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After Barry moved from Queens to Israel/Palestine again, I inherited his prime tenancy possition in the basement apartment in Jamaica. And I decided to not immediately seek a roommate to pay the half of the apartment rent that Barry had been paying, although this meant that my monthly rent for the basement apartment would now be about $150 per month; or about double what I had been paying when I shared the apartment with Barry.

But the monthly wage that I was getting from my Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] travel season job provided enough money per month to pay the monthly rent alone, given how little I tended to spend on food, consumer goods or entertainment in the 1970's; and given the fact that I saved a lot of money by not owning a car (and, in the 1970's, not even having a driver's license).

It was in the Jamaica basement apartment that, after Barry had moved out, I wrote the first version in the 1970's of the "Richard Farina Is Gone" eulogistic folk song and folk songs inspired by Joan Baez's life up to that time, like "Joan Baez's Song," "Woman Inspired" and "Wise Woman" (a folk love song whose lyrics and melody I now no longer remember).

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While working at the Council on International Education Exchange [C.I.E.E.], I also wrote a folk love song for a white woman in her 20's with long dark hair whom I considered beautiful and felt drawn to, named Paula, after meeting her for lunch in Midtown one 1970's weekday in the Spring. She was from suburban New Jersey and had some kind of well-paying job that involved helping to keep track of the additional money that the Midtown Manhattan book publishing firm she worked for made from selling subsidiary rights for things like movie adaptations and tv adaptations of the books they published, etc.

But after meeting me for lunch, Paula apparently felt no reciprocal physical or romantic attraction for me; and by the third time I telephoned her to see if she wanted to get together again for a date, she made it clear that the reason she was unavailable for a date the first and second times I called her after our lunch hour together wasn't really just because she was busy that evening. The deeper reason was that she had decided after talking with me during our lunch hour together that she didn't want to have anything to do with me; and, after I telephoned her a second time, she had begun to consider me as some kind of pest.

So after feeling the hostile vibes of her voice's tone, following my third telephone call to her, I wrote off Paula as being too culturally straight to interest me, despite her physical beauty--although I did still sing the folk love song I had written for her after our first lunch hour together for a few years, because I liked that particular folk song's melody (which is a melody I now know longer remember).

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The two other white women who were hired a few months after me to work for the busiest summer months in the came Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] office with me, at adjacent desks, were both recent, but non-intellectual, college graduates in their 20's from Boston; and both of these women were friendly and excited about spending the summer in New York City.

After working, conversing and laughing together in the C.I.E.E. office for about a month with one of the women from Boston named Connie, who was Irish-American in her family background,, I realized I was attracted to her emotionally, as well as sexually; and I actually wrote a folk love song for her, which I no longer remember. Besides having an easygoing, humorous and warm personality, Connie also had long. light-brown hair and most men in the 1970's likely considered her to be physically beautiful.

After Connie's last day of work at C.I.E.E. in late August, I ended up taking a cab with Connie from the building in which the C.I.E.E. office was located, in UN Plaza near the United Nations buildings, across town to a West Side apartment building across the street from the Museum of Natural History, in which Connie was now going to move into and share with a friend of hers; and I helped carry some of the heavy suitcases that Connie had brought to work on her last day at C.I.E.E. both to the cab from the C.I.E.E. office and from the cab to the West Side apartment building she was moving into.

Then, realizing and feeling sad that I was no longer going to see Connie at work again each day, after Connie thanked me for helping her move her suitcases, I suddenly asked her: "Do you want to keep in touch with each other in the Fall? I liked working with you."

Looking surprised, Connie then seemed to think for a moment, before replying in a kindly tone, with a serious expression on her face:  "Well, thanks for asking. I liked working with you, too. But I've only really thought of you as just a fun guy to work with and not someone I'd ever be seeing outside of work."

I was disappointed for a second with Connie's answer. But I quickly replied with a smile. "That's O.K. I understand." Then, waving to her, as I slowly turned around before walking towards the subway station on Central Park West, I laughed and said:  "Well, I hope you have fun being in New York City in the Fall."

"Hope the same for you, Bob," I heard Connie call from behind me as I continued my walk to the subway station. And soon afterward I stopped singing (and eventually forgot the lyrics and tune of) the folk love song I had written for Connie but never got a chance to sing to her; and I never bumped into beautiful Connie again. 

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In the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] office, the ratio of male to female office employees was about equal in the 1970's. But the white women in their late 20's or early 30's who had obtained some of the middle-class professional jobs the C.I.E.E. needed to fill seemed more interested in their careers than in becoming romantically involved with any of the men who worked at C.I.E.E.--especially, given the classist way they generally viewed men who did not have middle-class professional jobs like they now had.

Yet a few of the white women in their 20's, who were hired a few months after me for the summer clerical work that was needed during the busiest July and August months of the student travel season, were friendlier and seemed more open to becoming romantically involved with their male clerical working-cass office colleagues than were the women who held the "professional" jobs at C.I.E.E..

For a few weeks, one of these female co-workers who sat at the desk right across from me seemed eager to flirt with me at work, when the telephone wasn't ringing. But after she got the hint from hearing the political conversations that Marvin and I were having in the office and the humorous freak left counter-cultural critique I was articulating of how the unhip executives at C.I.E.E. and all U.S. social institutions were involved in exploiting working-class people and needed to be replaced by a 1970's freak/hip youth revolution that created a more leisure-oriented economic system and society (which used technology and computers to free people from having to work 9-to-5, rather than to eventually create a new type of "techie billionaires" or to eventually eliminate millions of clerical and secretarial office jobs that, at least, provided many working-class people with the money they needed to pay rent to their landlords or repay their mortgage loans to their banks), she became less interested in flirting with me.

Perhaps she felt that her family's class interest/privileges would be threatened by the kind of societal changes Marvin and I were discussing, since the reason she had been hired for her C.I.E.E. summer job was because, coincidentally, her father was then one of the top executives at the C.I.E.E. office? Also, she may have felt embarrassed, after she heard Marvin and me joke about how nepotism was prevalent in the U.S. capitalist economic system when it came to which people were hired for the softest and most high-paying jobs (and even for summer jobs), by the fact that she, herself, seemed to provide an example of the nepotism that Marvin and I were joking about.

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Conversing with Marvin about the world situation, U.S. politics and U.S. society, while we both were spending our days chained to the same Council on International Education Exchange [C.I.E.E.] 9-to-5 workplace cage, did make the time at the job pass by faster; despite our particular political differences over what kind of revolutionary left strategy or revolutionary left political groups had the best chance to take political and economic power away from the imperialist U.S. capitalist ruling class, whose policies we both regarded as morally wrong, anti-humanistic and anti-democratic.

And, as a result, despite his Labor Committee/Labor Party membership, Marvin became an ally in attempting to raise the political consciousness of the other co-workers in the C.I.E.E. student travel office room in which we both worked.

When one of the other office workers in his early 20's, Glen, for example, expressed some irritation at the way Carol--who was his immediate supervisor--kept piling her work onto him in her bullying, authoritarian way, both Marvin and I laughed and reminded Glen that "that's how capitalism works." And by the end of the summer travel season in late August, all the C.I.E.E.  office workers in our office cage pretty much agreed that the kind of 9-to-5 clerical jobs which the older generation of bosses were offering the baby boom generation in their 20's once they left high school or college were totally unsatisfying and a waste of our lives.

One of the white office workers in his 20's who began his seasonal job at C.I.E.E. a few months after I did-- and who was hired despite still having a beard and long-hair and looking like a campus youth ghetto counter-cultural freak/hippie--noted that "Everyone I knew from college is bored stiff with whatever plastic 9-to-5 job they end up getting in the office building world. So things are bound to change for the better by the 1980's." 

But, aside from Marvin and me, none of the dissatisfied white office workers in their 20's seemed to have the faintest idea of how they collectively might go about ever attempting to create a new economic society or system; in which they wouldn't have to spend their 20s and 30's in the 1970's and 1980's having to do menial clerical office work for the culturally-straight, often less-educated, unhip elderly folks in their late 40's, 50's and 50's--who usually were the ones assigned to be their immediate supervisors.

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (46)

Discovering  that Marvin, a culturally straight-looking white guy in his mid-to-late 20's, was a "closet communist" who considered himself a revolutionary communist in his politics, was a treat--at first.
But after a few weeks of discussing each other's take on U.S. capitalist society in the 1970's and the 1970's U.S. left, however, I realized that--besides not being that sympathetic to the freak/hip left/yippies' insurgent counter-culture--Marvin's conception of revolutionary leftism had led him to be a 1970's member of Lyndon Larouche/Lynn Marcus's Labor Committee/Labor Party sect.

During the 1970's, LaRouche's Labor Committee/Labor Party sect was then presenting itself as a revolutionary communist political alternative to all the other U.S. Left groups and sects, which it characterized as a non-revolutionary "swamp left"; and it apparently viewed the Communist Party USA [CPUSA] group as its main competitor for potential organization recruits and new members in the 1970's. And for this reason, Labor Committee/Labor Party members somehow then felt justified in staging physically violent attacks on CPUSA members to disrupt CPUSA group meetings, as part of its "Operation Mop-Up campaign to establish Labor Committee/Labor Party/Lyndon LaRouche leadership and control of the 1970's insurgent U.S. Left.

Naturally, I rejected the "Operation Mop-Up" politics of the group that Marvin did political work with at night and on weekends, when not being a 9-to-5 wage-slave at the Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.]--where his wage day job involved helping to especially book the C.I.E.E. charter plane flights between New York City and Paris that were being reserved mainly for French students--under the supervision of a jolly white woman, who seemed to be in her 50's, who spoke French fluently, like a native of France; and who spoke English with a French accent.

Also, having personally observed the negative and disruptive political role that Lynn Marcus/Lyndon LaRouche's Labor Committee members had played around Columbia University's campus in the months following the April and May 1968 Columbia student rebellion--in opposition to Columbia SDS's New Left activists and the Black Panther Party--there was little chance that I would be won over to Marvin's strange brand of leftism. No matter how hard he might try to recruit me, once he discovered that I was the only other office worker at C.I.E.E. who probably understood the leftist wavelength he was on intellectually and philosophically at that time.

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Another reason I was able to get some of the other Council on International Educational Exchange [C.I.E.E.] office workers to start thinking about how boring and empty the 9-to-5 workweek pattern was for those of us who had been economically compelled to accept the menial or flunkie clerical jobs, in order to obtain the rent money that the greedy New York City landlords ripped off each month from their tenants, was that at C.I.E.E. there was also actually another office worker there who was a politically conscious, anti-capitalist, leftist working-class intellectual. His name was Marvin and he worked at the desk next to mine.

While it wasn't that unusual to find co-workers in the 1970's within the clerical workplace offices of the Manhattan skyscrapers who were liberal Democrats in their politics, by the 1970's it was already rare to find co-workers, white or Black, who were revolutionary socialist, revolutionary communist or revolutionary anarchist in their political beliefs, in the workplaces inside Manhattan's skyscrapers.

And by the 1980's, it often seemed like all the New Left white radicals of the 1960's and early 1970's who were from white upper-middle-class or white upper-class backgrounds had made a collective decision to only seek middle-class professional jobs, academic university jobs, managerial jobs or high-wage unionized labor-aristocrat blue collar or union bureaucracy jobs; rather than collectively getting jobs within the Manhattan skyscraper office work world. Or rather than at least attempting, like I was, to politicize, radicalize and encourage the unionization of all of the unorganized, non-unionized, low-wage clerical office workers whose labor was being exploited each day within these Manhattan skyscrapers.