My new story, “When Paris Beckons” was published today by Marie Lecrivain in her Dashboard e-zine.
Here it is for you now. A middle-aged man reassesses his life and prepares for a new chapter, as he rambles through The City of Lights. Enjoy!
My life continues to surprise me. It hasn’t been a linear route, for sure. I liken it to a knock-out rose bush. Sometimes, everything’s in full bloom. Then, all the petals fall to the ground and the branches are barren. Then, I see a bud here, a bud there. The plant flowers anew, the cycle continues.
Upon college graduation, I scoured the newspaper help-wanted ads. No Interwebs back then. And, being a Bronx Primitive (TM), I had no business connections to speak of, so talk about taking the wide route around the racetrack of life.
It was hot and sweaty in my old Fordham apartment. The oscillating Vornado fan blew sooty air this way and that. Fan-conditioning! One morning, red BIC pen in hand, I found a job possibility: management trainee for a cosmetics/beauty products wholesaler on Third Avenue, about a quarter-mile south of Sears. I called, shined my Frye boots, dusted off my Robert Hall brown polyester suit, and went to my interview (the boss’ office was air-conditioned — aahhhhh!).
Somehow, I got the job. The pay was outstanding: $7,500/year.
The next Monday I started. The boss gave me sell sheets of products, package sizes and prices, which I was to memorize. Then, I was led to the warehouse, where I was to unpack cases of products with a box cutter and place the goods on floor-to-ceiling shelving.
No a/c in the warehouse. It was sweaty, filthy, and boring. I tore into my new job. On the second day, I arrived in cut-off jeans and tee-shirt, for my suit was already ruined by the dirty shelves back there. The managers looked at me askance.
At lunch, I walked up Third Avenue on that second day, and found a bar. The a/c was blasting. Three shots for a buck, and they had hot roast pork hero sandwiches for $.75. I downed the three shots and ripped into that hero, juice running down my filthy arms. I finished the day.
The third day, I looked forward to lunch and that bar. I barely finished the day. It was exhausting. At the end of the day, the boss called me in. He tested me on the info on those sell sheets, which I hadn’t even looked at. I coughed up dust balls from the warehouse and left.
The fourth day, I showered and dressed, and paused. Then I called the boss and quit. He offered to pay me for the stock work I did, but not a prorated portion of my lofty $7500/year salary. I said fine.
This second-generation American learned some valuable lessons. It wasn’t my first job that required intense physical labor, but it proved to be my last. Our forebears worked with their hands, so that we can work with our minds. That was one. Another was tremendous respect for, and appreciation of, those who must tackle, hold, and succeed at, these physically demanding jobs. Last, I eliminated a type of work I didn’t want to do.
But now I was out of work, out of money, and almost out of my apartment. I learned an amazing fact: when the wolf is at the door, I could reach back and make stuff happen. I got another job. It, too, was shit. But it was indoors, in air-conditioned splendor. I learned a lot about life there at this crappy insurance company in the Wanamaker Building in the Village, and there I met the girl of my dreams.
We were two Randall McMurphys in that company, stirring it up, just passing through. Our lives took flight.
$7,500 a year and a bar with three shots for a buck had initial appeal, back when I was 22. But looking back, I took Yogi Berra’s advice, and I’m glad I did: “when you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Ah, The Rascals! What was a New York City summer without The Rascals? I just now came back from an outside mission in 95-degree heat and somehow my mind fell into a late-60s crevasse and there I was again, just a working class kid in a crummy Bronx high school, and there was no a/c at home, or at work (NYPL on Bainbridge, in the now tagged-up building just north of Fordham Road) and I’d stop off at Spinning Disc, or Music Makers, or Cousins, to buy 45s and, more often than not, they were tunes by The Rascals.
We are lost these days, with multiple once-in-a-generation issues: Pandemic, climate change, Russia/Ukraine war and resulting economic issues, a broken political system. We are split into tribes, paddling the ship of state in circles.
Well, guess what? The late sixties were no bargain either. Vietnam, the draft, political mendacity, the aftershock of JFK’s assassination, the assassinations of Bobby + MLK + Malcolm X, civil rights unrest, rioting/arson, hard-hats vs. college kids — it was all too much. And then came Kent State.
So there I was, dealing with these macro issues, while the “war-at-home” micro-shizzle raged. My chaotic family life burst like a ruptured appendix that spewed emotional sepsis into every corner of my life. Thank the goddess for top-40 radio and the radio stations such as WOR-FM, WBAI-FM, WPLJ-FM, WNEW-FM, and WWRL-AM (where I first heard Little Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips Part I & II”).
I did what I had to, in order to save myself. I did a deep psychological dive, ever the Pisces, and swam far below the turbulence. I started hanging out with a new crew, years older than me, and as the draft calls rose, and the body bags piled high, The Rascals released “People Got to be Free”. A friend of mine at school, a senior, enlisted. “I’m going,” he said, “because they killed my buddy.”
After graduation, at my new place of work, as an office boy in a financial company’s bursting room, the 1A-classified guys were getting called at age 19 and two months. Those that returned and still could interact told horrific stories of their time in-country, long periods of intense boredom interspersed with bursts of gut-ripping madness, and they spackled their broken lives with expensive muscle cars and drugs, lots and lots of drugs.
Of my old guard, Tony C. was one of the smartest, earning all-honors classes at my aforementioned crappy high school. Tony grew up on Hoe Avenue, and suffice to say his neighborhood in the sixties was less than optimal. He was never without a bottle of Thunderbird or Carlo Rossi Paisano, When Tony’s dad died, in the east Bronx, I was asked to join the gang at the wake, but I was working doubles and exhausted. In the middle of wake-week, I got a call from one of the guys.
“You blew it man. You really blew it.”
“Why?”
“We were all in the funeral home, meeting T’s family. All of a sudden, a door opens and three BIG guys walk in, followed by a little guy, who spoke to T and his mom and family.”
“And?”
“It was fucking Crazy Joe Gallo man! You missed it!!!”
Well, I didn’t have the heart to say that, upon hearing this account, I was greatly relieved in not being there, for I knew it was only a matter of time before the mobster known as Crazy Joe Gallo met his fate (gunned down in Little Italy) just like it was a matter of time before Tony C. met his. The gang fractured after graduation but I saw T once, decades later, on a downtown #2 IRT, holding a hand rail during morning rush hour, weaving, eyes fluttering, the ever-present pint of Thunderbird in his back pocket. I mentioned it a few years later, my Tony sighting, to another old friend, who filled me in. T was a hardcore alky, periodically homeless, and now very much dead, having died of exposure. And I remembered how Tony and this friend were lost to us for an entire week during the blizzard of ’69 (“the Lindsay storm”) after dropping acid. This was pre-mobile phone, when our two buddies were gone to us. Lost in a snowbank? Mired in Mexico? Remanded to RIkers? We had no idea and neither did their families.
In a way, the lyrics of a Rascals hit from the Summer of Love (haha) was a life-preserver for me. The song was “How Can I Be Sure?” As I searched for the real me, a kid in a chrysalis during chaotic — no, downright frightening — times at home and in the wider world, I realized that that song’s love interest was, in actuality, myself. “How can I be sure? In a world, that’s constantly changing, how can I be sure, where I stand with you?” It took many years for me to learn to listen to myself, trust my instincts, care for myself, as the world turned to spin art, and up was down, and down was up.
I mean, like now.
It was the third of June, another sleepy dusty Delta day.
Nah, not really. But it was hot. Real hot, as in high-summer-swampweather-in-the-Bronx-with-no-a/c-and-nothing-much-to-do.
My crappy apartment back in the early sixties, when I was just a kid, had 15-amp glass fuses that blew as soon as the toaster went on, so a/c was out of the question. Plus they were too expensive. Plus, box fans were “good enough” according to the parental units. So we’d take the 12 to Orchard Beach, or walk down Fordham Road to Miramar pool, or go to Hom & Hom’s and sit in the arctic a/c at lunch, order the cheapest thing on the menu (chicken chop suey) and drink endless pots of tea, or go to Bohack and stroll down each aisle, in air-conditioned comfort, and load carts, until we came to the end of the road, the produce section, and then — finally cooled off — we’d simply leave the carts, loaded, and walk out into the steam bath of Fordham Road.
Or…we’d head to Pizza Haven, order a large pepperoni pizza, shake a blizzard of garlic powder on it, and sit — yeah, in air-conditioned comfort — and watch provocative Walton High School girls in their heavy mascara and beehive hairdos slither to Louie Louie and other tunes booming from the jukebox.
On this particular day, when the temperature was 95 77-W-A-B-C-dee-grees, we headed to Pizza Haven, carrying our $2.99, 2-transistor radios purchased at an Alexanders door-buster sale.
https://musicradio77.com/images/pmogopcm.wav
Pizza Haven was full, that Wednesday, and inside the shop it was frigid and redolent of pizza and molten calzones. It was also full of Walton girls, dancing to The Locomotion.
“You gotta swing your hips” Little Eva urged, and we were not disappointed, we few, we happy few (11 year olds), as the Walton girls shimmied and shook in their cutoffs, ruffled tops, chipped nail polish, and teased up hair, the fragrance of pizza now elevated by top notes of their Juicy Fruit breath.
Every group had a runt of the litter, and for us, admittedly a group of goobers, that was Alan Marcus. But he was a runt who never quite understood his place in the pack and opened his fresh mouth with disturbing regularity and, on this day, when a Walton girl bumped into him as he balanced two flopping slices and a small Coke, and she shook to “Jump up, jump back”, he blurted, “Hey, watch it!”
Our hearts sank, for we knew chaos would ensue. Alan was surrounded by these Valkyries, pushed, prodded, slapped and, finally, punched against the jukebox. He sank, slowly, to his knees, a little kid version of Billy Fish’s horrific demise in “The Man Who Would Be King”
One of us grabbed his arm as he sunk to the floor, as Walton girls flailed, as Little Eva pleaded “so come on, come on….do the locomotion with me!” We yanked him up, Walton girls following us out the door and into the steamy street, our uneaten (and, worse, already-paid-for) pizza still on the counter as Lou, the owner, reminded us to shut the door tight on the way out: “Hey, close-a the door!”
“WHY did you open your mouth?” we asked. Alan sobbed miserably, humiliated and dripping with Coke one of the girls poured over his greasy hair.
“They were gonna spill EVERYTHING!” he moaned. I looked up. The Bronx sky had that white-ash, washed out, hot town, summer in the city look. Inside was food, cold soda, gum-snapping females and, importantly, air-conditioning. Out on the street, sidewalk gum melted into the treads of our Keds. I wiped my brow.
“What now?” my friend Larry asked.
“I dunno,” I said. “Let’s play stickball, I guess.” Alan walked home, head down, and we turned the other way and walked back to 190th Street where, with any luck, one of us would have a Spaldeen with some bounce left in it, and a bat, and the cops wouldn’t come to break our broomstick in two, just because. We were 11, school was out, it was awful hot, and there was nothing else to do. Alan had already gotten beat up. This day was shot, but I looked ahead to the evening, when it would cool down a bit, and we’d walk to the candy store to get 2-cent pretzel sticks, the Bulldog edition of the Daily News, and packs of smokes for our dads, who sat across the street from our sweltering apartment on aluminum folding chairs and drank Schaefer, the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.