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 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.