Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (33)

From his day job during the 1960's, my Iranian immigrant landlord in the 1970's had apparently been able to save and earn enough money to buy his house in Jamaica, Queens and obtain a mortgage loan from a New York City bank. And he had apparently then turned some of his house's extra rooms and its basement into separate/divided-up residential units; which he then rented to tenants, while he lived in a separated section of his house and continued to earn money from his day job.

Aside from Barry and me, most of the Iranian immigrant landlord's then tenants seemed to be single, apolitical Iranian men in their 20's who had come to the U.S.A. to be foreign students in local New York City colleges. Barry's previous roommate, for example, was an apolitical, secular, good-natured Iranian guy in his late 20's, who dressed tweedishly, and who had first come to the U.S.A. on some kind of foreign student visa. He had been renting the basement apartment with another Iranian student who moved out, prior to agreeing to let Barry move in and rent/share the basement apartment as his new roommate.

The reason Barry had needed to find a new roommate before I moved in with him was because this previous roommate was now moving out in order to live with his U.S.-born and raised American womanfriend--a middle-class, culturally straight white woman in her 20's, who was probably also considered physically attractive by most culturally straight U.S.-born men--in her much more modern Village area apartment in Downtown Manhattan. 

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (32)

The owner/landlord of the house in Jamaica near Hillside Avenue, in which the basement apartment I wished to share and rent with Barry was in, was an Iranian immigrant man who appeared to be in his late 40's; and who spoke English fluently, with only a slight foreign accent. He apparently had been living in the United States since either the late 1950's or 1960's, dressed in a Westernized way like most culturally straight native-born men his age in the United States dressed in the 1970's, and did not seem to be any more into religion than most people his age who had grown up in the United States.

Having first learned in 1966 that the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] had illegally overthrown the democratically elected government of Mossadegh in 1953, after his anti-imperialist nationalist administration nationalized the foreign transnational oil corporations that had been exploiting Iran's oil resources since the days of overt British imperialist rule (and having also later read a Monthly Review book about Iran's post-1953 history under the repressive regime of the Shah of Iran), in the 1970's I realized why some Iranians--especially politically dissident and anti-dictatorial secular Iranian nationalists, liberals, leftist, professionals, workers and students--might find it more desirable to live in the USA rather than in Iran under the Shah.

Also, in the 1970's I still remembered a long conversation I had had one evening in 1967--on Broadway near Columbia University's campus--with an Iranian man in his late 20's or early 30's who was a graduate student at Columbia in which, in a very cautious way, he confirmed my observation that Iran under the Shah's rule was a police state, in which large numbers of the Shah's political opponents and journalistic critics were being held as political prisoners; and that the U.S. government's policy of supporting the Shah's dictatorial regime was an immoral, undemocratic policy.

So I assumed that the owner/landlord of the Jamaica house whose basement apartment I was seeking to share and rent with Barry was opposed to the Shah's rule. But the immigrant Iranian owner/landlord seemed cautious about ever discussing Iranian politics whenever I happened to hand him cash for his rent, in the months after Barry first introduced me to him; when he then quickly agreed to let Barry choose me as Barry's new roommate and for me to be his new additional basement apartment tenant.  

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (31)

It was while working at Bulova in Woodside that I began living in a basement apartment in a house near one of the IND subway stops on Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens.

On one of the hallway bulletin boards in the Queens College building where the college's academic library was located, an index card had been posted by the tenant of this basement apartment, who was a white guy in his 20's named Barry, indicating that he was looking for a roommate with whom to share the rent and living space of the Jamaica apartment.

After noticing the index card, which also indicated how relatively low was the  monthly rent required to share the apartment would be, I telephoned the phone number on the index card and arranged to meet Barry in his basement apartment after work on the following evening. And the following evening, after seeing that I was also a white guy in his 20's like him, was employed, could immediately pay in cash both a month's security deposit of my half of the rent and half of the current month's overdue rent, and didn't seem to be a gay man (during a 1970's decade when homophobia was much more widespread that it would later be by the second decade of the 21st-century), Barry decided that I would be an appropriate roommate for him. Especially since the index card he had posted in the hallway bulletin board at Queens College had not produced any other callers about the apartment; and he did not want to have to spend any of his money purchasing some kind of newspaper ad in the classified want ad section of the Village Voice, in order to find a new roommate.

It wasn't until the 1990's--when internet sites like Craig's List started providing a cheaper way for people in their 20's who needed a roommate to find prospective roommates in their 20's--that there developed a simpler and cheaper of finding a roommate in his or her 20's than by just posting an index card on some local campus bulletin board for free.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (30)

The neighborhood streets in Woodside around the Bulova building at 61st Street in Queens were also much more deserted on weekdays in the 1970's than were the neighborhood streets around the skyscrapers and offices in Midtown Manhattan. Plus the local library was either closed on too many of my lunch hours or too distant from the Bulova building for me to walk to and from during my lunch hour. And I can't recall either reading books in the local neighborhood library or taking out books from the local neighborhood library very much during my lunch hours at Bulova.

So walking each weekday around the Woodside neighborhood near the Bulova building in the 1970's during my lunch hour seemed like much more of a drag than was walking around Midtown Manhattan during my lunch hours in the 1970's. And it wasn't until the 1980's that I finally realized that--instead of either browsing in a local neighborhood library during my lunch hours, or walking around streets or into nearby neighborhood parks, or sitting on a bench in nice weather reading a book, after finishing my bag lunch or purchasing a hot dog or falafel from a street vendor--a possible alternative way I could spend each lunch hour was to write a 1960's memoir or articles for underground or alternative newspapers.

So when the assistant office manager, who was in her late 50's, reprimanded me one day for mailing out some form that I apparently had mistakenly assumed should be mailed out by, in an irritating way, saying "Never assume anything!"--and when the number of more complex jeweler replacement parts and repair order forms that could not be fulfilled easily started to pile up on my desk downstairs (after the white-haired culturally straight executive in his 60's, who seemed to be just warming a seat for a few more years until he would be able to retire, kept dumping all of this more complex work into my mailbox without being willing to explain, or able to explain coherently, how the complex requests should be answered)-- I decided to leave Bulova.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (29)

Eventually, I left my Parts Department shipping clerk-typist job at Bulova when I found a more interesting travel season long-term temporary clerk-typist job in Manhattan with the Council on International Educational Exchange [CIEE]. Aside from Walter and, in part, Claudia, none of the other workers I met at Bulova seemed to be on the same cultural and philosophical wavelength enough with me for me to feel I would ever have much to talk about with them--once the initial novelty of them listening to my "outsider" philosophical post-scarcity hippy/freak rap/counter-cultural critique of their work situation started to wear off.

The guys in their 20's who worked in the larger upstairs mail room/shipping department room, who had all never attended college, did start to grumble a bit when the office managers below and above them initially installed surveillance cameras in the larger mail room/shipping department room, to insure that they all spent each minute there working--on the pretext that "stealing" of some Bulova clocks and Bulova watches by employees had been discovered during an inventory and surveillance cameras were required to prevent such "theft". But since they lacked a union to protect them from any managerial disciplinary action, it still seemed unlikely that their grumbling meant that they would be able or willing to risk losing their jobs by protesting more openly and collectively or by engaging in some kind of job action/labor protest action.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (28)

I can now only recall two of my co-office workers in the upstairs office where I had my desk at Bulova. One was a white woman clerk in her 30's whom most men would have likely considered physically attractive, who was married (and whose children were probably then in elementary school) to a culturally straight white guy, who had some kind of blue-collar working-class job, yet wasn't anti-capitalist or leftist, philosophically. The other was a white woman in her early 20's named Claudia, who was also married, but who didn't have children yet and who seemed somewhat in touch with an apolitical version of late 1960's and 1970's rock music and youth culture.

Most men likely found the dark-haired Claudia physically attractive. She was also friendly and seemed like someone who had smoked or was continuing to smoke pot with her husband on weekends. She reminded me somewhat of some of the young, apolitical and non-intellectual white working-class women I had been physically attracted to in the late 1960's, when I was a student activist at CUNY's experimental upper-division college, Richmond College, on Staten Island.

So after bumping into Claudia outside of the Bulova office building a few times when we happened to have boarded the same IRT subway car on either a morning commute to or evening commute from work, I actually did write a folk song that expressed how I was starting to feel attracted to Claudia. But after her husband picked her up after work one day in his car--and I realized that he was her husband and not just a current boyfriend--I pretty much quickly stopped singing my "Claudia's Song" when I practiced my guitar at home. 

I never mentioned to her that I had written a folk song for her. And, within a few years, I had both lost the song lyric sheets and had totally forgotten the melody and words of  "Claudia's Song" forever. I guess I hadn't spent long enough practicing the song for it to become engraved in my memory for life. 

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (27)

On the days when I was caught up with my shipping out of the required replacement parts to jewelers and jewelry stores  in the downstairs Bulova building basement and remained at my desk in the upstairs office, catching up on my paperwork, I was sometimes able--when the assistant supervisor who guarded us office workers was either out to lunch or at a meeting on a different floor--to break down the robot-like workplace discipline of the other white office workers. I would walk from my desk to the other side of the office floor, where their desks were located and start conversing with them about their lives and about how much of a drag 9-to-5 work and wage-slavery was. Office workers in this Bulova office--like in many other office workplaces in the 1970's--were not yet all separated from each other by cubicles/boxes as they all would later generally be by the middle of the 1980's

The 1970's were still close enough to the affluent 1950's and 1960's post-war "golden age" of U.S. capitalism and U.S. imperialism, during which many U.S. white working-class people felt they had escaped forever from the possibility that their newly-gained post-war relative economic affluence would ever be endangered again by future capitalist recessions and depressions. So the white Bulova office workers had still mostly not yet developed the post-1980's "economic depression mentality," which caused most white U.S. workers to become more fearful about losing their paychecks under capitalism than they were about losing their leisure and free time to 9-to-5 wage slavery (as their parents had).

Thus, my fellow white office workers responded to my "rap" somewhat positively, and also began to stop working like robots and started to talk to each other, whenever the assistant supervisor who guarded them was out to lunch or away from her desk in order to attend a meeting on a different floor.

Another reason I probably found it easier to break down the robot-like office work discipline somewhat at Bulova when I worked there was because the 1970's were still close enough to my days as a 1960's New Left activist/hippie freak organizer. So the long-term psychological impact on my personality of having to be a 9-to-5 wage slave for decades in order to obtain my apartment rent money each year had not yet become evident.

And thus, I probably still possessed more residual 1960's charm, friendliness, spontaneity and encounter group-type emotional openness (and less caution about exposing my inner feelings and dissident philosophical/political views to other employees) in the way I approached other white workers in the 1970's than I possessed during the last two decades of the 20th-century and in the 21st-century, as I aged as a U.S.white wage-slave.