Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (Conclusion)

By this time, of course, besides being turned off by having to room with a sexist like Barry, whose 1970's political views and values did not reflect my own 1970's revolutionary left, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist non-Zionist and male feminist political views and values, I also had had enough of living again in Queens County.

Prior to the 1970's, I had grown up in Queens, lived in the Midwest and lived in Manhattan and Staten Island; and in the 1970's I had lived in the Bronx and the Midwest again, before finally returning to Queens County.

My childhood memories of growing up in the Douglaston and Little Neck area of Queens within the Beech Hills-Deepdale developments of low-cost, co-op garden apartments, during the 1950's era of U.S. white working-class affluence, were memories of a Queens in which I still felt on the same cultural wavelength as were most of my childhood friends, childhood classmates and childhood elders. But now in the 1970's, as an adult in my 20's who had become politically radicalized and alienated from culturally straight white suburban middle-class/affluent working-class values, I no longer felt I was on the same wavelength as the other adults in their 20's who still lived in Queens in the 1970's.

Between the 1950's and the 1970's, both Queens and I had changed; and by the 1970's none of the people I had grown up with in Queens seemed to ever appear in my daily or weekend life scenes in the 1970's; and there also seemed to be little likelihood that living any longer in Queens in the 1970's would enable me to easily find any new scene of people with whom I would feel some philosophical affinity, shared life aspirations or emotional closeness to.

So, naturally, when I heard from my sister, who was now living in Brooklyn, that there was a vacant apartment in Brooklyn that I could rent by myself for just $100 a month, my revisit to Queens ended. And to the more urbanized borough of Brooklyn/Kings County I moved my guitar, my cheap portable typewriter and the duffel bag that contained all my clothes, as a new year in the 1970's began.

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Although Barry had mentioned having had "a chick" while in college that he had split up with eventually, it wasn't until near the end of the time I roomed with him in the Jamaica basement apartment that he brought home a "chick" who spent a night there with him; apparently someone Barry had also previously dated during his college days.

She was about the same height as Barry, had long, straight black hair, wore  jeans and had a face and figure that most men in the 1970's would have considered physically attractive. Yet despite her somewhat hip-looking surface appearance, she didn't seem that hip intellectually or counter-cultural in her value-structure.

To interest her initially in going out on a date with him again, Barry had to agree to find a blind date for her friend, another woman in her early 20's who, unlike Barry's womanfriend, didn't wear jeans and would not have been considered physically attractive by either most culturally straight men or most hip, counter-culture-oriented men in the 1970's. So that's why Barry pushed me into "helping him out" by agreeing to be the "blind date" that the "chick" he was trying to "score" with was requesting that he also provide to go out with them. And, as a favor to Barry, I got into his van with him one night when he wasn't working at the Queens College student union building, because of the Christmas season school break, and he drove us both to the Queens apartment of the parents of my blind date, to pick up both Barry's date and my blind date.

Once we got there, the parents of my blind date examined Barry and me and reminded us to bring their daughter home before midnight. I no longer recall where we went immediately afterwards with Barry's date and my blind date after we left the parents' apartment; probably to some restaurant for dinner. But I do remember that both my blind date and I quickly concluded after talking with each other in the back seat of Barry's van that we were neither physically attracted to each other or had any common interests.

She seemed to be interested in the 1970's in just finding a straight, conventional, religiously conservative Jewish middle-class professional man--perhaps an accountant, lawyer or medical doctor--who wanted to get married, have children and make a lot of money--which, I, obviously, wasn't. And, in turn, I didn't feel that she was on the same wavelength as me philosophically or intellectually enough for me to want to date her again, even if her surface physical appearance had, in fact, resembled that of Barry's date more.

Eventually, Barry drove us all back to our basement apartment in Jamaica, where he spent abut a half-hour in his bedroom making out with his date, while my blind date and I awkwardly attempted to make conversation in the living room, before Barry and I drove both his date and my blind date back to each of their parents' apartments, in which they each still lived.

But the next night, Barry was able to go on another date with his date, without being required to drag me along as a blind date for his date's friend, like on the previous night. And after his second date with her, Barry brought her home to the basement apartment and apparently "scored," since she was now willing to spend the whole night sleeping and making love with him in his bedroom.

The following morning, however, Barry's new "chick" and sexual conquest was first crying and then screaming at Barry for awhile, before Barry was able to temporarily quiet her down and then drive her back home to her parents' apartment.

Apparently Barry had been able to "score" with his new "chick" the previous night because she had assumed that he had agreed that they were now "a couple" and that he would start looking, with her, for a fancier apartment in Queens in which they would now live together.

But once they awoke the next morning, Barry apparently denied that he had ever promised to live with her in a fancier apartment or solely sleep with her; and his new "chick" and sexual conquest, predictably, felt disappointed, betrayed and sexually exploited. Hence, the tears and the screaming. And also, predictably, Barry then decided he would have to "go to his bull-pen again" and try to find another "chick" he knew from his college days, in order to make another "score"/sexual conquest, rather than have to deal with another scene with the "chick" who had been screaming at him.

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I can't recall much else I did during the last month in my basement apartment in Jamaica, while waiting to hear whether or not the book publishing firm was going to hire me for the publicity clerk job. What I do recall, though, is on one Friday night going alone to a local community college in Jamaica to hear a student who played acoustic guitar with a harmonica in a harmonica holder perform a 1-hour set; and thinking that the student-musician-performer reminded me of early Dylan, musically and stylistically; but that he did not remind me of early Dylan, lyrically.

I also recall meeting a Chinese-American male friend of Barry; and also going on a blind date that Barry had arranged for me with a woman friend of a former "chick" friend of Barry that Barry was again trying to "score" with, during my last month living with Barry in the Jamaica basement apartment.

Barry had apparently met his Chinese-American male friend--who was also in his 20's, but now married to a Chinese-American woman in her 20's--when they were both undergradate students at Queens College in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Having grown up in Queens in the 1950's and early 1960's like Barry and me (before the post-1980's mass migration of Chinese-Americans from Manhattan's Chinatown and immigrant families from Asia to Queens seemed to dramatically increase the number of Asian-Americans in that borough), Barry's friend seemed as Americanized and assimilated as Barry and I. But the parents of Barry's friend were apparently less completely assimilated and Americanized than my second-generation parents had been; and  they were apparently still pressuring Barry's friend to live his life more like they wanted him to live it, rather than how he and his wife wanted to live.

So Barry's Chinese-American friend still seemed to feel some conflict as to what his goals in should be in the 1970's; although, like Barry, by the 1970's he had absolutely no interest in devoting any portion of his life or time in working for a revolutionary transformation of U.S. society, as I still did.

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Having quit the Manhattan Criminal Court dictaphone-typist job after finally receiving the needed first paycheck after 6 weeks, I was now ineligible to receive unemployment compensation checks. So some of the time during the December that I last lived in the Jamaica basement apartment with Barry in the 1970's was spent looking at Sunday New York Times classified want ads.  

Noticing a want ad for a "publicity clerk" job with a book publishing firm in Midtown Manhattan, I telephoned its personnel office to arrange for a job interview. After being interviewed, my impression was that the person who was the publicity department manager was going to hire me, especially because I was the first applicant to be interviewed, in a decade when the first white applicant for a skyscraper office clerical job usually still was the person who would get hired, unless he or she lacked the job qualifications. But because it was the month in which the publicity department manager was apparently busy hanging out at various seasonal office parties and/or schmoozing/meeting with her print media contacts, press agent contacts, bookstore managers and newspaper or magazine book review editors, she took her sweet time about calling me back to let me know that she had hired me and when I might start working as her publicity clerk at the book publishing firm.

But after two or three telephone calls to her by me, which apparently also convinced her that it made sense to hire me as her publicity clerk because I was eager enough about obtaining the job to call her about her decision more than once, I was told to report to for my first day of work in early January of the new year.

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Given the fact that I felt it was morally wrong and politically unprincipled for me to work in a New York County/Manhattan Criminal Court system that I believed was continuing to act as an instrument of political repression and human rights denial, on behalf of the white corporate power structure of New York City, in the 1970's, I quickly decided to quit the dictaphone-typist job as soon I was handed my first paycheck.

But during the first week of working in the dictaphone-typist pool, I was surprised to learn that, while the other dictaphone-typists were now each receiving their paychecks every two weeks or every month, a newly hired employee of Manhattan's Criminal Court like myself had to wait 6 weeks before he or she was handed a paycheck. So I, thus, couldn't afford to leave this job until 6 weeks were up.

Luckily for me, the unemployment benefit checks that were long overdue for me arrived during the middle of the 6-week period when I was waiting for my first paycheck from the Manhattan Criminal Court/New York County Supreme Court job. And the money from the late unemployment benefit checks enabled me to come up with my half of the monthly rent for the Jamaica basement apartment that I shared with Barry again, only about a week after the rent was due.

Barry had, however, seemed to get a bit anxious when I didn't have my half of the $150 rent at the beginning of the month. So I telephoned a former camp co-counselor whom I had befriended during the Summer of 1970, with whom I had resumed my friendship a number of years later, after bumping into him while transferring from the 74th Street IRT elevated station to the Roosevelt Avenue IND stop in Queens one evening, as we were both coming home form work.

When we got together in the evening following this telephone call, I hinted to him that I was expecting an unemployment benefit check or a paycheck soon, but that I needed a small loan in order to pay my half of of that month's rent to get the anxious Barry, my roommate, off my back.  But when my friend--whom I had never asked for any kind of a money loan or favor before--seemed unwilling to help me out with the rent this one time, I realized that he really was just a "fair weather" friend; although I hid my changed feeling about our friendship from him when we said goodbye to each other outside my basement apartment in Jamaica. Queens.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (70)

Before spending some of the Fall in which I lived in the basement apartment in Jamaica hitching around the U.S.A., I had assumed that, upon my return, I would be able to collect unemployment insurance benefits, and use my unemployment benefit check money to pay rent and food costs for the next 26 or 39 weeks, based on my clean lay-off from the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] seasonal student travel agency clerical job at the end of August.

Unfortunately for me, however, after I applied for unemployment benefits, the Unemployment Insurance Division of New York State that was responsible for mailing out my weekly benefit check apparently took its sweet time about sending me my benefit check. Even over four weeks after applying for unemployment insurance benefits, no unemployment compensation check had been mailed to me.

I did, however, pick up $20 one morning, after reporting to the local unemployment office in Jamaica near Sutphin Blvd., to stand in line before signing for yet another promised but undelivered unemployment benefit check, when, on the way home, a nun called to me after noticing me walking on the sidewalk in front of the church where she worked. Needing a man to carry into the church a pile of boxes that had been dropped off on the sidewalk in front of the church, the nun offered to pay me $20 if I agreed to carry the boxes into the church.  Yet after paying my half of the basement apartment's rent for the current month, I no longer had enough money to pay my half of the following month's rent. 

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It was during the Fall that I was living in the basement apartment in Jamaica that I first noted the negative political results at Queens College of the Zionist movement's well-funded post-1970 program to push "Jewish identity" consciousness and "Jewish studies" programs on campus, in which some assimilated U.S. students of Jewish religious background took some courses for college credit.

By the late 1960's, the elderly, rich white folks who funded or controlled the "professional Jews"/Zionist/Jewish nationalist organizations and lobbying groups in the U.S.A. apparently became concerned that too many assimilated U.S. students of Jewish religious background felt more of a political affinity with the African-American Liberation movement in the USA and groups like the Black Panther Party, or anti-imperialist New Left groups like SDS, than they did for Israel, Zionist youth groups in the U.S.A. or on-campus Hillel groups.

The "Jewish identity" and "Jewish Studies" programs the Zionist movement set up in the 1970's on U.S. campuses, it was hoped, would counter the apparent drift of assimilated students of Jewish religious background to the anti-imperialist New Left of the 1970's, in a more successful way than it was countered politically by the Zionist movement in the 1960's.

And by the mid-1970's--once the assimilated U.S. students of Jewish religious background and their womenfriends felt there was no longer any risk of being drafted by the U.S. military for an imperialist war, after U.S. military intervention in Vietnam began winding down, draft calls were reduced and the draft was eventually ended--the "Jewish identity" programs push at places like Queens College did seem to have succeeded, somewhat, in increasing the numbers of students who got involved in pro-Israeli, Zionist student youth groups than had been involved in similar groups in the 1960's, during the Vietnam War Era and the heyday of the New Left and SDS.

Checking out a forum on Middle East issues at Queens College one evening in the Fall, I was surprised, for example, to see that the number of Queens College students who cheered the Israeli government's representative when he defended his government's policy of refusing to negotiate directly with the Palestine Liberation Organization and refusing to withdraw, in violation of UN Security Council resolutions, from the territories it had occupied during the June 1967 Middle East War, outnumbered the Queens College students who were critical of Israeli militarism, from an anti-imperialist left point of view.

And when I spent a few minutes, after the forum, explaining why people in the U.S., regardless of religious background, had an internationalist obligation to oppose Israeli militarism and human rights violations and support the right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination on democratic grounds, to a white woman student of Jewish religious background, whom most men would likely have considered physically attractive, she seemed to become enraged at me, while calling me a "self-hater" and "a traitor." For a second, it almost looked like she was going to even test out the effectiveness of her apparently recent martial arts training on me, if I hadn't decided that there was no point in continuing the discussion with her and started to quickly walk away from her.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (68)

By the time the sun had set on that Fall day, I was beginning to feel the effects of the acid. Consequently, when I got to the Queens College student union building I was flying high as a result of the acid.

Although I was able to find the unmarked back entrance door to the student union building that Barry had mentioned, a Queens College women student with a walkie-talkie, whose work-study job was apparently to patrol the student union building's stairwells, coincidentally, was walking down the stairs in the hallway near the back entrance of the student union building at the exact moment when I made my entrance.

"Let me see your I.D.!," she called out to me immediately after she spotted me while, at the same time, walking towards me quickly in order to block me from going down the stairs to the basement cafe.

Surprised by being spotted so unluckily, despite Barry's promise earlier that day, that there was no unforeseen difficulty in getting into the student union building by the unmarked back entrance, and being so high that I wasn't as quick-thinking as I might otherwise have been, all I could think of doing was to smile sheepishly and whisper to the woman student patrol monitor, "I''m a friend of one of the security guards and he told me I could use this back door to come into the building."

"You say you're a friend of one of the security guards and he said you could use this entrance to sneak in?" the woman student patrol monitor asked in a suspicious voice.  "What's your friend's name?"

At that point, however, I suddenly realized that I'd better try to bring myself down quickly from the acid before I got Barry into trouble and possibly cost him the weekend job that he liked so much. And I somehow managed to start retracting my story about "my friend" telling "me I could use this back door to come into the building," by answering "I was just putting you on. So why don't I just leave now, since I don't have a student I.D.? And we can forget the whole thing."

The woman student stairwell patrol monitor, however, was apparently still suspicious and, blocking me from leaving the building through the same door through which I had entered, she said "Why don't you just wait a minute, while I call my supervisor?"

She then spoke a few words through her walkie-talkie and, a few minutes later, an African-American man in his late 20's, who was dressed in a mod way, appeared.

"Now why don't you tell him what you told me about how you got into the building without showing a student I.D.?" the woman student patrol monitor said.

Thinking quickly, I winked at the African-American man and said:  "Look, brother. I'm too high to recall how I stumbled into this building. You know what I mean. But now that I know you need a student I.D. to get into the building on Saturday night, I promise I'll never try sneaking in here again."

The African-American supervisor laughed and replied:  "Well, we'll let you go now, brother. But if we ever catch you inside here again without a student I.D., we might have to just call the police to take you away."

"Thanks a lot, brother," I said in a grateful tone as the student parole monitor and her supervisor led me to the exit door through which I left the building.

Once outside the Queens College Student Union building I breathed a sigh of relief that I was able to retreat from the building without apparently costing Barry his job. And by the time Barry returned from his security guard job around midnight to the Jamaica basement apartment, I was asleep.  The next day, however, Barry asked:  "What happened to you?  I though I'd be seeing you in the basement cafe last night?"

Laughing, I replied:  "I was on acid and it turned out I couldn't find the back entrance door. So I ended up just coming back here early and listening to music until I started to fall asleep.".

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Since the weather was nice outside, however, I decided to spend that Saturday afternoon outside, enjoying the fresh Fall air and walking around Queens. And near the end of the afternoon, as I walked on the sidewalk along the Long Island Expressway service road, I was approached on the street by a white woman who looked like she was still just a junior or senior in high school.

"Wanna buy a tab of acid for 5 dollars?" she asked me, apparently because I was then long-haired, bearded and looked like a freak.

"Sure," I replied. Then, after I took my wallet out of my pocket and handed her a 5 dollar bill, the white high school woman student gave me a tab of acid in exchange; and then she quickly started to walk ahead in the direction opposite from the direction I was walking.

Apparently she was more interested in finding other freak customers on the streets of Queens to sell her tabs to than wasting anymore of her time finding out what I might be into, besides also being into dropping acid like she was. But, although I was somewhat attracted to her physically and might have been interested in getting to know her better, because she also seemed a little too young at that time for me to consider getting involved with romantically, I wasn't that disappointed when she walked away from me in search of other customers. So I just shrugged and also continued my own walk in the opposite direction for a block or two before swallowing the tab of acid.

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Barry seemed to enjoy his weekend job as a security guard in the basement cafe in the Queens College student union building. One reason might have been that he felt it was like being at a party with people only a few years younger than him, on the college campus where he had previously graduated from, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night; and, in addition, it seemed to provide him with more of a possibility that he could pick-up  and "score" eventually with more younger "chicks" than did his Monday through Friday day job during the week as a delivery truck driver.

And after about a month working as a basement cafe security guard at the Queens College student union building, Barry invited me to check out the scene on one Saturday night.

"Why don't you check out the scene tonight?" Barry suggested.

"How can I check out the scene if I don't have a student I.D.?" I replied. "Without a student I.D., you're not allowed to even enter the Queens College student union building by the security guard in the lobby."

Barry laughed. "Just walk around to the backside of the student union building. There's an unmarked exit door leading into the sub-basement level of a stairwell there, that most people don't know about, which is always left unlocked. Just walk around to the back of the building, open the unlocked door and up  the stairwell a half-flight of stairs and you'll be just down the hall from the basement cafe entrance--where I'll pretend to check your wallet and then let you walk by me." 

"Well, if it's that easy for me to get into the student union building, I'll check it out sometime tonight," I said.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (65)

After a few days back in the Jamaica basement apartment in the Fall, Barry said to me one evening after he came home from his day job:

"I spoke to the landlord today about fixing up this apartment. You know, repainting it, making it more modern."

"Won't he then raise the rent?" I replied.

"Not if we pay for itself ourselves,he said. So it's O.K. for him if we fix this apartment up and repaint it," Barry said.

"I don't think I really have the money to spend on paying to fix it up," I said.

"That's O.K.. I'll fix up the apartment, repaint the kitchen and my bedroom and pay for it all myself. I just got hired for a second job to work on the weekends. So I'll now have some extra money to pay for fixing up the apartment," said Barry.

I was surprised to hear that Barry, in addition to working again at his old day job as a delivery truck driver during the week, was now willing to give up his weekends off to work at a second job.

"You're actually willing to give up your free time on the weekend in order to work at a second job?" I asked.

"I don't mind. It's a cool job at Queens College on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. All I have to do is make sure that the people who enter the basement cafe to hear the band play in the student union building have Queens College student ID's," Barry answered.

"So you're like a security guard."

"Right, a security guard job."

I, myself, didn't think it was that "cool" a job to get paid for blocking and excluding non-students who didn't have Queens College student ID's from entering the basement cafe of a Queens College student union building that had been constructed with public funds provided by taxpaying parents of non-students, as well as current Queens College students. But the fact that Barry would now not be in the Jamaica basement apartment watching the loud television set programs every Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening, now that he had to be working during those hours as a security guard, meant that I could now enjoy the apartment space alone for more hours on the weekend than previously, during the next few months.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (57)

Even after 1968, I still admired and respected Joan Baez for being such a principled and intellectually strong and morally strong person who, despite her celebrity and pre-1970's commercial success, was willing to both use her celebrity to publicize and promote her anti-war movement politics and Gandhian pacifist philosophical beliefs and put her body on the line to the point of being arrested for the causes she believed in. So, not surprisingly, I expressed my feelings for Baez during the 1970's by writing a few songs that she inspired.

The lyrics to the "Joan Baez's Song" that I wrote, for example, began in the following way:

"Oh, Joanie Baez, I love you
Yes, Joanie Baez, you're so beautiful
When I was just a kid, I hared your voice
You seemed so sincere and so very wise.
But now they tell me
That I can't be free
Oh, Joanie, please help me." 

And the "Woman Inspired" protest folk song included the following lyrics:

"Oh, are you still singing?
And where are you living?
And are you still learning?
And who are you now loving?
Oh, Woman Inspired
Can you still catch fire?
And ignite the Cause of Freedom.

The campus laboratory
It still works for the Navy
The bombs, they still are falling
The children still are dying.
Oh, Woman Inspired
Can you still catch fire?
And ignite the Cause of Freedom."

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (56)

On a musical level, I had pretty much remained a fan and admirer of Joan Baez artistically between 1965 and the end of the 1970's. And insofar as I ever had any musical career goal or ambition or "dream" since 1965, it's always just been to become one of Joan Baez's protest folk song writers.

Yet on a political and philosophical level, I think it was only in the 1965 to early 1967 period that my politics and philosophical views were pretty much completely identical to Joan Baez's political and philosophical views. Once Baez became involved with David Harris in funding and promoting the politics of the Resist! anti-war group and I became involved in campus organization with Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] and Richmond College SDS in the late 1960's, my political and philosophical  views began to diverge from Baez's views; although we both were anti-war, both favored a pacifist U.S. foreign policy, both thought a non-commercial motivation was what determined whether or not a performer of folk songs should be categorized as an authentic folk singer (rather than as just a professional entertainer/rip-off artist who primarily sang folk songs for personal commercial gain), and both favored a radical or revolutionary transformation of militarized, U.S. capitalist society in the 1960's.

Baez's view, however, was that Resist!'s strategy and its emphasis on philosophical non-violence and Gandhi's philosophy made more sense than the kind of non-violent confrontational strategy and political emphasis that Columbia SDS and National SDS was promoting in the late 1960's. Also, when Baez, initially, made what I thought were unfair criticisms of certain aspects of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960's that emerged from the New Left anti-war and civil rights movements of the mid-1960's, I felt our politics and philosophical views were diverging even more.