Before I moved to the Bronx, I had already written protest folk songs like “Bloody Minds” and “He Walked Up The Hill,” as well as folk love songs like “If I’ll Give You A Rose,” “Open Up Your Eyes” and “Show Me Films.” But between April 1970 and early August 1971, the protest folk songs and male feminist folk love songs poured out more rapidly. Some of the folk songs I wrote during this period I no longer remember. Or, at best, I only remember the melody and one verse of the lyrics or just the chorus. Other folk songs written during this period I still remember enough to sing.
“Come With Us” included the following lyrics:
“Oh, people sitting on the ground
Why can’t you hear the sounds?
We’ve been trying
But so many still are dying.
And I wish I could have you as a friend
But you seem to prefer another man
So I’ve been cryin’
While you’ve been flying.
Come with us
Flee with me
We’ll be kind
In the breeze...”
“Florrie’s song” included the following lyrics:
"Oh, rhymes and chimes
Runnin’ through my mind
And sobs and moans
Engraved in my soul.
So come to me
Florrie
Oh, can’t you see
Florrie.
The wind, it’s cold
I often feel alone
You still work
Why don’t you take a rest?
And come to me
Florrie
Oh, can’t you see
Florrie...”
“Woman I Love” was another folk song from this period which included the following lyrics:
“Oh, I wish you were here tonight
I’d kiss your lips and I’d hold you tight…
And what are you doing?
Woman I love
And how are you feeling?
Do you still come?...”
“Lynn’s Song”, which was one of the first folk songs written around this time that described the political and economic situation of most intellectual women in the 1960s and early 1970s in an updated way, was also written in the Bronx and included the following lyrics:
“Oh come in
Lynn
We might lose
We might win
You are smart, I know
And your anger shows.
Most men own pets
Who cook and kiss
Men earn bread
So they command
Their maids,
Their women...”
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
Writers Guild Office Boy 1970 (vii)
The folk song lyrics to love songs and protest songs, along with original folk song melodies, burst out easily for me during the 1970s. Living alone in relative creative isolation and without a television set in my cheap pad, I could pretty much turn my stream of consciousness and feelings into a set of poetic lyrics; and then match the words and my feelings to some melodic chord progressions which enabled me to sing the lyrics as a folk song—after spending a few hours experimenting with different chord progressions—whenever I wanted to. Rarely did I ever experience any writer’s block during the 1970s; and my aesthetic distance from nearly all the people who inspired my love songs or protest folk songs at that time seemed to also make the folk songwriting process as easy for me as it had been for Woody Guthrie during the 1930s and 1940s—when he was under 40.
My general idea in late 1970 was to attempt to generate anti-imperialist revolutionary political and revolutionary feminist consciousness among 1970s youth by writing folk songs in the Guthrie-Ochs-Early Dylan tradition that expressed the revolutionary anti-imperialist and revolutionary feminist consciousness that I had acquired during the 1960s.
What this meant, specifically, was that I would try to reflect the revolutionary politics of the New Left Movement of the late 1960s in my protest folk songs, in the same way Dylan had reflected the left-liberal politics of the early New Left Movement of the 1960s in his early 1960s protest songs. In addition, I would also attempt to write folk songs from a male feminist perspective that portrayed women in a non-sexist way (unlike most of the pre-1970 U.S. popular corporate music industry and traditional folk songs had done); and which reflected an admiration, a love and a sexual preference for liberated women who were revolutionary feminists, politically and socially conscious, intellectual, non-traditional, anti-imperialist fighters against male supremacy, racism and classism and for women’s liberation. My hope was that once I had written these revolutionary protest folk songs and male feminist love songs, they would get recorded and help shift mass youth consciousness in a more revolutionary direction in the 1970s, in the same way Dylan’s early 1960s songs and Ochs’ songs had helped radicalize youth more in the early 1960s.
My general idea in late 1970 was to attempt to generate anti-imperialist revolutionary political and revolutionary feminist consciousness among 1970s youth by writing folk songs in the Guthrie-Ochs-Early Dylan tradition that expressed the revolutionary anti-imperialist and revolutionary feminist consciousness that I had acquired during the 1960s.
What this meant, specifically, was that I would try to reflect the revolutionary politics of the New Left Movement of the late 1960s in my protest folk songs, in the same way Dylan had reflected the left-liberal politics of the early New Left Movement of the 1960s in his early 1960s protest songs. In addition, I would also attempt to write folk songs from a male feminist perspective that portrayed women in a non-sexist way (unlike most of the pre-1970 U.S. popular corporate music industry and traditional folk songs had done); and which reflected an admiration, a love and a sexual preference for liberated women who were revolutionary feminists, politically and socially conscious, intellectual, non-traditional, anti-imperialist fighters against male supremacy, racism and classism and for women’s liberation. My hope was that once I had written these revolutionary protest folk songs and male feminist love songs, they would get recorded and help shift mass youth consciousness in a more revolutionary direction in the 1970s, in the same way Dylan’s early 1960s songs and Ochs’ songs had helped radicalize youth more in the early 1960s.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Writers Guild Office Boy 1970 (vi)
Besides starting to write a political analysis of Newsreel, by December 1970 I had also written some new folk songs and an historical play, “The Assassination of Governor Bent.” This play dramatized the 1846 or 1847 revolt in New Mexico, near Taos, by an alliance of Pueblo indigenous people and Mexican people. My historical drama represented an attempt to again use the Broadway theatre as a tool for encouraging Revolution in the United States, by showing on the stage main characters in the process of fighting a righteous, although unsuccessful, battle against the U.S. imperialist troops that had just taken their land from them.
After finishing “The Assassination of Governor Bent”, I sent a copy of the play’s manuscript to Columbia Professor of English Stade (a former professor of mine), after he replied to a letter I had written to him asking for some criticism from him of my new play. But given how threatening the play’s politics were to Professor Stade, he predictably critically trashed the play-- in the same way he had critically trashed the papers and essays I had written for him that threatened him politically when I was a freshman in his English Composition course.
In Professor Stade’s view, the play was worthless, from a literary perspective, because he felt the Governor Bent character and the other characters who repressed the 1846 or 1847 revolt in New Mexico were portrayed as “cartoon caricatures" by me; while the anti-imperialist Pueblos and Mexicans who revolted then were portrayed as “too heroic” and seemed to be more like SDS members of the 1960s than people who lived in the 1840s in New Mexico. In Professor Stade’s view, the only thing that seemed real about “The Assassination of Governor Bent” play was the “rage” against the system that the drama seemed to express.
I disagreed completely with Professor Stade’s evaluation of “The Assassination of Governor Bent.” But I realized that if a then left-liberal anti-communist, but also anti-racist and anti-militarist, intellectual academic like Professor Stade didn’t like my “The Assassination of Governor Bent” play, there was no way that any Broadway producer or Off-Broadway producer or Big Media theatrical critic would ever like this socially-oriented, historical drama with a revolutionary message.
So after receiving Professor Stade’s negative evaluation, I shoved the manuscript of “The Assassination of Governor Bent” into one of my drawers and gave up playwriting again, in order to focus more on writing more folk songs in the evening and on weekends in my Bronx slum apartment during the last month of 1970 and the first 7 months of 1971.
After finishing “The Assassination of Governor Bent”, I sent a copy of the play’s manuscript to Columbia Professor of English Stade (a former professor of mine), after he replied to a letter I had written to him asking for some criticism from him of my new play. But given how threatening the play’s politics were to Professor Stade, he predictably critically trashed the play-- in the same way he had critically trashed the papers and essays I had written for him that threatened him politically when I was a freshman in his English Composition course.
In Professor Stade’s view, the play was worthless, from a literary perspective, because he felt the Governor Bent character and the other characters who repressed the 1846 or 1847 revolt in New Mexico were portrayed as “cartoon caricatures" by me; while the anti-imperialist Pueblos and Mexicans who revolted then were portrayed as “too heroic” and seemed to be more like SDS members of the 1960s than people who lived in the 1840s in New Mexico. In Professor Stade’s view, the only thing that seemed real about “The Assassination of Governor Bent” play was the “rage” against the system that the drama seemed to express.
I disagreed completely with Professor Stade’s evaluation of “The Assassination of Governor Bent.” But I realized that if a then left-liberal anti-communist, but also anti-racist and anti-militarist, intellectual academic like Professor Stade didn’t like my “The Assassination of Governor Bent” play, there was no way that any Broadway producer or Off-Broadway producer or Big Media theatrical critic would ever like this socially-oriented, historical drama with a revolutionary message.
So after receiving Professor Stade’s negative evaluation, I shoved the manuscript of “The Assassination of Governor Bent” into one of my drawers and gave up playwriting again, in order to focus more on writing more folk songs in the evening and on weekends in my Bronx slum apartment during the last month of 1970 and the first 7 months of 1971.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Writers Guild Office Boy 1970 (v)
Between the time I escaped the draft, stopped working for Newsreel and moved to the Bronx in April 1970 and the time I went down to the Newsreel office again in November 1970 to pick up the film on the 1968 Chicago antiwar protests that I was screening at Lehman College, over 7 months had passed. But, coincidentally, when I stopped by the Newsreel office, I noticed that two of the women Newsreel members in their 20s with whom I had worked in its high school organizing caucus, Karen and Sara, were each working with the films in the Newsreel office loft.
Both Sara and Karen smiled, said hello to me and seemed friendly. But neither seemed to have yet concluded, like I had concluded 7 months before, that Newsreel’s lack of an effective mass distribution network meant that its films were not going to be able to change mass political consciousness dramatically during the 1970s.
Sara was dressed more mannishly than she had dressed 7 months before and seemed to be both more radical politically and more of a radical feminist than she had been in March 1970. And Karen of Newsreel still looked as beautiful and revolutionary as she had ever been.
Stopping by the Newsreel office again and bumping into Sara and Karen again reminded me that I still admired Movement people--and the alternative media work they were doing (despite it being politically ineffective)--more than the plastic upper-middle-class, predominantly white male liberal radio and television writers and plastic corporate liberal mass media people I was meeting in my 9-to-5 straight job as a Writers Guild office boy in the Fall of 1970. And despite having dropped out of Newsreel over 7 months before, meeting Sara and Karen again reminded me that I still generally felt attracted more to U.S. women who were involved in doing Movement work than to U.S. women who weren’t as politically conscious or as politically active in the Movement.
So in late 1970 and in the early months of 1971, I attempted to show some moral support for Newsreel’s work again by donating some of the wages I was earning as the Writers Guild office boy to help fund Newsreel’s early 1970s work. In addition, I began to write a political analysis of Newsreel, from a male feminist antii-imperialist left perspective, which attempted to clarify why Newsreel didn’t seem to be making as much political progress between 1968 and 1971 as the SDS chapter at Columbia had made between 1966 and 1968.
Both Sara and Karen smiled, said hello to me and seemed friendly. But neither seemed to have yet concluded, like I had concluded 7 months before, that Newsreel’s lack of an effective mass distribution network meant that its films were not going to be able to change mass political consciousness dramatically during the 1970s.
Sara was dressed more mannishly than she had dressed 7 months before and seemed to be both more radical politically and more of a radical feminist than she had been in March 1970. And Karen of Newsreel still looked as beautiful and revolutionary as she had ever been.
Stopping by the Newsreel office again and bumping into Sara and Karen again reminded me that I still admired Movement people--and the alternative media work they were doing (despite it being politically ineffective)--more than the plastic upper-middle-class, predominantly white male liberal radio and television writers and plastic corporate liberal mass media people I was meeting in my 9-to-5 straight job as a Writers Guild office boy in the Fall of 1970. And despite having dropped out of Newsreel over 7 months before, meeting Sara and Karen again reminded me that I still generally felt attracted more to U.S. women who were involved in doing Movement work than to U.S. women who weren’t as politically conscious or as politically active in the Movement.
So in late 1970 and in the early months of 1971, I attempted to show some moral support for Newsreel’s work again by donating some of the wages I was earning as the Writers Guild office boy to help fund Newsreel’s early 1970s work. In addition, I began to write a political analysis of Newsreel, from a male feminist antii-imperialist left perspective, which attempted to clarify why Newsreel didn’t seem to be making as much political progress between 1968 and 1971 as the SDS chapter at Columbia had made between 1966 and 1968.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Writers Guild Office Boy 1970 (iv)
The second evening ed course I took at Lehman College in the Fall of 1970, on methods of teaching social studies in secondary schools, was taught by a white guy in his early or late 30s who was then the head of the Social Studies Department at Jamaica High School in Queens. The ten other students in this class all seemed to be teachers in their late 20s or early 30s who were just taking the course in order to receive permanent licenses; and who all seemed to be culturally straight, non-intellectual and conventionally middle-class in their aspirations.
In contrast to the students in his evening secondary educational teaching methods class, the Jamaica High School social studies department head was intellectual, somewhat hip culturally and seemed to identify with the New Left Movement of the late 1960s, despite being in his 30s in 1970. You got the impression that when he was in college during the late 1950s, he had been some kind of a bohemian rebel.
I don’t recall much of what was discussed in this course, other than that the instructor and I usually expressed similar views on both what needed to be changed in the way social studies was taught in high school and what methods worked best in teaching social studies; while the conventional teachers who were in the class either just sat there without participating much in the classroom discussion or expressed more concern about how to motivate their students than on how to change the way social studies was taught and what was taught in social studies, so that high schools became agents for creating a more democratic society, instead of institutions that were run in authoritarian ways.
To pass the course, each student in the class was required to show the methods he or she would use to teach a social studies lesson in one of our evening class’s sessions. I can’t recall now at all what methods others used when they gave their demonstration lessons in the evening ed class. But I do remember that for my demonstration lesson I got the instructor to arrange to have a projector in the room for the evening class, so that I could screen a Newsreel film on the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention antiwar street protests for the class, as a prelude to a post-screening discussion.
Compared to the demonstration lessons the others in the evening class had done, my demonstration lesson seemed much more interesting to the instructor and to most of the conventional teachers who were taking this course--mainly because in 1970 the footage of the 1968 Vietnam antiwar protests that were included in Newsreel’s films had not yet been aired on the U.S. television screens. And the Newsreel film created the impression that more young people in their early 20s were really ready to make a Revolution in the 1970s than the U.S. mainstream television news programs seemed to have indicated to the older students in this evening class and to the older class instructor.
Not surprisingly, because I had been the student in his evening class who had stimulated him intellectually most during the semester, the Jamaica High School social studies department head not only gave me an “A” for his course on teaching methods. He also invited me to contact him at Jamaica High School once I got my teachers license and wanted to start teaching social studies in a New York City public high school.
But although I also aced the other ed evening course I took in the fall of 1970, by the time it came to register for the Spring Semester, I once again realized that being a high school teacher in the public schools while the Viet Nam War was still raging was, given my revolutionary anti-imperialist politics, not what I felt morally comfortable doing in the early 1970s, especially while other anti-imperialist activists from the 1960s had been forced to live underground lives as a result of the COINTELPRO repression.
Another reason I lost interest in continuing on the middle-class high school teacher preparation career track by 1971 was that when I visited the Newsreel office on 28th Street and Seventh Avenue again, to pick up the films I screened in my Lehman College evening ed course, it reminded me why I had previously rejected the teaching career option in favor of the Movement writer-activist-musician lifestyle choice.
In contrast to the students in his evening secondary educational teaching methods class, the Jamaica High School social studies department head was intellectual, somewhat hip culturally and seemed to identify with the New Left Movement of the late 1960s, despite being in his 30s in 1970. You got the impression that when he was in college during the late 1950s, he had been some kind of a bohemian rebel.
I don’t recall much of what was discussed in this course, other than that the instructor and I usually expressed similar views on both what needed to be changed in the way social studies was taught in high school and what methods worked best in teaching social studies; while the conventional teachers who were in the class either just sat there without participating much in the classroom discussion or expressed more concern about how to motivate their students than on how to change the way social studies was taught and what was taught in social studies, so that high schools became agents for creating a more democratic society, instead of institutions that were run in authoritarian ways.
To pass the course, each student in the class was required to show the methods he or she would use to teach a social studies lesson in one of our evening class’s sessions. I can’t recall now at all what methods others used when they gave their demonstration lessons in the evening ed class. But I do remember that for my demonstration lesson I got the instructor to arrange to have a projector in the room for the evening class, so that I could screen a Newsreel film on the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention antiwar street protests for the class, as a prelude to a post-screening discussion.
Compared to the demonstration lessons the others in the evening class had done, my demonstration lesson seemed much more interesting to the instructor and to most of the conventional teachers who were taking this course--mainly because in 1970 the footage of the 1968 Vietnam antiwar protests that were included in Newsreel’s films had not yet been aired on the U.S. television screens. And the Newsreel film created the impression that more young people in their early 20s were really ready to make a Revolution in the 1970s than the U.S. mainstream television news programs seemed to have indicated to the older students in this evening class and to the older class instructor.
Not surprisingly, because I had been the student in his evening class who had stimulated him intellectually most during the semester, the Jamaica High School social studies department head not only gave me an “A” for his course on teaching methods. He also invited me to contact him at Jamaica High School once I got my teachers license and wanted to start teaching social studies in a New York City public high school.
But although I also aced the other ed evening course I took in the fall of 1970, by the time it came to register for the Spring Semester, I once again realized that being a high school teacher in the public schools while the Viet Nam War was still raging was, given my revolutionary anti-imperialist politics, not what I felt morally comfortable doing in the early 1970s, especially while other anti-imperialist activists from the 1960s had been forced to live underground lives as a result of the COINTELPRO repression.
Another reason I lost interest in continuing on the middle-class high school teacher preparation career track by 1971 was that when I visited the Newsreel office on 28th Street and Seventh Avenue again, to pick up the films I screened in my Lehman College evening ed course, it reminded me why I had previously rejected the teaching career option in favor of the Movement writer-activist-musician lifestyle choice.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Writers Guild Office Boy 1970 (iii)
The hashish that I smoked with Mary on our Saturday night trip to the Fillmore East had been obtained from John on Staten Island.
John was a white working-class guy who had grown up in poverty in Bedford-Stuyvesant, before eventually enrolling in Staten Island Community College and, subsequently, in the experimental upper-division CUNY school on Staten Island, Richmond College, in the late 1960s. By the time I met John in the Fall of 1968, when I enrolled at Richmond College for my senior year of college, John was into both underground anti-war journalism and psychedelic drugs.
John was both a good writer and a good editor. He had been one of the official student newspaper editors at Staten Island Community College. And in the Fall of 1968, he was one of the editors and founders of the anti-war student underground newspaper at Richmond College. But by the Spring of 1969, John seemed to be more into smoking pot and hashish, using psychedelic drugs and dealing pot, hash and psychedelic drugs on Staten Island than into underground journalism anymore.
In the Spring of 1969, John had a Volkswagen car, was usually high on pot, hashish or some psychedelic drug all the time, and had no difficulty driving around Staten Island, onto the ferry and into Manhattan while high on marijuana or hashish. He was into a hippie-love trip in the Spring of 1969. And, if you stopped by his pad in Staten Island to hang out for awhile, John was always very generous about sharing a joint with you, while you both listened to records and got into deep philosophical, metaphysical and political discussions.
After I moved from Staten Island in late May 1969, I didn’t see much of John on a day-to-day basis. But about every three or four months, I would usually spend an evening taking the ferry into Staten Island and see which people there from Richmond College that I might bump into while down there. And I would sometimes also spontaneously stop by at John’s pad and, if he were at home, we’d spend a few hours turning on together and I’d sometimes also buy some grass or hashish or mescaline from John.
So in the Fall of 1970 when I wanted to get some hashish and tabs of mescaline, I paid John a visit on Staten Island. When I got to his apartment, John wasn’t home. But his roommate at the time, a good-natured African-American guy who had graduated CUNY with a BA in engineering was at home, and we had an interesting chat about what kind of job market was then being offered to college graduates who had majored in engineering in 1970, while we waited for John to get home from work.
John’s roommate felt that his firm employed many more engineers than they actually needed for the Defense Department work they had contracted to do, because it enabled his firm to bill its clients more. And he felt that engineers like himself were just being paid to warm seats and not to do any actual work at his engineering firm. So he was already looking for some other engineering firm to work for that would provide him with a more challenging and interesting paying job.
After I had talked for a short-time with John’s roommate, John arrived home from his job at the local mental hospital on Staten Island. He was as friendly as ever and seemed high on something.
But after we smoked some hashish together and talked for awhile, John casually mentioned that now, in the Fall of 1970, he was using the needle and into heroin on a fairly regular basis, because he felt that nothing else could match the pleasurable sensation it gave him. But he wasn’t a junkie and was able to perform both his assigned work at the mental hospital and deal grass, hash, mescaline and acid as efficiently as he had been able to do before he started using the needle.
John also mentioned that some of our fellow working-class freak students at Richmond College from the Spring of 1969 had also gotten into heroin and died of overdoses, died from injecting some bad smack or become junkies. But John seemed confident that there was little danger that he would either end up OD-ing or becoming a junkie.
Like me, John assumed that in the 1970s pot, hashish, and psychedelic drugs would be legalized in a few years, heroin would be distributed,as required, to junkies at local hospitals and there would likely be a Revolution in the United States. But while he waited for the legalization of soft drugs and the Revolution to happen, John seemed to figure it made little sense to think in terms of doing anything else when not at work other than using the needle or getting high on psychedelic drugs for the next few years.
Shortly after I paid John for the hashish and tabs of mescaline he sold me, and still high from the hashish we had smoked, I left his apartment and started walking back towards the Ferry Terminal. But this proved to be the last time I ever spoke with John and I have no idea whether or not he survived through the late 1970s, the early 1980s, the 1990s or the early 21st century. I recall that there was some rumor during the late 1970s that John had either died of an overdose of heroin or been killed in some drug deal-related incident.
Yet this could have just been a rumor based on John deciding to move to a different part of the United States without having to let anyone on Staten Island know where he was going to live, for a variety of personal or business reasons. For all I know, John of Staten Island may have ended up just becoming a professional in the 1980s who married and raised kids. Although if he had been able to enter the upper-middle-class in the 1980s, he would probably have been the type of middle-class person who got into cocaine heavily during that decade.
John was a white working-class guy who had grown up in poverty in Bedford-Stuyvesant, before eventually enrolling in Staten Island Community College and, subsequently, in the experimental upper-division CUNY school on Staten Island, Richmond College, in the late 1960s. By the time I met John in the Fall of 1968, when I enrolled at Richmond College for my senior year of college, John was into both underground anti-war journalism and psychedelic drugs.
John was both a good writer and a good editor. He had been one of the official student newspaper editors at Staten Island Community College. And in the Fall of 1968, he was one of the editors and founders of the anti-war student underground newspaper at Richmond College. But by the Spring of 1969, John seemed to be more into smoking pot and hashish, using psychedelic drugs and dealing pot, hash and psychedelic drugs on Staten Island than into underground journalism anymore.
In the Spring of 1969, John had a Volkswagen car, was usually high on pot, hashish or some psychedelic drug all the time, and had no difficulty driving around Staten Island, onto the ferry and into Manhattan while high on marijuana or hashish. He was into a hippie-love trip in the Spring of 1969. And, if you stopped by his pad in Staten Island to hang out for awhile, John was always very generous about sharing a joint with you, while you both listened to records and got into deep philosophical, metaphysical and political discussions.
After I moved from Staten Island in late May 1969, I didn’t see much of John on a day-to-day basis. But about every three or four months, I would usually spend an evening taking the ferry into Staten Island and see which people there from Richmond College that I might bump into while down there. And I would sometimes also spontaneously stop by at John’s pad and, if he were at home, we’d spend a few hours turning on together and I’d sometimes also buy some grass or hashish or mescaline from John.
So in the Fall of 1970 when I wanted to get some hashish and tabs of mescaline, I paid John a visit on Staten Island. When I got to his apartment, John wasn’t home. But his roommate at the time, a good-natured African-American guy who had graduated CUNY with a BA in engineering was at home, and we had an interesting chat about what kind of job market was then being offered to college graduates who had majored in engineering in 1970, while we waited for John to get home from work.
John’s roommate felt that his firm employed many more engineers than they actually needed for the Defense Department work they had contracted to do, because it enabled his firm to bill its clients more. And he felt that engineers like himself were just being paid to warm seats and not to do any actual work at his engineering firm. So he was already looking for some other engineering firm to work for that would provide him with a more challenging and interesting paying job.
After I had talked for a short-time with John’s roommate, John arrived home from his job at the local mental hospital on Staten Island. He was as friendly as ever and seemed high on something.
But after we smoked some hashish together and talked for awhile, John casually mentioned that now, in the Fall of 1970, he was using the needle and into heroin on a fairly regular basis, because he felt that nothing else could match the pleasurable sensation it gave him. But he wasn’t a junkie and was able to perform both his assigned work at the mental hospital and deal grass, hash, mescaline and acid as efficiently as he had been able to do before he started using the needle.
John also mentioned that some of our fellow working-class freak students at Richmond College from the Spring of 1969 had also gotten into heroin and died of overdoses, died from injecting some bad smack or become junkies. But John seemed confident that there was little danger that he would either end up OD-ing or becoming a junkie.
Like me, John assumed that in the 1970s pot, hashish, and psychedelic drugs would be legalized in a few years, heroin would be distributed,as required, to junkies at local hospitals and there would likely be a Revolution in the United States. But while he waited for the legalization of soft drugs and the Revolution to happen, John seemed to figure it made little sense to think in terms of doing anything else when not at work other than using the needle or getting high on psychedelic drugs for the next few years.
Shortly after I paid John for the hashish and tabs of mescaline he sold me, and still high from the hashish we had smoked, I left his apartment and started walking back towards the Ferry Terminal. But this proved to be the last time I ever spoke with John and I have no idea whether or not he survived through the late 1970s, the early 1980s, the 1990s or the early 21st century. I recall that there was some rumor during the late 1970s that John had either died of an overdose of heroin or been killed in some drug deal-related incident.
Yet this could have just been a rumor based on John deciding to move to a different part of the United States without having to let anyone on Staten Island know where he was going to live, for a variety of personal or business reasons. For all I know, John of Staten Island may have ended up just becoming a professional in the 1980s who married and raised kids. Although if he had been able to enter the upper-middle-class in the 1980s, he would probably have been the type of middle-class person who got into cocaine heavily during that decade.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Writers Guild Office Boy 1970 (ii)
By the middle of October 1970, both Michelle and Eric had finally moved back down to D.C. and I had my Bronx studio apartment just for myself and my pet kitten, “Kitty” again. And with my wages of $100 per week (in 1970s money) and only a $57 per month apartment rent, I felt I had more spending money in my pocket than I had ever had during my college years. So for the first time in a few years, I actually bought some new clothes for myself at the Alexander’s discount department store on the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road on one Saturday afternoon.
While waiting for the Black Panther Party and its radical feminist-led white movement allies to make the Revolution in the early 1970s in the United States, I did not want, in the Fall of 1970, to get my survival money by just being an office boy or clerical worker until the Revolution happened. Yet until I was able to “earn my living in the 1970s as a protest folk singer-songwriter” the way Phil Ochs had been able to do during the 1960s, it looked like I was going to be stuck in the 9-to-5 office world as a clerical office worker like my father had been for so many years.
So, after being hired by the Writers Guild in September 1970, I also decided to enroll in two education courses at Lehman College’s evening division in the Bronx, in order to obtain the remaining education course credits I needed if I ever decided I wanted to teach social studies at some New York City vocational high school for white working-class students—while waiting for the Black Panther Party and radical feminist-led Movement to make the Revolution.
Although Lehman College’s evening school courses for non-matriculated students were not free (as they were for matriculated undergraduates in the Fall of 1970, five years before free tuition at CUNY was ended), the tuition costs for the two education courses I enrolled were still less than $200. And because my father (whom I had not asked to pay any college costs for me since the end of my freshman year at Columbia) seemed pleased that I now seemed more willing to finally consider becoming a middle-class professional than I had previously been, I decided that it wasn’t exploitative of me to ask him to pay the $200 I needed to take my two education courses at Lehman College’s evening school. But it proved to be the only time after the 1960s that I ever asked my father to help me pay for a U.S. university course.
I only lived three blocks from Fordham University’s gated campus on Fordham Road. But tuition there for any evening teacher education courses was much more expensive than what CUNY charged in those days for its non-matriculated students. So that’s why Lehman College was where I ended up taking my evening teacher ed courses in the Fall of 1970.
Lehman College’s campus, near Bedford Park Road and Jerome Avenue at 196th Street, was about a 25-minute to half-hour walk from where I lived at 188th Street, east of Webster Avenue. Since Lehman College, unlike Fordham or Columbia, was solely a commuter school, there were no dormitories on campus. And, unlike at Columbia or Fordham’s campus in the evening or on weekends, few students ever hung around the campus of Lehman College after dark. So unless you met somebody in an evening class before they hurried home off-campus, it was unlikely that you could meet anybody on campus at Lehman in the evening by just hanging out in the college’s library.
Lehman College had once been Hunter College’s Bronx Division. But by the Fall of 1970 it had been renamed for former New York State Democratic Governor Herbert Lehman, was no longer part of Hunter College, and was the Bronx equivalent of Queens College. Consequently--although the open admissions to CUNY demand for all New York City high school graduates had been won as a result of the African-American and Puerto Rican student building occupations at CCNY, Brooklyn College and Queens College in the Spring of 1969—like Queens College’s student commuters, Lehman College’s commuting daytime student body in the fall of 1970 was still predominantly from white working-class Jewish ethnic backgrounds, although the Lehman College students were generally from less affluent white working-class backgrounds than were the Queens College students.
Most of the evening students at Lehman College, like the evening students at Queens College, were usually just either New York City public school teachers who were required to take more evening school education courses to be permanently certified or 9-to-5 office workers in Manhattan’s business world or in city and state government offices who needed to obtain college BA degree credentials, eventually, to either retain their business or government jobs or to get promoted in the corporate or government agency world.
The main difference between the student body at Lehman College and the student body at Queens College seemed to be that most of the commuting daytime and evening students at Lehman College were from the Bronx or Westchester, whereas most of the commuting Queens College students were from either Queens or Nassau County. Another difference between Lehman College and Queens College seemed to be that a greater percentage of students from less affluent working-class Irish-American backgrounds seemed to attend Lehman College than attended Queens College.
Ironically, when I registered for my two evening education courses at Lehman College in late September 1970, I recognized one of the security guards who was working at Lehman College during its registration period from my days as a Columbia student. At Columbia during the 1965-66 and 1966-67 academic years, he had been the Columbia worker you encountered when you entered or left the Butler Library stacks that would chat or flirt with practically every Columbia or Barnard student who entered or exited the stacks in a cheerful, friendly way.
“Hey, don’t we know each other from Butler Library?” I said to the Lehman security guard after I recognized him.
“Yes. I remember you,” he said with a smile. “What are you doing here?”
“Taking a few courses. But where have you been? You seemed to suddenly disappear from Butler Library at Columbia.”
The Lehman College security guard laughed and replied: “I was drafted and had to spend two years in the army.”
“Glad to see you survived,” I said.
The security guard smiled. “I managed to avoid being sent to Vietnam and got sent to Germany, instead.”
“Good for you,” I said with a laugh and, as the line of registering students moved forward into the next room, I added “Nice to see you again.”
I also recognized in back of me on the Lehman College registration line a white guy in a suit and tie with short hair who had attended Richmond College with me during the 1968-69 academic year.
“Weren’t you a student at Richmond College?” I asked him.
“Yes. Oh, I remember you,” the guy answered.
“Why are you taking courses at Lehman?”
“I’m working as a student counselor in the Dean’s office at Baruch College and I need some additional courses to obtain a Master’s,” the guy replied.
I felt like laughing, because in the fall of 1970, to me this guy seemed like the least appropriate person to counsel CUNY students. At Richmond College, he had been a veteran older student who was a right-wing conservative and a few years older than the other undergraduates who seemed totally unhip politically and culturally to what undergraduate students then wanted from life.
“That’s interesting,” I said before the registration line moved forward and I was able to get away from the culturally straight right-wing would-be college administrator--without having to exchange anymore pleasantries to someone whom I felt was still helping to block radical democratic social change in the USA.
The two evening courses I enrolled in at Lehman College in the Fall of 1970 was a course on the problems students from Puerto Rican family backgrounds faced in the New York City public school system and a course on high school social studies teaching methods. Each course met two evenings per week, but on different nights. And I do have some memories of what went on inside the classroom in each of these evening classes during the Fall of 1970.
A white teacher ed professor in his late 40s or 50s, whose ethnic background was Puerto Rican, taught the education course on the special difficulties that students of Puerto Rican descent-- especially those students whose parents only spoke Spanish--faced inside New York City’s public schools. The professor was a left-liberal politically and provided good information in the course and assigned readings that documented the various ways the New York City public school system discriminates on an institutional and interpersonal basis against Puerto Ricans; and why there was a need to set up bi-lingual educational programs in the public schools, especially in the early grades.
There were only about ten Lehman College evening school students in the this class, including a few current white teachers who seemed to be taking the course, like me, in order to just accumulate the education course credits they needed to obtain a permanent teacher’s license. But none of the teachers in the class seemed interested enough in the course to participate much in the class discussion.
So whatever class discussion happened usually ended up being some kind of debate between the left-liberal professor and myself versus the two right-wing conservatives in the class who kept challenging the professor’s thesis that the New York City public schools treated Puerto Ricans in a racist way and that some kind of affirmative action program (that “discriminates against white people’ according to the right-wing conservatives in the class) was needed in New York City.
One of the right-wing conservatives in the class was a young white guy in his 20s, who didn’t seem particularly closed-minded or especially racist. But the other right-wing conservative who was most vocal in the class was an older guy in his late 50s who was apparently a retired white cop now living on his pension, who, having never attended college, had decided to spend some of his newly-acquired leisure time taking college courses in the evening. Often he seemed to be using his classroom time in the evening to vent his rage at the impression he was getting from watching the TV news that “his country’s” youth was “going commie” in a dangerous way. So he and I sometimes got into some heated debates in the class.
For this class on “Puerto Ricans and the Public School System,” I had to write a term paper. So I wrote a research paper on “U.S. Business Operations In Puerto Rico,” which described how, after 1898, Puerto Rican became an economic colony of the U.S. corporations and was still an economic colony of the U.S. corporations in 1970; with U.S. corporations making super-profits from their investments in Puerto Rico because of Puerto Rico’s high-unemployment, sub-standard wage-rates and corporate tax-exemption incentives, as well as from their exports to a captive Puerto Rican consumer market.
But what turned out to be most memorable for me about my Lehman College teacher education course on Puerto Ricans and the New York City public school system was that by enrolling in this class, I ended up meeting Mary of Valentine Avenue in the Fall of 1970.
Mary sat on the other side of the classroom on the first session of class and didn’t participate much in the class discussion. So, initially, I barely noticed that she was a classmate of mine in the “Puerto Ricans and the Public School System” class. But after the night class ended--and I had left Lehman’s campus, walked up the hill of 196th Street/Bedford Park Avenue, reached the Grand Concourse and approached Kingsbridge Road, on my way to Fordham Road and my apartment—I noticed that Mary was walking in the darkness in front of me. And by the time she reached the next red traffic light, I had caught up with her as she waited for the light to change to green.
“What did you think of the class?” I then asked her.
“Some of it’s interesting,” Mary replied cautiously.
We then started to chat as we walked further south on the Grand Concourse towards the first floor apartment on Valentine Avenue which Mary shared with a woman friend named Norma. I then continued walking for another 10 to 15 minutes, past Webster Avenue, until I reached my own apartment.
Mary, who wore blue jeans each evening, was an Irish-American woman with long brown hair whom most men considered pretty , in her early twenties, who was a few inches shorter than me. She had graduated from Marymount College, which was then an all-women’s Catholic school, just a year or two before the Fall of 1970. But in the Fall of 1970, Mary was then working as a tour guide at the RCA Building during the day.
Bored with having to mechanically repeat the same tour guide text in front of tourists each day at the RCA Building in order to earn her rent money, Mary had decided to enroll in an evening education course at Lehman that semester in order to start accumulating the required credits she might need if she wanted to try to get an elementary school teaching job eventually in the New York City public school system. Like me, however, Mary was a also a Bob Dylan fan in the Fall of 1970 and was anti-war in her politics, despite her right-wing Irish-American Catholic family and parochial school background.
After the first night walking home from Lehman College with Mary and chatting with her, I realized I was attracted to her. And by the second or third class session, I was not only walking her home after each evening class, but she had given me her phone number and was inviting me into her apartment to meet her roommate, Norma, and talk some more in her living room before I continued on my way home.
So, until the end of the Fall 1970 semester, going to my “Puerto Ricans and The Public School System” class always meant walking home and visiting Mary and Norma in their Valentine Avenue apartment for a half hour or so during the week--before getting back to my own apartment to read or work on writing a folk song lyric and then preparing to get to sleep before midnight, so I’d be able to get to the Writers Guild office in Midtown Manhattan the next morning by 9 a.m..
Mary’s father had died before I met her, but she was still close to her mother despite now living in her own apartment on Valentine Avenue. Mary had spent part of the summer just before I met her, for example, traveling with her mother around Ireland, visiting distant Irish relatives, touring the Irish countryside and checking out Irish historical tourist sites and museums in Dublin.
Between the time I worked with another Irish-American woman named Mary at UM & M in the Summer of 1965 and when I became friends with Mary of Valentine Street in the Fall of 1970, the only Irish-American women I had ever had much contact with had generally been hippie-woman who pretty much totally rejected their Catholic upbringing and a Catholic identification; and, having fled from the culturally straight 1960s Irish-American communities in which they may have grown up in, identified themselves more as hippy chicks than as “Irish-Americans.” So Mary was really the first culturally straight Irish-American woman I got to know more than casually after I, myself, became more of a bohemian, hippie, leftist radical.
Before she met me, most of the men with whom Mary had been friends seemed to just be culturally straight, politically unhip Irish-American men from generally right-wing working-class Catholic backgrounds. The kind of Irish-American men who, in the 1960s, were usually more into being on the parochial high school football team, attending sports events and drinking in Irish bars in the Bronx than into hanging out in the Village, being too intellectual or getting into the Civil Rights or antiwar movement in any deep way.
When they went to college, the kind of Irish-American men that Mary was used to hanging around with usually just went to then-Catholic-oriented universities or colleges like Fordham, St. John’s, St. Joseph’s, St. Francis, Manhattan College, Notre Dame, Holy Cross or Boston College as undergraduates, joined fraternities and were usually still more into drinking beer than smoking pot or using psychedelic drugs, prior to the 1970s. In addition, although by the end of 1968 the Civil Rights Movement in the North of Ireland had brought Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and the question of British imperialism in the North of Ireland to the U.S. television screen, neither Mary nor any of the Irish-American guys she knew seemed to have come from Irish-American families who had passed on to them much Irish Republican or Irish nationalist political or historical consciousness.
So, although Mary was into Dylan like I was into Dylan in her musical tastes, she didn’t seem to have previously known many guys who were either hippies or Jewish in their ethnic/religious background at the time she met me in the Fall of 1970. But after about a month of walking Mary home from Lehman College after class during the evening and hanging out in her apartment for a bit after walking Mary home, I decided the time was ripe to telephone Mary and ask her if she was interested in going out on a date with me on a Saturday night.
In the Fall of 1970, hip capitalist rock promoter Bill Graham had not yet closed down his Fillmore East Theatre on the Lower East Side’s Second Avenue. So, after purchasing two tickets to a Saturday night show at the Fillmore East that included a set by B.B. King, I telephoned Mary and asked her if she felt like seeing the show with me on Saturday night.
Mary agreed to go with me to the Fillmore East’s Saturday night show and it was decided that I would meet her at her Valentine Street apartment after dinner on Saturday evening. And then we’d take the D train down to Second Avenue on the Lower East Side to the Fillmore East.
Excited about going on a real date with Mary for the first time, I arrived at Mary’s apartment on Saturday evening. In my pocket, besides my tickets to the Fillmore East show, was some hashish. Just in case Mary felt like watching the show while high on hashish with me.
Mary was dressed-up in a sweater and a skirt--and wearing more lipstick than she usually used--when I arrived. But she still looked very pretty and attractive to me, so I still felt like getting involved romantically with Mary, as we talked in her living room before leaving for the Fillmore East show.
Mary agreed that it would be fun to smoke some hashish before we went downtown to listen to the music. So we smoked some hashish together before leaving her apartment and walking towards the Fordham Road IND subway station to get on the D train going south.
I can’t remember much about the subway trip downtown, except that we barely noticed any of the other passengers around us while we conversed with each other in an animated way. But I do recall that by the time Mary and I were standing on line with our tickets outside the Fillmore East, waiting to be let into the theatre, we were both feeling the effects of the hashish and each enjoying being high on it. Once inside the Fillmore East Theatre, I can only vaguely recall what each of the featured acts performed. But I do remember that both Mary and I pretty much lost ourselves in the music and felt being stoned on hashish made the show more enjoyable.
By the time we took the subway back up to the Bronx and reached Mary’s apartment on Valentine Avenue, the effects of the hashish were wearing off. But although Mary seemed to have had a good time on our date, in the Fall of 1970 she apparently wasn’t the type of woman who would invite you into sleep with her after only one date or quickly express affection for a guy in a physical way, unless she really had decided she loved him. So after Mary kissed me goodbye on the street outside her apartment building in a friendly, but only polite way, and thanked me for the good time, I realized that Mary was still more cautious than I was about becoming romantically involved with each other.
After my Saturday night date with Mary, I still remained friends with her and continued to walk her home after class and stop off in her apartment to chat for a bit. But by the end of the Fall 1970 semester, Mary began to discourage me from seeking to get any closer to her or telephoning her much after we ceased to be evening classmates.
Wanting to eventually have children and not being as much into free love or radical bohemian politics as I still was, Mary had apparently concluded that there were too many philosophical and cultural background differences between us that would doom any attempt by us to develop a love relationship, despite my attraction to her. And after I got the hint from Mary that she hadn’t fallen in love with me, I stopped telephoning her.
So Mary of Valentine Avenue vanished from my life forever by early 1971, even though, in the late 1970s, I started to again bump into more Irish-American women my age that lived in New York City, after I began doing Irish solidarity political work.
While waiting for the Black Panther Party and its radical feminist-led white movement allies to make the Revolution in the early 1970s in the United States, I did not want, in the Fall of 1970, to get my survival money by just being an office boy or clerical worker until the Revolution happened. Yet until I was able to “earn my living in the 1970s as a protest folk singer-songwriter” the way Phil Ochs had been able to do during the 1960s, it looked like I was going to be stuck in the 9-to-5 office world as a clerical office worker like my father had been for so many years.
So, after being hired by the Writers Guild in September 1970, I also decided to enroll in two education courses at Lehman College’s evening division in the Bronx, in order to obtain the remaining education course credits I needed if I ever decided I wanted to teach social studies at some New York City vocational high school for white working-class students—while waiting for the Black Panther Party and radical feminist-led Movement to make the Revolution.
Although Lehman College’s evening school courses for non-matriculated students were not free (as they were for matriculated undergraduates in the Fall of 1970, five years before free tuition at CUNY was ended), the tuition costs for the two education courses I enrolled were still less than $200. And because my father (whom I had not asked to pay any college costs for me since the end of my freshman year at Columbia) seemed pleased that I now seemed more willing to finally consider becoming a middle-class professional than I had previously been, I decided that it wasn’t exploitative of me to ask him to pay the $200 I needed to take my two education courses at Lehman College’s evening school. But it proved to be the only time after the 1960s that I ever asked my father to help me pay for a U.S. university course.
I only lived three blocks from Fordham University’s gated campus on Fordham Road. But tuition there for any evening teacher education courses was much more expensive than what CUNY charged in those days for its non-matriculated students. So that’s why Lehman College was where I ended up taking my evening teacher ed courses in the Fall of 1970.
Lehman College’s campus, near Bedford Park Road and Jerome Avenue at 196th Street, was about a 25-minute to half-hour walk from where I lived at 188th Street, east of Webster Avenue. Since Lehman College, unlike Fordham or Columbia, was solely a commuter school, there were no dormitories on campus. And, unlike at Columbia or Fordham’s campus in the evening or on weekends, few students ever hung around the campus of Lehman College after dark. So unless you met somebody in an evening class before they hurried home off-campus, it was unlikely that you could meet anybody on campus at Lehman in the evening by just hanging out in the college’s library.
Lehman College had once been Hunter College’s Bronx Division. But by the Fall of 1970 it had been renamed for former New York State Democratic Governor Herbert Lehman, was no longer part of Hunter College, and was the Bronx equivalent of Queens College. Consequently--although the open admissions to CUNY demand for all New York City high school graduates had been won as a result of the African-American and Puerto Rican student building occupations at CCNY, Brooklyn College and Queens College in the Spring of 1969—like Queens College’s student commuters, Lehman College’s commuting daytime student body in the fall of 1970 was still predominantly from white working-class Jewish ethnic backgrounds, although the Lehman College students were generally from less affluent white working-class backgrounds than were the Queens College students.
Most of the evening students at Lehman College, like the evening students at Queens College, were usually just either New York City public school teachers who were required to take more evening school education courses to be permanently certified or 9-to-5 office workers in Manhattan’s business world or in city and state government offices who needed to obtain college BA degree credentials, eventually, to either retain their business or government jobs or to get promoted in the corporate or government agency world.
The main difference between the student body at Lehman College and the student body at Queens College seemed to be that most of the commuting daytime and evening students at Lehman College were from the Bronx or Westchester, whereas most of the commuting Queens College students were from either Queens or Nassau County. Another difference between Lehman College and Queens College seemed to be that a greater percentage of students from less affluent working-class Irish-American backgrounds seemed to attend Lehman College than attended Queens College.
Ironically, when I registered for my two evening education courses at Lehman College in late September 1970, I recognized one of the security guards who was working at Lehman College during its registration period from my days as a Columbia student. At Columbia during the 1965-66 and 1966-67 academic years, he had been the Columbia worker you encountered when you entered or left the Butler Library stacks that would chat or flirt with practically every Columbia or Barnard student who entered or exited the stacks in a cheerful, friendly way.
“Hey, don’t we know each other from Butler Library?” I said to the Lehman security guard after I recognized him.
“Yes. I remember you,” he said with a smile. “What are you doing here?”
“Taking a few courses. But where have you been? You seemed to suddenly disappear from Butler Library at Columbia.”
The Lehman College security guard laughed and replied: “I was drafted and had to spend two years in the army.”
“Glad to see you survived,” I said.
The security guard smiled. “I managed to avoid being sent to Vietnam and got sent to Germany, instead.”
“Good for you,” I said with a laugh and, as the line of registering students moved forward into the next room, I added “Nice to see you again.”
I also recognized in back of me on the Lehman College registration line a white guy in a suit and tie with short hair who had attended Richmond College with me during the 1968-69 academic year.
“Weren’t you a student at Richmond College?” I asked him.
“Yes. Oh, I remember you,” the guy answered.
“Why are you taking courses at Lehman?”
“I’m working as a student counselor in the Dean’s office at Baruch College and I need some additional courses to obtain a Master’s,” the guy replied.
I felt like laughing, because in the fall of 1970, to me this guy seemed like the least appropriate person to counsel CUNY students. At Richmond College, he had been a veteran older student who was a right-wing conservative and a few years older than the other undergraduates who seemed totally unhip politically and culturally to what undergraduate students then wanted from life.
“That’s interesting,” I said before the registration line moved forward and I was able to get away from the culturally straight right-wing would-be college administrator--without having to exchange anymore pleasantries to someone whom I felt was still helping to block radical democratic social change in the USA.
The two evening courses I enrolled in at Lehman College in the Fall of 1970 was a course on the problems students from Puerto Rican family backgrounds faced in the New York City public school system and a course on high school social studies teaching methods. Each course met two evenings per week, but on different nights. And I do have some memories of what went on inside the classroom in each of these evening classes during the Fall of 1970.
A white teacher ed professor in his late 40s or 50s, whose ethnic background was Puerto Rican, taught the education course on the special difficulties that students of Puerto Rican descent-- especially those students whose parents only spoke Spanish--faced inside New York City’s public schools. The professor was a left-liberal politically and provided good information in the course and assigned readings that documented the various ways the New York City public school system discriminates on an institutional and interpersonal basis against Puerto Ricans; and why there was a need to set up bi-lingual educational programs in the public schools, especially in the early grades.
There were only about ten Lehman College evening school students in the this class, including a few current white teachers who seemed to be taking the course, like me, in order to just accumulate the education course credits they needed to obtain a permanent teacher’s license. But none of the teachers in the class seemed interested enough in the course to participate much in the class discussion.
So whatever class discussion happened usually ended up being some kind of debate between the left-liberal professor and myself versus the two right-wing conservatives in the class who kept challenging the professor’s thesis that the New York City public schools treated Puerto Ricans in a racist way and that some kind of affirmative action program (that “discriminates against white people’ according to the right-wing conservatives in the class) was needed in New York City.
One of the right-wing conservatives in the class was a young white guy in his 20s, who didn’t seem particularly closed-minded or especially racist. But the other right-wing conservative who was most vocal in the class was an older guy in his late 50s who was apparently a retired white cop now living on his pension, who, having never attended college, had decided to spend some of his newly-acquired leisure time taking college courses in the evening. Often he seemed to be using his classroom time in the evening to vent his rage at the impression he was getting from watching the TV news that “his country’s” youth was “going commie” in a dangerous way. So he and I sometimes got into some heated debates in the class.
For this class on “Puerto Ricans and the Public School System,” I had to write a term paper. So I wrote a research paper on “U.S. Business Operations In Puerto Rico,” which described how, after 1898, Puerto Rican became an economic colony of the U.S. corporations and was still an economic colony of the U.S. corporations in 1970; with U.S. corporations making super-profits from their investments in Puerto Rico because of Puerto Rico’s high-unemployment, sub-standard wage-rates and corporate tax-exemption incentives, as well as from their exports to a captive Puerto Rican consumer market.
But what turned out to be most memorable for me about my Lehman College teacher education course on Puerto Ricans and the New York City public school system was that by enrolling in this class, I ended up meeting Mary of Valentine Avenue in the Fall of 1970.
Mary sat on the other side of the classroom on the first session of class and didn’t participate much in the class discussion. So, initially, I barely noticed that she was a classmate of mine in the “Puerto Ricans and the Public School System” class. But after the night class ended--and I had left Lehman’s campus, walked up the hill of 196th Street/Bedford Park Avenue, reached the Grand Concourse and approached Kingsbridge Road, on my way to Fordham Road and my apartment—I noticed that Mary was walking in the darkness in front of me. And by the time she reached the next red traffic light, I had caught up with her as she waited for the light to change to green.
“What did you think of the class?” I then asked her.
“Some of it’s interesting,” Mary replied cautiously.
We then started to chat as we walked further south on the Grand Concourse towards the first floor apartment on Valentine Avenue which Mary shared with a woman friend named Norma. I then continued walking for another 10 to 15 minutes, past Webster Avenue, until I reached my own apartment.
Mary, who wore blue jeans each evening, was an Irish-American woman with long brown hair whom most men considered pretty , in her early twenties, who was a few inches shorter than me. She had graduated from Marymount College, which was then an all-women’s Catholic school, just a year or two before the Fall of 1970. But in the Fall of 1970, Mary was then working as a tour guide at the RCA Building during the day.
Bored with having to mechanically repeat the same tour guide text in front of tourists each day at the RCA Building in order to earn her rent money, Mary had decided to enroll in an evening education course at Lehman that semester in order to start accumulating the required credits she might need if she wanted to try to get an elementary school teaching job eventually in the New York City public school system. Like me, however, Mary was a also a Bob Dylan fan in the Fall of 1970 and was anti-war in her politics, despite her right-wing Irish-American Catholic family and parochial school background.
After the first night walking home from Lehman College with Mary and chatting with her, I realized I was attracted to her. And by the second or third class session, I was not only walking her home after each evening class, but she had given me her phone number and was inviting me into her apartment to meet her roommate, Norma, and talk some more in her living room before I continued on my way home.
So, until the end of the Fall 1970 semester, going to my “Puerto Ricans and The Public School System” class always meant walking home and visiting Mary and Norma in their Valentine Avenue apartment for a half hour or so during the week--before getting back to my own apartment to read or work on writing a folk song lyric and then preparing to get to sleep before midnight, so I’d be able to get to the Writers Guild office in Midtown Manhattan the next morning by 9 a.m..
Mary’s father had died before I met her, but she was still close to her mother despite now living in her own apartment on Valentine Avenue. Mary had spent part of the summer just before I met her, for example, traveling with her mother around Ireland, visiting distant Irish relatives, touring the Irish countryside and checking out Irish historical tourist sites and museums in Dublin.
Between the time I worked with another Irish-American woman named Mary at UM & M in the Summer of 1965 and when I became friends with Mary of Valentine Street in the Fall of 1970, the only Irish-American women I had ever had much contact with had generally been hippie-woman who pretty much totally rejected their Catholic upbringing and a Catholic identification; and, having fled from the culturally straight 1960s Irish-American communities in which they may have grown up in, identified themselves more as hippy chicks than as “Irish-Americans.” So Mary was really the first culturally straight Irish-American woman I got to know more than casually after I, myself, became more of a bohemian, hippie, leftist radical.
Before she met me, most of the men with whom Mary had been friends seemed to just be culturally straight, politically unhip Irish-American men from generally right-wing working-class Catholic backgrounds. The kind of Irish-American men who, in the 1960s, were usually more into being on the parochial high school football team, attending sports events and drinking in Irish bars in the Bronx than into hanging out in the Village, being too intellectual or getting into the Civil Rights or antiwar movement in any deep way.
When they went to college, the kind of Irish-American men that Mary was used to hanging around with usually just went to then-Catholic-oriented universities or colleges like Fordham, St. John’s, St. Joseph’s, St. Francis, Manhattan College, Notre Dame, Holy Cross or Boston College as undergraduates, joined fraternities and were usually still more into drinking beer than smoking pot or using psychedelic drugs, prior to the 1970s. In addition, although by the end of 1968 the Civil Rights Movement in the North of Ireland had brought Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and the question of British imperialism in the North of Ireland to the U.S. television screen, neither Mary nor any of the Irish-American guys she knew seemed to have come from Irish-American families who had passed on to them much Irish Republican or Irish nationalist political or historical consciousness.
So, although Mary was into Dylan like I was into Dylan in her musical tastes, she didn’t seem to have previously known many guys who were either hippies or Jewish in their ethnic/religious background at the time she met me in the Fall of 1970. But after about a month of walking Mary home from Lehman College after class during the evening and hanging out in her apartment for a bit after walking Mary home, I decided the time was ripe to telephone Mary and ask her if she was interested in going out on a date with me on a Saturday night.
In the Fall of 1970, hip capitalist rock promoter Bill Graham had not yet closed down his Fillmore East Theatre on the Lower East Side’s Second Avenue. So, after purchasing two tickets to a Saturday night show at the Fillmore East that included a set by B.B. King, I telephoned Mary and asked her if she felt like seeing the show with me on Saturday night.
Mary agreed to go with me to the Fillmore East’s Saturday night show and it was decided that I would meet her at her Valentine Street apartment after dinner on Saturday evening. And then we’d take the D train down to Second Avenue on the Lower East Side to the Fillmore East.
Excited about going on a real date with Mary for the first time, I arrived at Mary’s apartment on Saturday evening. In my pocket, besides my tickets to the Fillmore East show, was some hashish. Just in case Mary felt like watching the show while high on hashish with me.
Mary was dressed-up in a sweater and a skirt--and wearing more lipstick than she usually used--when I arrived. But she still looked very pretty and attractive to me, so I still felt like getting involved romantically with Mary, as we talked in her living room before leaving for the Fillmore East show.
Mary agreed that it would be fun to smoke some hashish before we went downtown to listen to the music. So we smoked some hashish together before leaving her apartment and walking towards the Fordham Road IND subway station to get on the D train going south.
I can’t remember much about the subway trip downtown, except that we barely noticed any of the other passengers around us while we conversed with each other in an animated way. But I do recall that by the time Mary and I were standing on line with our tickets outside the Fillmore East, waiting to be let into the theatre, we were both feeling the effects of the hashish and each enjoying being high on it. Once inside the Fillmore East Theatre, I can only vaguely recall what each of the featured acts performed. But I do remember that both Mary and I pretty much lost ourselves in the music and felt being stoned on hashish made the show more enjoyable.
By the time we took the subway back up to the Bronx and reached Mary’s apartment on Valentine Avenue, the effects of the hashish were wearing off. But although Mary seemed to have had a good time on our date, in the Fall of 1970 she apparently wasn’t the type of woman who would invite you into sleep with her after only one date or quickly express affection for a guy in a physical way, unless she really had decided she loved him. So after Mary kissed me goodbye on the street outside her apartment building in a friendly, but only polite way, and thanked me for the good time, I realized that Mary was still more cautious than I was about becoming romantically involved with each other.
After my Saturday night date with Mary, I still remained friends with her and continued to walk her home after class and stop off in her apartment to chat for a bit. But by the end of the Fall 1970 semester, Mary began to discourage me from seeking to get any closer to her or telephoning her much after we ceased to be evening classmates.
Wanting to eventually have children and not being as much into free love or radical bohemian politics as I still was, Mary had apparently concluded that there were too many philosophical and cultural background differences between us that would doom any attempt by us to develop a love relationship, despite my attraction to her. And after I got the hint from Mary that she hadn’t fallen in love with me, I stopped telephoning her.
So Mary of Valentine Avenue vanished from my life forever by early 1971, even though, in the late 1970s, I started to again bump into more Irish-American women my age that lived in New York City, after I began doing Irish solidarity political work.
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