Stories I'd Tell My Children (But Maybe Not Until They're Adults). Michael N. Marcus
Samson gave us a “pop quiz” I could just tap my nose and, in seconds, a red river would be gushing from my right nostril. I’d soon be heading to the nurse’s office for a nice 30-minute nap until the hemorrhage subsided.
After a while, Mrs. Samson realized that I was a hopeless case. She was friendly with my parents and didn’t want to flunk me. So just like Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Frances Samson made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
She said, “I know you’re not doing any work, but I want you to get into a good college, so I’ll give you a B.”
Mrs. Samson didn’t have to put a gun to my head to convince me to take the deal. It was a better deal than I deserved, and I owe her a lot.
Chapter 18
Grandma, the lesbian painter, and arroz con caca
(Where were you when the shit hit the floor?)
After numerous changes of curricula and colleges, I pulled the plug on my formal education at the end of 1969 and moved to New York to become a magazine editor.
I spent the first week living in the Bronx with my grand-mother, but we were the Odd Couple.
Grandma Del was like a fastidious female Felix Unger. She was a neat freak who ironed shoelaces and wrapping paper (I’m not kidding) and had floors that were clean enough to eat off of (not kidding about that either). I was more like Oscar Madison. I was a 23-year-old male who had been living unsupervised since graduating from high school, and my standards were different from my grandmother’s.
We loved each other, but as with a lot of marriages, we could not live with each other. I had to move out.
Although I had the title of Assistant Editor, my salary was only $115 per week, and even in 1970, that didn’t pay for much real estate.
I schlepped my suitcases downtown and checked into the Grand Central YMCA, where I could afford a cell-sized cubicle within walking distance of my office. I spent weekends wandering the streets of Manhattan, looking for a more permanent and pleasant residence where I could bend over in the shower if I dropped my soap without attracting a new boyfriend.
I quickly found out that I was about 20 years too late for a $100-per-month loft in Greenwich Village, so I looked at the East Village. There, I found places that I could afford but didn’t like, and places that I liked but couldn’t afford. There were novel architectural touches, like bathtubs in the kitchens, roaches in the bathtubs, and drunks and drug dealers in the hallways.
Then I had a revelation.
If I did somehow find a suitable place in the East or West Village, I’d have to take the subway to and from work, which would probably take about 20 minutes in each direction. Since I had to be on the train anyway, why not consider living in one of the “outer boroughs,” outside Manhattan, with a slightly longer commute?
I could have gone to Staten Island, Brooklyn or Queens, but I was born in the Bronx. It was familiar turf. That’s where Grandma’s familiar cooking was, I knew the stores and the restaurants, and it would be an easy train ride.
I went to a real estate agency that specialized in apartment rentals, and was directed to a potential home on Walton Avenue, near both the number four train that goes down Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and the D train that runs on Sixth Avenue. (Tourists say “Avenue of the Americas.”)
The apartment was no palace, but it was affordable ($66.21 per month, thanks to New York’s weird rent-control laws), convenient and good enough. It was considered to be a “professional apartment,” the type of dwelling often rented by a doctor, on ground level with its own private entrance. My front hallway turned out to be the perfect place to park my Vespa motor scooter.
The law required landlords to paint apartments for each new tenant, but my landlord refused and wasn’t worried about prosecution. He was, however, willing to give me a free month’s rent and six gallons of white paint and some brushes, rollers, trays and drop cloths if I agreed to take care of the painting.
I agreed.
I had recently met a beautiful, smart and very funny girl named Laurel at a mutual friend’s party. It was a terrific party. One of the guests had a copy of a studio master tape of what would turn out to be Elton John’s 11-17-70 album.
Laurel, too, had recently moved into New York and she offered to help me paint. I liked her a lot and hoped for a weekend of painting plus passion. After we painted and had sandwiches and beer I embraced her, and kissed her romantically. She kissed me back sisterly. Then she told me she was a lesbian.
Anyway, I got the place painted and furnished and began my life as a New Yorker. I enjoyed exploring and taking pictures and seeing how much had changed—and not changed—since I had moved from the Bronx to Connecticut in 1952. For a while I thought I’d write a book about my discoveries. Its tentative title: In the Bronx, Boys Still Piss in the Street.
At about 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning, about a year after I moved in, I heard a strange gurgling sound. I got out of bed, checked my bathroom and kitchen and found nothing abnormal, and went back to sleep.
Around 7 a.m., I heard much more gurgling, and much louder gurgling, and got out of bed. I was horrified to see a stinking slimy mixture of RICE AND SHIT (“arroz con caca” in the common Bronx vernacular) oozing out of my bathtub, sink and toilet and rapidly coating the floors of my apartment!
I remembered the old joke about someone falling into a septic tank and yelling “FIRE!” because no one would come to help if he yelled “SHIT!” I called the fire department, and asked them to pump me out. They wouldn’t, but they did arrange for the city’s Emergency Services Department to clean up and find out what caused the disaster.
Apartment buildings have vertical waste “stacks”—pipes that run from the basement to the roof and connect to the drains in each apartment.
Typically, there is a stack for all of the bathrooms in the “A” apartments, all of the “B” apartments, etc., and other stacks for the kitchens in each apartment line. At the top, the stack is open to the air on the roof to help the waste to flow downward. At the very bottom, below my ground-floor apartment, the stack made a turn to run almost hori-zontally through the basement and then go underground to the sewage pipe in the street.
Investigators found that some wise-ass kid had gone up on the roof and dropped a 7-Up can down the waste stack. It passed through six floors to the basement below my apartment but couldn’t make the turn to the street, so it blocked the path for the flowing crud.
As people in the building awoke and started cooking, eating and flushing, whatever should have gone outside, backed up, squirted out and ended up in my carpeting.
Two months later, it happened again and I moved out.
Chapter 19
The food chapter: stalactite spaghetti, sink spaghetti, barbecued spaghetti, cat lasagna, too-famous lasagna, fried dicks
Stalactite spaghetti
The lunches served in our high school cafeteria cost us 35 cents a day. And, as you might expect of food supplied by the lowest bidder, it usually sucked.
As an alternative, sometimes we’d bring brown bags of mommy food, or go to nearby Chuck’s or Al’s restaurants after school. Sometimes we’d go to one of our houses and raid the refrigerator.
My mother was getting pissed off about the fridge raids. She didn’t mind our eating the leftovers, but she didn’t like the mess we usually left on the stove and in the sink. Mom gave me specific instructions to terminate the after-school cooking.
One day, some friends were at my house, and of course we were hungry. I didn’t expect my mother to get home for a couple of hours, so I thought we could safely reheat some spaghetti, eat