Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (64)

While still living alone in the basement apartment in Jamaica, Queens during the 1970's, I was surprised one evening in the Fall to hear a knock on the basement apartment door. And when I opened the door, the former roommate of mine, who had moved from Jamaica, Queens to live in Israel near the end of the previous Spring--Barry--was standing in front of me.

'I'm back from Israel. And I'd like to move back in with you. Unless you've found a new roommate," Barry quickly said, as I motioned for him to sit down on the chair in the kitchen-dinette.

Although I enjoyed living in the basement apartment without a roommate more than I had enjoyed living with a roommate like Barry, who did not share my 1970's political and philosophical views, since the basement apartment had first been rented by Barry, before he later agreed to have me as his roommate the previous winter, I felt morally obligated to agree to let Barry move back into the basement apartment as my roommate--if that's what he now wanted to do. And besides, since I--at that time--expected to be living for the next six months on a weekly unemployment benefit check that paid less than what I had been earning from either my Bulova Parts Department clerk-typist job or my temporary student-travel agency clerk-typist jobs during the previous 9 months, getting a roommate--even one who was as sexist, male chauvinist, non-feminist and pro-Zionist as Barry was in the 1970's--who would be paying half the monthly rent and utilities expenses, now made sense from an economic standpoint for me.

"If it's O.K. with the landlord for you to move back in with me, it's O.K. with me," I quickly replied. And after getting the landlord's approval the next day, Barry handed me the $75 in cash, which represented his half of that month's rent, and moved into the apartment again as my roommate.

Despite being raised by a right-wing Zionist New York City cop, who moved to Israel following his retirement from the NYPD, Barry had apparently decided after, himself, living in Israel for a second extended period in the late Spring and Summer during the 1970's, that, despite his pro-Zionist upbringing and political sympathies, he was too Americanized, himself, to want to spend the rest of his life living in Israel rather than living in New York City.

And once the Israeli government apparently notified Barry that, if he was going to live in Israel and become an Israeli citizen, he would have to then serve some time in the Israeli military, Barry quickly purchased an airline ticket back to the U.S.A.. After all, in Barry's view, one reason he had left the U.S.A. was that, like most of the people he had grown up with in Queens, he was anti-war and opposed to serving in a U.S. military that waged endless war in countries like Vietnam. So it made no sense, he felt, to--despite his pro-Zionist politics--to now suddenly risk his own life, by being compelled to serve in the Israeli military, after having been previously successful in personally avoiding serving in the U.S. military of the country of his birth.

Queens College Revisited: The 1970's (63)

When I was hired by the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.]--while living in the Jamaica, Queens basement apartment--to work as a clerk-typist there during the summer travel season, the hip-seeming, non-authoritarian, white department head in his late 20's, Steve, told me that the seasonal full-time job would only last until the end of August. But during the last week of August, Steve--who had by then recovered from the hepatitis he had contracted earlier in the summer and was now back at work in the C.I.E.E. building office--asked me to come into his private office to speak with him.

After I sat down across from where Steve sat behind his desk, Steve smiled and asked in a friendly tone: "You know I've been pleased with your work. And I was wondering whether you would be interested in continuing to work here for an extra month--or whether you've already made other plans for September?  I realize that it was originally agreed that the job would only last until the end of August. But we're still busy now and we could still use you until October, you you haven't already made other plans."

By the end of August, of course, I couldn't wait to make my escape from being bullied by the culturally-straight, authoritarian, white women, who seemed to be in her 30's, that was my immediate supervisor, for whom I typed up the charter flight passenger manifest lists each morning. And once the woman co-worker in her early 20's whom I was attracted to, Connie, was no longer working in the same C.I.E.E. office and conversing across the desk with me during the workday by late August, there was also no longer any potential romantic incentive for me to want to work an extra month on my temporary travel season job at C.I.E.E..

So I quickly replied to Steve:  "I did already make other plans for September. So it wouldn't be possible for me to work an extra month here. But I thought you were a good department head to work for, Steve."

Because the original official agreement with Steve was that the job would end at the end of August, I also felt confident, as I left the office on my last day of work, that Steve would not contest my eventual claim for unemployment insurance that I was going to file in late September; following my plan to take a Greyhound bus out from NYC to California in early September, stay a week in Berkeley, take a bus down to LA to visit Disneyland (which I had never visited, despite having longed to visit it when I was a child), and then hitchhike across the continent back home to New York City and Jamaica, Queens in the 1970's.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (62)

I no longer remember much of what I did during the weekday evening hours after working at the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] by day, once I finished writing the "Generation In Chains" novella in the summer that I lived alone in the basement apartment in Jamaica, Queens. The only two things I can now recall doing that stand out in my memory are meeting a woman friend  from the Midwest in Central Park, alone for a few hours, when she was in Manhattan with her family to attend some kind of extended family wedding; and also exchanging letters with a woman who was a member of an academic left group of radical economists.

Neither the visiting womanfriend I met in Central Park nor the academic left woman economist, however, seemed interested in visiting me in my basement apartment in Jamaica. The womanfriend I met in Central Park had to go back to the Manhattan hotel later that evening where she and her parents were staying; and, in addition, had begun to identify herself more as a lesbian than as a bisexual at that period of her life. And the academic left woman economist seemed more interested in preparing herself for some kind of college professorship job teaching Marxist economics to undergraduate students than into developing a closer friendship or relationship with a non-academic left, working-class writer-musician-left activist like me.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (61)

After concluding in the 1970's that there was little chance that the hip capitalist corporate folks who acted as U.S. music industry/record company gatekeepers/censors would ever be willing to allow me (or anyone else) to record in their studios any songs whose lyrics reflected the anti-capitalist and revolutionary male feminist politics of the folk songs I had written in my late teens and 20's (or distribute any vinyl records of songs whose lyrics reflected such politics), I decided to try to start writing "the Great American" novel in the 1970's, "Generation In Chains." This "Generation In Chains" novel would, hopefully, reflect the 1970's social reality that my post-World War II baby-boom generation was enslaved by the U.S. capitalist economic and political system of the 1970's.

The main fictional protagonist of "Generation In Chains" was a 1960's white New Left Movement activist-organizer named Daryl who, in the early 1970's, was now being hunted by the F.B.I.. And the fictional character in many ways was modeled after the young Mark Rudd, whom I had known in the 1960's before I was suspended by the Columbia University administration in 1968 for engaging in political protest inside Hamilton Hall, during the second New York City police invasion of Columbia's campus in late May of 1968.

Initially, I was able to diligently work on my novel in my basement apartment in Jamaica each evening after coming home from work at my Council on International Education Exchange [C.I.E.E.] student travel agency clerk-typist job, and on my weekends off, in a disciplined way. And, initially, I did enjoy laying out in a fictionalizing way New Left sub-cultural history of the 1960's and early 1970's at the same time. I felt I was using the "Generation In Chains" plot and theme to expose the totalitarian nature of U.S. society and to stimulate the development of revolutionary anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist mass consciousness, hopefully, among those who would eventually read the novel.

But after about a month of working on writing "the Great American Novel" that would be called "Generation In Chains," I concluded that, for a U.S. worker who was economically enslaved in the 9-to-5 work world on Monday through Friday, spending all your limited free time in the evening after work, in the early morning before going to work on weekdays, and your weekends writing your novel was like being stuck doing homework all the time in high school; or having to write term papers, without getting paid, to obtain credits in college.

To write "the Great American novel," meant that I would have to sacrifice a lot more of my limited free time when not in the 9-to-5 working-class cage than writing protest folk songs required. The lifestyle of a working-class novelist, I concluded, was a much more self-enslaving life-style to get into, under capitalism, than was the lifestyle of a working-class writer-musician-activist, who just wrote protest folk songs and revolutionary feminist love songs, rather than wordy novels that took months to complete in most cases (and often years to find some corporate media conglomerate--or even an upper-middle-class-controlled academic or leftist small publishing firm--that would be willing to publish the novels).

So rather than continuing to spend all my summer evening and summer Saturday and Sundays locking myself inside my Jamaica basement apartment writing a novel when I felt more like being outside, I decided to conclude my "Generation In Chains" literary project by just completing it as a novella; and then I mailed the completed "Generation In Chains" novella manuscript off to some 1970's college student newspaper office (where it probably was quickly dumped in the wastebasket by some white upper-middle-class college student newspaper editor). And during the rest of that summer I was able to now have time to ride on local transit system buses that took you from Jamaica to Far Rockaway Beach or Long Beach and then lay around on the beach on a few hot weekend days, with a can of beer, without feeling any self-induced pressure to continue to work on writing my "Great American" novel.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (60)

When I worked during the week at the Council on International Educational Exchange [CIEE] student travel agency in Manhattan in the 1970's, I would sometimes spend a few hours on Saturday or Sunday shooting some basketballs on the basketball court near Jamaica High School, which was located just a few blocks up the hill from the basement apartment in which I lived, in the late Spring and early Summer. And sometimes, I would get involved in a one-on-one pick-up half-court basketball game with one or two of the African-American high school students who might also be shooting basketballs on the same basketball court on weekends. The playground basketball court near Jamaica High School in the 1970's was more like the basketball courts in Riverside Park in Manhattan, in that the pick-up games were sometimes inter-racial--as opposed to the pick-up games in the Queens playground basketball courts in Whitestone, Douglaston, Little Neck, or Glen Oaks which were then only filled with white guys playing basketball.

Yet although I spent some of my weekend Spring and early Summer time when living in the Jamaica basement apartment playing basketball in the playground and, on a few weekends, taking buses that drove their riders from Jamaica to the boardwalks of either Far Rockaway or Long Beach, most of my time at home during the Spring and Summer was spent writing my unpublished 1970s's "Generation In Chains" novelette. 

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (59)

It was while living alone in the basement apartment in Jamaica during the 1970's that I spent a week or two writing and putting on a cassette tape the only few song commercials that I would ever write. In the 1970's the biggest corporate media television advertisers in the USA like General Motors had not yet been sold the right to use the folk and rock songs written by songwriters like Bob Dylan during the 1960's, as soundtracks for their television commercials. So I naively thought that maybe I could make some extra money to help fund my protest folk song writing, pay my rent and help finance my subsistence lifestyle of emancipated poverty, by selling  some original song commercials to the then-biggest U.S. transnational, General Motors.

I now no longer recall either the lyrics or the melodies to the few General Motors song commercials I wrote in the 1970's. But I do recall being mailed a letter from one of the General Motors marketing executives, along with the returned cassette tape on which the song commercial had been recorded, indicating that he liked the songs but that GM had no need for them at that time. Perhaps if GM had used some of these song commercials as the soundtrack for their tv commercials in the 21st-century it would not have nearly gone bankrupt during the post-2008 Great Recession?  Only kidding, of course.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (58)

After purchasing and listening to the 1970's Joan Baez vinyl album which she recorded and released after she had visited North Vietnam (during the same December 1972 week when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had ordered the Christmas bombings of some North Vietnam cities  which destroyed civilian targets like hospitals) and spent some time in a North Vietnamese bomb shelter, I thought Baez might now be interested in recording some of the anti-imperialist and anti-war protest folk songs I had written in the late 1960's and early 1970's, such as "Bloody Minds," "He Walked Up The Hill," and "Living On Stolen Goods," as well as the "Richard Farina Is Gone" eulogistic folk song. So I mailed a cassette "basement" tape of these folk songs and some other protest folk and folk love songs to the contact address for Baez that was listed in Who's Who In America.

Baez, however, didn't seem interested in recording any of these folk songs. But Baez's mother wrote me a personal note indicating she liked some of the folk songs and encouraging me to keep on writing folk songs.

Baez was the only post-1940's-born U.S. folk singer in the 1970's (aside from Phil Ochs, who only sang the songs he wrote himself) whose politics and song lyrics/musical preferences were close to mine and who had access to a record company recording studio. So, once she didn't express any interest in recording any of the protest folk songs, eulogistic folk songs or love folk songs I had written in the 1970's, that pretty much eliminated the possibility, of course, that any of these folk songs would reach a mass anti-war audience with their anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, revolutionary consciousness-raising message during the rest of the 20th century.