THE PHYSICAL
Part 3

It’s 1962 and Morris Krieger’s dire warning is ringing in my ears.

“World War III is coming.”

I’m taking my Army physical with several hundred other kids in Selective Service Headquarters off Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. A red faced Sergeant, crewcut bristling, hash marks covering his khaki sleeve, sharply creased blue trousers with a red stripe strides along our line, shouting:

“Strip to your shorts and shoes. Guard your belongings. If you lose your pants you will go home to your mothers bareass naked…”

Krieger, the last anarchist orator of Union Square, greeted JFK’s election with a prediction:

“Camelot will have its war…”

I kept myself awake all night smoking Gauloises to increase my heart rate; chugging Coke to turn my urine brown. Now I’m lightheaded. I stumble into the kid in front of me. He turns with a snarl: “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

After the Bay of Pigs, Krieger became more strident.

“No one will remember the poor fools left to die on the beach…Millions more will be led to their death…”

I’ve been in high school locker rooms, but have never seen such a grotesque profusion of male flesh. Fat and woebegone, buff and arrogant, slight and timid…Red pustules on white flab, acne clusters, pimples, sores, weird Rorschach bruises. Gray jockeys, bulky boxers with stripes and flowers. The undersized sneak covert looks. The muscled strut and sneer…I try to place myself along this continuum. I am tall, but slouched and narrow-shouldered. I always made the team, but was never a star. I can do sit ups and push ups, but strain at pullups and chins. I’ve fought to defend myself, but have never attacked anyone in anger…

The Russians move their missiles out of Cuba. Krieger scoffs at claims of victory.

“Russians don’t blink. They merely look for another battlefield.“

They give us a form to fill out.

“Print clearly,” an older man in a doctor’s white coat says in a German accent. “If we can’t read it you’ll do it again.”

I curse my good health. There’s an endless column of diseases, but I’ve never had one.

The mental disorders are more promising. Bed-wetting, problems in school, visits to a psychiatrist, arrests, convictions, feelings of persecution, sudden eruptions of rage, homosexual attraction…

I’ve been advised I’ll arouse suspicion if I check them all. Just pick one aberration I can defend.

I check “use alcohol and illegal drugs…”

” Word War II was just a sideshow,” Krieger says. “The Tsar and the Robber Baron tried so hard to get Adolph on their side. Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Mosley, Chamberlain, Joe Kennedy, JFK’s dad. If only he wouldn’t be so stubborn about the Jews. Even Uncle Joe Stalin wanted to make a deal. From one mass murderer to another. You keep your camps I’ll keep mine. But Adolph wouldn’t share. So they formed an uneasy alliance to silence his Wagnerian oompah band. And when it was over they couldn’t wait to return to the eternal debate on what is the best way to control a subject population–Communist regimentation or Capitalist exploitation…”

We form a single line and shuffle into a large room, the size of a gymnasium where doctors in white coats are waiting. They are elderly, probably retired, and bored. Stethoscopes are pressed to our chests. “Deep breath…Breathe out.” Lights are shined in our eyes, noses and ears…A tongue depressor is thrust so deep in our mouths we gag. “Say Ahhh…”

Some kids are taken out of the line and sent to smaller examination rooms. They’re the lucky ones, but they walk with heads down as if they’ve been found wanting.

A doctor with a hammer gestures impatiently to a chair. “Well, sit down…” He taps our knees lightly. The kid ahead of me shudders and his knee shoots up. Mine hardly moves. “You waiting for the second feature?” he snaps. “Get up.”

Krieger spots me carrying Camus and Hesse.

“Alienation and mysticism,” he thunders. “The cheap thrills of the bourgeois state. Meant to distract the intelligentsia from its oppression.”

It’s pointless to explain that I use the books to start conversations with girls in coffee shops.

“Drop your drawers,” a doctor shouts. A kid walks up to him. He thrusts his hand under his right testicle and orders:

“Cough.”

Then moves the left.

“Cough.”

And does this a hundred times.

At the end of the room a doctor commands:

“Lean over and press the wall with both hands. Now reach back and spread the cheeks of your ass…Spread ‘em!”

He walks up and down the line looking up every one’s ass.

“Did he lose somethin’?” some kid whispers and we all get hysterical laughing.

We walk into a room with rusty sinks, faucets sputtering, along all four walls. A man in a white coat hands out plastic vials.

“Piss in the vial and bring it to the desk,” he orders.

Another moment of truth as we check out the line of pissing penises. Dark ropes, purple veined monstrosities, fragile pink wands; it’s amazing that they are all the same organ. I am abashed by the larger ones, but not encouraged by the smaller.

After all that Coke my urine rust brown.

The man at the desk hands me a tiny dipstick.

“Stick it in your specimen,” he says. “Show it to me.” He hardly looks. “Dump it in the sink…”

We’re done. Our journey through the rooms has taken us back to the entry hall. A man in a white shirt covered with medals checks my form. Suddenly, I am sorry that I checked off drug use.

“Down the hall to the left,” he says.

A line of kids is waiting outside four offices. We hear snatches of conversation.

“How many times a week?”

“Was there a police report?”

“Don’t give me the letter. Send it to the Draft Board.”

I am steered into an office. An old man with two brown moles, each sprouting a hair, on his bald head looks down at my form.

“Drugs?” he asks.

I nod.

” Heroin? Opium? Hashish?”

“Marijuana,” I say.

He writes in a blank space on my form.

“Drinking?”

“Wine…”

“Sweet wine, dry wine? Beaujolais, Chablis?”

“Italian Swiss Colony,” I say. “Whiskey, too?”

“Rye, vodka, gin…?”

“Scotch,” I blurt.

“What kind?”

I panic. Try to remember the weird-shaped bottle in the sideboard that my father sneaks shots out of while my mother is in the kitchen.

“Haig and Haig…”

He looks up with a smile. “Haig and Haig. Can’t afford that on a private’s salary…”

JFK is sending 16 thousand “advisors” to help the South Vietnamese repel the Communist invaders from the north.

“The Tsar cannot take his army away from oppressing his own people,” Krieger says. “He will use the Vietnamese as proxies. The Robber Baron will send his own young men to keep them from making trouble in the Civil Rights movement and Organized Labor…”

Krieger’s wife comes to keep him company. A wiry old lady with sun-leathered skin, she knits while he rants. Unwraps salami sandwiches and pours coffee from a thermos.

“Were you in the Army?” I ask.

“It was important to defeat the Nazis,” he says. “But I did not support the oppressive military system…”

“He was a good soldier,” his wife says, placidly knitting.

Krieger twitches in irritation.

“I was not,” he says.

Three weeks later I get a letter from the Selective Service System. I have been classified “1Y”, which means I am deferred for a year.

It’s what I wanted. Still, I feel rejected and vaguely ashamed.

NEXT: A VERY SHORT REPRIEVE

MY FIRST PHYSICAL
Part 1
A NOTE FROM A SHRINK

It’s 1962 and I’m in a boho Garden of Eden.

I live in a sub basement in Greenwich Village. “The coolest place in the world,” my friends from Brooklyn say.

The super lets me tap into his electricity and use his phone. His wife takes messages for me. “You should call your mother,” she says. I feed his two cats. They kill mice and leave them outside my door.

I never take cabs or go to fancy restaurants. I live on diner food, peanut butter and jelly and chocolate milk.

Won’t go north of 14th. Street. Except to Birdland on 52nd. where I pay $1.25 admission to see the greatest jazz musicians in the world–Dizzy, Miles, Count Basie, Gerry Mulligan, Sarah Vaughan–every week another genius.

Don’t go on dates. My friend David lives in a four story walk up in the Flower District. I’m so stoned the trip up the stairs seems to go on for hours. We sit in the dark and watch the light on the amplifier blink in synch with Wanda Landowska playing Bach partitas. The door swings open. Female silhouettes appear, then disappear as it slams shut. Something warm slides in next to me. A wisp of hair brushes my cheek.

There hasn’t been a war in nine years, but the orators of Union Square warn of world cataclysm.

“Satan has been released from his thousand year captivity,” a skinny old woman shrieks in a dense German accent. She sits under a bed sheet with “TURN TO JESUS” scrawled in lipstick. ” Gog and Magog have gathered the minions together for war,” she says. “They are as numerous as the sand in the sea…A great multitude will die untested. Only the righteous will be saved…” Brandishing a dog-eared Bible she cries: “Turn to Jesus now before it is too late.”

Across the park Morris Krieger, the anarchist, invokes Randolph Bourne:

“War is the health of the state,” he says. “It sets in motion the irresistible forces for uniformity. It coerces into obedience the exploited minorities and the individuals who are straying from the herd.” He stops and walks through to the crowd to where my friends and I stand, dazed with marijuana and Italian Swiss Colony muscatel.

“Democracy is an excuse to excite the masses,”he says. “Pursuit of happiness? Only the happiness they allow you. The happiness of acquisition and slavish obedience, the happiness of sycophancy. You have found happiness outside of their system through drugs and interracial fellowship. You are a threat to the state.”

A few benches down, a kid strums a guitar and sings in a Woody Guthrie whine:

“The General needs his War

To get that extra star.

Ford needs a war

To sell his armored car

JFK needs a crisis ’cause his New Frontier’s a lie

He ain’t never gonna give poor folks

A slice of the pie.

The doomsday warnings are comic relief for the drunks and the junkies lolling on the benches. Workers on lunch stop to heckle the speakers before returning to the grind. Even the cops shake their heads indulgently.

Meanwhile, the date of my physical looms.

“My shrink will give you a note that will get you out,” David says. “It’ll cost you thirty-five bucks for the visit.”

The office is on the ground floor of a building on Riverside Drive. I look at the names on the plaques and find: Dr. Paul Fruchtman. He’s at the end of a warren of tiny rooms. Doesn’t look much older than me. Short in a brown suit with a soft handshake and a few strands of hair across his bald head. He sits in an armchair, almost brushing knees with me and lights a pipe upside down so the window fan won’t blow it out. I stare at it wondering how he keeps the ashes from falling.

“Why don’t you want to go into the Army?” he asks.

David has told me he wants a crazy, radical answer.

“I don’t want to serve a state that exists to perpetuate the power of the capitalist oligarchy,” I say.

He scribbles on a legal pad on a clipboard.

“Do you worry about being in close quarters with other men?” he asks.

He wants me to say “yes.” To admit to being a latent homosexual. It’s a lie that will get me out, but I can’t tell it.

“No,” I answer.

“Are you afraid you might be killed?”

Another “yes” is indicated here. Another lie I can’t tell.

“No…”

He sits back, puffing on his upside down pipe.

“Tell me the truth. What is that worries you the most about being in the Army?”

I give him my first honest answer.

“Making my bed.”

He leans forward, eagerly. “Making in your bed?”

“No, just making my bed,” I say. “My father says they punish you if they can’t bounce a quarter off your blanket. Also, folding my clothes. I can’t really fold my shirts. My mother always yells at me. Sewing, too. My father says you have to sew your stripes on your shirts, he calls them blouses. We had to sew our own shop aprons in sixth grade and I couldn’t do a hem stitch and had to get one of the girls to help me…”

He raises a hand to stop the torrent.

“Okay, I’ll give you a note that you’re in treatment with me and aren’t ready for the stresses of military service. That will give you a temporary deferment, known as a 1Y. After a year they’ll call you again and I can renew the deferment.”

I rise, relieved.

“Of course there’s one condition,” he says, relighting his pipe. “You’ll have to continue in treatment with me.”

“You mean, be a patient?”

“Yes. Once a week should be enough.”

It’s a shakedown. He gives me a bland smile. “You’re in limbo” he says.” You can’t make the transition to productive, responsible adult life. As you get older that can become very serious.” He hands me a form. “Fill this out and bring it back” —he checks his calendar—”next Thursday, same time…You can pay Miss Rubin at the front desk.”

Miss Rubin is whispering urgently into the phone. I glide by without paying.

I can’t go out that night. The super’s cats creep through the window yellow eyes glowing in the dark. I see endless rooms of green filing cabinets. Echos of doors clanging shut. Clerks shuffling past each other down dusty aisles. A thick manila file with my name on it is dropped on a pile of files…Carried to another room. Dropped on another pile. Handed to a man in a baggy, gray suit.

He’s out there now. In a dark doorway across the street. People hurry by him with their heads down, each followed by a man in a baggy, gray suit.

NEXT: MY FIRST TRIP TO WHITEHALL STREET

I BURGLE BOOKS ON PARK AVENUE

I MAKE A BIG HAUL IN A FANCY BROWNSTONE
Part Two

Summer of ’61. There are no cell phones, computers, emails, Facebooks, Twitters. But everybody knows where the party is.

You don’t have to make plans. A fifteen cent subway ride takes you to Washington Square Park where hundreds of young people from everywhere in the city and the world congregate every night. Wander around, you’re sure to find someone you know. A familiar face is good enough to try a tentative “What’s happenin’?”

The Washington Square Arch was designed by Stanford White, a Gay Nineties debauchee, famous for drugging and raping teenage girls. Dope dealers cluster around the arch determined to continue his tradition. Hard-eyed desperadoes in their ’30′s they stand under the inscription “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair” selling “beat” marijuana, which they call “Village Green,” made of a few stalks of the real thing mixed with the crushed leaves and twigs of the indigenous Elm trees. Whispering men flit in and out of the darkness, faces glowing ghastly white. For a buck they’ll squeeze a “taste” of amphetamine from an eye dropper onto your tongue. Junkies mingle around the benches at the entrance to the park, sucking cigarettes. Finally, the “connection” appears and leads them like the Pied Piper out of the park to a “shooting gallery” nearby. LSD is still a CIA secret. Cocaine is for esthetes only.

Only a few months before the folksingers were denied permits to play in the park and were dispersed whenever they gathered. Then, they marched a thousand strong up Fifth Avenue, singing and chanting. The police called it a “beatnik riot,” and waded in with horses and billy clubs, singling out the blacks for arrest and mistreatment. In a time of Freedom Rides and sit-ins, New York City, the bastion of liberalism, called off the cops. Now the park is thronged with folkies, blues singers, orators and drummers. It’s a lukewarm melting pot. Blacks and whites feel each other out. Mixed couples are safe in the park, but if they venture onto the sidestreets of Little Italy they risk a beating from the locals.

My friend Benny plays congas at the fountain with a group of Puerto Rican kids who bring their drums and gourds and cowbells down from the Bronx. They are a tight clique and don’t like people to mess up their beat, but Benny gets me a hearing. “My boy plays pots, man. You gotta hear this.”

I have been playing pots since I was a kid and created a drum set in my mother’s kitchen–soup pot for the deep tones and sauce pans for the trebles–banging away until my grandmother cried, “what is he, a red Indian?” Struck with the fingertips a pot’s metallic ring is crisp and resonant and provides a bongo embellishment to the relentless rhythm of the drums. This is new to the Bronx kids. They nod and slide over, making room for me.

Saturday night I meet Benny outside the liquor store on Sixth Avenue. A wrinkled, brown clerk in a gray smock opens the cooler. “Cold wine for a hot night, boys? May I recommend Italian Swiss Colony?”

A pint of sweet wine and four Romilar cough tablets confer an ineffable feeling of well-being. The drums are pounding as we walk to fountain. In a few minutes we have drawn a crowd. A skinny blonde girl in gym shorts and a sleeveless blouse is whirling like a dervish, hair flying. Her boyfriend, shriveled and balding, although not more than twenty, jumps and lurches, clapping, “go man, go,” and clawing at the patchy blonde scraggle on his face. You can always tell the rich kids. They’re purely decadent. More crazed and reckless than the inhibited lower classes.

The drummers wear sleeveless undershirts, showing off their muscles and tattoos. I wear a golf shirt stolen from my uncle. The blonde dances closer and closer, choosing her mate. We play louder and faster.

The boyfriend comes up with the rest of his crowd. “You guys are cool. You wanna play for our party?” His friends are blotched and loutish in khakis and dress shirts. But the girls have that alluring sheen of wealth. We don’t have to consult. “Yeah, sure, we’ll play,” Benny says.

I’m new to Manhattan and have never been to the Upper East Side. We take the Lexington Ave Express to 86th. Street and walk down Park Avenue. Liveried doormen glare as we pass. We turn down a quiet side street of four story brownstones and stop shyly outside the address the boyfriend gave us.

“Anybody know the cat’s name?” Benny asks.

“What apartment’s he in?”

“There’s only one bell, man…”

“So ring it, man…Shit, what are you scared of?”

The boyfriend opens the door. “Hey guys c’mon in…I’m Bobby…”

A narrow hallway leads to a large living room jammed with more rich kids, pot smoke swirling, liquor bottles on the tables. The blonde jumps off a couch and runs right at Benny.

“Hi…”

“Who lives here?” he asks.

‘I do,” the blonde says. “Well I mean my parents…I’m Celeste, who are you?”

“Benny,” he says and takes her hand. “They must have some cool pots in this kitchen,” he says to me and walks away with Celeste.

I walk through rooms, gleaming with gilt and dark wood, figured carpets, paintings under lamps. Familiar faces in every room. It looks like they’ve swept up every lowlife in the park.

In the kitchen people have raided the huge refrigerator, emptied the pantry and are cooking eggs on the six burner stove. Somebody has broken the lock on a wine cabinet and taken out all the bottles. I get an ominous feeling.

People rush by me on the stairs, going up to the third and fourth floor bedrooms. There’s a library on the second floor. A beautiful room; bookshelves floor to ceiling; leather couches and a large oaken desk. Complete collections–Harvard Classics, Modern Library. I see a series of slim volumes, the Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling. I pick up The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. My philosophy professor at Brooklyn College said “Kant is a bridge between the experienced world and ultimate reality.”

“Boo!”

Celeste dazed and exhilarated, jumps out of a false book shelf in the wall. Benny walks out behind her, cool as usual.

“Like one of them secret doors in the movies,” he says.

“You got some great books here,” I say to Celeste. “Is your dad a professor?”

“Professor?” she laughs. “He owns shitty supermarkets down South, hundreds of ‘em…”

“My boy loves books,” Benny says.

“Take as many as you want,” Celeste says. “He never reads them…”

She runs out.

Henry, one of the drummers, comes upstairs with a frightened look. “Them guys from the park are gonna wreck this house…We’d better fade…”

Celeste comes back with a large leather satchel. “Fill it up,” she says.

“Your old man will be pissed if he finds his books gone,” I say.

“My mom will just order new ones,” she says. “They’re for decoration. They buy them by the pound.”

More people are coming into the house as we leave. Just before dawn, we steal the bakery delivery outside a Gristede’s on 72nd. We go to a hill in Central Park and wash down the warm rolls with pints of Borden’s Chocolate Milk.

I’m home just after sunrise. I fall asleep thumbing through my haul of books. The next day is Sunday. I don’t have to be anywhere or do anything.

A few months later, I see a headline DEBUTANTE DEAD IN TRUNK under a photo of Celeste. She had OD’d on amphetamine and her boyfriend, identified as “Robert A…….g” kept her body in the trunk of his car for four days.

Bobby is declared insane and spared a prison term. A year later he takes a running jump through his stepmom’s picture window and lands 19 floors down on Fifth Avenue.

I still haven’t read Critique of Pure Reason.

It’s 1961 and the Godless Communists are on the move. Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space. “Now the Antichrist can rain death down on us from the heavens,” evangelist Nelson Bell warns. “America is in the gravest danger in its history.”

I’ve gotten a second notice for my Army physical. This one is mildly threatening. “You are ordered to report on…Failure to do so may result in fine and imprisonment…”

The Castro regime beats back a US proxy invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The East Germans build a wall. New president JFK advises all “prudent” families to get a bomb shelter. “Won’t be long now,” my philosophy prof says. “Your generation will have its war…”

I put the notice in a drawer under my socks.

I was always a reader, but now I’m am an addict. A book is the first thing I reach for in the morning. I can’t get out of bed without finishing a chapter and often doze with the clock radio blasting rock and roll in my ear, only to awake in a panic and stumble late into class, disheveled and blurting lame excuses.

I can’t eat without a book or a newspaper propped against a glass. Friday night dinner at my parents’ house is a torment because reading at the table is strictly forbidden. I hide a magazine on my lap and drape the tablecloth over it. My mother whisks it away with a worried look. “This isn’t healthy,” she says.

I can’t go to the toilet without something–anything– to look at. I scramble for reading matter, coming perilously close to crapping my pants.

Can’t go to bed without a book, but can’t sleep until I finish a chapter. I blink like an owl when I begin to nod, bite down on my lip and pull the hairs out of my chest. Then, the lamp is glaring in my face and the book is on the floor and I realize I’ve been asleep. So I find my place and begin reading again. When I finally decide to call it a night I have confused my brain with so many false starts that I lie in ragged exhaustion until the night turns gray and I drop off. An hour or a minute later I awake, haggard and unrested and begin to read again.

Ernest Hemingway, my instructor in male honor and courage, blows his brains out with a shotgun. Captured Nazi Adolph Eichmann claims he was only “the transmitter” of the Fuhrer’s orders, but he admits he did say: “I will jump gleefully into my grave knowing I have killed five million of my nation’s enemies…”

I’m living in a sub basement ($53 a month) on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village. It’s gloomy and the pipes sweat and the mice resent sharing the makeshift shower with me. I can barely see the street from my window. A sliver of sun tells me it’s daytime. I’m safe. Not even Adolph Eichmann could find me here.

I come home at dawn with a meatball hero and a Pepsi that I paid a buck seventy-five for at Whitey’s Pizzeria. I light up the joint I got for a dollar outside the subway on Sheridan Square and open the paperback I picked up for a quarter from an old guy with a book pushcart on Seventh Avenue. I read fiction, voraciously and uncritically. Irving Wallace, Franz Kafka, Jim Thompson—it’s all the same to me.

The 19th. century– Dostoevsky, Dickens, Balzac, etc.–is the best “reefer read.” Marijuana helps keep track of the characters and navigate the narrative switchbacks.

Dexedrine gets me into the rhythms of the moderns, especially Joyce and Faulkner. I finish the USA TRILOGY in a weekend.

In deference to all the alcoholic writers I am discovering I get drunk. But when I try to read I get the spins.

President Kennedy creates the Peace Corps and thousands of idealistic young people volunteer to help the natives of the Third World shed their ancient ways and become middle-class Americans. My mother urges me to join. “You could really find yourself in a program like this.”

Instead, I find a folk singer named Maxine who is willing to come home with me. It’s okay to smoke a cigarette, but reading in afterglow is a flagrant violation of post-coital protocol. When I open a book Maxine jumps up in revulsion. “God, I feel like I’m in bed with my dad.”

Vice President Johnson calls Vietnamese Premier Diem, “the Churchill of Asia,” and vows to defend his regime with American power. JFK increases “military assistance” to Vietnam, sending 16,000 “advisors.”

Maxine is throwing a party. Potato chips, gallons of Gallo California wine and somebody passing a joint in the kitchen. An older crowd. Workshirts and beards. Black tights, poorboy sweaters and Rapunzel hair. Maxine strums and sings Sloop John B, serenading a guy in a corduroy sports jacket, complete with patches, wavy graying locks and the smug look of every English professor who ever gave me a C-. I browse her paperback shelf and find a book by an author I never heard of— Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West.

After three pages I’m hooked. I barely hear the snatches of conversation around me. Maxine segues into Rock Island Line, then Cotton Fields Back Home. There’s another West book on the shelf–Day of the Locust.

I’m lost for hours. Then I sense movement. The party is breaking up. Maxine and the corduroy guy are in a clinch on the couch. He is whispering urgently, patting her on the shoulder like her dog just died.

I have to finish this book. And read the other one. I grab the two slim paperbacks. Can’t take them out. Someone might see me. I go into the bathroom and shove them down the back of my pants. Maxine bursts in, teary and distraught.

“What are you doing here?” she demands

“Just going to the bathroom,” I say.

“You can stay if you want.”

“What about your friend…?”

“Do you want to stay or don’t you?” she says and slams the door.

I know if I take my clothes off, Maxine will see the books. I slip them into the hamper and go out. The apartment is pitch black. Maxine is already in bed.

The first thing I think of in the morning is those books. I’m a good stealth dresser. In minutes I’m in the bathroom searching in the hamper. The books must have sunk to the bottom.

There’s a knock and a giggle.

“What are you doing in there?”

“Uh, just taking a shower…

Maxine comes in…”I’ll scrub your back…”

I jump back, but not fast enough. She sees the hamper cover on the floor and grabs my arm.

“What are you doing?”

A pair of black panties is hanging from my wrist.

Maxine is outraged. “You disgusting pervert. Are you stealing my underwear?”

“Well, I just wanted something to remind me…”

“Take anything you want,” she cries, running out. “Just get the fuck outta here…”

I find the paperbacks. Wrap them in a pair of black panties. Then, in another pair to be on the safe side. Maxine’s bedroom door is closed and probably locked. She won’t come out until I’m gone so I have time to check out her book shelf.

I find The Rosy Crucifixion, Sexus, Nexus and Plexus by Henry Miller and tiptoe out the door.

NEXT: I STEAL A BOOK FROM JAMES BALDWIN

My new partner in crime chain-smokes Gauloises and scratches his forehead until it bleeds. He’s sparse with the bio, doesn’t even introduce himself.

But when I ask about his chess ranking is he can’t help bragging.

“I’m a Master, 2200 rating.”

I flash him a dubious look.

“If you don’t believe it, look me up, ” he says.

I have him on the defensive. “You have to tell me your name.”

He realizes he’s been trapped into a forced move, so he tells all.

“Getty B….m. I played for Harvard.”

“What did you major in?”

Somehow my use of the word “major” tars me as a provincial. He regains the advantage with patrician sniff. “I guess you could say I majored in chess and mescaline,” he says. “Anyway, once I destroyed Yale for them they had no further use for me.”

His system uses the standard system of chess notation, dividing the board into numbers. He flashes the numbers by touching his nose with his fingers. When he rubs his eyes it means the number is greater than five. First signal indicates the piece to be moved. Second signal the designated square. As the game develops and most of the pieces are deployed he signals the square, depending upon my knowledge of the position to know which piece he is indicating. If I have a question I touch my king and he gives the original position of the piece. For example if he wants me to move a knight , he touches his nose again with two fingers, indicating the knight’s opening position

He knows I can play the first seven to ten moves of any opening or defense so he wanders around kibitzing other games until I signal him by lighting a Marlboro. Then, he saunters over, takes in the board in a split second and flashes his signal. He stays long enough to maneuver me into a winning position, then saunters away and leaves me to finish the game.

“We’ll beat these guys with their own vanity,” he says. “They all think you’re an easy mark. They’ll go nuts and double up when you beat them…”

We start with Ronald. He plays a simple Ruy Lopez opening and I hang with him for eleven moves before I need help. Getty strolls over as if he’s making a tour of the tables. He flashes me a signal and then moves away. I realize he has backed Ronald into a forced position where only one move is possible. He doesn’t even have to watch the game. He flashes the signals from another table. I follow his instructions and marvel at the elegant inevitability of his strategy. Ronald stares at me in disbelief and knocks over his king in the universal gesture of resignation.

“Again,” he says.

“For five bucks?” I say.

“Make it ten,” he says. “Lightning never strikes twice…”

“This time I play white,” I say.

White pieces make the first move and allow the player to determine the opening. Getty makes me play the Guioco Piano, a simple opening played by most beginners. It lulls Ronald into a false sense of confidence. He plays carelessly. Getty stands behind him and signals my next move. I am a puppet amazed at my master’s brilliance. I watch in astonishment as he maneuvers Ronald into a steel trap and begins to shut its jaws. Ronald tears his hair. He flicks bloody boogers. After two more games his spirit is broken. And we’re thirty two dollars ahead.

Next night I meet Getty outside the West 4th. Street subway stop.

“Ronald won’t play you anymore,” he says. “We’ll go to Fritz. He’s a jailhouse player. A lot of natural ability, but no theory. He’ll try to trick you with the King’s Bishop, but it’s the kind of opening where the attacker loses his advantage if the defender plays correctly. His friends will be watching so I’ll give you the first eight moves now.”

“You know what he’s going to play?” I ask, amazed.

“He plays the same opening every night,” Getty says. “He wins ninety-five per cent of the time. Now let’s split up. Remember, people are watching. Don’t even look around like you’re waiting for me to show. I’ll be there when I have to be.”

I take a few steps up Sixth Ave. When I turn, Getty has vanished./

Heads turn as I enter the park. I get a few grudging nods from the weaker players. They know I’ve jumped a level. I try not to swagger.

Ronald waves me away, just as Getty predicted. “Oh no, not you…”

I see Getty talking to Fritz’s entourage of tough black dudes. Is he making bets? When a loser gets up I slide in.

“Five dollars,” Fritz says. Getty wanders away as the game begins. Sure enough Fritz plays the King’s Bishop opening.

“You’re gonna do this,” he says after making what he thinks is a crushing move.

Armed with Getty’s sure thing I can’t resist a little kibitz. “No, I’m gonna do this,” I say and make the move that blunts his attack. A few moves later he resigns. “Beginner’s luck” he says. He pays the five and sets up the pieces. This time I take white and play the same opening he did. “You can’t beat me at my own game, boy,” he says.

I can’t, but Getty can. Thirteen moves later Fritz resigns to avert disaster. I offer a rematch, but his backers mutter uneasily and he waves me off. “Back of the line…”

By the end of the night I’ve taken Jack, the DA for twenty and Serge, the intern for ten. With Fritz’s money it adds up to a forty-five dollar night.

At dawn I follow Getty and his classy blonde girlfriend into the West Fourth Street station. He doesn’t introduce us.

“You owe me twenty-two fifty,” he says.

“What did you collect from Fritz’s boys?” I ask.

“Oh yes,” he says. “Twenty from them…” He gives me ten crumpled ones. “It was a good night.”

“Amazing,” I say.

He doesn’t want to talk.” We shouldn’t be seen together,” he says.

“I feel like I’m learning so much,” I say.

“Your game might come up a notch,” he begrudges. He walks to the uptown train. The blonde hesitates as if she wants to tell me something, but then turns and follows him.

“I feel could take over the game after you make that one brilliant move,” I say.” I wouldn’t need you anymore.”

“Maybe,” he says over his shoulder. “But that brilliant move is the one you’ll never make.”

NEXT: I LOSE MY EDGE