Ymca Youth Sports Draft Card - Mission Valley Ymca: Fill & Download for Free

1980s - Life in ManhattanNYC is a vast canvas of social and economic opportunities. What it is an adult "Fun Palace" of ideas, jobs, nights clubs, theaters, people, places and things being in New Jersey and Westchester. Here are just a few that we enjoyed.I was introduced to NYC during the 1950s when I was in the Navy stationed on a WW II Destroyer out of Norfolk. Liberty in Norfolk involved three streets. The Whites went to Granby and the World’s most infamous East Main, and the Blacks went to Church Street. Granby Street: The best Norfolk had to offer; Anything from 21st Street to the Waterfront, Granby Street was Norfolk’s downtown section and it wasn’t much. A few restaurants, stores and decrepit hotels lined the street all the way down to the waterfront, and it had no redeeming values. Down by the Elisabeth River waterfront were the sailor bars and the YMCA where the USO was located. One quaint thing, however, strolling through the area, one will encounter cobblestone streets made from the holds of sailing vessels that used them as ballast.Church Street: Harlem of the South; Norfolk was racially segregated and Church Street was where the Blacks had their hangouts, a place where they could be free to be what they wanted to be. Church was like 125th Street in Harlem, it had a history, from blues singers, to the early Greek, Chinese, Irish and Jewish immigrants, Church Street was considered the Ellis Island of the South. But now it was Black only!Then there was ‘world’s infamous East Main Street;East Main Street: Right up there with Sodom and Gomorrah . . . It was the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' and the lowest level of the largest outhouse ever built. . . . The city fathers of Norfolk refused to admit it existed . . . Clergy were afraid it existed Decent people would drive six unnecessary blocks to avoid it . . . And the Devil ran it. . . . And it was all White. The Black Sailors had Church Street.The world’s infamous section of East Main Street was only (maybe less) three blocks long and lined with Bars on both sides of the street with names such as "Virginian,” "Golden Palomino,” "Rathskeller’s,” "Ship Ahoy,” "Paddock Lounge,” "Red Rooster" and etc. The Bars served only 25-cent lean draft beer. You did not order brand names in Norfolk and the Bars featured barmaids who would (if you were lonely) sit with you and listen to your sad story, however, the cost of listening was buying them a drink which consisted of ice tea at a cost of $1 which was equivalent to four beers and could those Bar Maids drink fast! Most sailors fell for this little game only once but there were some who never learned!East Main Street, they wrote books about it and it was famous all over the world. You could find every sin covered in every religion in the world, in three or four blocks. It was a place established simply for the purpose of selling beer to stupid people, who passed it from mouth to kidney, to bladder, to urinal and finally to the Elisabeth River. All the while enjoying the convivial company of fat tattooed women with hairy upper lips. The place was a veritable Kasbahs of Carnal Delight. The place was so bad, it didn't even register a blip on the Morale Richter Scale. East Main was right up there with Sodom and Gomorrah. It was the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' and the lowest level of the largest outhouse ever built. East Main was the K-Mart of whoredom. If you had twenty bucks and you couldn't satisfy any particular lust desire you were hauling down there, you had to be into something involving baby ducks and penguins. East Main was a five-star hell hole where you could buy passion in fifteen minute increments from women whose panties went up and down like a tin can's signal flags, where you could drink cheap beer and pee in the street.Fleet sailors warned us recruits that sooner or later, we would be rolled on East Main Street. Just hope that she was kind enough to stick your ID and liberty card in your sock before she vanished with what was left of seventy bucks and your wallet? If Guinness had a record for the sleaziest bars per square inch, it would read. 'East Main, Norfolk'. They sold enough draft beer on a Saturday night to fill the New London diving tank, and most of it got pissed away in the adjacent alleys on the way to the bus stop up on Granby Street.While on East Main Street, it would often be our goal to drink a few beers at each bar, starting at the upper end of one side of the street, and drink our way down the street, then come up the other side. Needless to say I never successfully accomplished this goal. As a young man not used to alcohol, even though the beer was lean reduced to 3 per cent alcohol, I would get drunk before the round robin tour ended and wind up puking my guts out in an alley. The bus ride back varied in quality depending on the time you left, a late return meant ridding with a large group of sailors in various states of drunkenness with random puking. If you missed the last bus back to NOB which left around 2:00 am in the morning, you had to wait three hours before bus service resumed again at 5:00 A.M. It would get you back to your ship just in time for morning Quarters. After drinking ourselves silly on East Main Street, we were ready for some coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. A [White only] Christian Mission offered these amenities if we would listen to their “save my soul” preaching first. One time we tried this and listened to well mannered young men try to convert us to being ‘Born Again’ with sweet talk and using words like “anointed.” But it was for Whites only, anyone one else was going to Hell. I thought - Christians, Huh? To this day whenever I hear that “ANOINTED” word I get a nauseous chill up my backbone!One of the eateries we frequented on East Main Street was Eddie's Texas Chili. We usually wound up there or at pizza pallor on Granby Street after a drinking spree on East Main Street. Since everyone like different strengths of hot chili, it offered me a chance to taste all kinds on my trips to Eddies, we would order several varieties of chili, all from mild too hot. I usually ate chili somewhat on the mild side. My first time eating the mild chili, I said Holy Shit, what the hell is in this stuff, as a fire burned my mouth out? You could remove dried paint from your driveway and it took me two beers to put the flames out. Actually, it didn’t take me long to get used that mild stuff and soon I tried the next hotter chili which made my nose feel like it was snorting Drano. Well, everyone knows the routine by now, get me more beer before I ignite. Laughing, the Barmaid pounded me on the back, now, and my backbone is in the front part of my chest. I'm getting frog-faced from all of the beer. I felt something scraping across my tongue, but was unable to taste it. Is it possible to burn out taste buds? Sally, the barmaid, was standing behind me with fresh refills. That 300-lb. woman is starting to look HOT . . . just like this nuclear waste I'm eating! Is chili an aphrodisiac?When I eventually tried eating the middle hot chili, it made my ears ring and sweat pour off my forehead and I could no longer focus my eyes. I farted a misty smoke screen and four people behind me swooned and needed paramedics. I told the Barmaid that her chili had finally given me brain damage. Sally saved my tongue from bleeding by pouring beer directly on it from the 24-oz pitcher and I wonder if my lips are burning off. It really irked me that the other sailors asked me to stop screaming. Dang those Rednecks, my intestines are now a straight pipe filled with gaseous, sulphuric flames. I messed myself when I farted and I'm worried it will eat through the chair. Where’s the men’s room? No one seems inclined to stand behind me except that Sally; can't feel my lips any more and I need to wipe my butt with a snow cone. You could put a grenade in my mouth, pull the pin, and I wouldn't feel a thing. I've lost sight in one eye, and the world sounds like it is made of rushing water. My shirt is covered with chili, which slid unnoticed out of my mouth and my pants are full of lava to match my shirt. At least during the autopsy, they'll know what killed me. I've decided to stop breathing. It’s too painful. Screw it. I’m not getting any oxygen anyway. If I need air, I'll just suck it in through the 4-inch hole in my stomach. Want some red hot Chili?In my early Navy days in Norfolk, when I didn’t have a car or a ride for weekend liberty, I would take a Greyhound or Trailways interstate bus North to my destination, usually New York City for fun in Times Square, dancing at Roseland Ball Room, or hanging out with my buddies in nightclubs. I found that while traveling in the South the buses and all the bus stations were segregated, including restrooms and water fountains. If you were pissed off at Jim Crow and thwarted the segregationist pattern, like entering a “colored” rest room, you could be arrested and put in the local jails, where you would be treated horribly, being crammed into tiny, filthy cells and sporadically beaten. In the South, the police didn’t take kindly to whites who sympathized with the blacks. Southern politicians and White Citizens Console controlled the police, and secretly directed and/or approved the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and its violent actions against any type of integration, or Civil Rights sympathizers, and the KKK set upon their chores of ensuring segregation enforcement gleefully and with gusto. On my interstate bus trips, I met many Blacks, either sailors like myself, or just travelers, and we would become friends. When the bus stopped for bathroom or food in the South, we left the bus and parted company into separate facilities, but when in the North we shared all facilities together. On one trip I met Mary Thomson, a young Black girl who lived in Manhattan, and we became good friends on the trip to New York. She was very pretty, smart and had a great personality and I wished I could date her when she visited her parents in Norfolk, but as things are in the South, I knew that was impossible.Eventually, I bought a 1952 Cadillac Deville and ran a Taxi service to New York, dropping sailors off at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 49th Street or Penn Station on 34th Street. Going back, I just sat in front of the bus terminal with a sign and pick up sailors who are all around looking for a ride back to Norfolk. They paid my expenses plus a profit and it never cost me a cent for my New York trips, in fact, they helped me pay for my Cadillac.Liberty in ManhattanLiberty in Manhattan was a blast. Tonight we were at the Captain's Bar on the Hudson River. You have to be 21 to drink in the bars and we expected our uniforms would be enough for us to drink. If that ridiculous security check at the entrance wasn't enough, some bar tenders were carding many of our sailors when we got to the bay to order drinks. If we got a table, we literally had to flag the server down. She wouldn't look in our direction, and tried to look busy bussing other tables around us. Look, I understand we look young, but everyone in our group was between the ages of 18 and 21, good fighting age, and lots of us loved a good fight too. Only a few were over 21, so we lied about out age and that seemed to be good enough for the bars tenders, most of them were Irish anyway and I am sure they understood how good a beer tastes. Bars were all over the place in New York City, and they all served food too, so we could eat snacks everywhere we went. We loaded up on burgers, calms, and fried onions.We would walk over to Times Square and walk around. The neon lights and tens of thousands of people on the streets made life exciting. We wound up in a sleazy bar called Barú Urbano, a Latin American bar on 43rd Street off Broadway. A popular club, Barú hires an off-duty police officer in uniform to monitor the parking lot on Friday and Saturday nights. Inside, there is a bouncer who looks like Gorgeous George. Despite concerns raised by some in attendance at Baru tonight, bar fights aren’t uncommon during big sporting events, like the home town Yankees or Dodgers games. A fight had just concluded before we got there which resulted in two people arrested for battery on a police officer, and four for disorderly intoxication, according to Tony, the Italian Bar Tender.Ted Strauss, my best buddy on the Soley, lived in New York City in the Bronx and he and his family loved the performing arts they took to many performances. We attended works by Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, The New York Philharmonic, The New York Ballet, and the Metropolitan Opera. It was all a great a great education for me since I had never been exposed to such entertainment before.Besides being the center of the American music industry, and by extension, one of the major centers for popular music worldwide, New York City was the intellectual and artistic center of the United States and it was home to the worlds best performing arts centers. That included Carnegie Hall, one of the most important music venues in the world, especially for classical music, Radio City Music Hall, the Metropolitan Opera (The Metropolitan Opera is the largest classical music organization in North America), and the New York City Ballet.Ted and I went to an all-star show at Madison Square Garden on 49th street, we got $15 tickets free from the USO to see Red Buttons, Polly Bergen, The Four Lads, and the people that were on last Sunday’s Ed Sullivan Show. It was sponsored by the VFW so we got free. They also had a large group of USO girls attend, as well as having entertainment from the Latin Quarter and Copa Cabana night clubs. Another day we went to the ‘Treasure Hunt Show’ starring Jan Murray, and ended up at ‘The Jack Paar Show.” The TV studios are really different from the way you see them on television. Last night, Ted and I went to see a live radio show and a TV quiz program on Broadway in Times Square. The radio show was “Upbeat Saturday Night” with Jim Lowe, the guy that wrote ‘Green Door’. Then we went to see “Top Dollar.” I guess you watch it at home; at least you did when I was there. We were the only two servicemen there, so after the program they showed us around the set. We’re trying to get tickets to see one more Ed Sullivan show before we leave. Ted and I went out to the Statue of Liberty to take pictures. We climbed all the way to the top of the crown, the view wasn’t as great as the Empire State Building, but I got some great pictures. We also took some pictures of Broadway at night too, so I hope they turn out.Sometimes we stayed at the decrepit and worn out Lincoln Hotel on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street. It was perfect for sailors looking for a cheap room on weekend liberty in the Big Apple. A few blocks away was the heart of Times Square, the really decrepit part of town - well, raunchiness anyway and then maybe decrepit, the exotic raunchy part taking precedence. What with all night Movie Theaters, Bars, Strip Clubs, Dance Emporiums, and Night Clubs filled with celebrities and beautiful women all over the place; Times Square was a sailor’s delight. New York City was America's nightlife capital, with some of the bars and dance clubs clustered around bustling neighborhoods like the Village and Times Square. And sailors like to dance . . . Most clubs have swing-based, while in others it was Ballroom dancing. When Dick Clark broadcast his show nationally in 1957, becoming American Bandstand, New York City and Philadelphia became the dance capitals of the USA. People dressed up, the girls were fabulous, you meet every kind, and you could dance with the black beauties from Harlem.On one of my trips to New York I had a guy in my car, Herb Watchel, who grew up on Coney Island and he said if I drove him home to Coney Island in Brooklyn he would treat me to a weekend on Mermaid Avenue and all carnival stuff that go with it. So I did and what a blast did we have. Herb told me about growing up on Coney Island. “I grew up in Coney Island and it was the place to shop, and hang out, it was simply the best place in the world for a kid to grow up . . . Every thing was there on Mermaid Avenue; the Coney Island rides, The Cyclone Roller Coaster, Nathan’s, Steeplechase, the beach, the fishing pier, the Lowe’s on Surf Avenue, the Parachute Jump, the Wonder Wheel, Cotton Candy, Jelly Apples, Buttered Corn, Shatzkin’s Knishes, Faber’s, Playland, The Magic Carpet Fun House. We had Delis, Pizza Joints, Diners, Italian Bakeries, Chinese restaurants, luncheonettes, Ice Cream shops and department stores.” Herb took me there and we did it all. We ate at Greek Diners most of the time, there was almost a classic quality to the New York diner experience - sing waitresses en all - and they are all over the City offering burgers, eggs and full meals at cheap prices. They all feature all-day breakfast specials, steaks, pork chops, southern fried chicken and of course, a bottomless cup of coffee, the real surprise about the menu here is that they offer every demographic—Jewish, Italian, Irish and everything else under the sun, including enormous desserts, all baked fresh on the premises daily.And who can forget what Manhattan is most famous for . . . Swing Dancing. THERE are swinging parties in Manhattan nearly every night. The trick is in knowing where to find them. We have been to Swing 46 which is sandwiched between a Blarney Stone and a liquor shop on Eighth Avenue just south of Penn Station and up four flights of stairs was a scene invisible to most New Yorkers. Wild and sweaty, loud and crowded, it featured scores of smiling, ever-shifting couples energetically executing the kinetic choreography of the Lindy Hop, the Charleston, the jitterbug , the Balboa, the collegiate shag. Another great place is Sofia's at the Edison Hotel. The unwritten rule of these dance parties is to say yes to anyone and to smile regardless of what your partner does.New York City is a nightlife capital, with some of the bars clustered around bustling neighborhoods like the Village and Times Square. Nightlife can take many forms, but for New Yorkers and visitors looking to let off a little steam, nothing quite does the job like a night of dancing with the city’s mega dance clubs are synonymous with Manhattan. And sailors like to dance . . . Most clubs have swing-based, while in others it was Ballroom dancing. When Dick Clark broadcast his show nationally in 1957, becoming American Bandstand, suddenly teens from coast to coast were seeing and copying the way the kids in Philadelphia danced, and that regional style soon became a national dance style. New York City and Philadelphia were the dance capitals of the USA.After Operation Spring Board, the BLU Bat Expeditionary Force, and the great Russian submarine chase and crossing the Equator, it was back to Norfolk for more 2nd fleet maneuvers and a shipyard breather to get our radar upgraded again, and then in response to the call to colors, the USS Borie DD 704 steamed up to New York for our second Fleet Week in Manhattan. Now there's a port for you, a million places to go and a million things to do. The flash and dazzle of Broadway at night, Times Square, Greenwich Village, Joe King's Raskeller and of course the old A train.Fleet Week starts with a parade of military vessels, all dressed in battleship gray and contrasted with brilliant blue skies, made its way up the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey. The "Parade of Ships" starts with vessels sailing under the Verrazano‑Narrows Bridge, up the Hudson to the George Washington Bridge. Among the ships was my group of DESRON Two ships (eight cruisers & two destroyers), and our carrier Battle group, and sailors who stood at parade rest along the rails in our dress uniforms. Accompanied by NYFD fire boats with fire hoses spraying high, the ships head north along the Hudson en route to the George Washington Bridge, where they will turn around and sail back to the respective piers where each vessel will be berthed for the Fleet Week festivities. DESRON TWO, including my ship, the destroyer Borie, is anchored out in the Hudson River just south of the George Washington Bridge. We took a motor whale boat to get to the Fleet Landing where the Military Police Headquarters was set up in the fifties.Once again I stood Military Police in Manhattan with a loaded 45. At Military Police Head Quarters I was part of a Radio Jeep team that coordinated military responses to requests for support from the city's police department, what with major contingents of the 2nd fleet anchored in the Hudson River for Fleet Week, there always seemed to be some trouble somewhere. I was assigned patrol in a radio jeep with a Marine sergeant, Sgt. Joe Campbell, and we patrolled 8th avenue and Times Square. We handled all sorts of inquiries. Requests included assistance to quell bar fights, street brawls, and help to help move Brig prisoners.Sgt. Joe Campbell, the street wise Marine Sergeant who is permanently assigned Military Police, and I decide to go to the called the Foxy Lady Strip Club where our sailor was rolled at and investigate and see if any other sailors are in there. We had a description of the culprit and we wanted to find him. My partner gave me the low down on 8th Avenue Strip Clubs. He told me that strip club owners are pretty much of the same moral caliber as drug dealers and pimps, which they often, in fact, are. Most, if not all, strip clubs are fronts for drug trafficking, and prostitution. Strip Clubs cater to sleazy and sexually insecure men, act as a hangout for COPS and the great unwashed and those tenderfoots who haven’t French kissed a girl. The twenty-year-old first timers are so awkward, they fall in love with a professional sex dancer and spend too much money.Sgt. Campbell told me about the carnivorous sweet-smelling drug dealer with hazel eyes who has the charming essence of chronic and cologne who hang out in a strip club. He is always center stage as he drops fistfuls of ones on the stage and buys a string of dances. The strip dancers love drug dealers, they are always laid back to be with and lose with their money. But they often Mickey Finn and roll innocents and put the establishment into the hands of the police causing lots of trouble. Sometimes there is violence, my partner talked about a wonderful person he knew, a young man who worked security at a strip club, and who was killed by a drug dealer who dealt out of his club. He also was called into the site where a patron was shot dead in some drug related altercation. Bottom line, the Adult Sex Industry is dangerous.As we enter, on stage we see a group of Go Go dancers in various degrees of undress with men shoving dollar bills into their G Strings. The walls, like most strip clubs, have mirrors that hang above the couches where men sit wit the women and get hand jobs for twenty dollars. We talk to a floor supervisor and ask questions about our sailor, and he is no help. Then we ask Strawberry, a nearby dancer, questions and again no answer. We want that drug dealer and suddenly there he is stuffing a ten-dollar bill into a topless and leggy blonde's G string.We find out his name is ‘Shorty’ and leave. Out on the street, my partner finds a street drug dealer he uses for information and tells him Shorty from the Foxy Lady is talking to the police about his drug providers to get a deal. It all seems stupid to me, trying to set Shorty up with his drug dealing bosses, but my partner says that casting any doubt at all will land Shorty in real trouble. And so we left the scene and resumed our Radio Jeep Patrol satisfied that some street justice will be preformed.It was in the morning and Sgt. Campbell and I were driving east on 42nd Street in our haze gray Military Police jeep, and we were sitting at the stop light on Broadway with our top down watching the hundreds of people cross the street. My hat was rolled and cocked on my head in the salty fashion of a sailor who has been around the world a few times and seen a few things. I had my right leg propped up on the door sill, half hanging out, and looking like a really tough guy police character. Suddenly, there in front of me, right on 42nd Street and Broadway, was Audrey, that blond and good-looking girl I met at the Bainbridge swimming pool when I was in Fire Control school two years ago. She was dressed in blue jeans and calico shirt and had tennis shoes son. Back then I was a recruit, tender behind the ears and not a real sailor, but now I was muscled, tan, a few pounds heavier in the right places, swaggering with a 45 Colt on my hip in my salty White navy uniform with a crisp black Military Police insignia. I had been to more than twenty countries, up against the Russians, been near death many times, felt tough and like an old salt now. I felt unbeatable, was good at my job, loved the sea, was a good street fighter and I must say, I was looking salty and feeling good!I hollered her name and she jumped back on the curb and looked around for who was shouting at her. I know she never expected to see someone she met two years ago gawking at her from a military jeep in the middle of Times Square, but there we were. I recognized her, would she recognize me? She looked around and then saw me and got a puzzled look on her face and I could just imagine what was going through her mind. Then she said, “My God, it’s you Jerry.” Well, she did recognize me. I asked her if she wanted to go for coffee and Joe and I took her to the coffee shop on 41st and Broadway and parked our military jeep on the sidewalk. She said I looked so different, so manly and grown up now, and I wondered if she was sorry that she didn’t keep in touch with me. Audrey had graduated Hunter college and become a New York city school teacher and she talked about her job and what it was like teaching kids from the big city. I gave a short resume of my last two years, travel and adventure stuff, but it was just a short history of events. It was nice seeing her and we had a good time reminiscing, but I was disappointed that Audrey didn’t keep in touch with me so long ago. I had dismissed her as a nice girl who went her own way and we disconnected, besides, what was he going to do with a sailor who spent all his time out at sea?The Big AppleIn general, New York is a nice big city (really big city) and is constantly expanding and reinventing itself. It's expensive, noisy, crowded, fast-paced and harsh during the peaks of summer and winter. New York City has five boroughs, and a variety of neighborhoods, so while it’s likely that nearly everyone could find some suitable area, it still won’t be right for everyone. New York exists at a double speed. Everything here is a little faster, a little more hectic, and people try to fit more things into a day than in many other places. It’s probably not a good fit for a very laid back person. For me, it’s always interesting, which is worth a great deal. But New York is not for the weak of heart, the weak of mind or the weak of body. But she's also very beautiful. That's for sure. New York’s full of life and adventure, there's always something to do, the people are strong and they speak their mind, there's the best transportation- unlike most places, you don't even need a car because the subway can take you everywhere for one price - and there's so much diversity and culture everywhere. And there's this strange comfort to be living in New York, knowing that there's millions of people there and there's ALWAYS noise and something going on. No matter what time it is, there's people out, and that makes you feel safe. Also, restaurants and stores are open till very late at night, many even 24 hours, and that's great in case you ever want to have a pizza or watch a movie at midnight. There's not many places that are open as late like in NY. Let's just say that Manhattan is the gold standard for a diverse and exciting life. It is the best place to work and make good money. But it can overwhelm one. I consider it necessary to have a place outside of Manhattan to go to for the best living experience. Conn , Hudson River Valley, Hampton's, Jersey Shore, Poconos, Adirondacks or any other green place has to be the yang to your Manhattan ying or vice versa.The city was completely different in the 1980s. Much scarier than it is today. The city where greed was good that captured the grit, grime and glamour of 1980s. New York in the 1980s was an altogether different city from the safe, clean (for the most part), cosmopolitan urban playground it is today. It wasn't nearly as safe as it is now. Sure, the city had a lot of "character" and created stories that you will remember and tell your grandchildren, stories movies and gritty TV shows are made from. In the 1980s, New York City's Times Square wasn't so much the "Crossroads of the World" as it was the wrong side of the tracks. The nightclubs of the 1980s were often wild landscapes that attracted unique nocturnal animals. The sex market and drug trade thrived in the area, and homeless encampments dotted its streets. Many local theaters - once legitimate operations showcasing the performances of renowned actors like Lionel Barry more - had become home to peep shows and porn movies. Living in New York was a little like combat, you could get mugged by a crack addict.That is why savvy ‘street smarts’ were developed. But I remember walking down 8th Avenue, home to strip clubs and porn shops, and meandering Hell’s Kitchen neighborhoods and the local butcher would give us slices of bologna to munch and the delis would give us sour pickles from their big street barrels. We would walk just a few blocks and run into swarms of people that we talked too. I remember that magical feeling of not only being a part of an intimate community, but also something larger and grander than we could ever really know at that age but happily knew we’d spend a lifetime trying to figure out. We don’t remember feeling afraid. We don’t remember it as a horror show. We remember it simply as our childhood, one we shared with millions of other people, one which we could have despite being a part of a decidedly middle-class family—and not one in which our parents’ income needed to be in the mid-six-figures.Many of the neighborhoods that nowadays are "hip and happening" were extremely dangerous places back then. For example, take Brooklyn. Now a center of youth culture, 25 years ago it was a real dangerous place to be. Even Times Square, now a major tourist center of New York City, was an absolute dump. A lot of this decay was due to the crack epidemic; in many lower class apartment lobbies, crack addicts passed out were a common sight. Addicts, desperate to get enough money for a fix, were constantly mugging and stealing. Crime was higher, the city was dirtier, and graffiti covered the surfaces of subway trains, building walls, bus stops and park benches.The city came out of bankruptcy in the late 1970s and by the mid 1980s a crack-cocaine epidemic began to take hold in the city. People would steal radios and "CBs" from parked cars everywhere, giving rise to those removable car radios and signs in car windows saying, "NO RADIO!" I remember every park, even Washington Square, was scary after dark. You knew not to walk through there at night. My funniest memory looking back now was taking the train to 42nd Street and practically running from 5th to get to Port Authority. One Saturday night I was heading out to Jersey, at 1am taking a drunken friend home. On the FDR doing 110 dodging ten gallon potholes. How could I possibly let a pretty girl go to the Port Authority to catch a bus? By the Triborough I passed an officer in a junked out Chrysler. He flashed his lights. I slowed down, he did not pursue. Because no good deed goes unpunished but it wasn't the NYPD's job to do so. I purposefully put a really cheap radio in the car. Like a $29 Realistic model. So it would not get stolen. One morning I got to the car and the window was broken in. I opened the door. And there by the foot pedals was the radio. I picked up the radio, and on the top cover, in magic marker in large red block letters was written "F... You. Get a better radio..." The New York City subway of today is what one might lightly call “starkly different” from its predecessors. In the 1980s, over 250 felonies were committed every week in the system, making the New York subway the most dangerous mass transit system in the world. Over the course of a decade, New York public. You'd never make eye contact on the subway, either. The trains were always dirty and covered in graffiti. It was the cheap way to travel and you felt it. And boy, did you sweat if you got on an express train by accident and wound up in an area you didn't want to be.In fairness, I worked in Midtown in a Fortune 500 high technology environment and spent plenty of time traveling around the USA and there was nothing anywhere that rivaled the energy and excitement of New York. I walked miles every day in Manhattan and felt safer there, surrounded by all of those people, than I ever have felt again. Yes, in Manhattan, there were pockets of risk here and there that I avoided. I saw the beautiful side of the City. I had a rich social and cultural life during that time. I went to museums, galleries, movies, and shows. I ate out and went to the occasional bar with friends. I stood in line for hours to see The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi and countless other movies on their opening nights with huge crowds of other people. The opening of a new Woody Allen film was a major civic event. I used those closely printed pages in the front of the New Yorker -- the ones non-New York residents just skip over! -- to find cultural events I wanted to attend. I thought the 80's were fun and happy years, for me anyway. Even though the streets were dirty, the subways were filthy and crime was about to reach it's peak, I only remember the good things during those years because, I think, they far exceeded the negative stuff. After all it was New York City, my hometown. The whole point of what I'm saying is that although the crime was high, it wasn't so high there were shootouts on every corner, and in spite of it, life went on.In the 80's, if you were lucky enough to live in NYC, there were many things to do and many good times to be had. Now, New York is one of the safest cities in America. Areas that used to be slums filled with desperate people now house million-dollar apartments and expensive boutiques. I remember walking from Grand Central to Port Authority on 42nd St. It was all strip clubs and XXX theaters and video shops. I learned to wear sunglasses no matter what the weather. Now it's tourist central with ToysRUs and the Disney store.Many people, most of them high paid professionals, led insulated lives during this era. They traveled in taxis around the city. They bought bagels and lox and caviar at Zabar's. They enjoyed cultural spectacles at the Metropolitan this and the Metropolitan that, and rendezvoused at the New York Athletic Club. They met for breakfast at Sarabeth's; they lunched and dinnered with friends who lived that way too, sharing their theories about poverty, and crime and punishment, and the Yankees, and the best tennis racquets, and their next trip to Europe. Hey, I charged up a storm at Bergdorfs and Bloomingdale's and Saks, ate at The Four Seasons and An American Place and the River Café. We sat next to Joe Piscopo one night at the Empire Diner, which made the City's best milk shakes and Blue Plate specials. It was the eighties, and Wall Street was in LBO heaven.My sales job required I work 75 to 90 hours a week and more to make budget. At work, a lawyer named Bob was addicted to coke. There were a lot alcoholics too. I asked a social worker about the "success" rate of different rehab programs. She replied that about 90% of their clients relapsed. That sounded hopeless to me. And I said so. Her answer was one I'll never forget: Yes, relapse is often part of recovery. It happens in Weight Watchers. It happens to people trying to quit smoking. It happens to drug addicts. Almost all the time. Eventually, either they die or they kick their habit.A big Palestinian family owned the corner limestone apartment building next door when I lived in Times Square. One of them raised pigeons on the roof. None of the adults spoke English. But the children, all born in Brooklyn, did. They stalked one another on our steps with toy Uzi's. The Palestinian children next door have grown up. One became a pharmacist. One works for a civil rights NGO. One is a film producer. There is a doctor, and a teacher. We are good friends. Their father still smokes. I would do anything for them. One of the boys married an Italian girl from Bay Ridge, not surprising really; he looks like he was born there, with his tan skin and black hair and tough guy sneer. She comes from a family that measures a cook based on her pasta skills. This new Brooklyn daughter-in-law has offered to teach the Arab mother from Jerusalem how to cook "real food". His mother of course was indignant. Now and then, a sedan would stop with the windows open blaring Tito Puente trumpets and bongos. I soon began to notice that lots of people in Brooklyn were hanging' out. We had a heat wave, but that didn't stop them. The hot sidewalks steamed after a summer thunderstorm. The car battery was lifted out of the hood one winter night after we parked it on 6th Street. A few months later, on 13th street -- a drug neighborhood -- the front passenger side window was smashed. I'd left an empty pocketbook on the front seat. A few months later, I learned what a crack pipe looks like.What defines New York? Firstly the bustle, the life. You need to understand the context. Just to take one example, Dublin (at the time) had no tradition of street food. None. Suddenly I am in this place with hot dog and bagel vendors and they make the food right there! And it is delicious. To this day the flavor of NY mustard is probably my favorite taste, bar none. And the people! So many people! If I sound like a gawp-eyed kid from the Sticks, well I was most assuredly not but nothing prepared me for NYC. I admit though, Europe at the time was not terribly multicultural so seeing Sikhs, Rastafarians, Asians of all stripes etc. was, well it was like being in an alien spaceport (in a good way).Secondly the infinite variety. No matter what your specialized taste or niche interest, there was a place that catered just to you. It is difficult to describe how amazing this was in the pre-internet age. For example, I was into RPGs, and in Dublin we had one shop—a comics shop—that had, like a half-shelf devoted to the most popular RPGs and war games. The scale. We had toyshops where I came from, of course we did. But nothing like the Toys R Us on the upper 90s (I forget exactly where). It was like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it just went on forever and every aisle had a new wonder. They also had a guy either whose actual job was to engage with the kids visiting the store or who got away with it week after week as you only had to look at e.g. a Stretch Armstrong or a Light saber and he'd be showing you how it worked, having duels with you etc.Then there is the "The Crazy." The other answers have referenced the crime, the lack of personal safety and so on. I was relatively sheltered from this but even so I was mugged twice by adults in the years I was there, once for my calculator watch, once for the 6 bucks or whatever I had on me. Yes too, were the men nodding out on the sidewalk, sprawled on steps around the neighborhood, were heroin junkies.NYC was overall fantastic. I attended many theater and Lincoln Center performances, often for $5 or $10 and also met many other Deaf New Yorkers like me, and there was always something to do. NYC was never boring. I also explored most of NYC on foot (or via subway) and got to know the city well . . . and I loved it!.1964 Presidential Election System at CBS Broadcast StudioStudio 41, CBS Broadcast Center, West 57th Street, ManhattanLife in ManhattanIBM put me up in the Shorham Hotel on west 55th just off 5thAvenue and every morning I would walk to CBS on 57th at 12thAvenue and spend about 16 hours installing and maintaining the triple deck 7000 systems with all its vast multiplexing, disk storage and data entry stations. I worked with a talented and interesting crew, including Lou Harris the Pollster, Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace and a crew of IBM system developers who had designed computer system software to extrapolate the vote (meaning forecast precinct winners across the USA) on election night. Eric Severoid was a curmudgeon, he was always cold and wore a sweater. Mike Wallace was the brainyac, Roger Mudd was the good-ole-boy, and Walter Cronkite was a world class charmer. He sat with us IBM guys in the CBS cafeteria and when he spoke, it was like a wise sage telling us about the world.Every night, we would sit in a conference room next door to CBS at the Holiday Inn with the system developers, Lou Harris and his people with the CBS producers and talk about politics, voting patterns, and what concerns were driving the election. I learned a lot then, how the USA political process works, how different parts of the country think and what issues are important to them. It was the real thing with top in their field experts and better than a PHD Political Science graduate study at NYU. Yes, their professors were there too as consultants and advisors and I could have written a Doctoral Thesis on voting patterns.I worked with Marcello who was a real character, a second generation Italian, spoke the language (plus a few more European languages fluently), while his parents still spoke only Italian and broken English. He was a very good looking dark complexioned man the girls fell in love with and I envied him for the lush, big breasted females that panted after him - and New York was full of them, many looking for a coupling, but Marcello only liked skinny blond, flat chested women who had buck teeth. I saw some of the women he dated and choked, they were ugly! Well, to each their own I always say! As for me, I had to win the girls over with my personality. Every other day, we walked down to the IBM facility that housed the CBS crew and where we had our IBM meetings. It was in an old building on 8th Avenue and the offices were on the top floor.We got into a non stop express elevator with sliding front steel gates operated by an old hunchbacked man smoking a big Cuban cigar. He had a small wooden stool with a red cushion he sat on, propped up his legs, grinned at us and threw the elevator lever into high speed, and the motors whirred up, the elevator lurched, and off we would go accelerating madly to the 45th floor holding our stomachs in from upchucking. I would bet we were traveling at 60 miles per hour only upwards. We would get to the top floor, and he opened the steel doors, and Walla, what a space. Nothing artistically great but with a beautifully organized office with old oak furniture and big, floor to ceiling windows with views of Manhattan all around. I would work here in a second.New York IBMersNew York IBM people were far different from the southern IBM types I worked with in Norfolk at the naval base. First of all, many of the New Yorkers were black, Asian, Latino, something that you wouldn’t see in the south for many years. Second, they were all ethnic, young and crazy, highly educated graduates from prestige Ivy League universities where brains, having big city competitive skills, and where strong and agreeable personalities counted, something you would never see in the south, where being white, seriously religious and politically conservative was the standard mantra. Bless me, Lord I almost forgot, if you had lots of guns, hunted and fished, that counted too.One thing that is very different is the societal differences between the girls in the North and the girls in the South as many southern women (and men) are still fighting the war and blaming the north for all their woes. And talking about women, personally, I have noticed that women in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, etc. all have big hair and use perfume and heavy makeup, while in New York women tend to look natural, using minimal makeup, with little to no perfume and having small natural hair.I was discovering that women in New York can be really out there, wearing mini skirts and braless halters, but that doesn’t mean at all they are easy. They didn’t dress up like they were in a fashion show, but in more practical terms for a big city, being on subways and walking a lot on their tennis shoes. Northern women, in my growing experience, were very independent and professed to prefer "men to be men, and women to be women," which I suppose indicates a preference for traditional gender roles. They also liked well educated and well-employed men with a sense of humor. They didn't like bigots and religious freaks who tended to be weird preachy types with horrible judgmental attitudes. I thought they would never like southern women then.Race is a determining factor on why the south is so different than the rest of the USA, fundamentalist religion and ultra conservative politics are two more. I found in the north, education and career types were determining factors, basically corporate verses union jobs,. and the mix of people in every career removed race considerations and no one thought of religion or politics - everyone just got along. And no one liked assholes, those pontificating types who rule their space with blasts of ideology crap depicting their spaced out views on the world. But there are significant North - South regional differences based on rural and urban life styles. When I lived in a rural community there was a jar of tea on my porch, the elderly attendant at the gas station filled my car for me, people talked to each other while waiting in line, people waved to each other on the road, shops and restaurants closed on Sunday, everyone looked out for each other's kids. When I moved to an urban setting in the same state most of those things disappeared.One good thing, I had been spending so much time in Dismal Swamp hunting deer and on Chesapeake Bay fishing with the boys that I had forgotten what a real New York bar was like. New York was nothing like dull dismal Norfolk. New York was a colorful universe, diverse and full of excitement. My first night in the City I took the F train to Greenwich Village and walked around. This was so different from Norfolk’s decrepit downtown streets. I marveled at the exciting street scenes filled with artists selling their paintings, small coffee shops with tables out on the side walk, thousands of interesting looking people walking around, and the hundreds of clubs/bars/restaurants that dotted the area where you could eat, dance, and engage in interesting conversations with intelligent people while drinking espresso in a street cafe.Every night I walked around Times Square, often I would take the F Train to the Village and walk around too. If we had known that the scrawny guy onstage at that Greenwich Village folk club might someday amount to something, I would have talked about it. It was Bob Dylan when Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg held court at house parties in Greenwich Village, or Andy Warhol at his studio, the Factory. It was the time when the hippies in Greenwich Village were the incubator for the cultural movements that shook the world.Walking around Greenwich Village you can experience both the Bohemian lifestyles of those long ago and the newly present boutique stores and cafes. I wondered around the Village looking for Jazz and street cafes where I could get an espresso. Several times I went into the au Go Go was which was an oasis for folk music, jazz, comedy, blues and rock. The club was the first New York venue for the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell. Richie Havens and the Blues Project were weekly regulars.I found Washington Square park, a place I would later have an office next to and have lunch in, and fell in love with the place. Some of the best memories are in this park. It's full of NYU students, political dissidents and demonstrators, and people watchers looking for a new adventure. like talking to an old man dressed in all pink wearing a rubber pig nose. Its always a must hang out spot for me every time I'm in the City.Get a couple of sandwiches from Mammon's, find a spot and absorb the scene. There are always people around -- students, musicians, artists, tourists, and NYers looking for a place to hang out and enjoy the sun. During the day the square is bustling with people and it's always fun to see what the theater majors at NYU are up to. It's a terrific people watching spot day or night when you're out with friends or with a date. At night, the park is mellower. The musicians are still out, creating a soundtrack. The music, twinkling lights and fountain lend a romantic backdrop for dreamers and lovers.Walking around Washington Square Park, I heard some really down to earth music blaring out to the street and I went into a place called the Monkey's Paw. It was filled to the brim with people of every type, every color, in all modes of dress. After I got a drink and settled in, I met this young and gorgeous Black girl who grabbed my arm, and led me off to a small sitting room where we talked. I was totally shocked! Never in a million years would the old South have a place like this. She was Black, and I was White. My God, they put you in jail for race mixing down South. It scared me to death, I expected the police to arrive any minute and arrest me. She laughed when she heard of my fears. Not in Manhattan, she exclaimed. Needless to say, it didn't take me long to give up my inhibitions and start thinking and acting like a New Yorker.The Roseland Ballroom is in New York City's theater district on West 52nd Street. I love to dance and found my way to Roseland where a thousand people gathered, standing around listening to the orchestra, and waiting for something to be played they wanted to dance to. Girls were all eager to dance, and what surprised me, was the Ballroom expertise most of them had. The crowd was inter racial and many dances were like the dance styles made famous in the old Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. The music covered all genres, Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kay, with The Fox Trot, Waltz, Rumba, Cha Cha, Mambo, Merengue, and Tango. Dancers showed off fancy footwork and twirled until they were dizzy.After living in the south for years, I had acquired a slight southern Virginia accent ( I had to for survival in Virginia) and New Yorkers would refer to my Southern dialect as a “hick accent.” The first few weeks, these New Yorkers had fun with me, being the only southerner in the IBM group. Believe it or not, I really was a southerner in many ways too, besides working in high technology, I had more than twenty guns, became part of the southern gun culture, had lots of “Good-ole-boy” friends, and hunted in Dismal Swamp and fished on Chesapeake Bay for years. But indeed, the south was a strange and violent place to me and I did not like many aspects of it’s culture. They would regularly mimic me by yakking like a hillbilly and excessively using words like “y’all” and “Coke” to mock me. So I accused them of using the phrase “youse guys” all the time which takes a simple phrase and makes it complicated, it’s like they are all born with a natural speech impediment. It didn't seem to make any difference that I was one of those southerners who fought for social equality for the blacks and had been to the March on Washington last year to hear Martin Luther King’s “ I have a Dream” speech.”Finally, I loved nothing more than when they asked the expected “Why do youse guys hate Black people?” Ah, all right, I had to admit it! Southerners used the term “Neegras” and were a little racist - some were really racist and mean too, it’s in their blood, goes back to slavery and Jim Crow, but they were not born wearing white robes and holding burning crosses. Only a few do that! I reminded them that it might be true that southerners are indeed more accommodating of blacks than Northerners. After all, the south has 85% of the black population, and Blacks make up about a third of the South compared too only about 1% of the North, consequentially, many Southerners have more real‑world contact with black folks. Northern whites have read about blacks and “had a black friend once,” but seldom interacted much with them.The Pollster - Lou HarrisAfter a day of checking out the hardware and software in Studio 41, Lou assembled our computer systems group in his next door Holiday Inn Hotel conference room to discuss progress and problems. It was there we learned how voter extrapolation worked and how the networks projected winners and losers. Lou said the vote was divided between Goldwater voters looking at “Law and Order” and Johnson voters looking at a “Great Society” issues while showing Goldwater as a War Monger.Working with Lou Harris I learned all about voting patterns in the USA. America’s voting patterns are split by region, with the Midwest and Northeast predominantly voting for liberal candidates, and the West (with the exception of the coast) and South voting for more conservative candidates, but also surprisingly found conservative trends in the West and liberal leanings in the Midwest that defy traditional stereotypes about these areas of the country. A number of important demographic factors determine whether cities vote for liberals or conservatives, with race being the most important factor. Cities with predominantly large diverse populations ended up as the most liberal places in America, while the small towns with the largest Caucasian populations wound up as the most conservative. The liberal cities have a wider range of everything, higher educational accreditations, performing arts, high culture, sophistication and highly diversified population demographics.The Democratic Party attracts all kinds, blacks, browns, yellows, reds and whites both poor and rich, highly educated and the far less educated, whereas the Republican Party mostly just attracts whites and the moderately educated. This causes the Democratic Party to have a wider range of IQ a higher average IQ than the Republican Party apparently dominating the average middle of the IQ spectrum. So, the extremely smart, well-educated liberals are truly the intellectual elite of the entire country and are Democrats. More interesting is the fact that those who are more oppressed and disadvantaged have consistently seen that their interests are more in line with intellectually elite Democrats rather than with wealthy elite Republicans. It’s not that Republicans are inherently less smart, although conservatives do consistently test lower on IQ tests, it’s that the Republican Party, in using the socially conservative Southern Strategy, eventually lost the highly intelligent liberal demographic that once voted for them. The election of 1964 was the first election, since 1932, that was fought over true issues. This election brought ideology into Americans politics.Election night the computers were humming away and CBS newsmen, Walter Cronkite, Eric Severoid, Roger Mudd and Mike Wallace, were perched high on their wooden podiums in Studio 41, the tote boards were spinning numbers, and excitement was in the air. Who would win, Barry Goldwater or Lyndon Johnson? Goldwater scared people, many thought he was a war monger and didn’t like his right wing ideas. Lou Harris said the people weren’t ready for ultra conservative thinking, the USA was basically center right and liberal on may social things when it came to human rights and the role of the Federal government in helping people. With these factors working for him, Johnson easily won the Presidency, carrying 44 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.We often met with Lou and his staff to discuss the progress of the computer system installation, the programming model and how vote forecasting worked based on extrapolation techniques. Lou had analyzed thousands of voter prescients across the USA, and each represented a particular voting profile, like Irish Catholics in Illinois, German Protestants in Milwaukee. Based on how these special prescients votes would accurately predict the larger population voting pattern. I learned where the USA was demographically different, what issues counted in different regions, and why people voted the way they did. Extrapolation meant you could take a voting prescient and based on its historical voting record, forecast how a larger group would vote. I.e., The way a prescient in Cleveland voted would dictate how Irish Catholics between age 40 and 60 would vote across the state of Ohio. Lou Harris had studied these prescients and had thousands of them statistically nailed down to their voting patterns and what that represented and he could forecast voting patterns.Generally, the counties that matter most are located in closely contested states, where they play a key role in determining the winner. Thus the most populous county in the U.S. — Los Angeles County, located in safely Democratic California — isn’t nearly as important in determining this election as the 95th largest county — Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County, the gateway to winning the swing state of New Mexico.Election NightWalter Cronkite will anchor CBS News' comprehensive coverage of Election Night and will be joined by a group of some of the most experienced political reporters in broadcast journalism, as well as correspondents and reporters in key battleground states. In addition, using our IBM 7000 Main Frame computers, CBS will provide the fastest, most reliable, most user-friendly election results available anywhere. Live results, updated every 90 seconds, for the Presidential, Congressional and gubernatorial races will be available down to the county level. Live, breaking news today: Latest national headlines, world news and more from CBSNews.com and watch the CBSN live news stream 24x7 users will see projections as soon as they're made by the Network's Decision Desk. The same complete, detailed national and state exit poll data used by CBS News producers and correspondents will be available on Live, breaking news today: Latest national headlines, world news and more from CBSNews.com and watch the CBSN live news stream 24x7 as soon as the polls are closed. To provide context to the data, experts from the CBS News Election Unit will update clear, user-friendly stories on voter trends and behavior throughout the evening. At the end of the night, Live, breaking news today: Latest national headlines, world news and more from CBSNews.com and watch the CBSN live news stream 24x7 will feature opinion and analysis commentary from our partners from across the entire political spectrum.I was there in Studio 41 all day, the computers were humming away, the operators were paying attention to every detail, CBS newsmen, Walter Kronkite, Eric Severoid, Roger Mudd and Mike Wallace, were perched high on their wooden podiums built special for this night, the tote boards were spinning numbers, and excitement was in the air. Who would win, Barry Goldwater or Lyndon Johnson? I was betting on Goldwater, I didn’t like Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ program, it was just another welfare program as far as I was concerned. But the United States presidential election of 1964 was the sixth‑most lopsided presidential election in the history of the United States. President Lyndon B. Johnson had come to office less than a year earlier following the assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, and Johnson had successfully associated himself with Kennedy's popularity and won a huge victory. Goldwater scared people, many thought he was a war monger and didn’t like his right wing ideas. Lou Harris said the people weren’t ready for ultra conservative thinking, the USA was basically center right and liberal on may social things when it came to human rights and the role of the Federal government in helping people.1969 - WoodstockThe famous Woodstock Folk and Rock'n Roll music gathering of Hippies was not held in the town of Woodstock but on Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, NY (just outside of Monticello off of Route 17B) which is more than 60 miles away from the actual town of Woodstock. By 1969, anti hippie hysteria had reached epidemic proportions and Woodstock was a major counter culture event, a rock and roll music festival that was meant to promote harmony and peace in the midst of the Vietnam War going on and Civil Rights struggle that catered to the hippie generation of the 1960s. Yup, any decent flower child worth their name was there to protest against the Vietnam war abroad and racial tension at home. It was Friday, and I was with Danny Rice, my best friend from our Greenwich Village New School working digs, us always hanging out with the creative types - the artistic crowd, actors, playwrights, NYU professors, etc. We had planned for a weekend in Monticello's Jewish Alps at Grossinger's to see a Buddy Hackett show. We heard about a concert in close by Bethel being called ‘Woodstock.’ It was going to be a gathering of all those hippie types with lots of Jazz and Rock'n’ roll music, as all of the popular musicians of the time would perform there: Jimmy Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills, and Nash; and dozens of other musical groups, so we decided to go there instead. So off we went. .The festival began just getting there across the Tappan Zee Bridge on the New York State Thruway in Rockland County, where every other car was packed with happy, long-haired college kids and Hippy types flashing peace signs. We were a few hours ahead of the big traffic jam, the travel atmosphere was of a vast medieval gypsy pilgrimage. Eventually, thousands of cars were abandoned for up to 20 miles from Yasgur's farm, as kids gave up on driving and decided to hoof it to the festival. Eventually the New York State Thruway was closed, so for many, Woodstock never happened. Dan and I got to Monticello late Friday morning, by that time the roads were jammed and most were closed, so I parked my Ford Falcon on Route 17B by the Standard Bred Racetrack and we walked for several miles to the site. As we came over the crest of a hill, and there sloping down before us and to our right, was a huge natural amphitheater with tall towers loaded with speakers, and covered with the biggest crowd any of us had ever seen. Early on when there were tickets, they sold for $18.00 in advance and $24.00 at the gate. But there were no tickets sold at the gate anymore, so everyone walked, ran, climbed and snuck in every way possible. I mean, it’s in the woods, there are no fences. About 400,000 people were there already and finally, it was announced to everyone that Woodstock was now a free festival.Dan and I found a space to camp with a New York University group from Manhattan. They had driven up in their VW Bus and packed lots food, sleeping bags, etc. We were well prepared too, we thought. We had new sleeping bags, changes of clothes, dozens of sandwiches, and jugs of water. Where we made camp was about a ten-minute walk from the big field where the stage was, and that big sort of natural amphitheater place. And so to walk from the music site back to where we were, was like walking through a big Hippy village full of little paths through the woods where people had set up little market stalls and were selling lots of cigarettes, bead work, food stuff and yes, drugs too. We walked back to the entertainment center and inched down practically to the stage, made our way to a spot halfway up the hill, sat down, and waited. Once we got settled over on the hill overlooking the stage I started to realize the magnitude of not only the crowd but the whole scene. It really felt like a city as you looked over the hills and saw the tents in the distance and the food tents on the top of the hill. It really was mind-boggling. I would spend the rest of the weekend with a boggled mind. Folk singer and guitarist Richie Havens kicked off the event with a long set, and Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie also performed later on Friday night. Richie Havens sang “Handsome Johnny,” a stirring anti-war anthem, good and loud. The sun shone.The crowd got bigger and bigger. Must be a million here now. We ate sandwiches and shared some with our neighbors. Everyone was feeling great. Then it rained and everyone got soaking wet and the music stopped to forestall the possibility of electrocution. We found out that heavy traffic had prevented the opening acts from arriving at the festival, so Richie performed several encores, playing "every song he knew." Searching for another song to sing, he began strumming, getting into a groove, when the word "Freedom" came to mind.He sang his now-famous song "Freedom" for the first time, on stage at Woodstock, making the words up as he played. I vividly remember, sometime in the wee hours, Joan Baez’s tiny figure spotlighted in the darkness, her pure voice singing a cappella. Back at camp, our sleeping bags and clothes got hopelessly soaked and muddied. Our spot was right next to a sort of aisle - a thick, slippery, brown river of boots and muck. As we lay there, trying to sleep, a constant, never-ending stream of people moved back and forth. All night long, without cease, their feet sloshed and stomped and slammed a few inches from our heads. Some of these passers-by were chemically disoriented and their panic and confusion made them heedless of their steps. The rain, the mud, the unending shuffling and tramping, the constant fear of having one’s face trodden on - all this made sleep difficult.Saturday At Woodstock - I woke up the next day ready for fun, there wasn't any music playing in the morning so there was time to check out the area. There was a walk through some woods from the camping area to the stage area and along the way you said hi to a lot of people and looked over the shops that were set up selling lots of cool stuff. As you walked through the woods you’d see “street” signs with names like “Groovy Way” and “Gentle Path” and “High Way.” You couldn’t help but feel like you were “home” or at least someplace that felt like home. With storm clouds approaching, the crowd chanted 'No rain, no rain, no rain.' But it didn't stop the deluge and in three hours, five inches of rain fell and the festival became a mud fest. Joan Baez famously sang 'We shall overcome' during a full-on thunderstorm. During the downpour there were fears some artists would get electrocuted. Alvin Lee, of Ten Years After, was warned of the risk as it was still raining when his turn came to go on. 'Oh come on, if I get electrocuted at Woodstock we'll sell lots of records,' he said. Saturday afternoon the weather cleared up and we put on our last dry clothes and began to feel tentatively cheerful. Then it rained again, torrentially. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing Woodstock and going home, but we and the NYU crowd stayed . . . what the Hell . . . this is Woodstock! The Food For Love concession was running low on burgers so it raised prices from 25 cents to $1. Festival-goers saw it as capitalist exploitation, against the spirit of the festival, so burnt the stand down. Hearing there was a shortage of food, a Jewish community center made sandwiches with 200 loaves of bread, 40 pounds of meat cuts and two gallons of pickles, which were distributed by nuns. The music started up again shortly after noon on Saturday with Quill and continued non-stop until Sunday morning around 9 am. The day of psychedelic bands continued with such musicians as Santana, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, and The Who, to name just a few.The Hog Farm, a commune from Taos, New Mexico, was flown in by festival organizers to set up a campground. They soon found themselves assisting with security, staffing a “freak out” tent to help attendees with bad trips, and opening a free kitchen to feed the crowds. The Hog Farmers were led by Wavy Gravy, a toothless former beatnik comic, who put on a Smokey-the-Bear suit and warned troublemakers they would be doused in fizzy water or hit with custard pies. As well as forming the Please Force, The Hog Farm were in charge of catering, ordering in bushels of brown rice, buying 160,000 paper plates, forks, knives and spoons and 30,000 paper cups. They fed between 160,000-190,000 people at the Hog Farm Free Kitchen, 5,000 at a time.Sunday at Woodstock - The day continued with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Slay and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, Joe Crocker, and Crosby, Still, Nash and Young. It was obvious to everyone that on Sunday, the Woodstock Festival was winding down. Most of the crowd left throughout the day, leaving about 150,000 people on Sunday night. When Jimi Hendrix, the last musician to play at Woodstock, finished his set early on Monday morning, the crowd was down to only 25,000.Monday at Woodstock - Blood Sweat & Tears - "Spinning Wheel" BS&T being one of the headline acts, they were scheduled near the end of the last day. Unfortunately, because of the many rain delays and power interruptions, their set didn't actually start until the wee hours of Monday morning. More than any other performance during those three storied days, Jimi Hendrix’s festival-closing set at 9AM Monday helped shape the sounds and images that still define Woodstock. Near the end of his two-hour show, Hendrix pulled out his electrifying version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ complete with guitar pyrotechnics - designed to sound like dropping bombs and machine-gun fire - which blow the mind from thousands of feet away.The performance of The Star-Spangled Banner by Jimi Hendrix that closed Woodstock was described by the rock critic from the New York Post as 'the single greatest moment of the Sixties'. Yet it was witnessed by just a fraction of the crowd. Most had gone home by the time Hendrix came on stage, at 9am on a Monday morning.More than 30 artists and 200 songs were performed over the three-day weekend. Some were established stars, others were just getting their start. And most of them had breakthrough performances at the festival. Even if their sets weren’t all that great, they were elevated by their association with the granddaddy of all music fests. The organizers played down the numbers they anticipated, telling the authorities they expected 50,000, while selling 186,000 tickets in advance (costing six dollars for each day) and planning for 200,000. In the end more than 600,000 attended. Another million had to turn back because of traffic. It was originally advertised as 'A Weekend in the Country.' First aid at the festival was provided by volunteer doctors, nurses, and EMTs who set up a field hospital near the stage. The medical teams tended to minor injuries, food poisoning, and an epidemic of cut feet (so many bare feet…).I can tell you that it is a spectacle that will never be matched in terms of variety, honesty, sharing and caring about complete strangers. Sure there will be bigger crowds somewhere, but the statement that was being made by the generation of time will never be matched. There was more emotion, tolerance and sympathy expressed and witnessed at that one festival than in all the protests, riots and sit-ins ever had in this country. When you get nearly a half million soon-to-be-voters all in one place and get the truth out, you have great potential in being recognized and heard. If half a million people could all live together without shower facilities, proper sanitation, a food shortage, and a day when it poured down rain (many of which didn't have a place to sleep) for three solid days in complete peace then that could happen anywhere! That's all it was...just three days of peace and music. It proved to the nation that in the worst possible conditions peace could work and it did!The Woodstock concert might very well be the most legendary concert of all time. Not just only because who all performed but even more so the stuff and atmosphere surrounding the entire event. It was held at the height of the flower power craze and the entire event became much bigger and longer than eventually anticipated, resulting in some crazy events. Woodstock would mark a significant event in American culture.Greenwich VillageNew York, in fact the rest of the country, has always accused Greenwich Village of being a little well . . . different. There is definitely a personality type that inhabits the area. You need to have an open mind and be someone's who's bold and independent and doesn't mind going out of their way to meet people or at first be out of your element. It's great for people who adapt well to new situation, love having their hands full, making connections and have big-time aspirations and want to be able to submerge themselves into their career from the start. We tend not to march to quite the same drummer as most of the rest of the country, which may be why we have attracted the artists, writers, musicians and all the rest of the excessive personifieds to the Village for so many years. It’s not that we in Greenwich Village “draw outside the lines” - we draw within much bigger lines and use brighter colors! Fertile doesn't even begin to describe Greenwich Village's yield of creative genius. Abstract expressionist painters and Hollywood types like Woody Allen congregate here, as well as folk musicians and poets.How to describe the Village? . . . First of all, be different. The Village is all about diversity. Everyone you meet here is fascinating in their own way. I was teaching graduate students at the New School and especially enjoyed the diverse academia and performing arts characters I met there and in Washington Square Park; actors, playwrights, university professors, and protestors of every stripe. Greenwich Village is all about a unique culture . . . hail, hail, the gang’s all here: a galaxy of scoundrels, artists and geniuses commingling in several key artistic scenes; the jazz and folk explosions, Off Broadway’s theater productions, where nonconformists, individualists, bohemians, progressives gather; where avant-gardes, experimenters, gays and lesbians could gather and feel at home; where actresses, poets, chorines, working girls, socialites hang out.As I walk around, enjoying espresso at the never ending street cafes and conversation with highly educated and talented people, dancing at the clubs filled with all kinds of exotic girls, hanging out with NYU students and professors in Washington Square Park, I fall in love with this counterculture mecca. It is one of Manhattan's neighborhood culture engines - a zone that attracts and nurtures creative people, radicals, visionaries, misfits, life adventurers - like me!For relaxation, I love strolling around the West Village for a few hours, it’s one of my favorite places to be in NYC, I love the shops, cafes, and neighborhoods, it’s quieter here than busy uptown, midtown, or the financial district. My favorite hangouts were in Union Square and Washington Square park which was next to NYU. The park is a fabulous place, full of students, professors, political demonstrators and musicians. Anybody can play music in Washington Square Park and it's not unusual to find several hundred musicians and their friends gathered to sing folk songs and hang out. Folk musicians like David Bennett Cohen had been gathering in Washington Square Park since the 1940s. The park was surrounded by town houses full wealthy people and the Mafia, night clubs, bars and restaurants . . . there was plenty to do. In 1961, Izzy Young was running the Folklore Center on McDougall Street, a few blocks away from the park. At the time, it was the heart of the Greenwich Village folk scene - a hangout for amateurs and professionals, including Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk.Nearby are other walk around neighborhoods, the Chelsea Market and Meat Packing district where you see modern street art and sculpture with views to the Hudson River and Chelsea Piers. Or take a stroll through Chinatown and the local Columbus Park where the community gathers on weekends to play games and music, it’s a great cultural scene. Don't forget 'Shop till you drop' in SoHo for clothing, shoes, or home decor and then walk a few blocks over to Little Italy to dine at one of the many cafes. There are fabulous restaurants all over the place, I would say about 500 in the West Village alone. Set in the leafy surrounds of Greenwich Village, I stopped in at the Spotted Pig, a busy celebrity filled and packed restaurant that had great food and goose-bumping bands.A Walk to Wall Street On BroadwayI work in Penn Plaza on 33rd across from Madison Square Garden and today. One of the best ways to experience New York City’s unique neighborhoods is to get out there and explore them by foot. And have a few bucks in your pocket so you can eat along the way. Even a tried and true New Yorker can discover new restaurants, shops and hidden gems one on a walking tour, and there’s no shortage of them. The streets are colorfully dynamic, every color, ethnic, attractive and unattractive type of person speed by in minutes, and if your game is people watching, there is an endless and colorful supply as thousands are parading by. No doubt about, Manhattan’s people meeting opportunities are the best in the world.Today, I am going for quick Pepperoni Pizza slices at the street eatery across on 32ndand then take a walk to Digital’s office on lower Broadway in the Financial District in the Wall Street area. I have an afternoon appointment with the sales manager discussing Banking sales strategy and as always, will enjoy the leisure three mile walk down Broadway past the Fashion Institute and Flower District. Along the way are endless Orange Juice stands, Pizza, Shiskabob, Papaya Hot Dog, delis and ethnic fast food eateries, and countless shops and boutiques.What with the colorful sights and exotic smells, I could be walking down any street in Athens, Cairo, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Paris or London, as the languages and ambiance change from one block to another. And the girl watching is tremendous, from any color to any ethnicity, tall and slim with big tits and plump butts, you are going to fall in love a hundred times. And they are all friendly and nice and easy to meet and have a few words with a Hello and smile on your face. Seventh Avenue is the main commercial thoroughfare that bisects the Village and I pass through my old haunt, Green Village OK, and am in the middle of Christopher St and Sheridan Square. The streets are magic . . . people were heading to Bleecker Street and West 11th Street. Girls were surging forward on high heels like models walking down the catwalk.The smell of lipsticks, perfume and cocktail permeated the air. I stopped at an ice cream parlor to investigate the flavors through the window. A woman came out with a coupon for 5 free ounces - the temptation got me and I went in. The woman gave me plenty of sample cups, and suggested I try the Salted Caramel Pecan and the Pistachio, both of which were delicious.The Chipotle on 48th Street. is opening to the public and to celebrate with a free burrito day. That’s right, everyone willing to wait in line for god knows how long, will be rewarded with a free burrito and soda. We could argue all day about whether or not the burritos at Chipotle are good. What we can’t argue about is the intrinsic goodness of free food. And free food always tastes good … maybe I’ll finally actually enjoy eating at Chipotle. Everyone seems pretty excited about the prospect of burritos being just a few blocks away, but I can't fall into that trap. For me, Chipotle is like a bad Chinese Buffet. I have acquired the taste for Mexican and have to go back once every three months, and feel sick, which is to remind myself why I only go once every three months. See, I distinctly remember what my brain told me the last time I ate Chiptole … "Never eat here again." Anyway, back to my meeting at our Broadway office near Wall Street. Sometimes when I was in a hurry, I would take a Cab to Wall Street, but your not gong to see much because you move faster than on foot, you're not hung up so much on the little details, and see the sweeping view of the street. Traffic on Seventh Avenue runs north to south, however, so if you're in a vehicle, the only way is down.Or I could take the IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line subway to Wall Street, but on a nice day, I would walk. It is served by the 2 and 3 trains, the latter of which does not stop here during late night hours. First off, the details on this walk. It is just over 3.5 miles in length ‑‑ sounds like a lot, but in New York City that's just a normal morning stroll. Plan on it taking at least one hour or more, depending on how fast you walk and how much looking around you do. There are plenty of places for snacks, meals, and drinks along the way. On the way down I walk through lots of different neighborhoods and came upon the NYPD Mounted Police Unit walking down 7th avenue into the Fashion District. In an area between the Fashion Institute of Technology and nameless high rises – where the grubby wholesale junk shops of 6th Avenue are just steps away lies the surprisingly happening block of West 26th street between 6th and 7th Avenues. Today I found a Jiannetto’s Pizza Truck parked on 28thbetween some “No Parking” signs, so I’m not sure how long he’s going to last at that location… but as of right now, Midtown West has got it’s very own pizza truck!Manhattan is always in a state of flux. Rents are killing business along Seventh Avenue and businesses are closing down. On Seventh, the landlords think they can ask these crazy prices. It's terrible that all these great mom and pop stores are closing., but it’s the old Manhattan story, periodically, there are fair amounts of empty storefronts, and then they disappear. It’s just the cycle of business. The streets are magic . . . people were heading to Bleecker Street and West 11th Street.Girls were surging forward on high heels like models walking down the catwalk. The smell of lipsticks, perfume and cocktail permeated the air. I stopped at an ice cream parlor to investigate the flavors through the window. A woman came out with a coupon for 5 free ounces ‑ the temptation got me and I went in. The woman gave me plenty of sample cups, and suggested I try the Salted Caramel Pecan and the Pistachio, both of which were delicious. Then I come upon Varrick Street, it originates in the West Village where it is a continuation of Seventh Avenue and continues downtown through Hudson Square and TriBeCa until it merges with West Broadway where my office is. I passed through Little Italy and came upon Federal Hall, the site of Washington's inauguration as first President on April 30, 1789. From here you get an excellent view of the New York Stock Exchange with its splendid array of magnificent Corinthian columns and sculpted figures on the pediment symbolizing Commerce. The NYSE has grown to become the global marketplace it is today.I came upon the Stone Street Tavern which some of the DEC gang had stopped at several times for Happy Hour. “Lunch and brunch were fine, but you can’t run a restaurant on that alone," The Stone Street Tavern spills out into the cobble‑stone Financial District Street where Wall Streeter’s spend warm evenings sipping beers, taking shots, and mingling with their own.Basically, it's like being inside a Banker sardine can and some Wall Streeter’s call this tavern obnoxious. Why is it obnoxious? Because its weird, it has a Saturday bottomless brunch where Eggs Benedict is made with a pork chop. Day or night, imagine a never ending sea of slick‑backs in blue pin stripes getting sloshed. But they have very attractive female bartenders with big boobs.I board the “F” train from 2ndAvenue heading uptown. I noticed an empty seat between two large older Slavic speaking women wearing checkered head scarfs who were slightly facing each other having an animated conversation. In between them are their shopping bags taking up two seats. The train was already filled with people sitting and many standing when I boarded the train. The women clearly were not going to move their bags willingly unless someone asked and I was hoping for a fat woman to come barging onto the train and throw herself down upon their shopping bags. Oh, how I so wished someone would come by and give them an attitude or cause a bit of drama and humor by taking the seat in between these inconsiderate women. This is not the first time I’ve wished for something bad to happen to ill-mannered commuters. There have been many times I wished I could blow a smelly ass fart when some fat cow decides to squish me, or when standing in a crowded bus or train just so people can move away from me.Delaware River Canoe TripDick Paulson, Mid Atlantic Regional manager was the DEC Canoe trip Organizer. Kissing Bettie good bye, I left our home in East Orange for the long drive to Upstate New York and Narrowsburg. Dan Lucky and I drove north on picturesque Route 17 to Middletown, picked up RT. 84 to Port Jervis and onto Route 97, a narrow, windy, mountain cliff road, to Narrowsburg. Used in many television commercials for BMW automobiles, Route 97 provides views of precipitous cliffs falling hundreds of feet below to the Delaware River. Part of the road went through an area called Hawks Nest which is just a cliff hanging over the Delaware River one thousand feet below. When we arrived at the Narrowsburg campground, I quickly found out a Digital canoe trip was not a Boy Scout trip but an excursion into those crazy MASH days I enjoyed while in the Navy. I remember my first night, it was a below freezing evening with fierce winds blowing off the river, the cases of beer were stacked up five feet high, and we warmed ourselves around the bonfire made up from huge wood logs gleaned from driftwood. Large brown Army tents were set up around the roaring ten-foot fire and regardless of the fact the cold air was freezing our butts off, horse play started quickly, hard-boiled egg fights began, and we started bombing people from long distances and unless you got hit in the face, they didn’t hurt at all. Between drinking and the bon fire, we stayed relatively warm. The War dance was scheduled for Midnight and we were going to need more wood for the fire.Fires were going out and we needed more fire wood, wow, lucky someone brought a chain saw, even more lucky were the plentiful eight foot long picnic tables! They burned nicely but soon expired, then there were those telephone poles for the campground lights, and because they were impregnated in creosote, and when properly cut up, made a good camp fire and burned for a few hours. But it was May and in the Delaware River basin that meant temperatures in the low thirties, and there were hundreds of us needing more warmth, only a gigantic bon fire would keep us warm and allow us to do our Seven Nation Indian War Dance. We started another bon fire made up from trees we cut down, which was huge and glorious and it roared all night long keeping us warm, except it needed to be fed large amounts of wood every hour. We spotted the 18th century Fort Delaware just up the hill near the highway and the chain saw gang and a wood chopping crew went off and the fort was stripped of all its fire wood and ten pine logs were chained sawed down from the fort's wall construction itself and hauled down to our campsite. The War Dance was spectacular! Anyone would have thought we were real Indians what with the whooping and screaming. With a few beers in us, we were all warrior Apache Indians for the weekend, and our sensational War Dance celebrated our superior mental abilities, you know, us being computer people of Digital Equipment Corporation, and our spectacular leadership in drunkenness and tom foolery being practiced in the finest art forms. We passed the peace pipe (can you guess what was in it?) and took solemn vows toasted by more beer.Later, around 2:00 A.M., Frank Purcell and some of the guys from Maynard were found passed out drunk and desecrating our campground with their obnoxious presence. The mess had to be cleaned up, so after putting life jackets on them, we loaded the drunks into canoes and cast them off into the river and laying there in a stupor, they quietly drifted off and headed down the stream to unknown destinations. We did not know how dangerous these acts were, but the rule had been established earlier, pass out and you were heading down the river in a canoe without a paddle. There were a few campground privies, but they were soon stopped up with excrements, so we relieved our selves quietly on the grass near parked cars, their darkened hulks being good for a modicum of privacy while squatting.It turned out many of these cars belonged to families who were not part of our group and they soon left when they discovered someone defecating or pissing on the wheels of their car. It was so cold a lot of the guys slept in those huge plastic garbage bags to stay warm and puked in them while sleeping making a nasty mess to get cleaned up the next morning, but the showers were not working (someone had busted the water pipes to trying to get the camp toilets working) and so they had to douse them selves in the cold river.Of course, when you woke up in a pile of your own vomit, it got very smelly too. Well, what do you expect when one drinks five cases of beer a day and makes a bed from a garbage bag? The first night was a hellish night of drinking, hooting, hollering and by 3:00 A.M., every tent was mashed into the ground and every bottle of liquor or can of beer was gone, all two hundred cases.When the Bob Landers trucks arrived the next morning to take us and the canoes to Calicoon, their drivers were in a state of shock, all the picnic tables and telephone poles were gone and so were most of their other campground guests. The toilets were over flowing and excrements were all over the campground. Muttering to themselves how the ‘boss’ would have something to say about our destructive behavior. The trucks took us twenty miles upstream in Calicoon where we loaded our beer cases and food coolers into our forty-five canoes and took off. Some of the still drunk boozers capsized right there before we got to the middle of the river and salvage rights went to the fastest sailors to pick up the beer now laying at the bottom of the river.That taught us a lesson, so we tied the beer coolers down with ropes so if we were capsized, the beer would stay with us. Most Digital men are ex navy, so the first thing we did in our canoes was to rope in a mizzen mast, tie on plastic garbage bags for sails, build a catapult from a sliced rubber inner tubes (a few cars in the parking lot were missing their spare tires) and start a fire amidships to keep warm. Going down the river, we used our catapults to bombard each other with mud balls and T-shirt soaked in gasoline. Then we got up to ram speed ready to plough into every Digital canoe we met. Very quickly we found that it was too easy to tip over when you were by your self, and even though tied down, the cases beer of beer went into the deep, so we tied many canoes together and formed unsinkable flotilla ram teams of three or more canoes tied together. If you crashed into a rock, the canoe would turn sideways and the water pressure from the rapid current would wrap the canoe around the rock, flattening the canoe like a tin can run over by a truck. And you had to get your canoe back to Narrowsburg or pay for it, so the crews would stomp the canoe into shape as best as they could and proceed down the river, with crooked and bent canoes, in zig zag formations. We were a motley crew as we canoed down the river, we discovered hundreds of cans of beer on the bottom and claiming salvage rights, dived in the cold water for them. One of the more dangerous stunts we pulled was to charge each other and joust with tree limbs. We found the empty cardboard beer cases didn’t work to well as armor.Aside from arming our canoes with fire shooting catapults, the first couple of hours on the Delaware were quiet. You’ll be gliding in your canoe quietly enough to see all that nature offers. If you watch closely while on the Delaware River and you may see eagles, deer, ducks and much more. It is about two hours leisurely paddling in a canoe – an easy way to enjoy your day on the water before the white water in that awaited us in Skinner Falls.We canoed about 13 miles to Skinner Falls, a class five rapids and spent the day there. As you near the rapids, actually a series of three separate raids, you can see the "V" pointing downriver, indication of your route. The "V" pointing upriver indicates submerged boulders; there are many of these. The canoeist in the bow will earn his keep. We kneel in the canoe to give you more stability. If you haven't done so already, don your life jacket and good luck.We uncoupled the canoes and went through one at a time but the upper Delaware’s most ferocious white-water rapids were not easy to navigate and we discovered getting through without capsizing were next too impossible. Even though rocks were everywhere, no one got hurt as we portaged our canes back along the shore line and canoed through the Falls many times that day. When you've passed through the third rapids you've completed the most exciting stretch of white water.Our campground at Narrowsburg finally came across the bow. At Narrowsburg the river reaches its deepest point (113 feet), and, edged with high cliffs, begins its most remote segment to Barryville. We arrived back at our Narrowsburg campground tired and very hungry.We had a great day and learned that our friends who were cast off drunk the night before were all okay, they were found a little down the river from Narrowsburg on the Pennsylvania shore begging food at a General Store who did feed them. And they say the South is hospitable!?Sunday, the next day we completed our canoe trip. The next 17 miles to Barryville are a roller coaster of rapids, which in spring can take less than five hours to traverse. It was here we ended our canoe trip, but not without more canoe tipping by some wild and crazy guys determined that everyone goes home wet. Bob Landers had a restaurant at Barryville, so after we crawled out of the water soaking wet thanks to the dunkers, we had a steaming cup of coffee and burgers and hot dogs waiting for us. It has been an adventurous and beautiful three day excursion, what with the campsite activities and each section of the river being different and has its own personality. And more significantly, you've experienced a canoe trip of exhilarating beauty and solitude.Because we burned all the picnic tables and telephone poles and damaged Fort Delaware, we were banned from the Narrowsburg Camp Ground forever. The carnage embarrassed Dick Paulson and he wouldn’t organize any more canoe trips, so I organized them for the next twelve years, and often, I had more than 400 people in attendance. The next year I contract again with the Bob Landers people and they put us into the deep woods in the Narrowsburg area, but there were no privies (who needs them anyway), or water or picnic tables, but we made do, just be careful where you stepped. Bob Landers didn’t object to our cutting down trees for the bon fire so we could have our War Dance ceremony. It was great!A Walk on 7th Avenue to Wall StreetThe Penn Plaza neighborhood, loaded with tall office buildings and surrounding Madison Square Garden and sitting over Penn Station, was great for people watching. For mind breaks, you can also just turn right or left out Two Penn Plazas’ multiple partitioned glass doors and go about your business or sit on the veranda’s expansive patio ledges and meet people or just doze in the Sun. It’s a great place, I have met people from all over the world and many pretty young women and enjoyed conversations before going back to work.I walk a lot in Manhattan, about five to ten miles every day, which keeps me in great shape at my glorious Hollywood figure of 175 muscled pounds. I must admit I did cast a good street characture wearing my Fortune 500 salesmen uniform, a dark blue pin strip suit. Walking out Two Penn Plaza onto the granite veranda and down the stairs to 7th Avenue where the covered entrance to Penn Station beckon train travelers. Thousands of people scurry about on 7th Avenue going somewhere, maybe to one of the hundreds of nearby restaurants, or to Macy’s or for a quick nip at McCann’s Irish Bar on 33rd. Tourists are easily spotted as they gaze upward at Manhattan’s skyscrapers and head to the Empire State Buildings on 34th with cameras around their neck. Besides the gawking tourists, I always wonder where these crushing crowds of New Yorkers are going, what businesses are they on, what is their final destination.Today, I am going for quick Pepperoni Pizza slices at the street counter eatery across on 32nd and then take a walk to Digital’s office on Rector Street in the Wall Street Financial District servicing Wall Street. Along the way are endless Orange Juice stands, Pizza, delis and ethnic fast food eateries, and countless shops and boutiques and I have said it before, waking around Manhattan what with its colorful sights and exotic smells, you could be experiencing any street in Athens, Cairo, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Paris or London, as the languages and ambiance change from one block to another. And of course those authentic real deal Mexican eateries where you get Montezuma's Revenge from a severely burned asshole from enjoying their hot sauce. Someone told me Japanese and Indian food is hotter - they even pass out diapers.Broadway and Seventh Avenue is the main commercial thoroughfare that bisects the Village and I pass through my old haunt, Greenwich Village OK, and am in the middle of Christopher St and Sheridan Square. I used to take the subway from here ‑ it's marked with a big "M" on the map right in the middle of 7th Avenue. The 1 train stops here and as you get out of the subway, take a second to get your bearings. The streets are magic . . . people were heading to Bleecker Street and West 11 Street.Along the street, I saw businesswomen hurrying on high heels, as well as tourists taking pictures and locals stretching their legs in the garden. I realized that a trip at Wall Street was as sound as a sale of stocks here. Why not treat myself a cup of coffee? After the meeting, I hit for a coffee shop and immersed myself in the sunshine at the busiest area of New York City. Soon, it was time to go home, but memories flooded my brain, as in the past when in the Wall Street area, several of us sales folks would often go to dinner at Windows on the World the World Trade Center and go to the Comedy Club in Battery Park. From there it was easy to catch the path Subway to Hoboken and the train to MiddletownHanging Out With the WWF WrestlersI went to a few wrestling shows at Madison Square Garden. The Undertaker is perhaps the most iconic wrestler in the world behind Hulk Hogan, though his in-ring talent far outpaces the Hulkster’s. Jesse “The Body” Ventura is one of America’s greatest oddities. The former Navy SEAL has led a truly bizarre and fascinating life that’s taken him everywhere from the sets of Hollywood blockbusters to Fidel Castro’s offices. I always wondered about the strange and bizarre people at wrestling. Tonight at the right in the end zone of the ringside seats sat a bunch of Front Row wannabees. These guys made the worst signs in the history of wrestling and think that they were really funny. They made a sign that said, "Dutch Mantel looks like Cousin It of the Adams Family!" And the problem was that it was not funny and it looked like it was lettered by a five year old. The letters were less than a half an inch high and could not be read unless you were about two feet away. That night I was prepared and held up a sign that read in huge letters, "THEIR SIGNS SUCK!" With an arrow pointing at them. I know, I have no shame. You could hear the crowd roll backwards with laughter as everyone began to read the sign.This jerk come walking out into the arena that held matches by Flair, Valentine, Race and Theca wearing a big plastic hat with a fist on top. That is when I knew that all the WWF wrestlers were clowns at heart. That was the first time I ever saw Hulk Hogan in person. He is big: Height: 6'7" - Weight: 302 lbs. I was stunned when I met him and he asked how I was. I just looked at him with shock, so embarrassing and found he was just a normal person. Wrestlers are like Rock Stars, they play in different cities every night and are lonely and are disconnected from the general population. Their friends are other wrestlers who they spend every day in the gym with practicing their moves and falls. Their persona in the ring is not the real person.Later, we were at the Brother’s bar across from Madison Square Garden sitting in the back on the big Travertine tile patio with some WWF wrestlers having a conversation while we sipped some beer under blue umbrellas. Then one of the funniest things I ever saw happened. This redneck guy was sitting with his family of six kids and he was angry at Paul Jones for cheating at ringside. (He actually believed all that Tom Foolery was real)This guy was so hot he stood up and confronted Jones with his fists. Paul Jones stepped back made a hand signal and two bouncers picked this guy up and carried him out of the building with his legs kicking in protest. We sat at the bar eating and drinking for a while and then they invited me to go with them to their hangout on east 42ND Street. where Hell's Angels and High Steel union men felt comfortable. In another word's - 'Kick ass country.'The 42nd Street bar was really a hole in the wall type bar, with a single glass door with “Clancy’s” on it, just a non-descript entrance with a large room behind the dingy door. Not to many New Yorkers would come into a place that looked that dingy from the outside, but it was a safe home to the wrestlers.It got late and my group of new friends and I decide to grab some food at Chili's which is on the same street as IHOP. Inside Chilies they started to put on a show and scared the other customers to death. It was an act, the same stuff they do in the ring, but these men are big and mean looking and even I wondered if they were joking. They started berating each other, calling names like jobber and a jabroni and a punk and whatnot, asking which one gets on all fours, making a total scene when the manager comes over and threatens to call the COPs if we don't leave. So we leave and go to I-HOP down the street and everyone behaves because they are hungry and at least I got a pretty funny story out of it. Over time, I met almost 20 wrestlers and most of them were insanely nice and normal. I invited them to my Delaware River canoe trips but they never came.Escaping the Roof Top KillerManhattan is full of tall buildings with roof top parapet surrounds topped by slate tiles. Whenever people visit Manhattan, they worry that something is going to fall down from a building they are walking by some day, like during a big windstorm something heavy and lethal blowing off and hitting you in the head. Recently, a marble tile let loose from a 72‑story building on the East Side, but no one was injured. Years ago there were a lot of injuries from falling air conditioners but there was a new law passed with a specified type of bracket that must be used for widow air conditioners. I'm more fearful of walking near high‑rise apartments with balconies where children drop food on pedestrians. Kids were dropping eggs and other foods out the window trying to hit people on 34th Street the other night. Of course, crazy people could just as easily drop bricks if they're demented enough, but it never happens. I don't worry about it, it's just part of NYC life and not worth being paranoid over. Of course, be careful at construction sites.Well, a crazy person(s) was dropping bricks and cinder blocks from roof tops and purposefully killing people. By the time the NYPD responded, the killer was long gone, so all over Mid Town Manhattan people were afraid. Now everyone walked down the streets and watched the roof tops for anyone looking down and if they saw someone, immediately took it as the Mid Town cinder block killer. The police were running around with every report of someone on a roof, and even helicopters were being used to spot people on roofs.Steve Adrian, Dave Goodspeed, Ralf Nultmeir and Bill Leonard came to visit me in Manhattan and all they talked about during our meeting breaks was the Mid Town roof top killer. It was on the news constantly and even occupying national news. So far a few people had been killed and more injured. Just imagine what a cinder block dropped from a roof top would do to your head while walking innocently down the street. We decided to go out for lunch to one of my favorite restaurants on 34th Street, a small family owned place with a great lunch for around $5.00 plus coffee. We were walking down 34th and all my friends talked about was being bombed by the roof top killer. With great apprehension, they watched the roofs while I laughed at their silliness, after, there are tens of thousands of building in Mid Town, walking scared would do no good. All of sudden, Ralf shouted, “Watch Out,” we scattered and a cinder block came down and just missed Steve by inches. The roof top killer was 15 stories above us and trying to kill one of us. That brought us to attention fast as we ran down the street. I found a pay phone and dialed 911 for police and dozens of squad cars were there in less than a minute.Within a minute SWAT was there too. Big tough looking men looking like a Force Recon Marine unit with auto weapons were all over the place, the killer could not get away, but he on the roof and it would take awhile for the police to get there. Soon, a NYPD helicopter was hovering above the building, but the killer was gone. As I understand it from the evening news, the killer got clean away.We went to the restaurant and had lunch. Our spines still tingled with the closeness of the attack and we thanked God for saving us. Maybe watching the roof tops was the only way to keep safe, it sure saved us this time, but that is a hell of a way to walk around Manhattan. Eventually the killer just went away and he/she was never caught. Or maybe someone caught him in the act and took care of him. The East River is full of surprises off the 50th Street pier.1983 Delaware River Canoe TripIt was Friday morning, Memorial Day weekend was upon us again and so was the annual Memorial Day canoe trip. A bunch of us met at 8:00 a.m. at the McDonalds on Route 23 in New Jersey and drove into Port Jervis north on Route 97 toward Hawk's Nest which winds along the cliff hundreds of feet above the Delaware River. Below us we could see people in canoes, but the journey wasn't over. Another hour up and down lovely hills, sometimes the road followed the eastern banks of the river, other times it would veer off into the woods. Soon we passed Narrowsburg, and then, just about five miles further north, we made a quick left turn onto a gravel road into the woods toward Skinner Falls. At the bottom of the dusty hill was a campground named Lander's. We checked in, found our campsite and began to settle in. The Falls were roaring with white water and beautiful, the camp ground was filling up with canoers and the Digital group was near the water’s edge. You could tell because of the noise. Tape machines were playing a variety of music.Van Morison's moon dance and Stevie Wonder hits from the 70's, Nirvana and the Latin rhythms of Tito Puente, all competing at full blast across the large, treeless oval field sliced up into campsites. There was the clank of a horseshoe game at the north end of the field and a loud contest of Eastern European men in Speedos kicking a soccer ball at the south end.I organized the canoe trip with more than a hundred coming, from New England, the Mid Atlantic and the New York - New Jersey area. It wasn’t just Digital employees anymore, but neighbors and our friends from the Elmsford Diner were there too. The stack of beer was set up along with the tents and cook sites. Bon fires were started for the traditional Mid night War Dance. A little later, we took a walk around the campground. All the noise was drowned out from time to time by the freight trains which would pass by, blasting the horn so loudly that you thought the train was in the campground. The din continued into the wee hours.On Saturday some campers rented inner tubes from the Lander's store and walked into the river, wearing bathing suits and the mandatory life vests and river shoes. We jumped into our canoes just north of the bridge which crosses into Pennsylvania, and started paddling. As we passed under the bridge, I noticed the row of cliff‑swallow nests. The swallows do a great job keeping the campgrounds relatively free of stinging bugs. The river was high this year and the current swift, and we can hear the water at "the falls" as soon as we clear the bridge. Skinners’ Falls is a beautiful tumble of giant shale rocks and is about the whitest water you experience on the entire Upper Delaware. It's great fun to ride through the rapids, swim to the eastern shore and walk up onto the rocks, catch a few rays, then haul the canoes back upstream and do it again.Even if you don't want to get wet, you can enjoy sitting on the rocks and watching the canoeists and rafters pass by (and count how many capsize), relax with a picnic lunch and enjoy the rushing sounds of water.We camped again Saturday in Skinner’s Falls and Sunday canoed to Barryville and ate hamburgers at Landers Grill. Sunday afternoon we drove home with another great canoe trip behind us.Long Weekend at the Jersey ShoreI don’t like to get drunk, it is embarrassing and I don’t like the way I feel, especially if I am feeling nauseously sick and start throwing up. So, I usually take it easy when drinking and stick with beer, something I know and can handle. But there are exceptions. Like the last time I went to the Jersey Shore with some of my motley gang from the New York support group. We got rooms at a motel right on the beach, a dingy, old, smelly, dirty thing, but it was on the beach and close by was the broad walk and all those dance clubs and juke joint Dive Bars the Jersey Shore is famous for, the ones that cater to the New York City wild man types, you know, the crazy fun living and damn the torpedoes kind of weirdoes. Not that the Jersey Shore is all about drunks and audacious times. In fact, what I have always loved about the shore was how much it has to offer. If you wanna just chill out all day at the beach and call it an early night, well, that’s there for you. There are great food and fishing and rides for the kids and the young at heart. However, there is no denying that drinking plays a major part in the allure of Jersey Shore. Don’t ask me to explain, it just is. There’s not one person reading this right now who can’t at the drop of a hat recite a blow-by-blow account of a night that started with three cases of Miller Late. “And how about stories your secretary, “Mary actually was wearing a can on her head and we all went out to Casino Pizza.” And so it is when the DEC folks from Manhattan get together, it usually means mayhem on the beach.After a 60 to an 80-hour work week, going to the shore is like taking a trip back in time. Down at the shore, its OK to funnel Miller Light or shotgun a can of low grade lager and listen all night to Bruce Springsteen on the Boardwalk. It’s OK to hang with your buddies or business teammates and get dirty. We are deadly serious during the week on our high tech - high stress jobs, but young professionals can succumb to peer pressure, acting more like high school seniors than the leaders of tomorrow. Whether its LBI or Asbury Park, people come to the shore to forget about the working week and have fun. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” and for a bad summer and an even worse existence. It seems in order to get ahead today, you need to put in at least 60 hours a week and sometimes a trip to the shore can remind us who we were, who we are, and why we work so hard. There is so much going on at the shore, college kids, locals, Manhattanites, Long Islanders, Upstaters, tourists, conventioneers, and have you ever noticed how many young workers at the Jersey Shore speak with heavy accents? The pizza workers? The balloon game barkers? The boardwalk sales clerks? Well, there's a good reason why, they are foreign college students here on work visas for the summer. Think of it as studying abroad for a semester, but instead of studying, they sell Hermit Crab shells.It was a grinding week, and after work, four of us drove down from Manhattan and had just gotten into Sea Side Heights on a hot Friday night in July. We are going to meet more of the group later, it’s only 7:00 p.m. or so. We were in Tommy’s Volkswagen red convertible enjoying the weather and the warm breezes coming off the sea shore. We went to a party in Dimsum’s (he’s Russian) Sea Isle condo that had already been broken up by the police for loud Vesuvius noises and disorderly conduct. Well, if you can call one of the girls running around in the parking lot in her panties disorderly - we thought it was funny since she weighed more than 300 pounds and gulped down booze from two peanut butter jars half full of vodka as she ran. We knew it was vodka because she had the White Gold Vodka, Black Edition, Russian labeled bottle tucked into the rear of her panties. And she wasn’t even part of our group, probably one of those crazy college kids from Columbia U., but we were cheering her on when the police came and broke it up! So we turn the car around and head downtown when we got pulled over on Central. At this point we were completely sober, but in fairness to the police, I would have pulled us over too. We LOOKED like trouble. However, the police quickly realize that we are straight and are just about to let us all continue on our way, when one of the officers, looking at the license of Tommy, the driver and says, “And you’re Thomas Briglow, right? And Tommy replies, “That’s what the license says, doesn’t it, genius?” Bang. Pow. The next thing you know all four of us are being locked up and you know what for? PARADING WITHOUT A PERMIT. That was all they could really get us on.We went to the judge quick and were on our way after paying a $35 fine each. And believe me, we were using credit cards and didn’t have a $35 cash between us. Tommy didn’t learn his lesson and insulted the Mouse McCourt judge and ended up spending the night in jail. And he was driving and now we were walking!I called Dimsum who picked us up and took us to his condo in Seaside Heights where his buddies, Cardiff and D'Milz, were hanging out smashing a case of Red Bull. There was a crowd there, all from my New York Support Group waiting for us: there was me (Lutz), Vince Kaminski (Weed), Tom Wilder (Surfer), Ed Hubbard (Shooter), Ben Battle (Brownstown), his girlfriend Sinbad, Dave Shea (Eat Me) his girlfriend at the time Ram, Dan Lucky (Ukraine), John Fischer (Burpy) and the support group’s two acquaintances, Robo and Roxy from the Seaside Heights Diner. Dimsum had a completely stocked bar and we got a few drinks before going to the 5 O'clock Somewhere Bar on the Broad Walk which offers signature boat drinks to Land shark Lager beer. The lively vibe of the bar features “flair bartenders” whose cocktail serving performances are only overshadowed by the cocktail creations they serve. Next door is D'Jais, well known for its diverse atmosphere, which different kinds of music seven nights a week. From there it’s a short jump to the Crescent Bar where the Bikers hang out for a taste of the real nightlife. It was right next to Braca’s the movie theater where James Candy is playing now.The Crescent Bar welcomes motorcycle riders. A pool table hides in the back, while an open spot just the right size for a Country - Western band is left by the door. Christy, the bar tender, says the stereotype of the "wild biker bar," she said, just isn't true. "Everybody thinks that this is a rough place because bikers come here," she said. "But we've had so many people that will come in by themselves, or with their friends, and love it. "They say the men are the most respectful, they feel safe, and the women say that this is the only place they'll come to by themselves," she said. A bouncer is on hand on the weekends to help with crowd control, and no "colors" (a biker's vest, which is adorned by club patches that identify the group of club the biker rides with) are allowed in the bar to avoid possible confrontations. Because the colors identify what club a person belongs to, they can quickly lead to trouble if rival gangs show up at the same spot. Christy says that riders are allowed to leave their colors on their bikes, turn them inside out, or put them in the back room; many outlaw clubs' members, however, are not allowed to take their colors off, and so will go somewhere else.Last month when we were here we went to Braca’s to see a Mel Brooks movie! We buy our tickets and, thanks to the 15 minutes of previews, haven’t missed a frame. The air conditioning is barely working, but each of us has two bottles of Red Bull. What could be better? Well, I don’t know if it’s the heat or the fact that we have been drinking for hours at that point, but the next thing I know were being woken up by an usher. The movie is two thirds over. The usher appears to be 15 years old and he’s ticked off. He sees the Red Bull bottles on the floor with his trusty flashlight and says to us with an all knowing smirk, like he really nabbed us, ”Uh, you didn’t buy that wine in here did ya? LIKE THIS THEATER SOLD POPCORN, GOOBERS, AND MD20/20! We got thrown out, but the story lives on. That usher today? I think he is working for the CIA.Tonight we are going to hang out all night at D'Jais - the bars are open until 5:00 A.M. - on the wooden dance floor right next to the beach. With sounds ranging from live classic rock & roll, reggae bands and the TriState's best DJ’s spinning the latest dance music. Few can resist the urge to jump up and boogie when Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” starts pumping through the big sound system’s speakers.Sea Side Heights is a mixed bag of nationalities, but for the most part, the majority of its summer help hails from former Soviet countries. One of the guys at DEC operates a family owned boardwalk businesses and find themselves becoming friends with their workers, and hanging out with them all summer, so when our support group go down for a few days in the summer, we are bombarded with a new slew of Olgas, and Ludas, and Soushas, and Natashas, whose names and faces I have to try to remember. But never before have I witnessed something like I did tonight. And Oh My God was it "different." First of all, they were not lying . . . besides the bar tenders, my six friends and I, were the only Americans in the place. And trust me, you could tell, just little things like the clothes and the hair styles were just . . . different.There was loud House and Techno pounding through the sound system, and a thin layer of fog machine smoke filled the air. Bodies threw themselves across the dance floor in odd and awkward movements there were no fist﷓pumpers here and the stage and speakers were stood on by both guys and girls who attempted to entice the crowd with bizarre dance moves. When the Russians come to dance, they come to DANCE! They were spinning and jumping and skipping and sweating and they just never let up, it looked more like a slam dance pit in the late 70's than anything close to what we're used to.Ukraine was pissed because he didn’t like Russians and was on one of his ‘try anything shooter all night vibes and he was filling his mouth with anything ranging from vodka to some fairy stuff that tasted sweet, like a Singapore Sling. Well when Ukraine gets all liquored up on shots, he becomes the most generous person in the world and buys rounds for everyone and rounds were bought. I’m sure some lucky, unsuspecting bastards standing next to me got a few shots and a hug from me during the night. Basically I got drinking – I had three Long Islands, two Sex on the Beach, and after that I was totally drunk barely walk out of the bar. Anyway, at this point, I’m flying on a new previously undiscovered drunken cloud. Then came that unavoidable feeling. I walked to the bathroom and sat in front of the toilet. Two orange, chunky pukes later, I walked out back into the bar.We sober up a bit and head out on the beach with the sand crabs for a swim, to cool off sober up a little. Then soaking wet, it’s to the nearest bar on the beach. There was this really hammered dwarf who would repeatedly stagger over to the bar, get a bartender to lean all the way over to hear him and then whisper, "I'm sorry I'm a little drunk" before exploding with laughter and then staggering back to the dance floor. A coworker and I were chatting about something on the news and I said "Yeah, at least it's not Russia!" Suddenly from the end of the bar a massive woman with a thick accent yells, "VAHT YOU SAY ABOUT RRRUSSIA?" She then started regaling the entire bar with stories of the Soviet glory days, babbling on in a crazy Bond villain accent about how great everything used to be. She proceeded to finish her margarita, left a $10 on the bar, and walked out. We then noticed that she'd peed all over the stool. We ended up throwing away the stool. I can think of crazier stories that happened that night, but this one stands out as one of the funniest scenes. I’m leaning against the bar talking to Brownstown and Ukraine about something unimportant when some girls sitting down next to us start laughing. We turn to check out what was so funny when we see this goof ball dancing it up on the dance floor. This guy was wearing some weird pants, a sparkling silver shirt and a skull and crossbones bandana. Even as hammered as I was, I knew this guy looked ridiculous. So without much thought, I made my way over behind him and started dancing behind him in a mocking way. My dancing is a mockery in itself but the fact it was geared at this guy had my friends laughing hysterically by the bar. Pretty soon a few others took notice in this ugly scene and found it funny. Sure enough, my target eventually caught on and kept trying to catch me doing whatever was making these people laugh around him. Like the idiot I was, the second he’d turn to me I would stop moving completely and scratch my head as if I had some intense idea I was trying to wrap my brain around.Closing time was around the corner so we got out of the bar and went to a pizza place on the Broad Walk. I managed to order a slice of pepperoni and bumped into an old buddy from my days at the New School in Greenwich Village, shot the shit (maybe he understood some of it, who knows) while they heated up my slice, made my way up the six stairs to join my buddies on the deck over looking the street and tried to sit down on a flimsy plastic chair. Now, at this point, everything went into slow motion. I sat on the plastic chair, which could not handle my drunken way of sitting, propelling me backwards. My slice of pizza went airborne, and in the middle of my fall, a convertible filled with four smoking hot girls drove by. I landed on my backside next to my slice of pizza and the sound of four of the hottest women I had ever seen laughing their asses off at me as they drove off in green Mini Cooper car. This upset me. What the hell kind of chair is this? Unfortunately, most of my angry remarks were directed at a bunch of police officers about ten feet away. Someone managed to hail a cab before I really got us all into a bucket of shit and started us on our way back to motel. As it turns out, we didn’t have enough for the full fare and this jerk off cabbie didn’t trust us enough to let us off at a bank (I might have played a role in that). He dropped us off a good ten minutes from our motel. I got out of the cab and promptly passed out on someone’s lawn.Now, this is the last I remember from the night. I blacked out the moment I stepped out of that cab. The rest has been told to me or I pieced it together. I woke up the next morning completely reclined in the passenger seat of a minivan parked in a random person’s driveway. I had no idea whose van this was, I didn’t recognize the house that was towering in front of me and I barely recognized the environment. What was even more alarming was that I was wearing nothing but my boxer-briefs and my socks. Where the hell are my clothes and it’s nearly 7:00 A.M. On the front steps of the house are all my clothes, neatly folded. My shoes are placed together right in front of my clothes with my wallet and lighter sticking out of them.That’s why I hate drinking and don’t do it. Except a little socially, but I never get drunk, well, except on my DEC canoe trips, but you are supposed too then! Brown Town is trying to be celibate and even Burpy gets no loving when the lady he picked up at Karma is found to be indisposed for that time of the month. Shooter gets one of the Princeton DEC secretaries to come down and they hook up. After few more nights in Seaside Heights there were no more drunken episodes or trips to the police station.Its Sunday morning, I rented a Jeep and I am heading home and it’s pouring down rain, I’m lost out on the edge of the county proper (only Jersey marshland beyond) somewhere near Perth Amboy and I’m just trying to find the way back to the Garden State Parkway and I think I almost have. I make a slow right turn on a slick surface street and WHAMMO! Out of nowhere this other car comes right at me and I plow into the ditch and I start to see jail in my very near future. I stagger out of my rental car, my forehead bleeding from an open cut above my eye and I look like I’ve just gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. This next part is a bit of an illustration into why alcohol in the system from the previous night, combined with a naturally outgoing personality can be a problem.So the cop (all I remember was one Highway Patrol officer) asks me if I’ve been drinking. I slur out my denial in obvious screwed-up tongue-tied fashion, the crash has taken its toll on my senses. He asks me a couple of more times. I admit to having drinks the night before, and he whips out the Breathalyzer, but remember, I haven’t been drinking for at least eight hours, I’ve been driving around now for a while, I’m a fairly big guy at 180 lbs. so the Breathalyzer likely doesn’t go off. They ambulance driver tries to “good cop bad cop” me into admitting any drugs I’ve taken because he’s “just wants to know.” They load me into the back of an ambulance and take me to the hospital where the dreaded blood test is done. Then I go to sleep for a few hours. When I wake up, I am alone in a hospital room. I am craving a Bettie Jean (my wife) toasted cheese sandwich with bacon and tomato and am still pleasantly buzzed from the percoset pain killer they gave me, I can see a long year of lawyer’s fees, hassles with my license, and having to drive a cheap car that will make me look like a jerk, and having no farther CAREER prospects whatsoever. But there are no COPs here waiting to take me to jail. I walk out of the hospital about 3:00 P.M. and call Tommy at his motel, maybe he is out of jail now. I drive home to East Orange and feel into bed.Monday morning my hung-over head and dilapidated body was rudely awakened by Bettie who asked me “what the hell had I been up too?” I mumbled something about being with my “boys” at the Shore and we drank to much.” Well, she knew I was there but to come home in this condition worried her. She told me that thieves had stolen a bunch of stuff from our garage last night. The kids bikes, a cheap lawnmower, a foot scooter and some sound equipment someone had been storing there were taken. I ran downstairs in a panic to find my garage doors wide open, it looked like the thieves had done us in. Except for the kids bikes, the stuff that was stolen was no real loss. That was a hell of a way to cap the weekend off. Must have happened after I came home? I was terribly dehydrated and still feeling queasy and drank lots of water and had a big breakfast with bacon, potatoes, whole wheat bread and eggs. I was still to messed up to drive to work so I took the buss into from East Orange to Penn Station. Vince was sitting in my One Penn Plaza office waiting for my appearance and he got some hot black coffee for me. I asked him about Roxy, the waitress from Sea Side Heights who got drunk with the rest of us. He said she did get drunk but didn’t have a drunk driving story, she wouldn't do something like that. Vince grinned! Now, giving a blow job to the driver, driving while switching places behind the steering wheel with her boy friend while they were both are undressing while going 60 mph, THAT she has done . . .Damn, why do I worry so much about people? It's my Irish heritage I think. Only 1/4 per cent but it can be dominant when I feel for people. I still feel wasted and know that exercise is good and plan on walking down to our Wall Street office this morning. I will stop off along the way and get something to eat at the my favorite Greek Dinner on 14th street.P.S. I get the police report about two weeks later. The box he’s supposed to check if you’re drunk isn’t. And the box your supposed to check if there are drugs in your system isn’t. And the box that he’s supposed to check if you had an open container isn’t checked either. The box you check for racial ethnicity I wrote in Irish. Officer O'Herlihy winked when he handed me the ticket. I love those Jersey COPs. "Hath and begonia"Night Out on the Town in Tarrytown - ElmsfordOne of my Massachusetts friends came down from Steve Adrian’s account management group in Maynard to see what I was doing with my big accounts, seems I had got a reputation for solving problems and doing some great things with making money with strategic accounts. After work we headed to an Irish café in Greenberg and reminisced about our days in the Cold War Navy. I guess that is the reason I drank too much, telling my ‘Sea Stories’ - I got s million they are true! We drank a wide range of alcohol ranging from beers to whisky to rum to tequilas and impressed by our drinking skills the bar tender gave us a few complimentary shots. I was thinking, what was wrong with me, I don’t drink like this, I hate getting drunk, but I guess there are some days where the whole world plots the stage to screw you royally. One of alcohol’s most beloved (and also most regretted) side effects is lowered inhibition. Simply put, you don’t care to stop and think about what you’re doing before you do it. The last tequila we drank did the magic trick and I puked on the bar counter. Ugh! I somehow managed to control myself and ran to the washroom tumbling and falling. I ate some hard boiled vinegar soaked eggs and pickle pigs feet soaked in piss (it seemed) to fill my stomach and felt better. My friend ate nothing. I paid the bill and we moved out. It was then show time at the Westchester Theater, a Lion King Broadway Review was playing tonight. Albeit hammered, we bought our tickets and secured our seats.The show started and my friend puked on the person sitting next to him. Even though tipsy, I couldn't stop myself from laughing and within minutes we were politely asked to leave the theater by a six-foot six 300 pound bouncer with dread locks and gold teeth. I knew of him from some of my hanging out nights in Westchester, met him once, he was gay but loved to fight and kick ass and get you to beg for your life. I heard he was a Force Recon Marine in Viet Nam. Ain’t going to mess with him, that’s for sure. Drunk on alcohol we reached the parking lot and ‘bang’ he did it again, this time it was massive, he puked all over my car’s trunk. We sat in the car for a while and decided to get some coffee at the Elmsford Diner. After a long night of downing booze nothing hits the spot like a big, hot meal. We sat there for an hour drinking coffee and I got something some burgers to eat too. I paid the bill but my friend had disappeared and then the security guards bought him from the washroom where he lay under the stinky urinal semiconscious. Those guards surrounded us like we were some most wanted terrorists caught red handed and told us to leave - or else! That night we slept in the car way in the back of the Elmsford Diner’s parking lot. The next morning the COPs hammered on the window with their night sticks, woke us up and told us to get the hell out of there. We went back to the office where I cleaned up in the wash room and my friend slept in the car. Thank God I kept fresh under wear, a shirt and a tooth brush with paste in the car - something I had been doing for years while working in the City and New Jersey. My friend recovered later, and I took him to the White Plans airport to catch his plane back to Boston. He told me that he had a great time in Westchester and would spread the word around in Maynard for visitors to see me when they hit town. Huh? I don’t need any more of that!Tonight I am going right across the parking lot from the office to the Marriott Hotel into a club called Gambits. It always had the quintessential mile long line of office workers on the make looking to get in. The club featured 2 separate dance floors across multi level seating, and went heavy on Video Music Programming. The clientèle was generally the 25+ crowd. As such the music was generally Top 40 Dance mixed in with a lot of high energy classic disco. I wasn't going to drink . . . but damn it . . . I did and slept in the office that night.Hanging Out in White PlainsEver since I transferred to New York City in 1968 with all its social opportunities, I have been the boss and ensured that my crew went out on the town to relax and bound together. You couldn’t do that in Norfolk what with segregation and absolutely nothing to do, but in the North, especially New York City and its environs, there are thousands of things to do and people to meet. Now I am in Westchester County which is New York's second -wealthiest county and is the seventh wealthiest county nationwide. There is Tarrytown and White Plains and dozens of small towns to frolic in with White Plains and Yonkers being the best. Even the hotel shave clubs and dancing and there are many hotels catering to the huge corporate headquartered business community in Westchester.So, you will see lots of black and white ladies in short skirts, braless halters, with big rear ends (mostly black) and big titties (mostly white) twisting, exuding sexual probabilities and twisting their stuff away all night long. A casual observer will notice right off the bat that drunk white people are a trip. Yeah, I will admit that Black people are loud by nature – face it, they are – but drunk white people take being loud to a whole new level. Especially the chicks, and they do all that kissing and tonguing of each other. Black chicks don’t do that, they turn their booty on the men and ‘shake it.’ How do I know this? Because I’ve been around the block a few times had some close encounters with them, and let me put this out there up front, I’m wary of drunk white people. It goes back to my Military Police days while in the Navy. Yeah, there is a difference in the races, pride is the number one killer of Black men between birth and death while alcohol and loosing money is the same for white people. And the bar tender says all white people go all Napoleon when they’re drunk and he has never seen a Black cat who has ever ordered a White Russian, because it has milk … and everyone knows Black folks are lactose intolerant. See, how much you learn when you frequent a bar?Are you looking for a hot night club spot in Northern Westchester? Well look no further than Teddy's Nightclub in the Holiday Inn in Mt Kisco only 30 minutes from White Plains. Nearly every night of the week there is some fun activity taking place at this establishment. Some nights there are top notch DJ's spinning music from the 50's to the present. Every Thursday there is a sizzling Salsa Party for a mere $10 admission price. On Friday Night's there are Red Hot Latin Dancing Parties with DJ Sala and many of the best bands in the area. Other night's fabulous area bands like Over the Top and The Show Time Dance Band perform.Whatever Tarrytown has for entertainment, White Plains has much more, and all aligned to the Manhattan style diverse night life in the form of huge night clubs and all night dancing with Blacks, Latinos and ethnics of every stripe. I found a raunchy club in White Plains off Mamaroneck Ave in White Plains that caters to diverse racial and social economic groups, where the New York Jets Football team hangs out, where the ugly looking Bouncers are bigger than the WWF wrestlers and they don't play either . . . what they say goes! Where all the bad ugly black dudes hang out looking for pussy or a fight, and where the beautiful people from all the office parks come to get dirty and dance the night away with some of the meanest mother fuckers in New York. And I will tell you from experiences, some of the smallest men are the best fighters and will take a big man down in a second, so watch your P & Qs.Tonight the DEC crew and I are going to White Plains and hanging at the Lazy Lounge, a joint that has live blues and jazz on Wednesday nights, live rock bands Thursday and Friday nights, and a DJ who specializes in Latin-style music and dancing Saturday and Sunday nights. With its 5,500﷓square﷓foot dance floor and state-of-the-art lighting and sound system, the Lazy Lounge Nightclub can accommodate hundreds of Westchester partiers which tend to be an integrated corporate crowd from the office parks in the area. The bar/restaurant had an extensive beer and wine list and also served salads, sandwiches and burgers, pizza and pasta. It's a good place for anyone.Sweetwaters & Mc KeilsAfter the theater I went to Sweetwaters, one if my favorite West Side hangouts for an evening of Jazz entertainment and hand with my celebrity friends. The Broadway show players hung there and I had made friends with many of them and also lots of Hollywood and musician types. I had met so many great entertainers, the cast of Dream Girls and Police Academy like Jennifer Holiday and Marion Ramsey were there tonight and were my friends. Sweetwaters had a huge circular bar sitting next to large dance floor with a orchestra. Famous entertainers performed there, some nights it was Jazz, others it R & B. Joe, the bar tender knew everyone and the minute I walked in he said. ‘Hey Jerry, the usual,” which was always a Miller Light beer I would nurse for hours. Steven Tyler from Arrowsmith sat at the bar and I had a drink with him. Steven is really quite an intelligent man with a very interesting extroverted personality. Tonight the cast of “La Cage aux Follies” was there celebrating some award they had just won. The Broadway show was a musical written by Harvey Fierstein. The musical was copied from a French play of the same name and focuses on a gay couple. Marion introduced me around. I always stood out in a New York bar what with my suit and tie Wall Street business orientation where most New Yorkers dress casual for work and more down for the bar crowd.Next I went to McKeil’s, a neighborhood hang out type of bar, the usually type found all over Manhattan. It was a comfortable place to hang your hat for an evening of pool, darts and card playing with your friends. McKeil’s served ups food like hard boiled eggs, hamburgers and salad if you were hungry. The clientèle were typical New Yorkers, very racially and ethnically diverse, educated professionals and lots of talented performing arts types with plenty of artistic weirdoes too, out for an evening of fun and relaxation. Plenty of desirable women too and you could meet your hearts desire if you were looking. But beware, New York women were intelligent and no nonsense types that could read you like a book if you were soulless and out on the make. So, be prepared to talk about your world view, travel experiences, current events, art, or the theater, but stay away from race, politics and religion if you got a lot of prejudice in you. Bigots and homophobia and preachy types don't work in New York, where people are basically altruistic, worldly and a liberal bunch who stay from right wing people with unforgiving opinions on sexual orientation, minorities, the poor and the unfortunate. New Yorkers are more forgiving and Christ like than most Bible thumpers I have run into who tend to be very judgmental and idiotically "right" about all things.Jerry Foster - Betchel Corp., East Orange HeadquartersI met Jerry Foster at the Royal Inn in East Orange, New Jersey and spent several weeks with him. He was on vacation and stayed in the New York area, this time at the Royal Inn which was close to Newark and Manhattan. Jerry was one of the most interesting persons I ever met. He was a Civil Engineer, an ex CIA agent, spent seven years with the CIA in Viet Nam and learned to speak French and Vietnamese.He couldn’t tell me what he did for the CIA in Viet Nam, but since then he got a job with Betchel (Who had an office in East Orange) and traveled the world assisting third world governments build infrastructures like water, sewer systems, bridges, and roads. The CIA taught him French but he also learned to speak Arabic, Swahili, Chinese and Japanese, with a smattering of Italian and German. He had been stationed in various West African countries for 12 years and knew the area well, had assignments in Kenya, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and South Africa, and lived in Morocco for several years. His wife was Japanese and he was waiting for a new assignment. Wow!Jerry gave me a course on Africa. He said they were lousy nation builders but excellent village builders, they watched out for their own at that level, and that is what their society successfully revolves around - is villages. He said the women, who are not suffering from decease, starvation or sexual abuse are extremely beautiful, sexy and were great dancers, but the men were lazy and poor soldiers, and the women did most of the work. But he liked Africans and said it was hard not to like them at the personal level.They were warm and generous and had a great sense of humor, but at the national level their governments were corrupt and they were ineffective as nations and frequently involved in civil war based on old racial tribal animosities. Jerry said the Arabs are the ones to watch out for, the Muslim religion can get a hold on them and they go off on a crazy and violent Jihad, and they can be very cruel and terroristic. Usually more modern than black Africans, but more corrupt, they treat their women terribly, even worse than Black Africans. Jerry said Black Africa is all about tribes, clans and super natural earth religions and the culture revolves around voodoo, sex, music and dancing and it is vibrant and exciting.He said the Arab culture revolves around ancient animosities between Shite and Suni and weather they live in the 9th or 15th century. Jerry loved the Black Africans and didn’t like the Arabs and thought Muslims were going to give the world big trouble. Jerry had tons of stories about living in Africa. He was in Ethiopia when a Muslim terrorist tried to hijack a plane. The Ethiopian security forces captured him on the plane, put a towel around his neck and cut his throat, the towel soaking up the blood. He told about being in Malaysia when the police caught six Australians shipping drugs and they hung them in the public square while he watched. He said it was not a pretty sight. Jerry talked about African women, how sexy and desirable they are, and how tempted he was so many times. He talked about living in Morocco, a Muslim country where women are separated from men, and virginity is held in high esteem, but sex is still available. They sneak around and do it up the rear instead of the vagina. And male homosexuality in Muslim lands is rampant. After two weeks, Jerry left and I lost tack of him, but what a great experience to know him!Newark’s Penn Station African ExpressNewark’s Penn Station [with the same name as Manhattan’s massive Penn Station], was a major hub for all New Jersey and New York trains connecting Manhattan with all points to the North, East South and West. Amtrak, Metro North, Jersey Central, and various short line trains all used Newark’s Penn Station for their hub connections to New York City, the Jersey Shore, western New Jersey, Upstate New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Additionally, Penn Station had subways and buses spreading the transportation network even farther into surrounding cities and throughout Manhattan.Newark and its immediate suburbs are heavily populated with Blacks, Italians, and Portuguese while the out lying, more wealthy areas, are populated with middle class Whites and Blacks and multi nationals of every stripe, however, New York City commuters euphemistically named the trains from Newark to Manhattan the “African Express” since people of color were the over whelming presence on the 20 minute train ride. For the most part, the Black, Spanish, Asian and Indian women on the trains were ‘chicked’ up with the latest fashions and had striking figures, which often enticed commuters into developing warming relationships. This could be quite disconcerting to the non New York travelers, those used to white only social associations, but to the native New Yorker commuter, more used to exciting journeys with colorfully exotic people, it was an enjoyable tour de force of people watching and hedonistic thoughts. “My God, did you see that one?” Smiling, with high heels, split dress and huge T And A! Occasionally, inner city dredges would complicate the scene, but that was not very often as they tended to use Port Authority buses for commuting.When riding the train with friends, we would count the number of times we feel in love, or lust as you wish, during the short train ride with typical counts being in the hundreds - not bad for a twenty minute ride. I think the extraordinary number of attractive people working in Manhattan was the result of the desirability of the big Apple’s life style for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, and any seeking adventure, economic opportunity and excitement. All in all, commuting to Manhattan could be like an arousing street tour of many foreign countries, all at the same time within a short ½ hour boarding and train ride experience. Walking the streets of Manhattan merely increased the number of attractive people by millions.Peppermint Lounge - Central Avenue, Orange, NJOne of my favorite hangouts was the Peppermint Lounge, located on Central Avenue in Orange a Newark suburb, and one of the best entertainment and dance clubs in Northern New Jersey. There were activities galore, and supplementing the house dance band, Tuesday nights were for Jazz Jam Sessions, Wednesdays and Thursday nights for amateur singing and stand up comedy and an occasional visit from celebrities. Many famous Black entertainers who made their fame making hit records, doing television shows and Hollywood movies came from the Newark area, so they frequented the Peppermint as well as the New York Giants football team. Everything from Gladys Knight, Minnie Ripperton, and Patti Labelle could be expected to share the stage. As I walked into the Peppermint, to my right was the oval shaped bar that would seat one hundred people, and around that were tables with chairs for another hundred. The Peppermint had two dance floors surrounded by tables and chairs, both seating more hundreds, surrounded by small auxiliary bars where waitresses scurried from to accommodate the crowds gathered off the main bar served by beautiful bar maids. The women working in the Peppermint had to be professional and they all wore short dresses and supportive halters, all to entice the fantasy of the young men who pinned away for a secret romance. Cigarette vending machines and juke boxes in dance parlors were sprinkled around the premises. The house band was in front of the main oval bar and located in front of the stage where amateurs performed hoping for a talent scout to discover them, and sometimes they were discovered and made famous.Nathan C. Heard - Howard StreetI sat next to an older man one night and talked with him. I found him to be extremely interesting and knowledgeable about Civil Rights, the Black experience, and the world in general. Turns out he wrote the book ‘Howard Street’ which I had just read and which I found gritty and very interesting. And because I had lived in the neighborhood (up the street) from Howard Street on South Orange avenue, found it to be relevant to my life. Howard Street is about a street of doomed souls ‑ whores, junkies, pushers, winos, thieves and corrupt COPs. This novel relates and entwines individual stories revealing a community whose lives and aspirations are tempered by poverty and the omnipotence of drugs. It turns out that Nathan Heard, serving time for armed robbery, was released Christmas Eve on the strength of this book, which also changed the rest of his life. He taught creative writing at Rutgers; had a column in the New York Times in the 70's; acted in Blaxploitation films; worked as a jazz drummer; and wrote another well‑received novel, Cold Fire BurningMy Friend Joe FrazierMy personal favorite celebrity friend was the world’s champions’ boxer, Joe Fraser, whom I spent many a night solving the problems of the world. He loved reminiscing about his boxing career and fights with Mohammad Ali and the exciting ‘Thrila in Manila fight.’ In 1971, one of my customers, Reuters, had extra tickets, so along with some guys from the office, I went to see the fight of the century, the promotional nickname given to the first boxing match between champion Joe Frazier (26-0, 23 KOs) and challenger Muhammad Ali (31-0, 25 KOs), held on March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The fight itself became something of a symbol of the country. Leading up to the fight, Ali (who had denounced the Vietnam War) had refused induction into the U.S. Army in 1967, leading to his being stripped of his title and barred from fighting for three years. Ali became a symbol of the anti establishment movement, while Frazier became a symbol of the conservative, pro-war movement.Fifteen years later when I was hanging out at the Peppermint Lounge in East Orange, New Jersey, I met Joe Frazier. I was getting a pack of cigarettes from the machine by the juke box and there he was. He asked me “Walcha you doing here White Boy?” I said, “Same thing as you Joe, having a good time.” We sat together and talked for hours about his fights and his gym in Philadelphia where he retired. I liked Joe. He was a gentleman and good man of the first magnitude, and it showed all over him, what with his decent bearing and sense of humor.I frequented the Peppermint Lounge every week for years and always there was Joe and we would sit together at the bar and talk about life in general and his career. He had a fateful destiny type problem with Ali, their careers crisscrossing all the time in magnificent fights, and Ali being the rebel and Joe being the patriot, but he respected Ali and never said a bad word about him. He was one helluva man!Royal InnHowever, during the 1980s when Bettie and I moved 80 miles away to upstate New York, my proverbial overnight hangout was the Royal Inn on Evergreen Street in East Orange. From there, I could visit all the clubs in the Newark area and get to public transportation the next day. Since I traveled around the USA constantly, the Royal Inn was a convenient layover spot for my business trips when I needed to fly out Newark Airport or take the Amtrak Train from Penn Station to Washington.The Royal Inn was home base and the entertainment center for the local business community, the criminal justice system players of police, correction, judges and lawyers, both prosecution and defense. Doctors and nurses from the hospital were there too, along with local sportsmen of the Newark area. The Royal Inn was known as the only seriously integrated white collar bar in the Newark area and consequentially attracted many out of town players seeking racially integrated adventures.James Almos and Dianne Warwick often made appearances along with their entourages. I put my friend Marion Ramsey who played ‘Hooks’ in the “Police Academy” movies onto the Royal Inn and she brought her friends over from the casts of several movies and Broadway plays.MikeMike was the bartender at the Royal Inn for as long as I went there, which was more than 20 years. He was a good-looking Italian, tall, with a rough voice and pleasant personality. I thought he must use a beauty parlor to keep his pompadour hair so black and groomed - I bet his hair was actually gray and he was in his sixties, but he looked like forty.Mike’s claim to fame was his ability to get along with anyone and serve drinks to a vast myriad of people (Blacks, Whites, street or business, drunks, suits, etc.), with such an honest verve that I felt as if I were sitting in front of a PHD study of human behavior. He could listen to the gripes, sad stories and anecdotes of everyone with equal verve, even on a very busy night, and he gave everyone his full attention.Mike told stories of some real characters. About two months ago, he flagged this Elvis impersonator. He couldn't find his coat, so he called the police in the middle of Karaoke night demanding that the bar be shut down.Recently this guy came in, he was a transsexual transvestite bisexual cross‑dresser. He had an operation to be a girl, dressed as a guy and was trying to pick up anybody. He was from Namibia, too, so he spoke this click language. Nobody had a clue what he was saying; plus, he was drunk. I guess he had his bases covered, but he really went to a lot of extremes to do that.If you don't know how to handle people and make them feel special, or listen to them or meet whatever needs they have when they walk in and sit down at your bar, then you will never prosper at this job. Being a counselor, confidant and a friend all at once is required for this position. To really be successful at this job you have to be a people person with common sense.Driving Home Late at Night and the WWFIt was 10:00 P.M., I had worked late on an RFP for the NYPD NYNEX submitted and I was tired. On the drive home, I pulled off Route 17 in New Jersey into this little dank and seedy dinner to get a bite to eat. I don't know if you're familiar with some of the neighborhoods in northern Jersey filled with Mickey Spillane characters, where rough neck motor cycle bars, strip joints and cheap motels with big neon signs permutated the area, so let's just say they are not the ideal places to drive down and stop off late at night looking like you just came from a Wall Street cocktail hour. Nevertheless, in the land of levis and black leather, dressed in my white shirt ensconced in a blue sharkskin suit and Boston brome shoes, I risked life and limb because I couldn't make the one hour drive back home without some greasy eggs, rock hard bacon, and cold orange juice first. I don't know what the name of the diner was, but there was a giant neon sign that said "Lookers." It turned out that "Lookers" was actually the strip joint place next door that "only adults are allowed into."I immediately noticed across the restaurant three large men in black leather biker outfits and heavy motorcycle boots. They had ear rings and WWF on their black leather jackets backs and I took them to be professional wrestlers like I see in Madison Square Garden. I went to the men’s room and ran into a giant coming at me, looking very serious, walking sideways to get down the narrow hallway leading to the restrooms. He was also dressed in black leather, was about 6 feet tall and had to weigh 350 lbs. After I finished my meal and was on the way out I said hi to the four large men, they simply smiled and invited me over to their table. I didn’t follow wrestling good, but I recognized a few of these men. Sgt. Slaughter played really mean in the ring but he really was nice in person, anyway, I definitely wouldn’t want to meet him when he is doing his mean ass hole acts in the ring. We sat and talked for a while and they couldn't have been any nicer A waiter came by to give them more coffee and you could tell when he was trying very hard not to piss on himself in front of these hard tattooed men, and Tito Santana says, with a serious, pissed off look: "Where is your boss?" The waiter pointed to the closest one of the owners and hauled ass out of there. The owner walks up and it turns out he is another professional wrestler and looks much bigger than he did on TV. Unlike his terrifying ring persona, Abdullah (real name Larry Shreve), he is very polite and soft-spoken and they all had a big laugh. The moral of the story is if you act scared you are inviting to be scared.The best of all was, obviously, “Macho King" Randy Savage. The first thing that surprised me was that his voice was almost the same as it was during interviews with Mean Gene. Either he really talked like that, or wasn't ready to break character just yet. He was the biggest star there and the last one to leave the venue. They then looked at the clock and told me that they were supposed to be meeting the Undertaker next door at Lookers in a few minutes with whatever Brian Lee's gimmick name was. I went to Looker’s with them just to see the hot female flesh they were hoping to snare tonight. I walked over and spotted sitting outside on a bench just to the side of the entrance none other than Rick "The Model" Martel in all his blonde locks and uber tan glory. He was by himself and drinking a glass of red wine just sitting there. I pause momentarily as I walk by and continue on to check in, thinking, 'Holy shit that's Rick Martel! Inside Looker’s the atmosphere was amazing. Besides the pole dancers, they had a screen set up with WWF replays. On the screen they had the whole roster in a continuous reel with just snapshots of their faces for about ½ a second. Whenever Rick Martel was shown, the audience would erupt. A young lovely came onto me as I was the only guy with a suit on, but I had to get home to Bettie. Damn, I like working in New York!