Monday the 16th

So I was sixteen and graduated high school a year early (I could hardly believe they let me do that - all I needed was to take two English classes that last year), and as I'd done miserably on the SAT and was rejected by all the colleges I applied to, I found that program in Bogota at the last minute and in early June, 1974 I found myself on an airplane heading to South America. In the program I lived with the family of one of the school admins. Her husband was a banker and they had three kids; a daughter my age who was still in high school, another girl a couple years younger, and a ten-year old son who became my favorite person on the continent. He was the main person who taught me Spanish as we spent a lot of time kicking a soccer ball back and forth in the street in front of their house.

I was a pretty lonely brat down there. The other American students were three years older, already pros at drinking and driving, and only a couple of them would have anything to do with me. At the same time, I was morbidly shy (nowadays they call it "social anxiety") and didn't really know how to make friends or even eye contact. The program was small and half the teachers were from the same family - two sisters and a brother (mirroring my host family) who were all amazingly brilliant - The oldest taught history, culture and language, the youngest taught literature and the middle (the man) taught politics and current events. They were ardent feminists, socialists and activists as well as fantastic teachers, all of them by far the best professors I would ever have. I loved all their classes and could never over-state the influence they all had on me.

Outside of class I spent a great deal of time alone in my room reading. I turned 17 in the fall and also started smoking cigarettes, the first in a series of bad choices in self-medication. I smoked Imperiales, which were seven cents a pack, out the window of my bedroom while I devoured authors by the dozen. That year I read through the complete works of several American writers - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Saroyan, Dos Passos, Brautigan and others - as well as launching on Latin America ones - reading Garcia Marquez in the city where he'd lived for my literature class and embarking on several others as well. I subsisted on saltines and these great little loaves of fresh french bread, a penny apiece from a bakery down the street.

Life with the family was hard for me. Dinners were pretty bad, usually some bad meat with beets and rice, while the father bullied his children and wife, not to mention the servant, Ludmilla, a dirt-poor peasant girl who literally slept in the broom closet. She worked sixteen hours a day and did everything for that family - her corn tortillas were incredible, made from scratch every morning - and was grateful to be treated like a dog. The father was an anti-role model for me, a little man who worked six days a week, then invited the same friend over every Saturday night, when they would stay up all night long, drinking bottle after bottle of aguardiente, getting louder and louder in their idiotic conversation while blasting terrible bolero music from the antique stereo system. It was always the second sleepless night in a row for me, because every Friday night some neighbor down the block would have an all-night party of their own, blasting cumbia so loudly that the bass-line (the most boring, repetitive grrr ...) shook every house on the block until six in the morning. (It's one of life's little ironies that now, more than 40 years later, the music I love the most is modern electronic "digital" cumbia coming out of Argentina and elsewhere on the continents, centered around the label ZZK Records.)

The mother of the family was a sweetheart, a really good person, generous and kind, and the young son was also a darling. The daughters, though, were not my friends. Their lives were not terrific. They had school all day, then worked every evening at home embroidering shirts. The older one was quite ugly and the younger one, though not pretty, certainly acted like a princess. There was no running hot water in their house - a middle-class life in Bogota in the seventies was very much like a dirt poor family's in Appalachia. To take a shower, one had to heat up a huge put of water on the stove, then stand in the shower and ladle it over your head. I hardly ever bathed while I lived with them and I'm sure I smelled awful. I was a lousy house guest in other ways as well. I didn't talk much, except with the boy (who was treated by the family like a little god, in that very macho culture), and locked myself away in my bedroom a lot of the time.

Early in 1975 I moved out of the house into an apartment in the center of the city, rooming with my friend D_, a "nice Jewish girl" from New York. We had both had enough of the family living by then, and were thrilled to have hot running water and our own kitchen to do our own cooking, and no servants. Neither of us ever adapted to the concept of common household slavery. We lived together, fairly happily, for the next six months or so. During this period I also did some interesting traveling. With my other school friend, R_, I went on an eastern voyage, through Bucaramanga, Barrancabermejo (I loved those names) and Cucuta, into Venezuela. We also went to Merida and Medellin, and made the long jungle railroad voyage up to the Caribbean coast, to Cartagena and Santa Marta, the original homeland of cumbia music. He was a great companion and avid reader. I remember him reading Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' on one of those trips, putting it down every page or two to tell me it was the best thing anyone had ever written.

On one of the school outings, R_ and I wandered away from the bunch and hiked up a mountain, but got lost and couldn't find the trail back down again, so we followed a stream down, figuring that gravity would show us the way. It did, as we waded through the water and hopped down waterfall after waterfall. We also swallowed some, which made us incredibly sick from parasites. By the time we made it back to the group, we were both in the grip of terrible fevers and stomach seizures. I was burning up and delirious and didn't think I would even survive the long bus ride home from the campo. Somehow I ended up back in the bed in the family's house and I have only vague memories of the curandero they had come over, a gypsy-like woman who burned incense and rubbed my belly with oils while she chanted and shouted weird noises. There were no doctors called or antibiotics prescribed, but when I woke up in the morning, I felt terrific. I'm not much of a believer in anything, but some people do seem to know their shit, and this woman had to be one of those!

A notable event. I came home for the Christmas holidays and went to work helping my bookstore boss, Carolyn, do inventory at her new job at a small local college bookstore. We were up all night, counting everything in the store and listening to the radio. This was the night I first heard Bob Marley's "Stir It Up", introducing me to reggae music that I spent the next decades fairly devoted to. I had a similar experience once with my best friend from junior and high school, D_, one day when we went to downtown Philadelphia by train on on of our many such excursions, and we stopped in a record store (he was a music fanatic and becoming a great guitar player at that time). The store was playing the album 'Caravanserai' by Santana - the other major music influence that stopped me in my tracks. I've been all about the afro-cuban percussion ever since.

I digress, which is intentional. I can only do this memoir stuff through stream of consciousness, just sitting here and typing and wherever it goes. I meant to talk about something else just now, but I have to mention two things about high school - working and running. I believe I mentioned that home life was pretty stressful in those days. My older brothers had gone off to college, and my parents were going through a rough patch in their marriage. It seems my father was serially having affairs with students and my mother was working for a hateful boss who treated her poorly. Family dinners were tense and awful. I took up long distance running, joining the cross country and track teams, mainly to stay away from the home. For a couple of years there I was running up to eight miles in the morning before school, and twelve miles after school, before heading to my job (which kept me away until late) at the college bookstore. Carolyn, my boss, was the adult who treated me the best in those days. I worked as a stock boy, shipping and receiving, pricing and shelving, and dreamed of becoming a UPS driver, because they seemed to be the most beloved yet independent people in the world. Who doesn't love their UPS guy? Carolyn was an unhappily married thirty-something who could not have children because of health issues. I adored her. She was a little Italian-American brunette who "cussed like a sailor" and had a million opinions. I thought of her as being my favorite aunt.

I also wanted to become a baseball statistician. In those days, that was not a thing. I belong to the same generation that went on to produce Bill James and Moneyball and all of that. I once wrote to the major league office asking how one could become an official baseball statistician and they told me to go to college and major in math. I didn't end up doing that right away, although in the end, computer science was not that far off! But I spent hours as a youth playing a statistical baseball game called All-Star Baseball (all my brothers were into it as well), which consisted of paper disks formatted to reproduce each player's stats. The circles were divided into little sections representing singles, doubles, triples, homeruns, strikeouts, walks etc based on the actual percentages from the players' careers. You'd make teams and lineups, and for each hitter you'd put his disk on a spinner and spin until the arrow stopped (like wheel of fortune) pointing at a section on the disk which determined the outcome of that turn. We kept detailed records of teams and games and manually calculated the stats to see if they truly corresponded to the disk representations.

I also invented a card game once, on a solo train trip I took to stay with my grandparents in New York City. In those days you could put a 9 year old on a train by himself, as a matter of course. The card game was called 'Election', and it consisted of 4 candidates (A, B, C, and D) to whom I would deal out 4 cards at a time. I would add up the cards and write down the totals in the candidates' columns. Periodically, every tenth round or so, I would add up the sub-total to see who was winning. The game would go on for forty or fifty rounds, and whoever won, won. I must have generated hundreds of games over the next years. It was pretty good training for my future as a cashier.

Nerd boy indeed. I didn't end up majoring in math, as I said, but Latin American history, in one of those twisty kinds of things that life ends up making of us. I had a history teacher in high school (Mr. Holt) who inspired me to want to do that, plus my Colombian teachers (Helena, Gabriel and Amalia) triply inspired me even more. But the way I ended up combining these things came straight out of biology. My first love, who introduced me to sex and broke my heart at the age of 14, was a Mexican-American girl. I had grown up with this girl, and had always thought of her as the most beautiful, the smartest, the fastest, just the best at everything. She was the root of my interest in all things Spanish to begin with, and over time that led me to South America, to Latin music, to the greatest literature (IMHO) of the twentieth century, and so on. A twisty kind of thing. In high school I had done a pretty extensive project on the history of Peru. I wanted to learn Spanish. I also wanted to run away from home and happened across the Bogota program while looking for anything that would let me do a freshmen year abroad. It was the only one.

But it was only a three semester program, including one exclusively devoted to intensive language learning. I knew no Spanish when I went there, but I had spoken Italian fluently, and within a couple of months I was getting around in Spanish pretty easily. I had to continue my education, though, and that presented a dilemma. Where was there a decent Latin American studies program in the US? I found three: Rutgers University, the University of Texas in Austin, and George Washington University in D.C.. I was accepted by all three. In retrospect, I should have gone to Austin. It was by far the best program, but I was a snob about Texas, so I went to GWU instead. It was a mistake. The program was essentially intended for people who wanted to work for the State Department or the C.I.A.. I ended up dropping out of college after my one year there. But it was a fateful year.

I lived in the transfer-student dorm, sharing a tiny two room place with five other guys. One of my roommates was a little dead-head from New Jersey whose goal in life was to get high all the time and open a bagel shop somewhere. He's probably a millionaire by now. He introduced me to drugs - my gateway to marijuana was actually through LSD and mescaline, thanks to him. My other roommate was a clean-cut midwesterner who favored red speedos, musical comedy, and probably at that time had no idea he was gay. My closest friend that year was a sensitive, bright guy who was very much into poetry and very much into finding out that he was (at the time) experiencing homosexual tendencies. He came on to me by reading me Alan Ginsberg and letting me know he was infatuated with me. He also had a girlfriend, back in New Jersey, to whom he wrote long, loving letters, apparently all about me. When she came down one weekend to visit him, the three of us went out drinking (Irish Coffees were my thing at the time), and she and I played footsie under the table while he didn't seem to notice. I ended up marrying that girl a couple of years later.

Gina was like a steroid to me, full of life and energy, exciting, interesting, very very smart and active. She was still in high school when we met and went off to college to become a union organizer. Later in life she became a very successful labor lawyer. She was radical, feminist as hell, and to me the sexiest woman I'd ever known. I loved her outrageous boldness. She was absolutely fearless. In one letter she wrote me that she'd been "raised to be a cunt". She came from a poor Catholic family, the youngest of six girls who shared a bedroom while the boy in the family (the oldest and only boy) got his own room. Her father had been an x-ray technician since the invention of x-rays, and was passionate about playing the organ at his local church. Her mother was a devoted wife and mother and perhaps the worst cook I ever met, but a loving woman who did her best. When I visited, Gina and I would (scandalously) sleep together in a single bed and overhear her mother saying "okay, Joe, do your business!". That was how she ended up with so many kids.

Over the next two years, Gina and I alternated weekends visiting. I would take the train up to New York, where she would meet me and drive me back to wherever she was living. For a time she was a live-in nanny to a rich family who lived in a house made famous by being the home of a famous cereal commercial ("Mikes likes it!"). On the other weekends, she would drive down in her little yellow VW bug to stay with me in D.C.. By that time I had an apartment at 17th and R (at the time a borderline ghetto neighborhood, now one of the toniest in the city). Over the next several years I shared apartments in that building with my brother Erik (twice), my friend Bruce, a few other roommates, and eventually Gina when we were married. I was also once mugged at knife-point in the elevator of that building by two little kids with very scary looking knives, one rainy day when I let them into the building.

By then I was smoking pot pretty much every day. It was another attempt at self-medication for depression and social anxiety, another poor choice. I was still smoking a pack a day of cigarettes and drinking at least six cups of coffee. I was working at Sidney Kramer Books and Gina also got a job at Kramerbooks. She had graduated from college but did not yet have a job with a union. We decided to organize our own, among the Kramer books employees. We had good reason to. Kramer had four stores and a warehouse and pretty lousy working conditions, not just the lack of heat in the basement or the warehouse, but they'd also failed to pay their health insurance premiums, so when one of our fellow workers needed medical attention he couldn't get it. There were other grievances as well, so we set about organizing, enlisting the retail workers union local. We ended up a mere one vote short (some workers are stupidly loyal to their bosses, a common frustration among organizers everywhere), but it got us both fired. Gina got a job with AFSCME so it was okay for her, and I ended up getting a job with the Olson book chain. Kramer hated me after that, with reason, and that led to some minor repercussions a few years later on.

Our marriage did not go well. Once we were living together, the excitement was not the same as the long-distance weekends had been. I was a dull, lazy anti-social, extremely depressed pothead and Gina wanted to get out in the world and do things and have fun. She started working late, going out of town and staying away. Once I was pretty sure she'd been cheating on me and I wrote about it in my diary and she read it and became furious, denying it, but it was true. I moved out, just left her one day without warning, the day before my 22nd birthday. It was a mean and cowardly thing to do. I forgot my bicycle, though, and when I went back to get it she had changed the locks, and was home and wouldn't let me in, and called the cops on me. We were pretty angry at each other, and it was over. Later she showed up at my work and threw a radio at me.

You try to remember the good things but it seems the bad ones have more resonance. When we moved her down to D.C. we decided to strap her mattress on the top of her VW, and we nearly flew off the Delaware bridge as the wind lifted the car off the road. She tried to teach me to drive but I freaked out. I couldn't do it, and didn't learn until many years later, at twenty-seven. We once went to Vermont on winter, where one of her sisters was living with a bartender, and we slept on a waterbed there and nearly froze to death. I was a stranger to her family. Some of them terrified me. One of her sisters was married to a brutal bully, who would make his wife lick the bottom of his shoes when he was mad at her, which was all the time. They lived "down the shore" and listened to police scanner radio at high volume on the front porch. Another sister was popping out babies and just kept them sedated with TV and popcorn while she was screwing her husband's best friend. Another was addicted to heroin and lousy boyfriends and had a teenage daughter whose future did not look so bright at the time. Gina had crawled out of the mud whereas I was a privileged jewy upper-middle-class red-diaper baby. Different worlds entirely.

"Slow and steady our love does grow. I sure do love you, my escargot" - she sent me that on a card once. I could never forget it. We did love each other those first few years, and I even loved a couple of those sisters. We were both passionately political, raised and radicalized in the context of Vietnam and civil rights and Nixon and feminism. I had come from a left wing family, and Gina loved that. She especially loved my mother (they remain friends to this day), and my great-aunt Sophie (my mother's mother's sister) who was a radical feminist labor organizer with the International Workers of the World from the 1920's onward. My mother's mother was also a powerful influence in my life; Bertha Russell, nee Branislawa Zanger, an immigrant who came through Ellis Island in the first decade of the 20th century. She was a New York City high school history teacher, an intellectual and serious woman who was also a doting grandmother (we called her Bama) when the occasions arrived. Apparently she was better at that than she had been at being a mother, according to my mother. My grandfather was in the publishing business - as a youth he had been a student of Thorstein Veblen and a devoted followed of Leon Trotsky. He remained a committed communist his entire life, dying at the age of 90 shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His life was an entire encapsulated cycle of that history, beginning with the Russian Revolution and ending with its ending. He was a short, round old man with a bald head, a white goatee and a twinkle in his eye. He was not always fat and rich, but was when I knew him, living in luxurious apartments in Brooklyn Heights, W. 64th St, and eventually E 81st on the upper east side, listening to classical music, publishing seditious historical tracts, and pontificating on leftover leftist dogma. When I was a child he called me 'Rostropovich' - after the famous Russian musician. One of my favorite memories is of holding his hand as we marched down some Manhattan street in one protest or another - I believe we were on our way to see Martin Luther King, Jr that day.

My parents were very much involved in radical causes. We marched on Washington like an annual occasion, attended be-ins and protests in Philadelphia and New York, both anti-war and pro-civil-rights. As a young teen I manned booths outside of super markets in support of the Farmworkers Union of Cesar Chavez, urging suburban shoppers to boycott grapes. My parents helped found and support a grassroots organization called The People's Fund, a radical alternative to charities like the United Way, and joined a food co-op. We had posters on our fridge wishing that the air force would have to hold a bake sale to fund their bombers while our schools had all the money they needed. I read Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd" and Saul Alinsky's "Reveille for Radicals" and had that poster of Che Guevara in my dorm at George Washington University. Above all, I despised LBJ and Richard Nixon for their wanton bombing of innocent civilians in Vietnam. One of the reasons I went off to South America at that time was to a) get the hell out of America and b) get prepared to become draft dodger when my turn came up. Luckily for me they discontinued the draft the year before mine. My older brothers had been fortunate to draw very high numbers, and would have qualified for student deferments anyway, as I would have also, but I hated my country. It was an evil place, and I felt it especially keenly as we grew up in a solidly Republican and quite racist area.

Our neighborhood was clearly red-lined. Black people were only allowed to live on one block of one street, the one directly behind ours. For the most part, they could only get jobs locally as cooks, gardeners, cleaning ladies or janitors. Although both of my parents were atheists (as were my mother's parents) we were essentially identified as Jews anyway, and were almost the only ones around. A couple of actually Jewish families lived a mile or so away, but we were it in the neighborhood. Ethnicity was a huge thing among white people in my childhood. It actually seemed to matter if your heritage was Irish or Polish or German or Italian. British heritage ruled of course. Civil rights seemed a world away from that place. We experienced it most keenly in high school sports, where our high school's main rival was one with a much higher African-American population (Kobe Bryant went there), and they kicked our ass in everything all the time. It was not pretty, the things that were said and screamed at those "sporting" events. I especially heard it at my track meets. As a long-distance runner, I competed mainly against other white kids but I was present for the sprints and jumps as well.

I did have a couple of cousins who drew very low numbers in the draft. Their father (my father's older brother) was a professional pilot who had been in the Air Force in World War Two, so they both enlisted in the Air Force and became pilots themselves. They were the only people in my family, that I know of, who served in Vietnam. Those years were so intense. Even now, with the Trump people shouting "lock her up" and the "rise of the alt-right" it seems to me that the intensity is nowhere near what it was in the late sixties and early seventies. In those days, hard-hats were spitting on hippies and Black Panther leaders were being framed and out-right murdered by the federal government, especially by the FBI with operation COINTELPRO. An entire generation of black leaders were literally wiped out. We may be facing a generation like that soon, if Trump's fascist tendencies light a real fire among the racists in this country, and the left and people of color are forced to fight back. I hope not. I hope that common sense will somehow prevail, but I would never put too much faith in that. History is a shit-fest of popular delusions and the madness of crowds.