Back then, it seemed like every time I took the Lexington Avenue subway it was winter and it was cold. I don’t mean cold like there’s a chill in the air and you forgot your coat. I mean icy f-ing New York cold, the kind of cold when wind howling down West 10th Street from the Hudson, or down East 12th Street off the East River would hit you in the face like you’d walked into a plate glass door made of ice. Winter winds in the city had fingers that could reach down your collar all the way to your beltline scraping your skin raw with air so frigid you couldn’t breathe it. It was cold on a molecular level. You could have used it to preserve fertilized eggs or sperm.
one of those lovely personal pieces which--thank God--you obviously like to post every week or so. once again, you've got two years on me, but the ways we spent those years are very, very similar (this is aside from the Head piece, which is still my favorite because (as I commented when you first posted it), I was also a citizen. in my particular case, the first apartment was one I shared, so each of us paid forty-two bucks a month in downtown Brooklyn, which made OUR train the A. I could fall out of bed into the A train, close my eyes and, in practically no time, I'd arrive at 125th Street and hightail it into the CCNY South Campus cafeteria, where a shared joint would allow me to sit and ponder deeply the issue of whether it felt important enough to attend my classes that day. yeah...crazy. I should have always gone, and ended up missing out on a lot of school I now deeply regret missing. yeah. crazy. crazy enough to decide that it was very cool to wear my extracted wisdom teeth on a chain around my neck. but I was also very much a citizen of CCNY, where my dad had brought me for homecoming every year from the time I turned three (he was an administrator....the joke I tell is that I was such a CCNY legacy, they gave me a full scholarship). and a citizen of the A-train as well. thanks, Lucian...really lovely piece. I sure needed it today. and now off for my booster shot.....
New York has nothing on Chicago when it comes to wintertime chills but most of the people in Chicago are sensible enough to bundle up -- especially while waiting on an El platform.
I loved your story, and it is flattering to think that Harriet must have had fond memories about you to regale her friends about her time of living dangerously. I, on the other hand, have nothing good to say about the years spanning my late childhood into early adolescence living in drab suburbs in Queens and Nassau Counties during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It never occurred to me during those sad, gray years that I would someday build on my talent for descriptive writing in my later years. All I would say about those years would be that I used my vivid imagination to pretend that I was living in some other time and place than the one I woke up to every morning. All that ended on a July morning in 1956 and moved to a town in New Jersey whose name at the time I couldn't be bothered to remember. Less than a year later, I was on my way to San Francisco; and it was like being born again into a world that was worth living in. The place I was leaving was like one of those Lexington Avenue subway stations that you wrote about today, a place where I was simply passing through, and happy to be done with it.
My brother arrived in Chelsea in the second year of Nixon’s presidency to begin his career at Juilliard drama school, in whose first class of graduates he was a member. (In the years since, he scooped up an Oscar, three Tonys, and even an Emmy, but that is another story.)
He drove up to his extremely modest apartment in a very humble borrowed car that he had driven from the Midwest. He left the car at the curb and went inside to see what his apartment looked like.
When he returned minutes later, all of his belongings were gone.
Welcome to the Big Apple in 1970!
I started my annual visits to him in ‘72, and recall that his apartment had been broken into something like half a dozen times. The thieves and the junkies seemed to be like gargoyles perched on the fire escapes waiting to pounce the moment the apartment was vacant.
In subsequent visits, as a young teenager, I envisioned myself as something between Ratso Rizzo and Travis Bickle: “I’m walkin’ here!” and “You talkin’ ta me?” burbled in the brain with every sidewalk excursion.
Visitors to the demimonde neighborhoods of New York in those years were advised to walk “as though you’re being pulled by a string from the waist“, with a purposeful strut, eyes forward, and never, ever, making eye contact with anyone.
If you happened to carry a bottle of some random beverage in your hand, you always knew it could come in handy in case you had to break it and use it as a weapon to defend yourself.
These, indeed, were the good old days in our great humming metropolis where the Bronx is up and the Battery down — what a Wonderful Town!
O.k., I'll be corny in Connecticut: I loved, loved, loved this story in every way. You know what to leave out, and how to head for the end--you literally took the Lex. At your mention of Jimmy Breslin, I wonder if you've seen that great doc on Jimmy and Pete. So I learn again that despite your welcome comments on the mess we're in as a country, I love your view of the past. Even the ratty places on Avenue B looked promising then because the future hadn't yet happened; we assumed it would be good. Despite your duty to keep us informed of the present, take us back with you. Then return and look at pictures of your beautiful offspring...see your lovely, talented wife and her paintings...hear her encouragement for your writing...and maybe watch a sunrise or two in Springs. You have to think that life has turned out ok in spite of (or perhaps because of) the costumes we wore...yes?
You are a brilliant story-teller, able to craft vivid and energetic images, entwining the famous with very personal and touching memories. You probably make creative writing students weep when they learn you’re a West Point engineer.
You've "always been a good storyteller"? Understatement of the century! This one's like watching a movie on the printed page -- OK, on my laptop screen. (Any surviving photos of you in the cowboy getup?)
So you're the angry young man who everyone said would become famous! I can see why, too. Quite the story teller, and yes, it is a true art, and you have captured a time when everything seemed possible. I hope you have your memoirs written down, because we're going to need something to remind us of a time when writing was actually revered as an art.
Your description of New York's winter winds has me thinking about one of my parents photographs of me at Minot Air Force Base during the winter of 1962-63. I don't have any clear memories of our time there, but one of those photographs of me revealing my teeth as I stood on a snow covered lawn whispers in my ear, "That is not a smile. It's a grimace."
one of those lovely personal pieces which--thank God--you obviously like to post every week or so. once again, you've got two years on me, but the ways we spent those years are very, very similar (this is aside from the Head piece, which is still my favorite because (as I commented when you first posted it), I was also a citizen. in my particular case, the first apartment was one I shared, so each of us paid forty-two bucks a month in downtown Brooklyn, which made OUR train the A. I could fall out of bed into the A train, close my eyes and, in practically no time, I'd arrive at 125th Street and hightail it into the CCNY South Campus cafeteria, where a shared joint would allow me to sit and ponder deeply the issue of whether it felt important enough to attend my classes that day. yeah...crazy. I should have always gone, and ended up missing out on a lot of school I now deeply regret missing. yeah. crazy. crazy enough to decide that it was very cool to wear my extracted wisdom teeth on a chain around my neck. but I was also very much a citizen of CCNY, where my dad had brought me for homecoming every year from the time I turned three (he was an administrator....the joke I tell is that I was such a CCNY legacy, they gave me a full scholarship). and a citizen of the A-train as well. thanks, Lucian...really lovely piece. I sure needed it today. and now off for my booster shot.....
New York has nothing on Chicago when it comes to wintertime chills but most of the people in Chicago are sensible enough to bundle up -- especially while waiting on an El platform.
I loved your story, and it is flattering to think that Harriet must have had fond memories about you to regale her friends about her time of living dangerously. I, on the other hand, have nothing good to say about the years spanning my late childhood into early adolescence living in drab suburbs in Queens and Nassau Counties during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It never occurred to me during those sad, gray years that I would someday build on my talent for descriptive writing in my later years. All I would say about those years would be that I used my vivid imagination to pretend that I was living in some other time and place than the one I woke up to every morning. All that ended on a July morning in 1956 and moved to a town in New Jersey whose name at the time I couldn't be bothered to remember. Less than a year later, I was on my way to San Francisco; and it was like being born again into a world that was worth living in. The place I was leaving was like one of those Lexington Avenue subway stations that you wrote about today, a place where I was simply passing through, and happy to be done with it.
My brother arrived in Chelsea in the second year of Nixon’s presidency to begin his career at Juilliard drama school, in whose first class of graduates he was a member. (In the years since, he scooped up an Oscar, three Tonys, and even an Emmy, but that is another story.)
He drove up to his extremely modest apartment in a very humble borrowed car that he had driven from the Midwest. He left the car at the curb and went inside to see what his apartment looked like.
When he returned minutes later, all of his belongings were gone.
Welcome to the Big Apple in 1970!
I started my annual visits to him in ‘72, and recall that his apartment had been broken into something like half a dozen times. The thieves and the junkies seemed to be like gargoyles perched on the fire escapes waiting to pounce the moment the apartment was vacant.
In subsequent visits, as a young teenager, I envisioned myself as something between Ratso Rizzo and Travis Bickle: “I’m walkin’ here!” and “You talkin’ ta me?” burbled in the brain with every sidewalk excursion.
Visitors to the demimonde neighborhoods of New York in those years were advised to walk “as though you’re being pulled by a string from the waist“, with a purposeful strut, eyes forward, and never, ever, making eye contact with anyone.
If you happened to carry a bottle of some random beverage in your hand, you always knew it could come in handy in case you had to break it and use it as a weapon to defend yourself.
These, indeed, were the good old days in our great humming metropolis where the Bronx is up and the Battery down — what a Wonderful Town!
O.k., I'll be corny in Connecticut: I loved, loved, loved this story in every way. You know what to leave out, and how to head for the end--you literally took the Lex. At your mention of Jimmy Breslin, I wonder if you've seen that great doc on Jimmy and Pete. So I learn again that despite your welcome comments on the mess we're in as a country, I love your view of the past. Even the ratty places on Avenue B looked promising then because the future hadn't yet happened; we assumed it would be good. Despite your duty to keep us informed of the present, take us back with you. Then return and look at pictures of your beautiful offspring...see your lovely, talented wife and her paintings...hear her encouragement for your writing...and maybe watch a sunrise or two in Springs. You have to think that life has turned out ok in spite of (or perhaps because of) the costumes we wore...yes?
You are a brilliant story-teller, able to craft vivid and energetic images, entwining the famous with very personal and touching memories. You probably make creative writing students weep when they learn you’re a West Point engineer.
Damn. Molecular cold preserving eggs and sperm. I'm in awe.
You've "always been a good storyteller"? Understatement of the century! This one's like watching a movie on the printed page -- OK, on my laptop screen. (Any surviving photos of you in the cowboy getup?)
Gotta do the whole memoir ! This is great !!
So you're the angry young man who everyone said would become famous! I can see why, too. Quite the story teller, and yes, it is a true art, and you have captured a time when everything seemed possible. I hope you have your memoirs written down, because we're going to need something to remind us of a time when writing was actually revered as an art.
This is so damned evocative. Hard to be clear eyed and nostalgic at the same time. There were those moments.
No Ratso Rizzo?
Your description of New York's winter winds has me thinking about one of my parents photographs of me at Minot Air Force Base during the winter of 1962-63. I don't have any clear memories of our time there, but one of those photographs of me revealing my teeth as I stood on a snow covered lawn whispers in my ear, "That is not a smile. It's a grimace."
Great story! I kept thinking of Jon Voight in “Midnight Cowboy” while reading but maybe it was you who inspired James Herlihy.
In the 2060's old men will write of life and survival in the great pandemic and riding NYC subways and in part because you inspired them to do so.
Splendid writing, Lucian. I especially loved the vivid description of the howling cold and your Sundance duds.