Why We Drink

Why We Drink

With apologies to Frank Capra (See, “Why We Fight”), and thanks to Amos Milburn for the nice live version of "Bad, Bad Whiskey." 

Alcohol has so many negatives that it can seem strange that people drink it at all. It will ruin your health; it will lower your inhibitions enough that you may pick up an STD; it can even make a teenager foolish enough to steal a car and end up in prison. Hell, it often makes men angry enough to kill their friends or their families. It looks like a bad idea from many angles, but people continue to drink it. Many drink it to excess. It's enough to make you wonder.

Then you remember that alcohol is easily available, and that it does a serviceable job in addressing certain uncomfortable situations that many people find themselves in.

If you are a person who worries excessively, having a few pops will temporarily make you forget them. If your temperament is wound a little too tightly, it will temporarily loosen you up. If you suffer from shyness, it will temporarily make you gregarious. Like most drugs, it works much better in the beginning than it does in the later stages of the habit. Oh, yes, it does become a habit.

For many people it becomes a crutch. For a long time I have described  alcohol as being not so much a substance as a place. It's a place that you can go almost any time that you wish, a place where worries disappear, where the women (or the guys) are more attractive, where jokes are funnier, and where Armageddon is a good movie. It is a place that many people can't wait to get to upon returning home after a long, grinding day of trying to make a living. I was one of those people for a few years in the mid-1990s.

In my teens and twenties, I drank with my friends. Teens? Whenever we could manage it. Twenties? Most evenings. In my thirties, I hardly drank at all. Socially, certainly, but that was only a few times every month. Drinking alone or in a group, I've never enjoyed being drunk, and I was never sloppy drunk. I went to law school in my early forties, and that was three rather sober years. I started working as a lawyer at forty-three. Working for other lawyers wasn't so bad, but when I committed to setting up my own practice, with the overhead, the business taxes, and the marketing, things got a bit tougher than I could easily handle. I never drank alcohol during the day, but at home, by eight or nine o'clock, I was a little bit frayed around the edges. No excuses offered, nor do I believe that any are called for. It happened, so what? After a few years I had a handle on the expenses of running a solo practice and I dried out, returning to drinking at a much more manageable level within a few years.

“Bad, Bad Whisky . . .” made me lose my happy home, says Mr. Milburn. As it happened, my drinking alcohol at any level had become a trigger for my now ex-wife. She convinced herself that both of her parents had been alcoholics, and that alcoholism had been a large part of them being hapless and distant (her father) or just plain mean (her mother). Entering our third decade of marriage, she decided that I was also an alcoholic, and that we three alcoholics were responsible for ruining her life.

Disclaimer: My own father was not afraid to enjoy a drink on occasion, but he was very responsible about it. He could always sip a short scotch or bourbon and then put the bottle away, with the same self-control that enabled him to smoke one cigar every month or so, never more. My mother was a different story. She was a dedicated, all-day drinker. She started in the morning, and put away a case of cheap rye per week.

After thirty-eight years of marriage, my first wife gave me the bounce. The following year she made her judgment permanent, and that was that. She never changed her mind. I waited five years and then moved on, which I think was only sensible. I was sixty-six years old, and I had to start preparing myself for impending frailty and the avoidance of loneliness in my old age. During that “up in the air” time, I steadied my nerves with a couple of drinks in the evening, and my blood pressure started to climb. That was the only six years of my life that I have ever lived alone.

By now I have lived in Thailand for fifteen years and I'm set up okay. I had an angioplasty a couple of years ago, so now I'm on meds for BP and cholesterol. All of the numbers are good, and I feel fine. My alcohol consumption has followed a pattern: abstinence; one little drink in the early evening; two little drinks; three little drinks; abstinence; repeat. The whole cycle takes about a year.

And now, the COVID-19 section of this essay!

We live in stressful times; no one could think otherwise. We are faced with three worldwide catastrophes simultaneously: climate change; COVID-19; and the Republican fascist coup in America. (Trump is just one aspect of that last one.) My hat is off to anyone who is not driven to drink by that lineup of horror.

I was at the “three little drinks” stage of the above described cycle as of about a month ago, when the generals who have been in charge here in Thailand for the last five years decided that Thais could not be trusted with alcohol during this COVID-19 situation, especially during the Songkran festival (Thai lunar New Year, the “water festival”). With the snap of their military fingers, there were no alcohol sales in the entire country. They said two weeks at first, but it was working so well that they renewed the ban for the remainder of April, and by now they are loving the results so much that alcohol sales are canceled for May as well. And do you know what? I'm just as happy that they are.

After a couple of days of settling into it, I am sleeping like a baby every night. After a couple of weeks, my blood pressure has dropped a few points, which I don't mind a bit. If I get a bit cranky, or worried, or afraid, I watch a Godzilla movie. That always distracts me. I was waiting today for the announcement concerning the government's alcohol policy, and I was fine with it when they announced that the ban on sales would be extended to at least the end of May.

Postscript: the Lost

The other day someone posted a photo of one of the famous boy baseball teams in our town in Queens in the late 1950s. A name came up that I hadn't heard in a while, and I commented what a good guy he was and I hoped that he was doing okay. Another friend sent me a message with the update.

Red G. was the boy. I remember him well from a very early age, six or seven years old. He was probably less than a year older than me. We were in the same group of little boys, playing around the neighborhood, playing ball or other games, talking about starting a club, sledding in the winter. He was always a sturdy boy, strong and athletic. A few years later was when we were involved with “choose-up-sides” baseball games at the big park near us, which had a great baseball field with a chain-link back-stop and a clay infield. Red was often one of the team “captains,” in charge of choosing players. To my knowledge, he never used his size and strength to push any of the other kids around. That was a popular pastime for many of the stronger boys.

After grammar school I never saw Red for about twenty-five years. My family and I were back in town in the mid-1980s so that I could finish my BA, and one afternoon I was waiting in the old neighborhood for my number two son, then in Kindergarten. I always referred to the mostly women doing the waiting as, “the other moms.” One day there was a guy there, about my age, a couple of inches taller and much stronger looking. We gave each other the same look. “Red?” I said, “Red G.?” He nodded and said, “Freddy?” We hardly spoke, the bus with the kids came, and that was that.

It turns out that Red was a New York City fire-fighter all of his working life. A fireman and a dedicated drinker, always, evidently, drinking in one of the bars that we remember from our teens. The Five-Corners; the College Lounge; the Blue Light. None of our friends were left at the end, they had all either moved or died. Red would either stand there alone or talk to anyone who was in the mood. He had a wife and children, but there had been some drama with one of the sons. Whatever, if Red wasn't on duty, he was at a bar.

He made it to his late sixties before the stroke got him. He spent a few years at a long-term care facility, and he died last year. I much prefer the happy stories about the boys and girls of my childhood, but many times I don't get one. Just the dying doesn't bother me, but Red's life sounds like it had a deep sadness in it. Alcohol can mask that feeling, but drinking cannot cure it.

Make your own decisions, dear reader. We are stuck with our temperaments, and there is very little that we can do about our personalities, but we do have some power over the direction that our lives will take.

Cardi B Should Have Taken The Deal

The video is called, "Pay the two dollars!" The moral of the vid is that listening to a lawyer who is only trying to up his billing can get you in trouble. Many times it's best just to go with the easy way out and cut your losses. 

Cardi B illustrated this point nicely last week. The underlying facts took place in my home town, which surprised me somewhat. College Point, my sleepy little corner of New York City, the little town on the way to nowhere, has grown in importance sufficiently to have its own strip club. A place called the Angels. (I've never been to the club myself; it has been twenty years since I've been back to town at all.) 

Cardi B had a beef with two heavily tattooed bar-tenders (of the distaff persuasion), and late one evening Cardi and a few of her peeps charged the place and gave the girls grief. The ruckus was sufficient to interest NYPD cops from the nearby 109th Precinct. Cardi B and two peeps were arrested for misdemeanor assault. At her arraignment on the misdemeanor, Cardi B was offered a terrific deal by the Queens DA's office. Plead guilty to a lesser assault charge and walk away, no jail time, no community service, no nothing. It had actually happened, after all. 

This is where Cardi B should have "paid the two dollars." Unfortunately, she, like the poor man in the video, had a lawyer. In fact, she had two lawyers, high powered guys. They convinced her to plead not guilty. 

That led to more investigation by the DA's office. They uncovered some damning evidence very quickly, simply by checking the relevant social media accounts. They discovered that Cardi B and the other two defendants were batting this around on whatever chat sites the young people are using these days, planning the assault, and Cardi B had been offering payment to the actual assault team. That makes it a felony. Back in court to be arraigned on the new, more serious charges, Cardi B remained unimpressed. She plead not guilty again, and the DA's offer was, of course, no longer on the table. 

She'll be lucky to get out of this with probation after a guilty plea to a more serious misdemeanor. I'm sure that her lawyers are still telling her, "we'll fight this case to the last drop of your blood and the last dollar in your wallet." 

Flippy's Road Trip

The subject of Ray “Flippy” B. comes up from time to time. I've been a bit under the weather, and a few days of low-energy lying around gave me plenty of time to be ambushed by some unanswered questions from the land of long, long ago. The Flip File came around, and this old mystery presented itself. There is at least a seventy-percent chance that this event actually happened, but it's been a while, and all of it was second hand. I never had the opportunity to talk to Ray about it.

These are the facts. Over the course of a few years, Ray became unmanageable. Beginning in 1968 and really becoming troublesome in 1970, Ray got himself addicted to barbiturates. He was still doing band work in 1968, but he was drinking too much and it was all getting out of hand. He attended my wedding in 1969, but he was a shadow of his real self. He had always been so lively, vivacious even, but all of a sudden he was unconscious much of the time.

We were no angels, mind you. I'm not being critical. We all took the more socially responsible drugs, like weed, acid, a couple of beers, but mostly we kept the pills to a minimum. By 1970 Ray was on an all barbiturate diet. That's a terrible addiction. The tolerance builds up very quickly, and before you know it you're taking four or five upon waking, just to get straight. It's fifteen or twenty to get loaded, whereas the first one, just one, had knocked you on your ass. It put Ray into another world, another stream of commerce, another group of friends. We didn't see much of him for a couple of years.

Onto the mystery. I remember hearing this story about Ray taking a road trip down south. It was all very vague. The version of events that came back to us was that he took the bus, the Greyhound, alone, with the intention of soaking up some musical influences from southern music. I don't know what the plan was, but he didn't make it very far. Somewhere around Nashville he was in a bar, probably a music bar, that would be a country music bar, with his broad smile and his stringy long hair, and his heavy New York accent. Some locals treated him to some southern hospitality. They gave him a terrible beating. After a few days in the hospital, he made his way back north.

That's the way the story was told to us, second or third hand at first. Later on, one of us got confirmation of the broad outlines from Ray himself. He got straight about that time, or not too long after. It's all very hazy; there are a lot of questions but not many answers. Did he take the trip to force himself to get straight? Was the trip some kind of misguided drug run? (The industrial providers for barbiturates were in the south. All of the downs in New York came from the south, in sealed fifty-five gallon drums.) Did the beating knock some sense into him? Unknown.

He did get straight there for a while. He got a job that he seemed to like, working for, what? A set builder? A stage builder? Something at the intersection of entertainment and carpentry. He started playing again. He had a new girlfriend, a cheerful little thing from the next town. I saw him once or twice, a few of us did, and he spoke with former band-mates about getting a jam going. He was somewhat sheepish about that lost couple of years, but he did seem like his old self.

And then he died, burned to death in a fire. Those are shocking losses, twenty-two years old and suddenly gone.

Between the ages of twelve and twenty, Ray was a social genius, beloved by all. The entire town loved him. His entire high school loved him. All of his friends loved him. Then, somehow, the light went out. Could the year 1968 itself have had something to do with it? That was a terrible year, all around the world, and it affected many of us deeply. Speculation is probably a waste of time. We'll never know what happened.

RIP, Flip. We still miss you.

The Little Park In College Point

The little corner of Queens where I grew up was not overrun with public parks. There were two nice ones on the East River. Both were good sized parks, with paths and benches, and each had a baseball diamond. One, by far the nicer of the two, was well used. There were always people there, and when the school schedule allowed there were swarms of boys around looking to get into games of baseball or something. There was a nice children’s playground, and each day around sunset there would be people of all ages who had come to see the sun set over La Guardia Airport and Manhattan. I spent a lot of time there.

The other big park on the river was way off in a corner where it was hard to get to, and it was right next to a municipal waste-water treatment plant. It had a nice view of the Whitestone Bridge, which is beautiful, but usually it was empty. We used it mostly as a place for underage drinking in private.

There were also a couple of small parks around the middling areas of the town. Were there only two? If there was a third, I’ve forgotten it. One of these was on 115^th Street, between 14^th Avenue and 14^th Road. It had very little to recommend it. There was no grass, and no view. There were benches, and playground equipment like swings and see-saws. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and I must say, it was not what anyone would call picturesque. Mothers could take their babies and small children there for some recreation, but it was usually empty. I am reminded of it now because another townie posted a recent picture of this park on Facebook.

While I was in late grammar school and early high school I spent quite a bit of time in that general area of town. I had many school friends down there, and it was only eight or ten blocks from my home. I always favored the lively boys to hang out with, and often we would be looking for some kind of trouble. That little park was right up the street from a deli that we liked. Howard’s Delicatessen, a family owned place. They’d been living in America, in this town, for over a century, but they still spoke German at home and had thick German accents. We could buy a nice deli sandwich for forty cents or so, and if we asked for it on rye bread the nice fellow behind the deli counter would say, “mit or mit out seeds?”

“Mit out,” we would blandly reply. The poor guy got furious every time.

Usually we did not have the money to buy sandwiches, or anything else for that matter. This led us to employ our trouble-making skills on occasion. One trick that we liked was to wait just around the corner for a soda truck to make a delivery. We would send out a scout who was a famously fast runner to grab a bottle of soda and run in a way that would cause the driver to chase him. Once he was half a block away he’d step on the gas and lose the guy. By the time the driver got back to the truck, we had all helped ourselves to a bottle of warm soda. Our friend would go around the block and meet us at that little park.

It wasn’t always as much fun as it seems. One day we were right down there on the corner in front of the store, there must have been eight or ten of us. We hadn’t done anything untoward, not yet anyway. A police car came down the street and stopped right in front of us. This was not an uncommon occurrence, and we all knew policemen, so we didn’t pay any attention. They probably want sandwiches, and look, it’s Whitey, so they want some beer as well. It got dramatic.

We were all familiar with Whitey. There was only ever one police car in town, and often Whitey was one of the two guys manning the car. He got out of the car, dressed as usual, with his tunic off, no hat, and his tie very loose around his neck. He was carrying his nightstick, which we were all familiar with. It was made of cherrywood, and the front had been drilled out and filled with lead. This was a typical set up for the NYPD at the time. Whitey’s also had a message carved into the handle. “Adios M.F.” 

He approached us and told us to “get the fuck out of here,” which was a very common phrase to hear from the NYPD in those days. My friend Tommy, whose father was also a cop, said something besides the preferred, “yes, officer.” Oh, Tommy, God bless and keep you. Tommy has preceded me into the afterlife. He was a tall boy, with a good nature but full of piss and vinegar. He was not one to take expressions of authority easily. Without saying anything, Whitey poked him exactly in the solar plexus with the tip of the nightstick, and Tommy went down like a wet dishrag.

“Anybody else wanna crack wise?” said Whitey. There was only a mumbled response to that. We helped Tommy to his feet and retreated around the corner. We were probably thirteen at the time.

Maybe we went to the little park. There were benches to sit on, after all, and a water fountain or two.

My last clear memory of that little park is one day when we had nothing to do and were sitting around in the park killing time. Someone suggested a spitting contest for accuracy, and we thought that that was a great idea. We set a coin about ten feet in front of the bench, and the person who’s spit landed closest to the coin was the winner. We had had a lot of practice, so it was pretty close.

Those were interesting times. Most of our parents were comfortable, but none of them were rich. Many of them worked the Civil Service jobs like policeman or firefighter or garbage man, and many of them had more or less unskilled jobs in the many factories. At least half of our parents owned their houses, though, and they all had decent cars. Most of our parents were active in the church, one church or other, the moms anyway, and we had all been through the same Cub Scout packs and Little Leagues for baseball. We led a life that started out much like a Little Rascals episode and in our early teens we looked and acted a lot like the Dead-End Kids. Most of us turned out okay.

I commented on Facebook recently that we grew up in a town where we lived simultaneously in small town America and the heart of New York City, and it’s true. Our town was on the East River, and it was surrounded on three sides by water and one side by swamp. It was so isolated that it retained its small-town character well past the middle of the 20^th Century. We had access to the subway though, so we could get to anyplace in the city before too long, and very inexpensively. That was College Point.

I guess that if you’ve got to grow up somewhere, you could have done worse than College Point. It wasn’t all bad.

The Old Apartment In College Point

College Point is a neighborhood in the Borough of Queens, part of the City of New York. Most New Yorkers don’t even know about it, nor would they have any reason to. It’s tucked over in its own little blind-spot, between La Guardia Airport and the Whitestone Bridge, on a point of land that juts out into the East River. College Point is the home of my youth; there are really no other candidates for the honor. Both of my parents were raised in College Point, more or less. Both of their families moved to town when they were young, somewhere around the ages of seven or eight. It’s not a particularly nice place, but it has always been very interesting.

My parents got married in the St. Fidelis Church in College Point in 1942. My father was already working at what turned out to be his only job after college. He worked for that company until he retired at age sixty-seven. He was 4F due to a major dose of childhood arthritis that left him almost handicapped. They moved around a bit during and after the war for his job, and when I was born they were living in Rosedale, also in the Borough of Queens, adjacent to what was then called Idlewild Airport (now JFK).

We moved back to College Point in the spring or summer of 1949, around my first birthday. The apartment was in a two family house on (redacted) Street, just south of 12^th Avenue. We had the upstairs apartment. The landlords lived downstairs. They were the parents of a childhood girlfriend of my mom’s. The building was on the old side, but not as old as many in the town. The layout of the rooms and the fittings of the house were old fashioned. It was heated by the burning of coal in a boiler in the basement, the heat rising as steam and warming the house through radiators. There were three bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room, plus a small room at the front that had windows on three sides and a large archway to the living room on the other side. Would that be a porch? Maybe a day-room? I don’t know what you’d call it today. It was treated as an extension of the living room. The kitchen had no cabinets at all. The large sink was attached to the wall and fringed with a curtain-like arrangement that reached the floor. All storage was in a doorless walk-in pantry.

We lived there until the summer of my tenth birthday, 1958, when we moved to a single-family house around the corner. I lived in that house until I got married in 1969, at which time my new wife and I moved into the upstairs apartment of a two-family house on (redacted) Street in College Point that was similar in some ways to the old apartment, “day-room” and all.

At that point I became nostalgic for that old apartment. It had only been eleven or twelve years since I had lived there, but childhood memory is a tricky thing. There were things that I could not remember, and things that I could not believe were true. And a lot had changed in that time; there had been a lot of building going on. I don’t know where I got the gall, but I decided to go back to that old house and just ring the bell, just like that, and ask to look around. I have a pleasant smile, and I am very personable and polite, but to be on the safe side I took my wife with me. The theory was that beautiful women open all doors, and this was no exception.

We just showed up on the doorstep one day and rang the bell. A cheerful young housewife opened the door. She was probably in her late twenties at the oldest, but my wife and I were so young that she seemed older. I explained that I had spent much of my childhood in that apartment, and announced my wish to take a look at it with fresh eyes, if that was alright with her. She was amenable and led us up the stairs without a second thought.

My first impression was that the place was much, much smaller than I remembered. It was all very nice, and it was furnished in much the same manner as it had been furnished by my parents, but the rooms all seemed so tiny. There didn’t appear to be any space that was not actually occupied by furniture. The building, it turned out, had a smaller footprint than the one that we currently occupied, and our new apartment had only two bedrooms, not three, all of which necessarily made the old apartment’s rooms smaller. In truth, it looked much nicer than it had in my time. The kitchen had been remodeled, so it all had a modern look to it. There was no longer a tiny, ancient refrigerator, no more sink better suited to a basement than a kitchen. Rather nicer furniture, too, except that my parents did have a nice maple dining room set from Ethan Allen. The view into and past the back yard was full of new houses, but I had watched them being built, so it was no surprise. The old tree was back there, and the driveway had been paved in the meantime. The boiler was now a new model burning oil, so the whole premises smelled better and cleaner, and actually was a lot cleaner, without all of the coal dust.

I was sure not to overstay our welcome, and I thanked the young woman effusively. She seemed to have gotten a kick out of the whole thing, and if I recall she did have the right to be proud of the home that she presented to strangers. It was immaculate, as though she had been expecting company. I have no idea what her name was, and I’m not sure that I ever did.

The things of our childhood all seem smaller than they were, if you think about it. It’s like the snow. There was a time when I seriously wondered why there was not as much snow as there had been long before. Then I realized, not quickly though, that of course it seems like more snow if you are a six-year-old with short little legs. Walking through a similar snowfall at a height of five feet, nine inches, it doesn’t seem like much snow at all. It was the same with the apartment. I ran through those rooms between the ages of one and ten, and they had seemed big to me at the time. Seeing the apartment again made me feel that a lot of time had gone by, and that a great deal had changed, but that was only the beginning.

By now I have the changes of a lifetime to look back on, and it’s been a lifetime of experiences covering many decades and spanning three continents. It’s all amazing, really, recalling the people, the events, the languages, and the vast catalog of things. I think that at some point I believed in the importance of some of it, but now I'm not so sure. Life for most people never really comes into focus, but some things do become clearer. It’s like Anne Frank said, “how sad it is that everything that we have learned, and done, all comes to nothing in the end.”  

Where Are They Now? College Point Edition

People grow up in their little towns and then many of them move to greener pastures. They follow jobs; they seek better weather; they settle in the area of their university; they go to an area that they saw during military service; there are many ways to find yourself far from your point of origin. For better or worse, my point of origin was College Point, in the Borough of Queens, in the city of New York. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, then or now, but it was, at least, an interesting place, and not without its attractions.

I’ll wager that I’m as far from College Point as anyone by this time. In fact, I’m certain of it. I’m twelve time-zones away, almost directly on the other side of the globe. The only way to be further away than I am would be to move to the same longitude as Bangkok at some point about a thousand miles south of the equator. That’s open ocean, and southern Indonesia would be more of a toss-up, so I’m claiming the record.  

We were the Baby Boomer generation of College Point, which means that there were a lot of us running around meeting each other, or playing ball together, or just hearing stories about one another, or trying actively to avoid one another. We were a big group, with diverse interests and personalities. Most of us lost track over the years, as will happen, but many of us have reconnected on social media. As a group, we seem to enjoy reminiscing, but there are a lot of no-shows. I find myself wondering what ever became of some of my old friends.

Would it be polite of me to mention names? I don’t think so. It’s better to respect the privacy of those who may not wish to be included in a social media extravaganza that they might find to be cartoonish, insincere and foolish. Better to wish them well in absentia and leave them in peace.

Mentioning names could just scratch old wounds. Some, for instance, are by now dead, perhaps long dead, dead, perhaps in unusual or disagreeable ways. I wish that I could only remember a certain friend from high school as the tall, handsome, cheerful, if slightly reckless teenager of our time together, instead of imaging his awful death by misadventure. He got into a fight on a Long Island Railroad commuter train and was thrown from the train to his death. He was about fifty years old at the time. Oh, John, what the fuck were you thinking?

Some of our fellows may be in prison, in fact the odds are pretty good that there are a few up the river somewhere. Some are no doubt right now in the process of dying from one thing or another. There is no shortage of things to die from, and we’re not getting any younger. In either of those situations, I think that I would only seek a time of quiet contemplation in which to make my peace with God, outside of the glare of Facebook.

There is one group that would definitely prefer to be left alone. Some of those wonderful young people that we recall so fondly actually hated College Point with a passion, truth be told, and couldn’t wait to get out. They got out at the first opportunity, and they have never wished to look back or be reminded.

Some of the girls did, I can tell you. Their opinion was that College Point was the very epitome of Nowheresville. To them, it was full of empty headed girls and violent boys with no futures. There was nothing worth doing and no one worth talking to. It was the dark side of the cultural moon. They thought that College Point was ugly, remote, and dangerous. Worse, they thought that it was boring.

I knew a couple of these girls, and I am thinking in particular of a girl that lived across the street from me. She was the oldest in a family with three beautiful daughters, and she was as smart as a whip. As fate would have it, we both returned to College Point temporarily in 1984, me to finish my degree at Queens College and her for reasons that were never completely clear to me. We set out every morning at about the same time on the good old Q-25/34. (I’ve always wondered what it meant that the bus line to northern College Point was designated with a fraction.) We sat together on the bus sometimes and talked together. She had done pretty well for herself in Manhattan, and when she spoke of that place her eyes rolled up to heaven and her face began to glow. She had an Austin-Healy that she really loved stashed in Connecticut or someplace. She was back at home because of some setback, and she felt sheepish about it. Thinking of it now, I hope that the glitch in her happiness was brief and forgettable, and I hope that her life after that was full of success and happiness. She had always been nice to me in the years when she was present in the neighborhood as an unobtainable dream. She tolerated me pretty well, and we sometimes walked together when returning to our homes. She’d even stop and talk for a while on the corner between our houses.  I’d ask her out to a movie about once a year, and her answer was always a smile and a gentle laugh with a “no” in it. I still appreciate those small kindnesses.

She, and many others, are absent from our new Facebook family. Maybe they are up on the Twitter or something, Instagram, what else is there? Linkedin? Maybe they are up on hipper platforms wondering what happened to me, but somehow I find that unlikely. Not that I know anything about what’s hip these days. For that information you must ask a young person.

Let me take the opportunity in closing to say a sincere thank you to all of my Internet friends and all of the wonderful people who take the time to read this blog. Your company, your time, and your kindness are deeply appreciated. I should also wish all of our absent friends not only from College Point, but also from the past in general, bon chance, mes amis! Health and happiness all around! I hope that all of your dreams have come true.

And to the dead, may your peace be total and undisturbed, or may you forever enjoy the paradise of your choice, whichever you prefer. You know more about that situation than I do. 

President DJT's Official Portrait

This official portrait is Donald Trump attempting to look tough, and failing miserably. This is what passes for a tough guy look in a bad Hollywood movie (think Steven Seagal.) When real tough guys turn their evil eyes upon you, it's a totally different effect. Yes, I'm sure. 

Really dangerous tough guys either look at you with a face that is so emotionless and relaxed that you'd wonder if they were actually dead, or a face that is full of excitement and joy at the thought of fucking you up. Brother, I hope that you never encounter either one. 

This Trump face in the photo is only the face of an over-sized, rich-kid bully who is trying to intimidate you. Trust me, just smack him and he'll start to sob like a baby. Yes, I'm sure. Just look at the way he folds when he meets with world leaders and they don't just start to cry and give up when he turns this super-tough-guy look on them. Or the way that they fail to be intimidated when The Donald "viciously" reaches out for a handshake and tries to twist their arm into submission. It's an act, and they know it. And not a great act, either. Maybe it works on other punk businessmen, but it is all a futile exercise on people who are actually somewhat tough, like Angela Merkel of Germany or President Xi of China. If DJT tried that handshake on a really tough man, he'd end up on his back with tears in his eyes. 

For the record, I am not now, nor have I ever been, tough. But I did grow up in a town where really tough boys were quite numerous, and the rest of us had to run into them on a regular basis and learn to deal with them. That would be College Point, in the Borough of Queens, in New York City, in the 1950s and 1960s. I've seen the real thing, and I've seen the style that Pres. Trump is now trying to use. The Trump style gets its ass kicked every time, often by guys that are way down the pecking order of toughness. Trump grew up in Queens, too, but being rich I'm sure that he missed the worst of it. I'm pretty sure that pushing his prosperous friends around gave him a false sense of power, which has only gotten worse the richer he has become. If he'd gone to the same schools that I attended, he'd have been knocked down a peg or two, that's for sure. 

Trump is trying desperately hard to be tough, but being tough is a little bit like being cool. Either you have it, or you don't. You can't try to be cool, or tough.  Trying is futile; it never works. Trying to be tough is . . . sad!!!

The College Point Window On This Election

One Coastal Small Town vs. Red State Mania

There have been wild demographic shifts in the United States over the last seven decades. Some, perhaps many, Americans have shown little or no discomfort over those changes and have moved on with the times; other Americans, perhaps many of them, have dug in their angry heels and now wish to unwind as many of those changes as possible. This election drew a bold line between the two groups.

Once upon a time, I was a boy. The time was the early 1950s; the place was New York City, the Borough of Queens, neighborhood of College Point. Most people, even most New Yorkers, would need a bit of clarification as to the College Point part. Let’s say that it is a part of the greater Flushing area, being north of Flushing proper, on and extending into the East River, on the north shore of Long Island, between La Guardia Airport (across the Flushing River) and the Whitestone Bridge.

College Point does make kind of a “point” of land, but neither the East River nor the Flushing River are real rivers. The East River is actually an estuary of considerable size, and the Flushing River is more or less an inlet about a mile long and culminating in a swamp. So from the geography on up, College Point is ridiculous.

The Whitestone Bridge is actually a bridge. It’s very beautiful. You can Google it.

That long-ago world was what I sometimes call “the white New York.” The city in general was something like 84% white. College Point, when I was a boy, was more like 99% white. That was back when the white folk were firmly in charge, the time for which many white people have grown nostalgic more recently. That College Point was almost entirely white was like an unwritten rule, and it was enforced with considerable prejudice by regular people without prompting from political or religious entities.

Did I say 99%? Let’s see. We were told that there were about 30,000 people in College Point back then. The 2010 census gave it as 24,500. Who knows? Maybe it’s been somewhere in that range for this entire time. The demographics, however, are radically different now than they were then.

Back then, to my knowledge, there were two black people who actually lived in College Point. They were a couple in their fifties; they worked the night shift at, I was informed, Flushing Hospital. I remember the building that they lived in, and I saw them coming and going from time to time. Sometimes getting the bus to go to work at about 5:30 p.m.; sometimes returning home in the early morning. If you saw them in the morning, they’d be carrying grocery bags from the Blue Star Market over in Flushing. Why, you’d think that they were consciously avoiding shopping in College Point, or even being seen on the street! Which was, I’m sure, the case, as ashamed as I am to admit it.

My tailor had an assistant who was a very kindhearted black man, and I know that there were other black workers at various businesses and factories. After hours they returned to their residences somewhere else.

That was the white world, which, as we shall see in a moment, has passed from history’s stage, never to return.

As for Hispanics in College Point, I did know that the mothers of a couple of my friends were Puerto Rican woman who had married local men. There were no Puerto Rican families, though. I didn’t think much about it. By the early 1970s the nice park in College Point had been discovered by Puerto Ricans from Flushing and Corona. They’d come over on Sunday and hang out on blankets, kick around a soccer ball. That made for a bit of tension, but none of them had moved in as yet.

No minorities successfully moved into College Point until after I had graduated from high school. There were stories of a few close calls, but people were scared off. Threats were made.

Of Asians, I only knew of two families. There was the Filipino family of my friend Alan A. In those days, and since, Filipinos are much more likely to be greeted as part of the American family than any other Asians. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe people remember that we fought the Japanese together. I guess there’s more to it, though, because we fought the Japanese together with the Chinese, too. Anyway, Alan’s was only one family. The other Asian family was Chinese, and, in an amazing burst of seeming racism, they owned the, wait for it! The Chinese Laundry. They were very nice and they seemed prosperous. I took my father’s shirts there.

Homosexuals are not, of course, a demographic, but let’s address that issue here as well. If there were any homosexuals at all, men or women, we would have had no way of knowing it. Back in the pre-Stonewall era, homosexuals kept their heads so far down it’s amazing that they could see a curb without tripping over it. And there were good reasons for that, too.  It was open season on homosexuals all year, every year, back then. A guy could get hurt.

Politically, everyone in New York City was a Democrat. Before the mid-1970s, Republicans couldn’t get arrested in New York. When John Lindsey got elected mayor in 1965 or so, he ran on both the Republican and the Liberal Party tickets. He was elected on the Liberal ticket. We were blue-collar, yellow-dog Democrats, with many of the working people being in unions.

Longing for a return to this world is like that short story, “The Monkey’s Paw.” The moral of that story, and all other “three wishes” stories, is, “be careful what you wish for.”  Those longings always cause enormous grief; those stories never end well.

New York, the Modern Era.

Everything has changed by now in such a comprehensive way that it really is a challenge to the understanding, even for people who, like me, embrace diversity.

Here are the stat’s for College Point from that 2010 census:

White:       32%

Asian:        28%

Hispanic:    36%

Black:        3%

By now it seems like New York also tolerates Republicans much better than in the past, while still voting largely Democratic. Hillary won New York, including College Point.

I have no statistics regarding the gay population, and my guess is that the actual numbers would remain about the same as a percentage of the population. That seems to be the way homosexuality works; it occurs naturally in the human population, and I’ve never seen or heard any speculation as to whether the percentage swings very widely, or at all. I would venture to guess, however, that the gay population is a bit more comfortable these days with identifying as gay. Certain demographics notwithstanding, most of the American people do seem to have grasped the fact that when one considers “homosexuals,” one is considering one’s own beloved family members, friends and co-workers, sports stars, dedicated police and firemen, doctors and nurses, soldiers and sailors, etc. For most people it was a small matter of discovering just who all of those gay people were. Having found out that they knew and loved multiple gay people, most Americans, to their credit, raised their eyebrows and said, “oh!” And that was more or less that.

But this is New York that we’re looking at in detail here. New York is a nice place, in many ways, but it is not America.

I have many friends from College Point that I am still in contact with. Quite a few still live there; the rest are spread out all over the east coast from Florida to Upstate New York, and all points west. Many of the friends who still live in College Point seem to resent the new diversity, and many of those who moved, moved because of it. Even though the area still went Democratic this time, this resentment bodes ill for the future of our politics.

The coastal people of America, including New York, voted for Hillary this time around, with a push, no doubt, from their diverse elements. Other reasons might include the fact that the white coastals are often better educated, more disposed to believe the evidence in scientific matters, less likely to take stories from iron age texts as facts, more able to resist shouted lies and flattery meant to influence their votes, and better able to think for themselves.

As for the diverse elements of the coastal states, the immigrants, minorities, subscribers to novel sexual theories, and others, I believe that all such groups have it rather harder in American society than we, the plain vanilla, and as a result there is a much greater flowering of common sense among them. They live more firmly in the world of reality, and are forced to look at things with greater attention. So Hillary, in this case, was a no-brainer for them. They know mischief when they see it.

The So-Called Fly-Over States

Middle America is a different story. Many of those states out there in what New Yorkers would call the middle of nowhere were almost all white back in the Fifties, and they’re still almost all white now. Those folks were fairly prosperous back then, and the white people like them were in charge all over the country. By now, those jobs and that prosperity are gone, and the coastal regions and the areas around big cities like Chicago seem to be chuck full of diversity. In fact, we’ve had a black president with an African name! How diverse is that! Maybe, the thinking goes, way too diverse.

Is there a certain tension between the fact that those urban and coastal regions have more diversity and the fact that they have more prosperity as well? Well, there might be at that. That could make people resentful. Maybe all of that diversity stole our prosperity!

Something happened in this election. I’m tempted to say that back in the white America of my childhood, or the World War II Era, let’s say, New Yorkers and Montanans, or Arkansans, etc., were racists or xenophobes in more or less the same measure. They would tolerate homosexuals to a very similar degree, each to the other (even if that was close to zero percent). They were Republicans or Democrats in approximately equal measure. They could talk together and get along, at least if the New Yorkers made an effort to speak slowly. (That’s not a dig, by the way; that shit is true.)

The bad news is that the two groups were all kind of racist and xenophobic back then, and they all hated homosexuals, but the point is that they had not yet learned to hate each other. That is the gift of the Modern World, the Modern America. Mutual contempt and hatred even within the white tribe is a recent development.

The worst news is that these “heartlanders” appear only to have gotten more racist and more xenophobic and more fundamentalist and more intolerant of other American demographics than they were in the past. This has happened over the last thirty years as they have watched their prosperity go up in steam. They have further hardened their hearts against those traditionally hated groups, and they have added many types of Americans to their hate lists. All of this while the coasts loosened up a bit.

They hate immigrants; minorities; homosexuals; the ungodly; Liberals; cosmopolitans; the poor (even though many of them are themselves poor); Muslims; culturally tolerant urban whites; Catholics and mainstream Protestants; the educated; anyone receiving government assistance (even though they themselves are very likely to be receiving government assistance); the Washington (and other) elites; Jews; and Democrats in general. They hate the courts; the Federal Government; science; diversity; and education. That is a breathtaking hate list.

Regarding the world, they do seem to tolerate Australia pretty well, and they appear to view Canada with mere suspicion and bemusement, while rejecting the rest of the countries of the world out of hand as either ungodly, socialist, communist, libertine, Muslim, brutish, or some combination of the above.

Now here’s the bit that I’ve been leaving out of all of my commentary until this point: they are empowered to hate all of these things by reference to their particular brand of the Christian faith.

It’s all about the Bible. Science has no validity at all. Many people in this situation believe that the earth itself has only been here for a very limited amount of time. Evolution is some kind of demonic trap for the faithful. White people were created in God’s image; all people of color are not purely white due to some curse directed at them by God. It’s a circus of anti-intellectual conformity out there out there in the plains states, and down south as well. No one in many of these areas is listening to the adults anymore.

These people, these Christian Reconstructionist, white supremacist yokels, are willfully ignorant, anti-intellectual and woefully uninformed. To simply call them “low-information,” or “low-education,” leaves off their most clearly defining characteristic. They are FUNDAMENTALIST Christians. Their minds are closed to debate. They know it all, as it has been shown to them in their revealed literature, and as it has been explained to them by their ministers, their mega-church pastors, their right-wing political echo chamber, and by a long roster of media celebrities from Alex Jones of the Info Wars to Shawn Hannity and Bill O’Reilly of Fox News.

And Here We Are.

For one thing, real discussion and compromise is impossible under these circumstances. Finding a solution to our current, growing problem is going to be very difficult without the ability to discuss differences of opinion or find compromises that are acceptable to all sides.

For another thing, unwinding history is impossible. Those jobs are gone; they’re never coming back. The discussion, if such a thing were possible, would be about new types of jobs, new industries, and better distribution of wealth. (Yeah, I said it. And within the last year alone I’ve read a few thoughtful pieces by ultra-rich tech guys or venture capital guys admitting that if nothing is done through the system, they’ll be hanging from lamp-posts before long.)

And there’s this, none of those minorities, or immigrants, or members of other sub-cultures that you don’t like, they’re not going anywhere. Most, by far, are American citizens. It might be possible to deport some of the undocumented, but that effort would elicit such screams of anguish from the business community that it would be shut down quickly. It might be possible to pull some Green Cards and get rid of a few students or something. We’re married to the rest. Get used to it.

And two things about religion: 1) Keep it to yourself, people. Keep your religion where it belongs, in your head, and in your church; keep it between you and your God; and 2) When it comes to OUR country, keep YOUR religion out of it. Make sensible reality based decisions about your votes, and don’t try to use YOUR right to vote to take OUR rights away. Or else we’ll start to wonder why you’re allowed to vote at all.

In the future, fundamentalist religiosity will be seen as a disabling mental condition. Do not hasten the day.

So now we are about to swear in Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. Reading it like that always looks like something in a movie script.

You could add: unless something happens. There’ll be no discussion of the possibilities here. I’ll wait until after the facts are in and then let the professionals discuss whatever has happened at that time.

No discussion of possible vote tampering, either. The strong tendency in America is always to avoid any discussion that could lead to a loss of faith in the system. So when it does happen, like in the year 2000, it turns quickly into “move along, people; nothing to see here.” We’ll see if anything develops this year.

It would be simplistic of me to blame the entire thing on the snake-handling Rubes. They couldn’t have done it all by themselves, although they were, no doubt, a big part of the victory. The Rubes got a lot of help. There are a great many yellow-dog Republicans these days; they’ll vote for anyone at all who appears on the Republican ticket. Many people have a big difference of opinion with Ms. Clinton’s policies and her style of politics; many people are opposed to globalization and Neo-Liberalism in all of their manifestations. Many people believed all of the lies that they read every day about Ms. Clinton. Many men, and women, just don’t think that the presidency is a suitable job for a woman. Many people just don’t like the woman.

Beyond the question of the results among the people who actually voted, there is the problem of the half of registered voters who didn’t bother to vote. Hillary’s negatives are so high that I’m afraid many of these stayed away rather than soil their hands voting for either candidate. It’s also important that all of the polls, right up to the morning of the election, had Hillary winning by a comfortable margin. This allowed unenthusiastic Hillary voters to just let her win without their having to go to the trouble of voting.

Let’s be serious. Voter turnout in America is always on the low side. It’s almost like many people just don’t care who wins, or who governs them. They’re all the same; the policies come from somewhere else anyway; why bother? That sounds very cynical, but it might be uncomfortably close to the truth.

That might be true in a normal election year, anyway.

2017: the year that normal was thrown straight out the window.

Now we will, unfortunately, see what will happen. Only one thing is for sure: it will all be described as “fantastic!”  

1941 Marches On - in College Point, NY

Queens, New York City, was my point of origin, and College Point was the place of my boyhood. I lived there until 1972. This parade was filmed a mere seven years before I was born.

College Point is a small, working class community on the north shore of Queens, standing between La Guardia Airport and the Whitestone Bridge. It is surrounded on two sides by water and two sides by swamp. (At least it was until recently. They've filled in most of the swamp.) It was like an island, and that gave residents a distinct personality. Boys from neighboring communities gave us a wide berth, because we had a reputation for being clannish, serious and tough. (Not myself necessarily, but a well earned reputation in general.)

Even so, I watch this with a strange kind of Star Trek alternative universe feeling. Your reporter was becoming aware only ten years after this film was made, but I can tell you that nothing looked like this anymore. This is a much more organized College Point; it looks like more of a community. It looks a lot cleaner, too. What happened, I wonder?

Could it have been World War II and Korea? Fears of communism and the Soviets? The New Deal? The atomic bomb? Do you think that it was TV that tore up the old social contract? Comic books? Black baseball players? Something happened, that's for sure.

Nice of someone's grandfather to make this movie that then see that it was preserved all of this time. These old films are fragile, and this one looks great.

"In Queens"

The actress Amy Ryan has a good career going. I recall her most fondly from the Wire, where she played the hell out of Officer Beatrice "Beadie" Russell. Nice job! She's working consistently, good for her. She's in a new project that looks good. I saw something about it on TV and it drove me to the Internet Movie Data Base to find out more about her. Very interesting.

Her bio says that she was born in "Queens, New York." To someone that was also born in Queens, that's like saying that she was born "on the earth." Queens is a big place, full of people and full of neighborhoods that are so big that they'd be cities anywhere else.

So just where in Queens was Amy Ryan born? What hospital? Flushing Hospital? Queens General? Physicians? Help me out here.

What neighborhood did her parents bring her home to? Long Island City? Malba? Corona? Kew Gardens? Whitestone? Howard Beach? Middle Village? Woodhaven? Queens Village? Bayside? South Ozone Park?

There's a difference, you know. Inquiring minds want to know!

Looking for clues . . . Amy's real name is Amy Beth Dziewiontkowski. I had friends with names like that growing up, so I guess that she could be from College Point. Or maybe Masbeth? Hunter's Point? Somewhere over next to Brooklyn?

It's a mystery, so far. Maybe I'll come across it.

Anyway, I really like Amy Ryan in the Wire, and I'd like to see her new project. Good luck, Amy!

Home girl!!!

Mr. Fred's Dream, Continued: Religion

Those fifteen friends . . . I should mention something about our religious backgrounds. 

Religion

Eleven of us came from families that were more or less Catholic.  No one’s family seems to have taken religion too seriously, though.  I was the only one that had attended Catholic schools.  Catholicism had never really taken root in any of us. 

Of the other four, one came from a nominally Lutheran family, one from a non-religious family that had at one time been Eastern Orthodox, and two came from Jewish families. 

The Lutheran family had been churchgoers when my friend was small, but he had received little or no religious instruction, and his only supernatural interest as a teenager was in the occult. 

The Eastern Orthodox family had long since abandoned any interest in religion at all.  My friend’s parents had been born in the Ukraine, and their experience of Soviet Communism, famine and war had been rather intense.  All of that had left them with the firm opinion that we are on our own in this world, and they sought no assistance from prayer.  My friend had, I believe, never heard a word about religion while growing up. 

One of the Jewish boys came from a mixed family.  Mixed in several ways, actually.  His dad was Jewish, but secular.  His mom was substantially black, from a family that was quite blended, and generically Christian with Catholic overtones from Irish progenitors.  He had hardly heard a word about Judaism while growing up, and his attendance of Catholic grammar school was a matter of geography and convenience.  It was the closest school to his home.  By the time that I met him he was vigorously anti-religious in the French style (he was quite a Francophile).  “Tax the church,” etc.  He had never received Jewish instruction, and he had not been Bar mitzvah’d. 

My other Jewish friend came from a semi-secular family of Reformed Jews.  He had received religious instruction as a boy, from two religions in fact.  The family lived in Puerto Rico for several of his high school years and while there he had attended a Catholic high school.  He did have a Bar mitzvah as a thirteen year old.  By the time that we were all hanging out, he was no longer interested, if he ever had been. 

All of this was somewhat interesting to some of us; less so to others.  My Reformed Jewish friend was interested in Catholic practice, a holdover from his days in Puerto Rico.  He was curious about confession, for instance.  I explained the process to him and taught him the formulas, and he actually did show up for confession once or twice.  We came up with a few sins for him to confess, and he recited the formulas and “confessed” those sins.  He was particularly fascinated by his “penance,” a list of prayers to recite.  He also took me and a couple of others to temple once or twice.  We wore our borrowed yarmulkes and sat respectfully.  It was all very interesting in a social science experiment kind of way.  But not for us, we all agreed. 

For the friends that I am still in contact with, religion has remained a mystery best left to others.  It is possible that some may have passed on their Catholicism to their children. 

I am only informed about one friend that found religion later on.  At some point, my “Lutheran” friend chose to become a Catholic.  He was drawn in equal parts by the ritual aspects of Catholicism and the writings of Catholic mystic Thomas Merton.  I think it all gave him some comfort, and I’d be happy about that.  He had pretty severe hereditary health issues that finally killed him a little on the young side.

For my part, I did not deliver my children to any particular religion, but neither did I bad mouth religion in their presence.  I took them, as boys, to a variety of religious services, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish.  I was leaving the decision to them, religion or not, up to you!  Neither of them has found a need to include religion in their lives.  They are both married to Christian women (one from Indonesia and one from Kenya), and we’ll see what happens with the children.  That one is too early to call. 

I remain non-religious, bordering now on being anti-religious.  I would tolerate it better if religion was merely a harmless diversion for fearful, confused people.  It certainly is that for most adherents, but for many it is a fever that causes much mischief in the world.  Many of the religions themselves have, over the centuries, generated a lot of mischief and terror on their own motion.  I find it all unforgivable and quite unnecessary.