What I Came Back To

A lot had happened in four years. Richard Nixon had been swept up in a second rate burglary at the Watergate apartments and resigned to avoid an impeachment he was likely to lose. Vice President Gerald Ford filled out his term and, except for his pardon of Nixon, governed without much controversy. He signed the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union, reducing Cold War tensions.

The Vietnam War finally ended under his watch, the images of helicopters lifting Americans and our allies off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, now embedded in our minds.  Congress had passed a new Civil Rights bill. Eighteen-year-olds had been given the vote in 1971 and they could now drink at 18 as well.

Victorian sexual mores, blasted by the Sixties, never regained a foothold. Pornography went mainstream in 1973 as Larry Flint launched Hustler, his raunchy version of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. The same year the Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to have an abortion in Roe v Wade. Sex was now okay and the modern woman could avoid what T.S. Eliot called “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.”

Richard made a living on the small royalties from his novels, magazine articles, occasional editing jobs and lectures. No progressive think tanks held out their arms to former radicals.  Richard thought my prospects for work in the publishing world were poor. In January, Dorothy Schiff, the outspoken owner of the liberal New York Post, sold her paper to Rupert Murdock who was busily converting it into a London style rag with a right wing bent. It fit the spirit of the times. America was moving to the right.

The few remaining radical groups were violent sectarians like the Symbionese Liberation Army that had captured and converted newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst at the age of nineteen.  More romantic a Native American Indian movement, AIM, which made yet another last stand for Native Americans at the Indian village of Wounded Knee in 1973, where warriors held out for ten weeks.  Two year later AIM’s final shootout took place at Pine Ridge North Dakota.

The economy was in free fall.  The Seventies were years of economic decline not seen since the Great Depression. The 1973 "oil price shock” and a stock market crash of 1974 ended any progress that labor had made over the last forty years.

Bruce Springsteen, the decade’s troubadour, caught the mood of working people in Born to Run, released in August of 1975.

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin' out over the line
Oh-oh, Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
`Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run 

The song is the dream of a “scared and lonely rider” to get out of the trap he’s in. He’s not the only one. “The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive” and the dream of leaving remains elusive at the end of the song.  They may have been born to run, but the working-class folks in the song aren’t going anywhere, while the more affluent middle class was moving on.

New York City lost a million citizens in the Seventies, as they fled to suburbs to avoid notoriously high rates of crime and homelessness. The city's subway system was plagued with robberies and frequent mechanical breakdowns. Prostitutes and pimps lined 8th Avenue and lingered in much of Times Square. People avoided Central Park, fearing muggings and rapes. Drug dealers occupied boarded-up and abandoned buildings in every borough.

Despite everything, Richard pointed out, in the end the center had held.  But the center had moved right, I said. Richard had no patience for politics, remaining an intellectual outsider, content with his bittersweet portraits of upper middle class New York Jewish life that brought charges of anti-Semitism from the Jewish establishment. I imagined some sort of similar life for myself, an obstreperous but successful writer. 

When I picked up my backpack and slumped into the tiny bedroom Richard had prepared for me, I had a buzz on.

The Powell Memo

Not only had the center held, but despite the rightward thrust of the country, most of the New Deal agenda remained in place.  It was still my country I was coming back to in 1976.

What I did not realize, until much later, was the impact that a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell was having because of a lengthy memo he submitted to the National Chamber of Commerce on August 23rd, 1971. Powell was on the board of Phillip Morris Tobacco Company and was later appointed to the Supreme Court. He argued that “business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.”  He expressed in one concise memo, what a lot of corporate CEO’s were thinking.

Powell was a firm believer in the old capitalist adage, that what’s good for American business is good for America. He wrote that complaining about tax loopholes for corporations and rich individuals was “either political demagoguery or economic illiteracy.”  “This setting of the ‘rich‘ against the ‘poor,’ of business against the people, is the cheapest and most dangerous kind of politics.” Powell believed that all our interests, rich, poor and middle class are the same.  

The “Enterprise” system he spoke of was unregulated capitalism. Any regulation, he explained, leads to socialism. “The only alternatives to free enterprise are varying degrees of bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom -- ranging from that under moderate socialism to the iron heel of the leftist or rightist dictatorship.”

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader epitomized the enemy. Powell quoted an article from Fortune Magazine. " [Nader] thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison -- for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer. He emphasizes that he is not talking just about 'fly-by-night hucksters' but the top management of blue-chip business.”

Actually, most Americans agreed with Nader’s basic points, if not with Nader himself. The year before, Congress had passed and Nixon had signed a series of laws protecting the environment. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and supported tough amendments to the Clean Air Act. The EPA announced the first air pollution standards. Lead paint and pesticides began to be regulated. The business community felt under attack.

Powell wrote that the sources of the attack were “varied and diffused.” They included the obviously left, but Powell was more concerned about criticism coming from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” Quoting a Stewart Alsop article, “a recent poll of students on 12 representative campuses reported that: ‘Almost half the students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries.’”

The Sixties progressive movement had apparently been more successful than anyone thought at the time.

Powell went on to outline how corporations could turn the tide toward business in every major American institution. It would expensive, require coordination and take a long time. “The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival -- survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.”

The memo became widely known after Powell’s appointment to the Supreme Court later that year and it became a businessman’s bible.

Over the next ten-year hundreds of millions of dollars from corporate America poured into conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity and the Cato Institute. Promoted as academic think tanks, they pushed a pro-business agenda, arguing for tax cuts for the rich, dismantling any remaining regulations, and encouraging fossil fuel develop. Oil and coal companies were among their biggest funders.

The think tanks provided speakers for the media, talking points for lobbyists, candidates for professorships, press releases for journalists, transportation for speakers … it was a huge conservative refuge that took care of its own. Progressives had their own think tanks, but nothing like the huge organizations on the right.

The same phenomenal growth took place with lobbyists during the 1970s. The number of Political Action Committees quadrupled in the four years following Watergate, from 248 to 1,100. Corporations with offices in Washington, DC, increased from one hundred to over five hundred, and those offices increased in staff from one or two people to six or seven. By the end of the decade, business achieved virtual domination of the legislative process in Congress.

The fruits of all this labor were not evident to me in 1976, nor to the rest ion the country, which elected a little-known, straight-laced Georgia Governor who taught Sunday School at his local Baptist church in Plains and was an ardent outdoorsman and protector of the environment.  Jimmy Carter was not what the Chamber of Commerce had in mind, but despite some outstanding achievements in human rights and world peace, Carter began to do the Chamber’s bidding.

Selling Fast Eddy

The next morning, Monday, I dressed in my brown suite, took out my earring, and trimmed my beard.  I was prepared to meet New York halfway.  A scruffy but warm work jacket and work boots didn’t help the outfit, but I figured I could take the jacket off inside buildings and maybe nobody would notice the boots on a cold winter’s day. Anyway, wasn’t I an artist?

As it turned out, I was wrong on all accounts, and two weeks after my arrival, on the Spring Equinox, March 21st, 1976, a Sunday, I wrote down these thoughts.

“I am frightened.

“Frightened' isn't the word for it. Sometimes I'm nauseous with terror. I'll be walking along between job interviews, and I'll think about going broke, jingle the few dollars left in my pocket, decide suddenly that nobody cares, and get dizzy. The dizziness begins at the back of my head, throws a brown film over my eyes so that everything gets vague, seizes my throat, starts my heart beating too fast and then lands in the pit of my stomach like a giant undigested lump of gristle. I start to sweat and grab hold of anything nearby.

“This happened to me Friday on the corner of 46th and Broadway. It was crowded and I knew that I shouldn't fall down. The crowd might flow around me for a few minutes, but eventually I would be trampled to death, arrested, or hauled off to a mental hospital. After all, justice must be done. You can't run a city like this with people being allowed to fall out. There is neither time nor space for that kind of behavior. 

My technic for dealing with panic attacks is simple. I try to get someplace where I can sit down without being bothered, and then I blot it all out. Everything. I make my mind a total blank.  I have found that a stiff drink helps, so I prefer dark, cool bars at such moments. 

“The only trouble with bars is that drinks cost money. They eat into my dwindling resources and so accelerate the process of going broke. It was best not to think about going broke while I'm sipping the bourbon and trying to go blank.  

I tried to ignore the bartender nudging the waitress and pointing at my shoulder length hair, tried to ignore the sound of their giggles. In a few minutes the brown veil passes. The gristle in my gut, the gorge rising in my throat, had been pushed down into my lower intestines where they sat like a huge, un-passed turd. 

I pulled myself together and went to the men's room where I splashed cold water on my face, brushed my hair, and practiced the self-confident, open smile that employers like to see on job applicants. The smile looked grotesque to me, but if the guy I was going to see was preoccupied enough with his own problems, then I might be able to get away with it.”

One person who read my draft of Fast Eddy agreed to see me. He was an agent who represented broadcasting writers, producers, and directors. He was my final chance for Fast Eddy.

“I was already late for the appointment.  I pushed the panic away and went back out into the swarming street. Bright sun. Dense traffic. Carbon monoxide. Nightmare noises. Beggars with out-stretched cups, pleading cynically. Greasy young men handing out invitations to exotic message parlors. Policemen with ever-roving eyes of distrust. Don't think about any of this, I warned myself, and took off at a half run for 54th and 9th Avenue. 

“By the time I slipped into the lobby I was dripping with sweat and breathing hard. The elevator was fortunately empty so I mopped my face.  A patina of oily soot streaked the paper towel with lines of gray. I ran a comb through my long hair, stuffed everything back into my pockets and buttoned the suit jacket as the doors slid open. 

“I flashed a smile and told the receptionist, “Mr. Frank is expecting me. I'm a bit late."

“'Mr. Frank is in a meeting,' she told me. 'He'll be with you in a moment.'

“By the time Mr. Frank could see me I was considerably calmed by the quiet, clean, efficient feeling of the office bustle. The sweating had stopped. My heart rate had slowed. I could even manage to think of myself as self-composed.”

“Mr. Frank praised some of the writing but felt the overall novel was, politely put, ridiculous.  He was probably thirty, buttoned up, with short hair and wistful intelligence. Mr. Frank said he was familiar with my radio work on WBAI and claimed to be impressed by it. He was curious, though, what had I been doing for the last four years? I explained that I had taken a leave of absence from television production to write screen plays.

“Mr. Frank was cordial, but his mind was already moving on to his next problem. He said he only wanted to see me to ask a simple question. “What in the hell are you going to do with your life now?”  My blank stare must have confirmed his own decision to play it straight. “Don't call us, we'll call you,” he concluded as he gently eased me toward the door with a handshake and a thanks for dropping by.

“Thank you Mr. Frank.”

An Eight by Ten Room

With my writing fantasy now firmly in the gutter, what was I going to do?  I was now forty-one years old without a prospect in the world.

Mr. Frank was the last appointment of the day and I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. I walked down Broadway feeling drained and defeated. I was afraid of getting nauseous again.  On 42nd street I slipped into a double feature for a dollar and a half. In my movie seat I experienced a feeling of relief. The next three hours were taken care of and then I could call it a day. I had made it through another one. I'd beat the reaper!

In one of the movies there was a scene depicting a presumed old Indian torture. The victim was tied between two wild stallions. The stallions were released and the man between them was pulled apart, his arms and legs torn from their sockets.

The scene appealed to me as a metaphor finally dramatic enough to encompass my situation.  “That's it,” I almost shouted out in the theater. “I'm being torn apart by that old stallion 'Culture' and this new, upstart challenger, 'Counter Culture.’  Two natural enemies. Two bitter foes, struggling in slow motion so that the whole torture was spread over weeks, perhaps months, even years!

“Half of me is still on the mountain where I learned to split wood, plow behind a mule, slaughter and butcher my own meat, deliver babies, make cheese, speak with the gods. To mention only a few things. The other half of me is on the pavements of New York looking for work. The pavements are very hard. The buildings rise above the concrete, tier after tier, brick and marble against glass and steel, up into small corners of a smokey sky, comically inhuman and unnatural.

I had lost track of time during the movie and when I left the theater it was dark on 42nd street. I took the subway up Broadway to Richard’s apartment. We had a drink together and then Richard left for the evening. I could tell that he was getting tired of having me as a house guest. The silence, the emptiness of his apartment was oppressive. I abandoned the glass and began gurgling Jimmy Beam out of the bottle. I washed the sweet smokey stuff down with cold bottles of beer. I looked through Richard’s records, but there was nothing there for me.The cool, abstract Fifties jazz seemed to mock my suffering, seemed to smile disdainfully and say, 'Hey, cool it man! Be groovy.'

“In my drunken imagination I am still on top of my mountain and I could see forever.  But I am not really on top of the mountain. I am in an 8 X 10 room at the bottom of an air shaft.

“I listen to the hollow echoes of other people who live on the air shaft. Someone is trying to learn Bob Dylan's ballad to Hurricane Carter. A man and a woman are screaming. She accuses him of insensitivity in a high pitched, strident voice of near hysteria. He says she is strangling him with her love.  A baby cries. A child is chastised. Toilets flush.”

Along one wall of the 8 X 10 room were the double doors of a closet and the door into the hallway. There was a bed, a small chest of drawers and an end table. The television set was on the dresser. The walls were bare and I thought idly about putting up some pictures, but it seemed to be an act of unwarranted faith, as if I really had a future in that room.

“The shade on the single window looking out on the air shaft is pulled down, but I can lie on the bed and look out through the crack along the bottom.

“I look across the air shaft at the brick wall and the drawn shades of my neighbors. Not all the shades are drawn. In the apartment across from mine I see a young woman cooking something on the stove. I watch her perform the casual, intimate acts of domesticity as if I were her husband glancing up from his evening newspaper. She is that close to me.

“But I am not her husband. I don't even know her. And when she becomes aware that someone is watching her, she glances nervously out the window, I look away and feel the guilty thrill of the peeping Tom.”

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remembered was waking up to an empty television screen of gray snow drops and the hum of unused electrical energy.

I undressed, turned off the set and the light and climbed between the dirty sheets. It occurred to me that I should to do a laundry. 

Driving a Cab

I finally realized I was taking the whole job hunting business too casually. I was still too much of the mountain, too little of New York. I dedicated the next day to getting my act together.

Using an American Express Card that I had carefully kept current during my mountain days, I replaced my boots with a pair of city shoes. I replaced the battered mountain jacket with a Polish imitation Burberry. I shaved off my beard and trimmed my mustache. 

Richard approved the changes but didn’t think they went far enough.

I had been walking the streets of New York for two weeks. Now through cracks in the concrete, between scraps of paper, empty bottles and scattered pop tops, the forsythia and the crocuses were blooming. Pigeons fluttered up from the crumbs of paper bag lunches. Old men and women sat on benches in the sun and stared ahead with looks of resigned incomprehension, as if they were wondering how it had all happened.

I no longer had a smile for them.

Two more weeks passed without success and I was out of cash and credit. My sister Mimi and her husband, Ed, were living in a large apartment on the Upper West Side. Ed was making a living by, among other things, driving a cab. Ed urged me to try cab driving. “It’s like being a fisherman,” he said, “A fisherman for fares. You read the streets like the waters of a stream, spotting the big fares in the slow waters of deep pools.”  Ed had a way of making everything he did an adventure, an odyssey like the journeys of the early explorers he was forever reading. Ed’s romanticizing was another way to live up to my father’s stern warning that “a job worth doing was worth doing well.”

The learning curve in cab driving was steep. After passing the chauffeurs test and studying my maps, I went to work for the 125th Street Cab Company, on Broadway and 127th Street. Low man in the pecking order when I went to work, I got the worst cab in the shop, a rattling monster that belched smoke and threatened to shake apart at any moment. People routinely asked to get out of the cab after driving a block or two. “No offense, but I’ll get another taxi young man.”  Of course, it was still possible to get another taxi in New York in 1976.

In fact, it was a grim time for New York City. New York had been in a financial crisis since 1974 when Mayor Beam had to lay off city workers for the first time since the Great Depression. When the federal government refused to help, the New York Daily News Headline read:  FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”   When Beame layed off firemen and policemen in 1975, the Police Union put up signs at major transportation centers, WELCOME TO THE CITY OF FEAR. 1976 and 1977 were times of soaring crime, an epidemic of arson in Harlem and the Bronx, the spread of porn shops and prostitutes on the west side of Broadway above 42nd street and when the lights went out for twenty-four hours in July, 1977, the city experienced what some people called “an orgy of looting and violence.” 

Ed taught me the city currents in all their intimate details, and how to fish them for maximum income.  Early in my shifts I looked for rides to JFK airport and took the quick route from midtown across the Queensboro Bridge and out Northern Avenue, or if that was clogged across 21st Street to Astoria Boulevard, through the streets of Queens to avoid the clogged thruways. I dropped passengers off as overnight fights were coming in and without waiting in long lines caught a fare back to Manhattan.

You make the most money driving a cab by moving as many people as possible as quickly as possible, but coming back from the airport I’d pitch tourists the scenic route. I went around the tip of Brooklyn past Brighton Beach where from the Shore Parkway the Veranzano Bridge loomed across Gravesend Bay, then through Bensonhurst and Fort Hamilton, picking up the Gowanus Expressway as the New York skyline sparkled across Upper New York Bay. 

I’d cross over to Manhattan at its southernmost tip, through the Brooklyn Battery tunnel, and head up town on any of a variety of routes to the tourist’s hotel.  It was a spectacular view, day or night, and well worth the fifty per cent it added to your fare. It was a taxi cab ride you’d never forget. 

I drove the night shift from 3:00 pm in the afternoon until 3:00 am in the morning, and I got to see the city’s underbelly. People smoked dope, snorted cocaine, fought with each other and made out on the back seat of my cab.

I always wanted two driving requests: “follow that cab,” which I never got, and “drive around the park,” which I got the night I picked up a couple in front of the Plaza Hotel on 59th and 5th.  He was dressed in a tux and she in a low-cut evening gown. I made a U turn in front of the Plaza and headed into the 59th Street entrance to the park. Before going very far I heard the hard slap of a hand hitting flesh. Glancing in the rear view mirror, I saw the guy in the tux pulling his hand back to slap the woman again and adrenalin pulsed through me.

I pulled over to the side of Park Drive, stopped and turned around, sliding back the glass window that separated drivers from passengers. “Not in my cab,” I said. He looked at me in surprise, but she replied, “Mind your own fucking business.”  So I closed the window and drove them around the Park while he put her across his knees,  pulled up her dress and slapped her butt.  I dropped them off back in front of the Plaza.  Her face and arms were red and she covered herself with a head scarf as the doorman held the door and another couple slid in the back of my cab.