Category Archives: slice of NYC life

You Don’t Know How Good You Had It

I have lived in this increasingly dilapidated apartment for decades.  Over the years I’ve had many upstairs neighbors as the apartment has changed hands many times.  Some lived quietly and considerately, others were an ongoing source of aggravation.  It’s hard to appreciate how lovely the quiet ones are until some flouncing, stomping, inconsiderate dick (of either sex) moves in.

When I first moved into the place, an old woman named Mrs. Freudenstein lived upstairs.   She was a German who had, so I learned from another original neighbor, committed the racial crime of marrying a Jew during the days when Hitler was making Germany great again.   (Yes, I know, believe me, sometimes the inevitable comparisons are impossible to avoid, believe me, believe me). Mrs. Freudenstein had been a widow for a while by the time I met her in 1975, her husband possibly met a gruesome end, for all I know, as they escaped Germany together.

She was a quiet, friendly, unassuming woman who walked over my head with the grace of a cat, on little padded feet.  She early on padded down one flight and silently slipped a note under my door.  

The short, elegantly handwritten note begged me to be a good neighbor by keeping my kitchen sink clean.   “Please, I am very clean.  I never had roaches, but now I do.  Please, please, don’t leave anything in your kitchen sink at night!”   Words to that effect and words I continue to live by to this day.  I bought a can of Ajax and a scouring pad and never leave anything in my sink overnight.   She thanked me weeks later when we passed in the hall.  

I soon know if my new neighbors are unsanitary types when roaches return to my kitchen– which the clean sink helps insure is never a vast army of them.  The sink, I don’t need to point out, is the only part of this place, outside of sections of the bathroom, that could be called clean.  Every roach I crush on the edge of the stove or in the sink I mumble an apology to, it is truly nothing personal, as opposed to the new anonymous slob above or below me, who I curse in the most intimate terms, for letting the cockroach colony in the walls between our apartments thrive.

The building has changed hands several times over the years as speculators tried to make money off this hundred year old six story apartment building.  One group decided to replace the boiler in November.  There was no heat or hot water for literally two weeks, which I know now is highly illegal.  There are portable boilers that can be parked in front of buildings to supply heat and hot water, through long hoses, while the main boiler is being repaired or replaced.  

I wore sweaters and hats and cursed a lot during those frigid November nights, but didn’t think to call the City and complain about this unconscionable violation.  A landlord, I now know very well, is required to provide heat and hot water during cold weather (hot water in all seasons), and restore it immediately or pay fines that mount daily.  These profit-driven real estate speculators were playing fast and loose with a law few tenants were aware of in those days.  

While I cursed against the cold, and boiled water to shave with and wash with, Mrs. Freudenstein upstairs, who had survived far worse, contracted pneumonia, and was taken to the hospital finally, where she died.  I always blamed this group of rapacious snakes, who owned the building for a very short time, for her death.  I remember seeing her son for the first and only time, carrying the dead woman’s things down the stairs in boxes.  

The new short-term owners of the building were not punished for her death in any way.  They were rewarded, actually, by a generous increase in the rent they could charge for the dead woman’s apartment.  The tenants who moved into the apartment that had been Mrs. Freudenstein’s home for the past forty years paid a 20% vacancy increase and a monthly portion of any costs incurred by the landlord to renovate any or all parts of the place, things like putting in a new ice box or a modern bathroom sink. 

This process has continued each time the apartment upstairs turns over and as a result, the place I pay about $800 a month for costs the tenant upstairs two or three times that.    

I endured a period when a young hyperactive buffalo named Thunderhoof stampeded from one end of the apartment to the other and back for hours at a time.  It aggravated me daily, but at least the heavy little guy eventually tired himself out and went to sleep at a childishly early hour.  On the other hand, the one-boy stampede got up with the sun and was off on his tiny, thunderous hooves as soon as he did.   Fortunately, they did not live above me long.

But this is not a trip down memory lane.  It’s an illustration of the old cliche Joni sang about: you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.   We don’t appreciate our good health, until it turns bad.   We often don’t appreciate the best things in life, until they are no more.

A woman moved in upstairs recently, an early rising night owl with a very heavy, seemingly pouty step.   All of her footwear is iron soled.  She is energetic and flounces heavily above me when she arrives home at one or two a.m., just the hour I am finally fully relaxed, and in a state of contemplation.  She hurls herself across the floor, seems to be flinging heavy objects as she goes, there are unaccountable thuds and crashes in her wake.  

Eventually she goes to sleep, loudly dropping her hard shoes on my ceiling and falling heavily into her bed directly over my head. This is all annoying, but just part of living in a city where people who grew up in suburban or rural ranch houses are inhabiting their first apartment where people live directly below their heedlessly stomping feet.

“You should go upstairs and talk to her,” Sekhnet suggested, not unreasonably.

Then I thought of former upstairs neighbor Bitch Boy, who came home at 2 a.m., from a job that apparently infuriated him, and blasted Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” for an hour or more, presumably to calm his seething.  I went up to speak with him a couple of times, did not find him particularly reasonable.  He was a stomper too, my friend even bought a remnant of thick carpet, in a heavy roll,  and brought it up to him to lay under his heavy boot steps.  

I found Bitch Boy, late one night, pissing against my door.    I flung the door open and he made a dash up the stairs, leaving a trail of urine on the stairs as he went.   I splashed a pot of boiling water, and some disinfectant, over his piss and came back inside shaking my head.  I eventually did some research, got neighbors to petition the landlord, who was then forced to take Bitch Boy to court, and the successor to Bitch Boy’s apartment got to pay his former rent, plus 20%.

Anyway, the clumsy, seemingly angry stomping of this new young woman upstairs is not worth commenting about.   Pieces of plaster fall from the ceiling more frequently now, but this place is well overdue for some renovations in any case.  That my apartment is currently too jammed with mountains of papers and piled boxes of other things to allow the replastering is on me.  Here is the problem.

My new upstairs neighbor is a soprano.   That means she has a voice in the range of a high-strung violin.   The first time I heard her voice exercises, directly over my pillow, I thought my new neighbor played the Theremin.  The eerie gliding note sounded right out of a 1950s low budget horror movie.  This was not Brian Wilson’s Theremin player from Good Vibrations, it was Bela Lugosi’s.  It played a four or five note, nerve jangling trill over and over. I listened from my bed and wondered why anyone in the world would be practicing the Theremin so industriously, so unmusically, particularly first thing in the morning.

Alas, it was not a Theremin player but a soprano, doing endless voice exercises, not always 100% tunefully but always with the effect of a female cat in heat shrieking in an alley, a torture victim losing control of all dignity and bursting into his or her highest register, nails, impossibly loud, on a blackboard and continuing, literally, for hours at a time.

The first few times it went on, and continued, certain exasperated men would shout out “Hey, shut the fuck up, will you?!!”  We have since given up this practice, since it does not seem to deter her.  She apparently knows her rights.  

I used to defend tenants in New York City Housing Court and learned once, to my surprise, that a hyperactive kid has every right to play drums ten hours a day overhead and under foot in a NYC apartment, no matter how badly, as long as the hours of racket are reasonable ones, neither too early nor after, say, nine p.m.

So there’s really nothing I can do about this hard-practicing operatic hysteric upstairs.  She generally only struggles to stay on pitch, tuning her high, hideous voice, for a few hours every afternoon. It was eight hours yesterday, but who am I to complain, tapping here incessantly as I do all day.  To someone with a stethoscope to the wall, floor or ceiling, I am probably a worse menace than she is.

I will say that the recent ten minute bleating of a neighbor’s smoke alarm, which turned out to be irate over nothing more than cooking fumes, was far preferable to my neighbor’s vocal exercises.  I would easily take two more hours of the monotonous, attention-seeking robotic alarm over ten minutes of the human’s deliberate operatic exertions.

This morning I was up unaccountably early, 7:20. a.m.  I couldn’t fall back asleep for a while, though I had not slept very long by 7:20.  Some time after 8:00 I was drowsy and began to drift off.  Just then Boris Karloff’s just slightly off-pitch Theremin player began to do her repetitive, amusical thing directly over my bed.  It continued, with pauses only for breath, until 10:30.

“Will you shut up?!!!” an exasperated man’s voice finally burst forth from the air shaft.

“Keep tuning your voice!” shouted another man’s voice, in that distinct dialect that also announces sexual preference, “I support you!  Artists should support other artists!”

A noble sentiment, and one I truly endorse, seriously.  People who lack the generosity to encourage each other’s creativity are a stinking, stingy basket of deplorables in my book.  

That said, I hope both of these artistic cunts will take up painting.

Dueling Douche Bags in the New Jersey Night

Friedman and I once went to hit golfballs at a NJ driving range on a Saturday night some time in the 1980s.  Neither of us had ever done it and we both sucked badly at it. Standing side by side we snorted and giggled as we hit dribblers and sideways three hoppers.  Almost assuredly we were also somewhat intoxicated as we tried to drive golfballs for the first time.  

Making the obvious assumption of the homophobic day (and fair enough, given the optics), two self-respecting macho Jerseyites walking to their cars behind us loudly exchanged a sneering comment about the two girlish fags taking their homo hacks. Nowadays that witless comment seems hideous but quaint, but at the time, the words made my ears burn.

My next swing was like Mantle driving a golf ball, I hit it flush and sent a long drive to the back of the lot there (my only decent shot of the night).  

I could swear I heard the two homos behind me clam up simultaneously.  Very satisfied, I felt, as I hit the next sixty sissified dribblers, although Friedman and I, more self-conscious now, tried a bit harder to suppress our giggles.

On Being Direct

It’s best to be direct,
though it can be painful 
while, say, 
pretending to converse 
with someone uncannily channeling
a beaming Christian Bale as American Psycho.
It’s easier to watch a horror movie
than to find yourself inside one 
trying to remain sincere
while looking into a funhouse mirror,
fun hogtied and bleeding,
gasping for breath.  
It’s fun until somebody loses an eye. 

My Proudest Sports Moment

Sports is a metaphor for a lot of things, many of them fairly mundane if not moronic.  But one very beautiful and meaningful thing is sportsmanship.  Playing fair, and cleanly, and being a good teammate, is no small metaphor for how a person should always try to live, even as it is largely a neglected art on the professional level where trash talk and loudly stinking millionaire egotism has become the norm in our sickened unto the death society.

Top personal contender for my proudest sports moment was a long, grueling contest I had on a paddle ball court in Queens with an Israeli who kept assuring his friend, waiting to play the winner on the only court available, that he’d beaten me many times, that I was shit, that he’d kick my ass easily, that I was lucky as a bitch every time I made a good shot.   In his defense, he said all this in Hebrew and had no idea I understood everything he was saying.  

He soon had me down 9-2 in a 15 point game, then 12-3.   Then I just got sick of hearing his bullshit and wound up beating him in triple or quadruple overtime.  You have to win by two when the game is tied at 14, 15, 16, etc. and in the end I did.   He was like a wet, wrung-out rag as his friend started on to the court to play me.

I graciously gave them the court, but not before turning to my opponent, putting a hand on his shoulder, and telling him in flowing colloquial Hebrew “this happened to you, sweetheart, because it wasn’t enough for you to play the game and win– you wanted to annihilate me….”.  The look on his face was indescribable and his friend had a very hard time not pissing himself as he fell over in hysterics.  I waved goodbye and walked off, feeling like a true champion.  I remember feeling like Bruce Lee.

But that was an ego-gratifying event in a sport I had decent skill in.   The true number one moment in my life playing sports was this one, years later, with much less personal glory in it for me, but much more illustrative of the way I have always tried to live.

I taught a semester of French (a language I mangle badly) at the Frederick Douglass Academy, a public middle school in East Harlem, directly across the East River from Yankee Stadium.   I was hired because the dynamic principal, Lorraine Monroe, hated her French teacher and wanted to get rid of him.  I’d been working in every kind of weather (there were many blizzards that winter) as a sub at the attached elementary school, been screwed by the moron principal of the other place, who reneged on her offer of a full time job, and I went to the other side of the building to say goodbye to Ms. Monroe.

“Widaen, do you speak French by any chance?” she asked me.  I told her I was taking a French translation test at CCNY in a few weeks to complete my Masters requirements.  That was good enough for her.

I rehearsed the line I delivered with a Gallic shrug when the French department chair asked me how my French was.    “Le Francais n’est pas exactement mon metier, you know,” here I gave the nonchalant little shrug and added what I didn’t know how to say in French “but I can get by”.  He nodded, good enough for him.  I was hired for an extended joke term as French teacher for several classes of 8th and 9th graders.

At the school there were several Teach for America teachers, America’s brightest and most idealistic young graduates, who taught for a year or two in inner city schools before going on to their graduate studies and lucrative and fabulous medical, legal, financial careers.  

Toward the end of the year there was a school sports day and Lorraine Monroe walked her entire school and staff a couple of miles across Harlem to the State Park built on top of the sewage treatment plant on the Hudson River in West Harlem.   The Park was impressive, a giant running track, many basketball courts, both indoor and outdoor, a weight room, tennis courts, an indoor pool.   This particular day the air flow was moving the right way and it did not smell like the million tons of human waste being processed directly under us.  In fairness to the many Harlemites who had protested its construction, on many days the whole neighborhood now does smell like shit.

When we got to the track, one of the young Teach for America guys, a tennis pro, I’d heard, challenged me to a foot race. He was ten years younger than me, and wiry, but the kids seemed to want to see the race, so I said ‘sure’.  I was amazed by the number of kids who were noisily rooting for me as we ran.   He claimed he won, but if he did, it was by less than a step.  A surprisingly slow motherfucker for a young tennis pro, I remember thinking.  I probably said as much to him at the time.

But that was not the great sports moment.  It came an hour or two later, when I walked into a gym where a full court basketball game was going on.  For some reason the tennis pro and an even more athletic Teach for America guy were on one team, the other team was all kids.  The team with the two adults was beating them something like 45-6 when I stepped on to the court for the side that was having its ass kicked.  

I don’t recall taking a single shot, or pulling down a single board, and I never was a very good basketball player.    I just fell into the point guard role.  I kept calmly talking sense, distributing the ball, pointing out a guy who wasn’t covered, getting everyone back on defense.  

In a very short time the game was tied.  I remember the way my teammates changed their demeanor, from whipped dogs to the clearly better team.  I remember the shock on the two young superstar teacher’s faces as the seesaw pivoted, the cautious way they started to play, the shots they were suddenly bricking.  

I don’t remember the final outcome.  I think I probably left before the end of the game, rotated back out and left the gym, never found out who won or lost, I truly didn’t give a shit. 

It remains my proudest sports moment.

Why So Glum?

“Why so glum?” she asked.  It seemed to her that he had many reasons to be cheerful.   His work was moving steadily forward, even if he was no closer to getting paid for any of it.

“Because I live in a giant toilet bowl where the biggest pieces of shit make the biggest splash,” he said.  

“That’s pretty good,” she said, “did you make that up?”   

“I don’t fucking know,” he said, and she recoiled as if struck.

“Don’t forget to flush,” he added, to the empty room.

Brave male kitten returns from catch-and-release

He whimpered a bit, then was stoic for the rest of the ride, watching me as I drove.  When I opened the carrier in his ancestral garden he cried again.   His sister, the alpha kitten, hearing this, came towards his cage as he emerged.  He went into the bushes and straight to business: a long piss.  Then he hunched like Arnold Palmer, instead of a putt he dropped a long, slow turd.  He kicked some leaves over it, found the food bowl, had a bite to eat, and dashed off in the direction his sister had walked off in.

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Little Bro headshot.jpg

Dog Days

The dog days of summer, dear diary, are heavily upon us here in New York City.   The radio warns of a fourth straight day of heat alert, real-feel temperatures again well above 100 with humidity to melt you.  Keep your pets inside, air-conditioner on high, the expert on the radio advises.   Check on the old people next door, make sure they have not parboiled.   The city opens “cooling centers” where sweat-soaked, stinking citizens can come and recover in super-cooled public rooms scattered around the more working class neighborhoods.

I am a complainer by nature, so it will surprise no-one to hear me bitch about lifting my head from a wet pillow, unpeeling myself from the wet sheets and picking up the thermometer I’d dragged up to the bedroom late last night.  I smirked as I read “95”.    I nodded grimly, this all figures, I said to myself, possibly out loud, as I began to mutter and staggered downstairs to get something to drink to restore some of the lost hydration I’d left soaking the bed.

A pair of bare feet at the bottom of the stairs startled me, I caught the next mumbled syllable in my throat.  It was Sekhnet, waiting for a call-back from work, stretched out near the cat, both of them vaguely in the warm wind of a tower fan, the only thing standing between any of us and certain death from heat stroke.   There is a tower fan next to me now as I write, bringing semi-cool air to my left armpit and side, wicking away the freely flowing sweat. I dare not write much longer, for fear of burning out this laptop in the 95 degree heat up here.  

Sekhnet was somber there on the living room floor.  We’d trapped three feral kittens the last few days, had them neutered by a vet a friend recommended, with certificates from a nonprofit making each wild animal’s care come in at not much more than a hundred and thirty dollars.  The two I picked up at the vet’s yesterday, after their hysterectomies, cried all the way home.  It was pitiful.  I was glad Sekhnet wasn’t there, her sobs would have drowned out the wails of the miserable little cats.

These feral cats have brutal, short lives in Sekhnet’s garden, though she cares for them like they were her own pets.  An old one lives to be two or three.  We have seen many generations now, and each generation has ended badly, dead kittens found here and there virtually every season, the older ones simply disappearing.  A dead kitten was found today, one of the almost full-grown males from Mama Kitten’s previous litter.  The grey, tiger striped corpse was found under the Chan’s apricot tree.  Sekhnet had Joe open the contractor bag so she could identify the dead cat.

“Scratchy,” she told me, and urged me not to mention it to the younger brother of the neighbor next door if I see him across the garden fence, to let his older brother tell him when he gets home from work.   The younger brother is a sad, limited man.  He has some kind of mental problems that erupt in screams sometimes, once in a while the cops are called in.   Not much danger of me running into the brother, or anyone else, as I won’t be spending more than a moment out there today, and certainly not a second at the garden fence.

“Mama Kitten had her litter, as I told you she was,” said Sekhnet, “she came by today and she’s not pregnant any more.”  Mama Kitten had her first litter at the age of six or seven months.  Three kittens, two of whom survived, one of whom survives today (the third is the corpse in Joe Chan’s contractor bag).  The runt of that litter, cute, spunky Dobbie (named for his long ears which made him look like J.K. Rowling’s house elf) made a nice meal for a red-tailed hawk, as far as we can tell.

We watched the two surviving kittens of that first litter eventually drive Mama Kitten out of the garden and take the turf for themselves.  Talk about ungrateful fucking offspring.  Talk about the cruelty of nature.  (Talk about a metal laptop heating almost to frying pan temperature…).  She’d come around to visit, always affectionate– rare in a feral cat.  She’d come to trust Sekhnet and me, would rub her face on our legs, let us pet her one stroke as she’d walk the length of her body under our hand.  

One day, as all the feral mother cats around here have always done, she came to the garden to introduce her new kittens to their benefactor, Sekhnet.  She marched four of them past, three with white faces like Dobbie’s, one who looked like her tiny twin.  Of those four, three survived (one disappeared a week or two ago, probably lunch for a red-tail).  All three have now been neutered (though it seems the runt may not be up for the challenge of survival– not having taken a bite since returning from the vet’s yesterday, staying out of sight) and…

“Mama Cat came by, skinny again,” reported Sekhnet somberly.  In a nest somewhere nearby she has her next litter, four or more adorable little doomed kittens born on a very muggy day in hell.   Mama Kitten was the one we were trying to trap, to have her spayed and the embryonic kittens aborted, but she was too wary, too close to giving birth by the time we arranged with our friends to come by with the traps and expertise in how to catch the ferals so they could be released back into the wild in a way that would not increase their already too large numbers.  

“She loved the turkey, which is what we should bait the trap with, once she reappears with her new batch of kids, once they’re weaned,” said Sekhnet.  “She hated the sardines though, she gave me a very dirty look and jumped back when I offered them.   Mini-Me ate the sardines, though Mama Kitten hissed at me for offering them to her.”  

The mother kitten began hissing at her kids when she became pregnant again, making sure they were on their own before she brought the next batch into the world.  So far this beautiful little cat, now little more than a year old, maybe a year and a half at most, has given birth to seven kittens that we’ve seen and several more newborns, tiny and suckling somewhere behind a garage, waiting to become Sekhnet’s adorable little charges.

Meanwhile, it is about a hundred degrees and only two of her last batch of four kittens is accounted for, the one who looks like her and the one still at the vet’s.  Hearty, brave and recently spayed, the little alpha kitten who looks like her has been up and around, eating with her usual gusto.   Her sister, skinny and withdrawn, traumatized by her trip to the vet, did not eat yesterday and has not been seen today.  The blue-eyed Dobbie-looking sibling, who turns out to be a boy, I will pick up at the vet’s tomorrow.  He will probably cry the whole way home, like his sisters cried yesterday.  Luckily, Sekhnet will be at work and not in the car, crying along with the cat.

Well, diary dear, I’d better shut this machine down, before it fries itself.  I ought to hop into the shower and drink another liter of seltzer, if I know what’s good for me.  Stay cool!

 

The Incident at James Madison High School

I must find Phil Trombino, it’s true.  Phil Trombino is a living primary source.  There is little on-line about the Human Relations Unit, its day to day operations, no trace of the sensitivity sessions I imagine, based on my father’s descriptions during the lulls in fighting over dinner.   Phil would have been in the room when the Unit went down to James Madison after the incident that began on December 7, 1973, thirty-two years to the day after another that would live in infamy.

The investigation into the incident, where blacks and whites squared off several days running in a Brooklyn high school that had almost ten years of integrated coexistence by then, can be found on-line, you can read all about it here.  Within a few days 100 policemen would be called in to keep a lid on the unrest.  I got as far as the last section of the introduction (page 4) when I was stopped in my tracks by the tone of the report.   Here is one section, containing language that seems inconceivable in the age of corporate spin we now all live in:

Madison HS report

“Analysis, understanding and remedy-seeking?”  What?  What kind of idealistic jerk-off seeks that in a report on who is to blame for a riot?

“We mean this report to help them, not discourage them in meeting difficult challenges on which all of us in this country need all the help we can get.”

“Challenges on which all of us in this country

need all the help we can get.”

Challenges that more than forty years later we have all but abandoned working on, in favor of pointing fingers and fixing blame.  My father is grimacing in his grave at the abandonment of the ideals that animated this report, the creation of the Office of Intergroup Relations, his years of hard, doomed work.  

“It does make a man wonder: for what was I pelted with rotten vegetables, called a fucking kyke Commie cocksucker, cornered by snarling, red faced New York City racists who bumped me as I left the auditorium?  Why bother sending those two New York City cops with me the next time?  Why bother explaining Brown v. Board of Education to rooms full of parents and teachers who simply and unequivocally hated niggers?  And nigger was the word that foamed on every lip in those days.  Jack Roosevelt Robinson?  Nigger. No other way to put it.  We’ve come so far as a politically correct society, of course, we’re, you know, all post-racial and shit, now white people lose their jobs for hate speech for failure to refer to that magic word as the “n-word”, you know, but the condition for actual n-words on the ground, the masses of them?  They’re fucked, vilified, feared, loathed.  Thugs, yo.  Them n-words is fucking thugs, yo, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Calm down, dad.  I know what you’re saying.  You’re singing to the choir director.  The children of the poor are largely doomed.  Doomed.  There are less dramatic ways to say it, but none are as concise or accurate.  If you are born into poverty, as you know, your chances of dying an early death in poverty are incalculably greater than your chances of escaping poverty.  America, America, God shed His grace on thee.  

“You remember you had nightmares after that piece in Mad Magazine?  Wow, I just thought of that, Elie.  Mad magazine had a version of that song, illustrated with photos, and over ‘crown thy good with brotherhood’ there was a shot of a cemetery where all the grave stones had swastikas painted on them.  I think that same spread had a lynched body hanging there somewhere.   You must have been nine or ten.  It was not long after we passed the display windows along the Time and Life building at Times Square and you saw that magazine with piles of starved extermination camp inmates on the cover, you were up a few nights after that one.”  

Well, yeah, I’ve never had much love for fucking Nazis, dad.  It’s not as though they didn’t kill every member of my family on both sides except for the few who made it here to the USA, USA!   But we can chat about that another time.  I’m reading through the report of the racial tensions at James Madison– I was already out of high school by that time, and this report reads like something out of the Freedom Rides down in Alabama.

“Uppity Negroes, Elie, never satisfied with their station, you know what I’m sayin’?”    

So I get to this part– rumors fly that black high school girls are trapped by a white mob in a local luncheonette, in Brooklyn, 1973, and police are called in to stand between angry whites and angry blacks in front of the luncheonette, which was closed and empty.  And Benjamin Tucker, a black community relations officer in plain clothes, is struck by a white cop, who “mistook him for a student”.  Presumably struck the black man with a baton, probably in the head.  The report is silent on this.

“New York City, Elie, at the dawn of 1974.  I was fifty, starting to get tired.   You believe, and you fight, and even though your ideas are right, and your ideals are unshakable, you will get beaten down when nothing changes.  I think I was in NYU hospital again that winter, I don’t remember.  You wonder what the fuck any of it means, after a while.  Benjamin Tucker, I met the guy when we were at James Madison.  He was angry as hell, I remember he said to me ‘Irv, I’m on a street corner in Brooklyn, working, and I get cracked across the skull from the blind side by some fucking Bull Connor wannabe because he thinks I’m some nigger high school kid?  Crackers in Brooklyn hate niggers just as hard as those white boys down in Allybama.’  And he was right to be angry.  I had absolutely nothing to say to him, except ‘You’re right, Mr. Tucker.’  That’s what I had to give him, the respect of calling him Mister.  Nice fucking world, you know?”

OK, dad, calm down, calm down.  It is a nice fucking world, if by nice you mean infinitely fascinating.  I’m going to read the rest of this New York City Commission on Human Rights report and then go for a stroll, to think about all these nice things, and I’ll check in with you later.

“Catch you later, I’m eatin’ a pertater,” said the skeleton, sinking back into its long nap.

Hats Off To Larry

Sometimes it’s good just to do something for the joy of it.  I pick up the guitar in that spirit sometimes, just for the happiness of making pleasing sounds come out of it.  I write this one today in that spirit, to remind myself of the only partly sardonic good luck I have to find myself me, given the alternatives.  

Last winter I went to court, dressed shabbily, I realize now, to represent a nattily dressed fellow who walked with a cane.  A very well-spoken man a lawyer friend of mine represented.  My friend had filed and served all the appropriate papers and made a motion for a judgment on default, since the defendant never answered any of his papers.  The judge needed to hear the damages to make an award and this would be done at a one-sided trial called an inquest.  My friend was not comfortable speaking in court, and since I was used to it, I examined the plaintiff at the inquest.  With me walking him through the story, and nobody to object that I was leading him, he told his story about an insensitive Bronx dentist who had treated him badly.

“And what did the defendant do when you told him you were in pain from the temporary cap that was cutting into your gums and cheek and making your mouth raw and bloody?”  I asked the plaintiff, in the manner of Fred Astaire leading Ginger Rogers.

“He told me ‘get the fuck out of my office’, excuse me, your Honor,” he turned quickly to the judge who nodded nonchalantly for him to continue.  “Then he called me cabron,” he repeated the entire Spanish phrase which he began to translate for the judge.

“I know what cabron means,” said the judge, “in English it’s cuckcold.”  

I nodded at the judge and the plaintiff and there was no reason to emphasize that what the hot-headed dentist had actually said was “get out of here man whose wife I fuck like every other man with a dick fucks, you dickless fucking fairy.”   No point, Judge, I confirmed with a glance.

“And after the police left and you told the dentist you would get a lawyer and sue him, what did he do?”  I asked with fake innocence, since anyone could tell I knew full well the answer to this twenty thousand dollar question.

“He picked up a stack of his business cards, threw them in my face and said ‘give these to your fucking lawyer, cabron, and get the fuck out of my office’,” I nodded with obvious sympathy.  The judge was impressed by the defaulting dentist’s cold-bloodedness.  I didn’t need to add what he would have said about the court, the judge, the law itself, if given the chance.

“Here, cabron, take these for that fucking homo judge who’s going to hear this case after I wipe my ass with your lawyer’s fucking legal papers, in fact, I have a box of a thousand business cards here, wait, here they are, and you can tell the judge to have a nice time and watch the paper cuts when he shoves all of them up his syphlitic asshole.  Now, go, and please, have a very nice day, cabron.”

 This would have been overkill, I thought.  In any case, it was unnecessary.  The judge, suitably inflamed, awarded a judgment against the dentist that was, with the 9% statutory interest, about $20,000.   When informed of the judgment against him the ill-tempered  dentist remained unconcerned.

I learned today that, pursuant to some papers we filed with banks and a marshal, $12,000 of Medicaid payments, on automatic deposit to one of the good doctor’s bank accounts, was seized by the marshal.   My friend and I will split a third of that sum.  “Ha hey!” I said, “better than being summoned for jury duty.”

I called a friend who is actively concerned about me.  I don’t blame him for being concerned and wanted to give him a little upbeat news.  When I told him the story he was very happy.  When I told him I’d write it up and send it to Larry, maybe get another $250 for it, he laughed.   Then I told him, quite seriously, that I’d return to my regularly scheduled pissing and moaning now and he wisely rang off.

The good news cheered me up briefly, I have to admit.  But I’m over it now, and looking for new thrills today.