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.