recognized for his abilities — he should have been snapped up for an army intelligence unit but wound up instead tramping about the jungles there, as a foot soldier grunt in the First Cavalry, his memories of those firefights and other inequities to haunt him for the rest of his life.) The kicker: When I walked in, the room was thick with pot fumes, one of his pals having already brought some around. Aside from the fact that I felt as if I had gotten my brains beaten in for nothing, I discovered that I suddenly found the aroma of that burning hemp nauseating — in fact, I wanted to throw up, but as it happened, despite my messed-up state, Tommy and his friends were getting around to their usual nightly business, for after priming themselves on beer and pot, it was not at all unusual for some of the fellows to skin-pop, and later mainline, heroin, an act (finding and hitting the right veins) at which they were quite adept. Though I myself never indulged, I had assisted in the act dozens of times: I’d wrap a piece of black rubber tubing around the user’s arm until the vein bulged big, and then, once the eye of blood had seeped into the syringe, unwrap the tightened band. Eyes rolling up in his head, ecstasy following, “What a snap,” the user would say, “like coming all over.”
It’s so tawdry that I would rather not go further into the details except to say that Tommy, a sometime heroin user from about the age of sixteen, would, like many other of the guys in the neighborhood, continue to celebrate its virtues well into his thirties, when all kinds of things would catch up with him.
Though I developed a radar for takeoff artists, there was sometimes little that one could do, as on yet another evening when I got jumped, these three guys materializing behind me right across the street from where I lived, my cheekbone broken and my jaw aching for weeks from getting kicked in the face over and over again. I should have gone to the hospital, but when the cops arrived — someone from across the way had seen them ganging up on me — and asked if I wanted to go to the emergency room, I, detesting hospitals and the very smell of medicine, turned them down; and so they took me up to the precinct house on 126th Street (behind the meatpacking houses that used to be there and a few blocks from the nastiest cop bar in Manhattan, the 7-12), where they had rounded up three suspects — young black men, burly and tough — who sat waiting in a pen. The cops prompted me to identify them and although those young men were smirking and indignant, for the life of me, at that late hour — it was two in the morning — I honestly could not identify them as my attackers with any certainty, or I refused to, even when one of the officers took me aside and urged me to reconsider—“They’re cocksuckahs after all.”