-Caveat Lector-
It was in the summer of 1973. With the death of my father, i decided to
leave California and head back to the East Coast. Perhaps some of you
know that feeling. You've lived in a place for years, and you reason that
if you don't break out of the old familiar patterns, you will be driven
somewhat nuts from the tedium of the ordinary.
Of course, I was single and stupid enough not to know that there are
certain hard economic facts that are inescapable in America, no matter
where you go. Changing your place of residence can actually throw you
into a more difficult situation than the one you're in. But if you're a
restless spirit, perhaps you can't help yourself. The American novelist
Theodore Drieser believed that our lives are controlled by subtle
inexorable forces beyond our control. Each of us is caught up in a
complex web of tendencies and predilections, energies which we might not
fully understand. Whether that is true or not, I don't know, but in the
summer of 1973, I wanted to get as far away as possible from familiar
scenes; and New York seemed like as good a destination as any to me.
So, I was off. I traveled for five days and nights on a Trailways
Bus--making a reverse Kerouac-ian "on the road" journey to dread Gotham,
the megalopolis of every American's imagination. I'll never forget the
sight of the city's skyline as the bus rolled across the Hudson into the
Port Authority Terminal. I was immediately plunged into a form of culture
shock: the noise and the smell of the city... I had five hundred dollars
on me, so I headed for the YMCA in the Chelsea district. I was
twenty-five years old, alone, in a city that I had only read about. And a
form of disssociation set in. It took me at least four days to get
used to the crowds, the constant twenty-four hour noise of the city
streets, and to learn how to get around on the subway system.
But first, there was the need to find a job. As the days passed
by, and my dollars began to disappear, I ended up paying one hundred
dollars to an employment agency for a job in the garment district. I
lived for three years in the city, staying in a rundown
hotel on Forty-Third Street, while I worked at a ribbon exporter's shop on
Thirty-Eighth Street. The experience was a transformative one. Why?
Because there is something about New York that strips away all of one's
illusions and self-sustaining myths. In the city, the smiling aspects of
capitalism are removed; and one comes into full and complete awareness of
the reigning power of money.
Unlike life in the South and in the West where a number of
comfortable support systems are maintained (social and religious) in order
to ameliorate the harsher aspects of capitalism, in the city, the power
of the dollar reigns supreme. One survives or perishes under the sway of
the dollar.
Along Eighth Avenue, there were pimps who waited every day for the buses
to unload their passengers, many of whom were fresh-faced young girls from
the Midwest looking for the excitement of the city. One could
find people sprawled on the sidewalk, either intoxicated or trying to
sleep, while the crowds passed around them obeying the cardinal rule of
street survival: don't get involved.
But as I got to know New Yorkers, I came to love them. What first
appeared to me to be indifferent streets were really tiny little
neighborhoods. And at work, although the workers were from a variety of
different countries and places, we were all really just brothers and
sisters, after all; fragile, imperfect human beings trying to keep our
lives together in an indifferent world that could devour one at anytime.
There was a kindly old Jewish man who had worked for the firm for
thirty-five years, every day taking the subway into Manhattan from
Brooklyn to work in the city. And there was George, the foreman, a black
man from the Bronx who had also worked for the firm for years. I worked
with people of every nationality and race, and I learned from them.
But the city taught me some cruel lessons about our system that I'll never
forget. The Times Square Motor Hotel had its share of "jumpers," people
whose luck had run out. I'll always remember the young girl who I had
admired in the lobby of the hotel. After checking into the hotel, on the
following day, she threw herself out of a ninth floor window, only to land
on an elderly man, killing both herself and him in a horrible scene that I
had the misfortune to witness. And while living in the city, I would be
robbed at gunpoint in one of the hotel's corridors. I always had the
sense that violence might erupt at anytime around any corner.
Living in the city taught me not only how tenuous our hold on life
truly is, but living in the grip of Malthus's "iron law of wages," in the
underbelly of the beast, I would emerge shorn of any illusions
about the true nature of our economic system.
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be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
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Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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