It’s 1962 and the State is closing in on me.

A few months after my eighteenth birthday I get a letter from the Selective Service Agency, enclosing a draft card, registering me for military service, with the command: “You must carry this on your person at all times.”

To me it’s just a drinking license. I don’t need phony “proof ” anymore. I can walk into any saloon head held high.

A month later I get an ” Order to Report for Armed Services Physical Examination” where “it will be determined if you qualify for military service.”

I’m a student and get an automatic “2-S” deferment.

Six months into my freshman year at Brooklyn College I drop out and go to Paris to write the Great American Novel. When I return, having barely managed to write a few postcards begging my parents for money, there is another “Order to Report.”

I complain to my mother. “They didn’t tell me they were canceling my deferment.”

“What did you expect, a personal letter from the President?” she says.

There is also a notice from the Department of Motor Vehicles, stating that I owe $300 in outstanding parking tickets.

And a letter from the State Board of Regents demanding that I repay my $800 scholarship because I didn’t complete a year in college.

“If you don’t pay they’ll hound you for the rest of your life,” my mother warns. “You can’t get away from them.”

But I’m convinced they will never find me. My sub basement on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village is an illegal residence so I have no lease. I pay the super $53 cash a month and $15 extra to use his phone and hook up to his electricity. I’m making $90 a week, $110 with overtime so I’m rich. I have no bank account. Willie, the shylock at the Park Circle Lanes bowling alley cashes my paychecks from the Riverside Memorial ChapeI. My chauffeur’s license has my old home address and a teenage photo of me, but I look completely different now–long hair, Fu Manchu mustache…

“There is no record of me anywhere,” I brag to Naomi Krieger as I follow her around Union Square Park. ” I don ‘t exist.”

“That’s very existential,” she says.

Union Square is a meeting place for radicals of every stripe and Naomi is its temptress. While orators mount benches and makeshift podia to harangue passersby with predictions of doom, indictments of America and fervent espousals of their one true cause, she glides through the crowd, handing out Anarchist leaflets. She has a mountain of brown hair, rimless glasses, fierce black eyes and moves with lissome grace. “Revolution is accelerated evolution,” she chants. “Force is the weapon of the weak…”

I join the ranks of the smitten, who follow Naomi on her rounds, hoping to get her attention. Some try to show their erudition, but she knows more about Marx and Engels and the Second International and the flaws in Dialectical Materialism than any of them.

Others try flattery. “You are the avatar of Vera Figner,” a bearded East European gushes, invoking the Russian who helped assassinate Tsar Alexander II.

She laughs. “Do you mean I’m the mythic device of an oppressive religion? The incarnation of a woman who devoted herself to a corrupt ideology which she repudiated later in life…? Thanks a lot…”

She is airy, unapproachable. Trotsky’s implacable intellect on Audrey Hepburn’s body. I’m humbled and exhilarated just to be in her presence.

Then, one afternoon, she walks across the park to the bench where I am eating a Sabrett’s hot dog with “the works.”

“Have you ever read any anarchist texts?”

I am caught in mid bite and spray mustard, ketchup and onions on my Dickey carpenter pants.

“No…”

“Here…” She hands me a pile of mimeographed leaflets–ABOLISH THE WAGE SYSTEM, THE BETRAYAL OF SACCO AND VANZETTI, THE MYTH OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE, all written by Morris Krieger.

That night I try to plow through the dense, smudgy single-spaced pages of anarchist theory. The next day she is on me like a teacher checking homework.

“Did you read the material?”

“Oh yeah…Interesting…I was always taught that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent…”

“Because you came from a Communist household, am I right? Liberals made them innocent to hide the fact they had committed the robbery as a propaganda by deed to inspire others to attack the Employer Class and overthrow the wage system…Come meet the author…” She takes my hand and leads me to a bridge table where a bald, old man with a battered fighter’s face and sleeves rolled up over brawny forearms is hectoring the crowd.

“Who protects you in this wonderful Democracy? Your government which taxes you and forces you to fight wars to enrich its oligarchs? Your boss who exploits you? Your landlord who raises your rent and cuts off your heat? Your family that extorts money and guilt with emotional blackmail…?”

The crowd enjoys baiting him. “Are you a Communist or Capitalist, Morris?” someone shouts.

Morris scoffs. “Communism, Capitalism. What does it matter who coerces you, the state or the Corporation? Krushchev and JFK are merely cult totems for the ruling class.”

“But they are enemies.”

“They are collaborators,” Morris corrects. “The Cold War is window dressing. Authoritarian systems secretly cooperate to oppress their subjects. The Hungarian Revolt, the Bay of Pigs were planned to fail. The CIA conceived them, funded them and then aborted them…”

“Our Lord Jesus will judge us,” a wild-eyed man shouts.

“Your Lord Jesus said ‘render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,’ Morris says. “He was just the first Capitalist propagandist.”

The crowd laughs and wanders away to seek amusement at another bench.

Naomi smiles proudly. “He’s brilliant. Makes you see things in a new way.”

“Morris Krieger,” I say. ‘Is he your grandfather?”

“He’s the father of my mother, according to Mildred, her mother,” Naomi says. “But since bourgeois morality forces women to lie about their sensuality who can really say and does it matter?”

“It doesn’t matter at all,” I say, eager to agree with anything.

Morris calls us over. “Naomi, bring your friend…So young man, is your father a party member?”

“Democratic party.” I say.

“FDR was an admirer of Mussolini, did you know that? Joe Kennedy, the President’s dad, loved Hitler.” He points to a livid scar above his eyebrow. “Lepke’s goons gave me this, the day the gangsters took over Local One of the Bakery Workers. The same day Hitler was selling out to Krupp and Stalin was starving the Ukrainians. And that Democratic Party stooge Sidney Hillman was having tea with Eleanor Roosevelt…”

I turn to Naomi. “Who’s Sidney Hillman?”

Morris shoves a pile of books in my chest. “We strive for the administration of things, not people. Educate yourself. Free your mind…”

“They’re heavy,” Naomi says. “I’ll help you carry them.”

I fly the two city miles to Barrow Street, borne by Naomi’s relentless rhetoric. The wind is on my face. The world races by as if seen from a passing train.

Naomi feels her way down the metal stairs to my pitch black sub basement.

“This is a magic place,” she says. “You could plot great deeds here…”

She brushes my hand away from her shoulder.

” Do you have to play the chivalrous rapist?”

She pushes me down on my unmade bed and presses her cool, dry lips against my neck.

“Can you imagine yourself a female?” she whispers in my ear. “Welcoming…? Receiving…?”

I can. No problem.

In the morning Naomi scours the food-crusted pots on my stove, washes my underwear in the shower and makes me get out of bed so she can soak my sheets in the super’s work sink.

“Don’t confuse this with an atavistic domestic tendency,” she says, merrily. “I clean because it gives me pleasure. I am not a slave of a peer-controlled feminist ideology.”

In the afternoon I plow through the Anarchist texts, scribbling statements I’ll be able to quote to Naomi.

Bakunin: “I am truly free only when all men and women are equally free.”

Stirner: “Society is a chimera. Individuals are the only reality.”

Kropotkin: “America shows how all the written guarantees for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression. In America the politician has come to be looked on as the very scum of society.”

True enough, but I’ll be able to tell her what I’ve observed on the streets of Brooklyn: Only the thieves and hustlers who live outside the law are truly free. I will impress her with my knowledge of the real world.

I run to Union Square. Morris is at his bridge table, offering the same books, the same replies to the same jibes.

“Naomi’s back at school,” he tells me.

“School?”

“Sarah Lawrence. She was just here for her vacation. She’s leaving next week for Paris for her junior year abroad to study French Literature.” Morris smiles proudly and I see the family resemblance. “She’s got a full scholarship.”

I go to Whitey’s Bar on Sixth Avenue. Nobody asks me for “proof.”

Next morning there are four envelopes on the steps outside my door.

One from the Division of Motor Vehicles stating that a warrant will be issued for my arrest if I do not pay what has now grown to $425 in parking tickets.

Another from the Board of Regents that “Collection Procedures will be initiated” if I don’t repay my $800.

Something from the NY State Department of Taxation that I am “delinquent” in submitting my return.

And a notice of “Failure to Report…” from Selective Service, warning that I face “imprisonment of up to five years and a fine of $10,000″ if I do not appear for a physical on the specified date.

My cover is blown. Someone has informed on me.

I call home and my mother confesses:

“I gave them your new address.”

“You?”

“The letters were piling up,” she says. “All these official envelopes. You could get into trouble.”

“But I am in trouble now that they found me,” I say.

“What are you going to do, hide like a mole in that cave?”

“At least I’d be free,” I say.

“Free? Who’s free? Free to be what? A bum?”

“You betrayed me…My own mother betrayed me…”

I hear my father’s voice. “What’s he yelling about?”

And my mother’s muffled reply. “He’s very upset…Sounds like he’s crying.”

NEXT: I AM HELD HOSTAGE BY THE MOB

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.

In Brooklyn, the backwater of my birth, people disagree violently– and coexist grudgingly. But across the Brooklyn Bridge the local Bohos enforce a rigid cultic orthodoxy.

The politics are easy enough to master. You’re safe anywhere from JFK to Joe Stalin with side trips to Trotsky and the brand new hero of the world revolution, Che Guevara. A Republican can’t even get in as comic relief.

The culture is more complicated. The Pantheon changes daily, new names added and subtracted. The criteria are what you read, wear, watch and listen to, who you know, what you’ve done or what you will do. In all of these I am judged and found wanting.

One night everyone is rushing to the NYU Student Center. I trail along, trying to impress Amelia, a poet with long, tawny hair–tall, broad-shouldered, wearing nothing under her granny dress. “You remind me of a lioness on the prowl,” I say, trying to be poetic. She gives me the arched eyebrow of disdain. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

A skinny kid with frizzy hair and an annoying nasal voice is singing Corinna Corinna.

“ I like Joe Turner’s version better,” I say, playing the purist card.

“Dylan is singing it the way it was originally written,” says a kid who’s famous for his collection of .45′s. “Joe Turner was just doing a Rhythm and Blues cover.”

A week or two later I’m in a crowd in the Art Theatre on Eighth Street watching Godard’s latest, A Woman Is A Woman.

” It looks like they’re trying to do a Gene Kelly movie, but they can’t sing or dance,” I say loudly to impress the lioness.

“It’s not a conventional musical,” a fat kid corrects. “It’s an interrogation of the musical form.”

“It’s neo realism set to music,” someone else says.

This is the year of Kahlil Gibran, of smoking pot and trancing out to Wanda Landowska playing Bach on the harpsichord. Everybody’s carrying Franny and Zooey. I brandish Sons and Lovers. In secret I read best sellers, The Carpetbaggers, The Agony and the Ecstasy.

I try for the right note, but keep hitting clinkers.

Dave Brubeck?

Wrong…” Miles Davis says he doesn’t swing…”

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers?

Clunk. “Cold War propaganda, designed to cause an anti-communist panic.”

Old Man And the Sea?

Clang..”Patronizing, stilted…Hemingway blaming the world for his flagging powers…”

I walk the streets looking for celebrities. Here’s a face I think I’ve seen on a jacket cover. Wasn’t that guy in West Side Story? That little bald guy could be e.e. cummings. Or Yul Brynner. A couple on Sixth Avenue–tall, hunched guy with a tiny chattering lady. “That’s Edward Hopper,” somebody says.

I stand outside the San Remo Bar on MacDougall and Bleecker, watching the Boho nobility, the men laughing and waving drinks, the women intense and attentive.

Sports give me partial cachet. On weekends handball is the hot item at the playground on Waverly Place. Played at top speed with a hard black ball, it’s my game. In Coney Island the old pros ran me ragged, but in the Village I’m a star. I hook up with a Puerto Rican kid named Benny and we hold the court as a doubles team for hours. On the hot days we roll our pants up over our knees and take our shirts off. The other guys have tapered waists, tendoned biceps and muscles rippling on their backs. I’m stoop-shouldered and you can count my ribs, but I play with vengeful arrogance and no one can beat me. The “parkies” hook up a hose and we run cold water over our heads. The lioness and her friends walk by swinging their shopping bags and stop to watch us through the fence. We shout and play harder. Lust swirls like summer dust.

On my way home from work one night I pass Benny and the lioness, making out on a bench in a dark park off Sixth Avenue. He jumps up. “Hey, man, wanna go to a party? Where’s the party at Ammie?”

She glares. “It’s at James Baldwin’s. For his new book.”

Baldwin is an angry, eloquent black writer, author of The Fire Next Time. I’ve been reading his essays. I’ve taped one of his quotes to my typewriter. “I am what time and circumstance and history have made me, but I am also more than that. So are we all.” I want to tell him how much that means to me.

” I don’t want to bring a lot of strange people,” Amelia says.

“He’s my boy,” Benny says and grabs my arm. “C’mon, man, it’s cool,”

Benny has to reach up to get his arm around Amelia’s shoulders. He ignores her and talks to me about the handball players and do I want to play in the money games on Essex Street on the Lower East Side? She is docile and quiet, a far cry from the oracle whose poetry intimidates and whose pronouncements settle all disputes.

“Why are you wearing that suit?” Amelia asks me.

“I work in a funeral parlor,” I say and– anticipating her scornful disbelief–”I really do…”

On Horatio Street the party crowd has spilled onto the street. James Baldwin lives up a narrow flight of rickety stairs. We squeeze past the people coming downstairs and push through the crowd in the hallway into a cramped apartment . There are more black faces than usual, but otherwise it’s the same people, nose to nose, shouting in each other’s faces. A Charley Parker record is tinkling somewhere. The walls are lined with bookshelves.

“Look at all the books he has,” I say.

“Makes sense, he’s a writer,” Amelia sniffs.

She puts a jug of Almaden Red on a bridge table. I try to follow her and Benny, but the crowd keeps closing around them.

A kinky-haired man with curling nose hairs and thick moist lips puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Just coming from a wake?”

“I work in a funeral parlor,” I say.

“Really…” He clutches my sleeve. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to know. What do they so with all the blood they pump out of the people?”

“Nothing,” I say.

In a corner James Baldwin is trying to pour vodka into a dixie cup and hold a cigarette at the same time. He’s a small man with a large head and bulging eyes.

Benny turns and giggles. “Cat looks like a fly, man…”

Benny’s eyes are red. He’s stoned. So is Amelia, but the weed has just made her obsessive. She towers over Baldwin. “Congratulations on the book, Mr. Baldwin…”

“Thanks, uh…”

“Amelia, from the Hudson Church Poetry Project? We met at the benefit?”

“Oh yes…” He gives me a quick look, dismisses me, and turns to Benny. “Are you a poet, too?”

Amelia slides over between us with a don’t try to talk to him look. I step away, starting to sweat in my woolen suit. I see a thick hardcover book–The Most of S.J. Perelman. I’ve seen that name as a screenwriter on a Marx Brothers movie. I read the inscription: “To Jimmy/Humbly/ Sid…” In a minute I’m shaking with repressed hilarity. This is a revelation. The way Perelman uses language, the mixture of puns, Yiddishisms and esoteric references. I had no idea that prose on a page could be so funny. I have to have this book. I jam it down the back of my pants.

Nose Hair heads me off at the door. “Can I ply you with alcohol? In vino veritas?“

He gives me a Dixie Cup full of sour white wine. “Seriously,” he says. “What do they do with the blood?”

I try to slide by him, anxious to get home and continue reading. “They let it drain out into the sewers.”

“Blood in the sewers,” he says. “The blood of the city’s dead…”

“And shit and piss, too,” I say.

“You’re a hardboiled realist, I see…” He puts his arm around me and feels the book.

“Is this a gun?”

” What do you think i?”

Now he’s intrigued. “I knew you weren’t an undertaker… You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

I give him the Bogey hard look. “What do you think…?”

He steps back, hands in the air. “Don’t shoot I’ll come quietly…” And shouts: “Everybody hide your drugs. the cruise is canceled. The polizei have landed…”

All eyes are on me. Astonished looks. The crowd parts to let me through.

“A cop…”

Across the room I see Amelia’s startled face.

Behind me, somebody giggles.

“You believe Amelia brought a cop to Jimmy’s party…?”

NEXT: I BURGLE BOOKS ON PARK AVENUE

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

The next night I am awarded the ultimate recognition– a nickname. Jimmy, the mounted cop, who patrols the park, kicking winos off the benches, trots by.

“Hey undertaker, how’s business?”

“Dead,” I answer. He laughs and clip clops away.

I make a frantic tour of the park. Getty is nowhere to be found. I walk all the way to the fountain. Passersby giggle. I check my fly.

A mocking voice blows a gust of Gauloise in my ear.

“Looking for me?”

Getty and his girlfriend have been trailing along behind me, letting the whole park in on their prank. It looks like they’ve been up for days. His pupils are pinned and he smells like a wet ashtray. She is slouched and hollow-eyed in jeans and a Harvard sweatshirt.

“Can’t play without me, can you?” he says. “You need your secret sharer to protect your lie.”

He’s testing me again, trying to show me up in front of his girlfriend.

“Joseph Conrad,” I say. “And you need your liar to protect your secret share.”

It’s a nice little Shakespearean reversal. The blonde raises an eyebrow. Getty scowls. He’s lost that exchange.

“Joe the Russian is the fish du jour,” he says. “Russians think they’re all masters, but he’s just a one-eyed man in the country of the blind.”

Another test. “H.G. Wells,” I say.

He sniffs. “George Herbert coined it, actually… Joe will play Queens Pawn, you’ll play the Sicilian. We’ll get him away from the standard variations in the first ten moves and he’ll be lost…” He drapes his arm around the blonde in a modified choke hold. “Come in off the street so they don’t see us together.”

Joe the Russian, shaven head, walrus mustache–the Gurdjieff look–is holding court at the main table.

“The undertaker has arrived in time for his funeral,” he booms. “Do you have twenty dollars?”

Twenty dollars is a huge bet for the park. It’s also all the money I have on me. In the crowd, Getty is in intense conversation with familiar faces, serious chess people. He’s flashing bills as if to cover an even bigger bet.

“OK, twenty,” I say.

Joe opens with the Queen’s Pawn. I make the standard responses. But then Getty puts his finger to his nose, signaling a departure. He begins to exchange, taking pieces off the board, building to an end game, pawn against pawn. I understand the strategy. He’s taking Joe out of his comfort zone.

But Joe is not discomfited. With every move he is becoming more confident.

“You can’t play scorched earth with a Russian,” he says to me. “Remember what we did to Napoleon, not to mention Hitler.”

I’t's like a scene from a horror movie—the puppet struggling with his master. I feel as if Getty is twisting my arm, forcing me to pick up the pieces and move them where I don’t think they should go.

Soon, only kings and pawns are left on the board. It’s a race to see which pawn can reach the last rank and get a queen. Getty wanders off, leaving me to finish the game. But I miscalculate an exchange. Now Joe is a square ahead of me. I waste a move and he laughs.

“Don’t expect me to make a mistake, patzer.”

Chess etiquette dictates that you resign a losing position. I knock over my king in the classic concession gesture and give Joe a crumpled twenty.

He is pontifical in victory.

“This was a good idea to force an end game with a superior player,” he says. “But after inspiration must come execution…”

Getty has disappeared, probably afraid to face me. I’m broke. I’ll have to jump the subway turnstile to get home.

I wander around the Village for a while. The coffee houses are packed and festive. No solitary readers. Nobody is alone but me.

As I turn onto Sixth. Ave. I see Getty and the blonde walking into the West 4th. Street station.

“Hey…!”

Getty flinches as I run up. The blonde steps in front of him.

“What happened to you?” I demand.

He shrugs. “I thought you had it won.”

“Why? The position was equal. I didn’t have the advantage.”

” I thought you did.”

“Then, why didn’t you come back and get your share?” I ask.

He blinks, the liar’s reflex and starts the sentence with “well,” another giveaway. “Well, I heard you had lost…”

The blonde can’t stand it anymore.

“For God’s sake, at least give him back his twenty dollars,” she says.

“You bitch!” Getty says.

“He bet on Joe the Russian,” the blonde says to me. “He got odds from those guys because they had seen you play the other night and thought you were so much better…”

“You traitorous bitch!”

“He was bragging about it,” the blonde says. “How they thought you were so good because you were playing his game. How he could make this game look close enough. How he could manipulate the universe.” She turns on him. “Didn’t you say that? Manipulate the universe?”

Getty’s eyes widen in fear as I move in on him. He takes out a bill. “Here, here’s your twenty back..”

But I want to fight. I want to put my fist through his bony skull. “Nah,” I say. “Gimme half of what you made…”My voice sounds coarse and thuggish in my own ears.

“Why?” Getty says. “You had nothing to do with it…”

“You couldn’t have done it without me,” I say. “I want my share.”

He steps behind the blonde with a spiteful sneer. “You got paid with phony prestige,” he says. “You’re a dilettante. You didn’t care about the money at all. You would have played for nothing, you would have paid me just so you could be the big frog in this little puddle…”

He’s right, of course. Greed and larceny are pure, but my desire to steal honor shames me and I have to act like a thief to save face.

“Gimme my fuckin’ money, you lyin’ rat bastard,” I say.

The blonde touches my arm. “Leave him alone,” she says. “Here…” She puts a bill in my hand. “He’s pathetic…”

She’s afraid. She thinks I’m some kind of Caliban from the outer boroughs. I take the bill.

“Yeah,” I say. “He’s pathetic.”

I go back to the park. My brief moment of glory is forgotten and I play at my level. But the nickname sticks and I’m greeted by the same dumb jokes.—”Business still dead?”— even after I change jobs.

I never see Getty again. Once I think I see his blonde girlfriend striding down Madison Ave on a stormy night, snow sparkling in her hair, her coat open against the sleeting wind. But it can’t be her because it’s thirty years later.

Part 1-3 of “I GET AN EDGE” are listed on blog page. Just click on blog in the Main Menu above. Enjoy!

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

It’s 1961 and Brooklyn is a living, breathing Antiques Road Show. We’re sitting on trillions and don’t know it. Everything in my parents’ house–from the fiesta ware, the Heywood Wakefield furniture, oriental figurines, candy dishes, Nelson clocks, Danish lamps, silver serving spoons from the “old country”–will be a classic collectible in the future. My tipsy uncle careens around our cluttered living room. “Better not break anything, Sammy…” my mother warns. “Why don’t you get rid of this junk?” he yells back.

The streets are lined with cars that in thirty years will be bid up to a half a million by Saudi sheiks. Now they’re just “lemons” with lousy brakes that won’t start in cold weather.

I give an elderly neighbor $350 for his 1957 Chevy Bel Air, I hate its mint green color so I pay Earl Sheib $39.95 to paint it black. I hate driving its “three on the shaft,” and burn out the clutch. I park it with the doors and windows open on a dark street alongside Prospect Park, notorious haunt of thieves and muggers. In a year, a vandal– or anonymous ill-wisher– will flip a lit cigarette through the back window and turn the car into a fireball.

Today, a ’57 Bel Air is worth between $55,000 and 100,000.00

My grandfather leaves me a battered leather box full of silver dollar and half dollar pieces that he had been collecting since 1928. I use them to buy gas and cigarettes when I’m short of cash. In a year I’m down to one silver dollar, which I save for good luck.

Estimated value: $100K.

I have been an obsessive game player since childhood. At the age of eight I was flipping baseball cards with my friends. Closest to the wall won. “Topping” or landing on top of another card won two cards. A “leaner,” or leaning a card against the wall brought in three. Between flipping and trading I amassed a complete set of Topps cards. Plus I had the lineups of the 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Yankees and New York Giants right down to the coaches. I would lay them on my bed and replay the games for hours.

At the age of ten I took up marbles. We dug holes in the dirt called “pots.” You had to roll into the pot first and then roll out to hit and win the opponent’s marble. I wore bald spots into the knees of my corduroy pants, but won over two hundred “pee wees, immies and puries” –classic marbles which have avid collectors all over the world.

In 1963 when I move in with a woman eight years older than me my mother goes on a ritual rampage to erase my presence. She boils my sheets, gives my clothes, books and records away and chucks everything else she finds in my room, including a shoebox full of the Topps baseball cards, a bowling bag where I keep hundreds of marbles and my collection of 150 Classic Comics, which had been gathering dust under my bed.

Estimated value 75 to 100 grand.

My new obsession is chess. It entered me like a virus at the same time I got my draft card and realized I would have to stay in college forever to avoid the military. My every waking thought is devoted to openings and variations. I dream games in which the perfect move appears to me and the onlookers applaud. I study books on strategy, memorize the famous games and read about the great eccentric champions–Alekhine, Capobianco, Bobby Fisher, the Brooklyn wunderkind .The sight of a checker board tile floor sends me into a trance in which I stare at the squares visualizing moves.

My life is now about marking time until I can play chess. In the morning I doze through my classes at Brooklyn College. In the afternoon I move bodies and direct mourners at the Riverside Memorial Chapel. At ten in the evening my day begins. Still in my undertaker’s black suit I drive across the Brooklyn Bridge to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. I pull into the first open spot, knowing I will return to find one or two parking tickets, flapping like trapped pigeons on my windshield. Under the street lamps in the southwestern part of the park, a crowd has gathered to watch the chess players. From early spring to late fall, the games are on, 24-7. There are about thirty stone tables, the boards etched into their tops, each manned by a “strong” player. By tacit consent the best ones have the tables closest to the street lights. The weaker players, derisively known as “patzers,” are consigned to tables in semi darkness on the outskirts.

The dominant players act with more privileged disdain than any movie star or billionaire I will ever meet. There is Duval, an elderly Haitian in dark suit, streetlight gleaming off his smooth brown pate, who sets up ornate ivory pieces and a chess clock and dispatches all comers at a dollar a twenty minute game. “Fish!” he cries, slapping down the pieces. “You lose!” Next to him is Jimmy, hunched and intense with prematurely gray Toscanini hair. Five dollars for unlimited time, but when the loser makes a bad move he mutters “blunder,” and forces him to resign. There is Joe “the Russian.” Bald with a drooping gray mustache, he puffs furiously on Parliament cigarettes as he bullies his opponents. “Stupid move, patzer .Don’t insult my intelligence…” And Fritz, a massive black dude with a full beard, who analyzes every move. “You think I’m gonna do this so you can do that, but I’m gonna do this and you can’t do nothin’ about it…”

Every other game has an element of the miraculous. You can throw up a buzzer beater that bounces off the rim and drops in. Hit a ball off the handle that just clears the infield to score the winning run. You can make a crazy shot and sink the nine ball. Or draw a Royal Flush and beat a lock poker player. But chess is unforgiving. There are no lucky moves. The better player wins every time. The hustlers in the park know this so they can afford to be arrogant. When a player sits down and says “I’ve been watching you. I know your weaknesses,” they can roar back “I have no weaknesses!” And trounce him in twenty moves.

I am determined to get better. For months I neglect my school work, stop seeing my friends and don’t open letters from Selective Service, probably scheduling my Army physical. I immerse myself in chess, studying during the day and playing all night. A girl I know comes and sits next to me, joining the girlfriends of some of the other players in what is at that point an all-male obsession. One night I realize she hasn’t been around for awhile. But I don’t care. I’ve made a breakthrough. Suddenly, I can see four, sometimes five moves ahead. I am beating players who used to beat me. It all amounts to a few dollars a night, enough for four gallons of gas (24 cents a gallon) and a hot roast beef sandwich at the Cube Steak Diner on Sixth Ave with a little profit left over. But the prestige is enormous. I still haven’t traveled the light years to the main tables, but I’ve moved up to one that had enough spill to illuminate half the board. I am greeted as I walk into the park. I see the weaker players talking about me.

It’s 1960. The US is beginning its longest period of economic expansion in history. But as business booms disillusion gnaws at the national psyche.

The Russians shoot down the U2, an American spy plane. President Eisenhower disavows its mission, then backs off and becomes the first American president to admit he has lied.

There are bloody uprisings in the Asian and African colonies of our wartime allies France and Britain. We had thought of them as bulwarks of democracy and freedom, but now realize they are oppressive imperial powers.

Four black students sit in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. They are arrested. Protesters all over the South are beaten, jailed, attacked by police dogs. Six years after Brown vs. Board of Ed. one quarter of our country is still a police state.

John F. Kennedy, a dashing young war hero with a hot wife, runs for President, promising change and a New Frontier. He is tied with Vice President Nixon until late returns from Cook County, Illinois make him victorious by one tenth of a percent. “The boys in Chicago fixed it,” says Mr. Leo, who runs numbers in Tony’s candy store on Eleventh Avenue in Brooklyn. “Just like Luciano fixed New York for FDR in ’32.”

My father has given me a job at the Riverside Memorial Chapel on Park Circle across from Prospect Park. He has worked himself up from monument salesman to manager, but is mortified at being in the funeral business. When people ask him what he does he says: “I play third base for the Cubs…” Or: “I’m the wine steward in the Woman’s House of Detention.”

I need a special Chauffeur’s license to drive the hearses, panel trucks and flower cars. But I’m 17 and you have to be 18 to get a Chauffeur’s license. Plus you have to pass another written exam and road test.

“Albino will fix it,” my father says.

Albino is a limo driver with connections way above his station. He is short and dark with a sharp, chin and beak of a nose. His eyes rove restlessly and his head jerks like a hungry bird’s.

On the way to the DMV I hear the story of his life. He talks in staccato bursts… “Youngest of eight. My father only had enough gas left in the tank to make a dwarf…He was a big guy,too…Everybody in the family shot up… Even in my sisters…I’m shorter than my mother for Chrissake…”

We drive over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. “We’ll go to Worth Street,” he says. ” I don’t trust those mamelukes in Brooklyn…”

He spent five and a half years in the Army during World War II. “They didn’t let me out until every Jap was dead.” He asks me if I’ve gotten my draft card. “Tell me when they call you for your physical,” he says. “I got a doctor who’ll make you 4F.”

There are lines out the door at the DMV. Only one window for the Chauffeur’s License applicants and there are at least a hundred guys ahead of me.

Albino pulls me away. “Wiseguys don’t stand on line…”

He gives me the form. “Fill this out.”

A few minutes later he is back. “Let’s get your picture took…”

The photographer is a little guy in a plaid bow-tie, eyes bulging behind horn rimmed glasses.

“Anybody ever tellya ya look like Tony Curtis?” he asks.

“No…”

“They will now…Stand straight and look serious…”

Albino takes me aside. “Got ten bucks?”

I don’t carry that much cash.

“Never mind, I’ll front it…”

My license shows up in the mail five days later.

I pay Albino back the ten. Years later I find out he told my father it cost 20 and got that plus a ten spot for his time.

I’m taking morning classes at Brooklyn College. Between the boiling radiators and the boring professors I go into a coma every morning. My Western Civ instructor, Professor Hoffman asks the class to talk quietly. “We don’t want to wake Mr. Gould.”

At two o’clock I run to my ’57 Bel Air, my home away from home. I change into a black suit in the back seat and head to the chapel. My job is to stand in the lobby and direct people to the reposing rooms. After visiting hours Albino and I load up a Chevy 31 Panel truck with mourner’s benches for religious Jews.

“Here’s a little trick, kid,” Albino says as we go to the first house. The order is for five benches, but he takes three.

A haggard old man, nose running, eyes red-rimmed complains: “We ordered five. We have to have five benches for the immediate family.”

Albino pats his arm. “Let me see what I can do.” He brings the two extra benches into house and comes back with a five dollar bill and a gleeful smile.

“Works every time.”

No one can be buried without a valid death certificate, issued either by the attending physician or the Medical Examiner. The Board of Health is very strict about correct cause of death and has been known to disallow a death certificate, causing a delay in burial. Also, religious Jews and Catholics object to autopsies, causing more costly complications.

But Albino has “fixed” Katz, a clerk on the night shift. He gives me careful instructions.

“Wait ’til there’s nobody in the room. Go to the cage and tell him you’re Albino’s friend from Riverside. Slip the certificate under the bars with two bucks under it.”

I do exactly as ordered. Katz, his face shadowed by a green visor, stamps the certificate without even looking at it and slides it back.

It occurs to me that we might be helping somebody get away with murder.

Albino agrees. “We might be at that.”

And puts in an expense chit for five dollars.

My Bel Air is what they call a “big six.” It can fly. The Brooklyn B ridge at 2am is a great proving ground.

But one night I get a speeding ticket. Next day I’m telling everybody how this motorcycle cop came out of nowhere. Later Albino sidles up.

“You wanna beat a ticket?”

He gives me a copy of the NYPD house organ, Spring 3100, a magazine distributed only to cops. “Put a copy of this on your windshield, and write Albino on the front page,” he says. “Keep your license in a little plastic envelope with a tensky folded up behind it. The cop’ll see the magazine. You slip him the license…” He snaps his finger. “Bingo, you’re outta there.” Then, in all seriousness, he warns: “it probably won’t work if you run an old lady over, or somethin’.”

That Friday night I go to a loft party in Greenwich Village. Four hours later I have ten very stoned beatniks in my Bel Air. Arms and legs sticking out of the windows, people giggling and struggling for breath under the pile. We decide to see the sun rise at Coney Island. A cop car follows me across the bridge and pulls me over. It’s a sergeant with a chest full of commendations. He looks at the squirming mass in the car.

“You tryin’ to break a college record or somethin’?”

As I open the door three people fall out at his feet.

“I’m gonna get writer’s cramp with you, pal,” he says.

He makes me walk a straight line. Close my eyes and touch my nose.

“If you were drunk at least you’d have an excuse,” he says. “You’re just a moron.”

He takes the magazine off the windshield. Takes my loaded license back to his car.

I wink at my friends. “Watch this…”

Ten minutes later he comes back with a fistful of tickets and hands them to me one by one.

“Overloading a car…Changing lines without signaling…Driving over the lane markers…One red light infraction…Broken tail light…Going 45 in a 35 mile zone. Normally, I would overlook that, but I’m throwin’ the book at you, asshole.”

He follows me as I drive everybody to the Borough Hall subway station and watches as they get out to take the subway back to Manhattan.

Then, he hands me my license with the ten still in it.

“You were lucky tonight, kid,” he says. “Next time I’ll be pullin’ your body out of a burning car.”

Next day I tell Albino the story. “At least there’s one honest cop in the world,” I say.

Albino doesn’t accept that explanation. He shakes his head in puzzlement. Then, he brightens.

“You said it was a sergeant, right?”

“Yeah…”

“That’s it, ” he says triumphantly, his vision of a corrupt universe confirmed. “Dopey me.” He smacks himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. “I forgot to tellya. Sergeants you gotta pay double, ’cause they kick back to the captain…”