Figure it out.

You want to know what tough is, try being born in one place, leaving all familiar things as a young man, and learn to survive and support yourself in an alien world. Then move to another place (and language) and learn how to support yourself again. And then move to another place and another language and not just learn the local ropes all over again but become a giant in your chosen profession.

You don’t need to see one of his 76 films to understand the genius of Billy Wilder.

Wilder was one of those mid-century mittel-Europeans who knew how to survive and succeed.  They walked across Russia, they walked out of Auschwitz, they walked away from trouble and if it ever found them again they knew what to do.

Wilder tells the story: “If you ever wake up in a strange hotel room with a strange woman at your side and she is dead, call Sam Spiegel. He will know what to do.”

If you want to survive, ask a survivor. If you want to know how to succeed, figure it out. The story could be the opening scene from a film noir, but in Wilder’s life and in Spiegel’s it is just a dramatization of the danger and uncertainty that lurked around every corner of it until they hit Hollywood. 

In a tight spot? Buddy, the Gestapo aren’t even on the train yet. The thing is, figure it out: be smart, resourceful and work like hell. In other words, be “creative”. Immigrants have a great advantage over the rest of us. They are continually called on to reinvent themselves, to figure it out. While most of us have them given to us from birth, they have to write their own parts. That’s why they are often so good at it and do so well. That’s not a Mexican gardener in front of your house, that’s someone inventing himself.

He’s in good company. Endre Friedmann left Budapest, taught himself to take photographs, went to Paris, fell in love with Gerda Taro, went to the Spanish Civil War, rehearsed for the Second World War, invaded Normandy with the first landing craft, partied with Hemingway, made love to Ingrid Bergman, founded Magnum with Cartier-Bresson, went to China, went to Russia, went to Utah, worked in New York, became an American, went to IndoChina and before he died there, stepping on a landmine, Robert Capa reminded all war photographers that if their pictures weren’t good enough they weren’t close enough.

Immigrants are the quintessential Americans. Or rather they have what we would like to think are American essentials. Risk-takers because they have nothing to lose, full of innovation and energy because that’s what’s in their bank, investors in the future because they have no past to return to. Entrepreneurs, they have the potential to reinvent themselves, and us.

And we are afraid of letting too many in. Go figure.

The Union.

   

Growing up in New York I lived in the orbit of the ILGWU.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union was “The Union”. 

Everyone called it that. “The ILGWU” was for people  from out of town.

The Union was the champion of the workers, the people who before the union, and not long before, had sat bent over sewing machines for 12 hours a day. It supported liberal causes long before the word became right wing code for welfare: taking “our” money and giving it to “them”.

What my father and his generation understood by liberal was simple: helping people rise. So that those on the lowest rung of the ladder could move off and up, just as they had themselves. They believed in this not just because it was the right thing to do, but because the result was better for all of us.

It was a statement of belief in society, the idea that we were more than a collection of individuals and their rights. Being part of a group brought mutual responsibilities and mutual benefits.

Think Jesus via John Donne and Franklin Roosevelt.

This was still the land of opportunity. People felt the tide of optimism after the war. So why not give everyone every opportunity to rise? The Union did it with better wages, safer work places, health clinics, education programs---even its own resort—and by giving a little power to the powerless.  

It’s hard to imagine now how large a shadow the garment industry cast in the city. There was, of course, “the garment district”. Through it ran “Fashion Avenue”. It employed over 70,000 people and generated many billions in revenues, wages and taxes. It was a place where people could get ahead: where they could learn skills, awaken their creativity, start a business on 37^th Street, find suppliers on 38^th Street and major retail customers on 57^th Street.

It was an incubator of prosperity.

My father, on the periphery, represented a trade association of small “contractors, men whose “shops”, with anywhere from 25 to 100+ machines, did mostly “piece work” for the big manufacturers.

His job was to represent the contractors and negotiate contracts with the manufacturers and the Union.

The contractors would rarely make the whole garment. They would make sleeves or shoulders or buttonholes. Like many in the trade, my father could look at a garment and estimate its cost, the labor, the time it would take, etc. He worked closely with the Union and was a confident of many senior officials.

His affiliation with “the movement” stretched back, as many of theirs did, to the Jewish Labor Bund beginnings in Poland. As a young man he organized workers and made speeches in support of improving the lives of workers. In this country he worked for the Jewish Labor Committee, a Union-backed organization that rescued people from Nazi-occupied Europe and helped place war orphans.

In the 60’s it played a significant role in the Union’s campaign for Civil Rights.

One my father’s friends was Louis Stulberg, who succeeded long-time ILG president David Dubinsky. Stulberg silently paid his rent after my mother, Ida Pearlstein, died and while he was out of work for the best part of a year, with two young children to support. This was something that was never mentioned.

Dubinsky, Sasha Zimmerman, George Rubin, Stulberg, Luigi Antonini were big personalities. Some of the Union people, the business agents who were responsible for organizing union shops, were just big. They had to be. Some manufacturers could be violently anti-union. They thought it cost them money and that they should be allowed to treat their workers as they chose. They hadn’t yet figured out how to export their jobs south to Georgia or southeast to Viet Nam and China, and take our tax base with them. Eventually they did.

In the periphery there was always organized crime: “the boys”. If you left them alone, my father counseled, they generally left you alone. If you “joined”, by borrowing money at loan-shark rates because you had nowhere else to go for capital, or to pay off debts, you were a member for life. Resignation was not in their by-laws.

The Union was as much a social welfare organization as a tool for collective bargaining.

When I was in high school I worked summers at Unity House, the leafy union resort for its members in the Poconos, just over the Pennsylvania border. If you were a union member you got two weeks sitting in Adirondack chairs or freezing in the spring-fed lake with the perch. In the evening, when you finally dragged yourself away from the second and third helpings at the table, you would be entertained by nightly concerts in the auditorium. The programs ran from Italian opera to popular music. One memorable rock-and-roll night featured Little Anthony and the Imperials, who closed their set with a falsetto-driven rendition of “Hava Nageela”.

Think: a Bar Mitzvah in Harlem.

I was a bus boy, then a waiter in the cavernous dining room. There was a huge Diego Rivera mural at the entrance, which no one took notice of until years later it, and the dining room, burnt down. There on the porch, ignoring Mr Rivera’s passionate dream of revolution, the guests lined up every night, dreaming of the Italian chef’s veal stew. At 7PM, like advance shock troops of the Appetite Army, the doors opened and they rushed in, not so much hungry for food as hungry to eat. The act of eating and eating a lot, of being able to eat a lot, of being seen to eat a lot, was some kind of sign of being OK.

The kitchen was divided into two parts, Jewish and Italian. The Jews would get gefilte fish. The Italians, eggplant parmesan. Everybody got roast beef. The kitchen practiced a seniority system. The veteran waiters got the first choice of rolls in the morning and the ends of the roast beef in the evening. All the guests wanted end pieces once someone at their table asked, and someone always asked. The competition in the kitchen was fierce for the well-done ends of roast beef. Unfortunately, a roast only has two ends.

The eggplant parmesan was the best I have ever had, and I was not alone in that judgment. The waiters kept multiples in their station drawers to enjoy after work with a beer, until the stocky Italian chef, who wondered why there were never enough for the guests, found out. One evening after dinner he ran around the dining room opening drawers, waving his chef’s knife. Afterwards there were always enough eggplants to go around.

One of my fellow waiters was Jon Dolgen, son of Abe Dolgen. Abe was a Union official and friend of my father’s. Decades later Jon became Head of Paramount. When I saw his picture in the paper I thought it was Abe. In 1963 we decided not to go to the March on Washington where Martin Luther King spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial because we wanted to stay at Unity House, work the weekend for tips, play softball and perhaps get lucky with a waitress after dinner.

So much for our sense of history and commitment to social justice.

The following is from the archives of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where my mother, Ida Alter, was one of the first women graduates as an adult student in 1947. It’s probably more than any layman person needs to know about these pioneering people from the past. But what’s wrong with letting their names ring out over the silent decades, since they built and were “The Union”, which helped so many people rise?

ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY

The ILGWU was founded in New York City in 1900 by Jewish, Italian, and some Scots-Irish and Irish immigrants. The Union sought to unite the various crafts in its rapidly growing industry to increase their mutual strength. There was early resistance to the ILGWU from the garment manufacturers with whom they collectively bargained. There were also challenges to the Union’s domination of the trade by the Industrial Workers of the World and by Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance.

By 1917, the ILGWU had defeated its rivals. Through a combination of militant and impassioned work stoppages lead by its more radical members and vigorous organizing and negotiation, the Union had also consolidated its power, greatly improved working conditions for its members and created the mechanism for arbitrating disputes and grievances under a labor-management agreement known as the Protocol of Peace. In 1919, the ILGWU became the first American union to negotiate an unemployment compensation fund that was contributed to by its employers.

The momentum of the previous two decades, however, was nearly lost to politically inspired intraunion warfare in the 1920’s. Under its newly elected President Morris Sigman, the Union’s General Executive Board disbanded left-wing groups within the Union in 1923, charging that they were communist cells. The radicals within the Union formed the Joint Action Committee to coordinate their battle with the parent Union. The issue came to a head in 1926 during a bitter and costly Cloakmaker’s strike. Mismanaged by the communist leadership in the local, the strike plunged the International eight hundred thousand dollars into debt. The chaos caused by the strike and the subsequent expulsion of communists from the Union left it greatly weakened. Sigman resigned in 1928 and was succeeded by Benjamin Schlesinger, who had previously lead the Union between 1914-1923. He remained as President until a fatal illness forced him to resign in 1932.

Despite the political turmoil during the 1920’s, the ILGWU pioneered in the establishment of an extremely progressive health care program for its members which included not only regional Union Health Centers but the establishment of a resort for union workers first located in Massachusetts, later in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, known as Unity House. The Union also had an imaginative and pioneering Education Department which not only trained workers in traditional union techniques, but provided courses in continuation education in such basic skills as citizenship and the English language. The ILGWU also offered its members a forum for their social activities—sponsoring such activities as sports teams and even a mandolin orchestra.

In 1932, David Dubinsky was elected President of the ILGWU. Dubinsky and the ILGWU (then 200,000 strong) were to play an important role in fostering industrial unionism in the United States by encouraging the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization. The Union would be an important political force in New York City and State politics and in the Democratic Party and Liberal Party as well. Dubinsky and his union were also instrumental in the decade-long effort to bring the plight of European Jews suffering under Nazi persecution to the attention of the world through the efforts of the Jewish Labor Committee. The ILGWU leadership included a number of significant figures in labor history in addition to Dubinsky. Among these were former presidents Benjamin Schlesinger, Morris Sigman, Louis Stulberg, and Sol Chaikin. The names of many of the union’s other officials such as Luigi Antonini, Charles Zimmerman, Rose Pesotta, Frederick F. Umhey, Julius Hochman, Fannia M. Cohn, Isidore Nagler, Gus Tyler, and Leon Stein, are also well known to historians. In the period following the Second World War, the union suffered a decline in membership due to the movement of shops from the urban centers in the northeast to the south to avoid unionization and to take advantage of less expensive labor. The ethnic and racial character of the ILGWU also changed as European immigrants were supplanted by Asians, Latin Americans and immigrants from the Caribbean.

The Union’s African-American membership was also to greatly grow during this period. In recent years, despite vigorous efforts by union activists to limit such activities, garment manufacturers were to export their manufacturing abroad, taking advantage of cheap third world labor supplies and further cutting the membership base of the union.

In July 1995 the ILGWU merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) at a joint convention, forming UNITE (Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees). At the time the new union had a membership of about 250,000 in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

The Infants and Children's Novelty Association.

The Infants & Children’s Novelties Association.

My father headed a trade association of small manufacturers, “contractors”, in the garment business, mostly Jewish, Italian and Chinese. 

It was called the Infants & Children’s Novelties Association. Later, probably because few people knew what a “novelty” was anymore, it changed its name to the Infants & Children’s Sportwear Association.

I didn’t know what a novelty was until someone said it was “snow suits and things like that”. Snowsuits were one piece Eskimo-like winter protection for toddlers, with mittens attached to the cuffs by strings. The kids disappeared in the snow suits and the mittens disappeared in their thousands, despite the strings. Not losing them, that would have been a novelty.

I never discovered what “things like that” referred to. “Sportswear” covered all sins, and novelties.

The men who made up the association were owners of small garment factories or “shops”, 25 to 100+ machines. They were called “contractors” because they contracted to work for the big manufacturers who actually designed and branded the clothes and sold them to the Macys, Gimbels, Lord & Taylors and Saks Fifth Avenues. 

While big manufacturers like Carl Rosen of Puritan could be elegant, imposing men in finely tailored suits with race horses in the country and famous models on their arms, the contractors were usually short, pugnacious men who smoked cigars a few sizes too large, talked a few decibels to loud, argued as a way of life, eventually agreed and made deals.

Almost none had been to college but all had degrees in hard knocks, some advanced.

As businessmen eeking out their percentages in a seasonal business, and as the low men on the food chain, they knew failure as well as success. This was the norm.  In the garment business disasters were dire and numerous but almost never fatal. One good season could push you through several bad ones. Contractors were optimists. Like the Brooklyn Dodgers they had an unshakeable faith in next year. No matter how many times you struck out this season, there was always the next one. And like Brazilian soccer players, they were known by a single name: Karasic, Russo, Liu, Saporta, Famiglia.  

First names were for wives or girlfriends---or both.

They were moguls in miniature, but more human. They were all from somewhere else, somewhere worse. All spoke English with foreign accents, but rarely the same ones.

But now, in the 50s and 60’s, they were Americans. New York was America and the greatest place they could imagine. They took nothing for granted and worked 26 hours a day. They couldn’t believe their luck.

And although they worked in an industry they themselves would call “dog-eat-dog”, they saw no reason to consume each other. They were first to put their hands in their pockets for a person (a suddenly paralysed basketball player), a family (of a policeman shot in the line of duty), even a country (Israel Bonds!). They were generous in the way only people who have really seen how bad the world can be are generous.  For them, the Second World War was yesterday, the Great Depression last week. They never forgot either.

So while they were tough cookies, nobody's fools, and fit enough to survive and prosper in the rough and tumble New York garment business, they didn't subscribe to the 'survival of the fittest'. They were not social Darwinists.

Sure, it was a tough world all right, but that was why you shouldn’t be a shit, especially a complete shit. And there was no notion that for someone to win someone else had to lose.

They were all less than a generation away from the Old World---in southern Italy or eastern Poland or western China--- where the opportunity for a person to advance, no matter what their energy, intelligence or talent, was zero. So this world wasn't that tough.

In mid-20th Century America, they were unexpectedly successful. They grew their businesses from a few sewing machines to 75 or a 100 or more. Their “shops” helped thousands of women support families.  Some contractors were only a few years off the boat, but already they had bought their own houses and drove their own cars and made good lives for their families in Long Branch, Asbury Park, Syosset and Yonkers.

They were capitalists, also citizens, part of the post-war rising tide that lifted all, or most, boats. Immigrants, they had earned the right to push their chests out as Americans.

They weren’t rich.  Who dreamed of rich? What did rich have to do with it? Rich was for people in the glossy magazines and air-conditioned movies in CinemaScope, an MGM fantasy with Tab Hunter or Rock Hudson and Doris Day, good for two hours on a Saturday night. Going to restaurants, going to Florida for two weeks, raising a family, have a son or daughter go to college: that was truly rich.

They were grateful for all that, and gratitude made them dangerous. When Henry Caruso invited our family to dinner at his house in the Jersey Highlands, course after course were carried from the kitchen by regimes of Caruso women. Platters of pasta were followed by eggplant parmesan. Then roasted chickens. Then veal scalappini. And when it was impossible to consider eating another thing, out came an enormous platter of pot roast and vegetables. 

It was a feast designed to not so much to feed your hunger, but rather batter it into submission. 

Desserts finally made their appearance. Cakes, canollies stuffed to bursting, biscotti in several flavors. You had to eat something of everything and say yes to more, even as your insides pleaded no.  It was ungracious, it would be bad manners, it would be remembered not to.

Finally out of the kitchen, like a curtain call, slipped the maestro of the meal, Mrs Caruso. Up to that point she had only been a head darting in and out of the dining room, a nervous mother hen checking on the appetite of her chicks.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese contractors held their gastronomic assaults in Chinatown.

Tony Liu’s dinners were in a small and undoubtedly family-owned restaurant off Mott Street. They consisted of uncounted plates of beef, pork, duck, sweet and sour fish and several impossible to define and you probably wouldn’t want to know anyway dishes.  Dinner always ended with winter melon soup. Winter melon, it turns out, is not a melon but a rather large gourd, rude in shape to boot: long, fat, curved and hairy. But the soup was spectacular and in spite of being gorged, we all waited for it. Leather pouches filled with marbles—or pearls for all I knew---were going away gifts for the ladies.

The contractors' hospitality was not limited to the table. When my mother was in the hospital dealing with an unpleasant but not life-threatening "procedure", her room could have been that of the chairman of the Florist’s Association. Then Hymie Saporta, a Sephardic Jew of unbridled enthusiasm, unmatched generosity and zero inhibitions marched in dressed in his "new $400 suit", a fact he pointed out with great pride to my mother, whose interest in sartorial detail was at that point at a low ebb. He carried into that arboretum what in a forest might have been a small tree but in a hospital room was more Redwood.

  

There were always tickets to be had for courtside seats to the Knicks at the old Madison Square Garden on 48^th Street and 8^th Avenue. It must be said, given the hapless Knicks of that era---Kenny Sears, Ray Felix, Willie Naulls and Richie Guerin—even those tickets weren’t always in such great demand by other than me and my pals. There were also World Series tickets to Yankee Stadium, signed baseballs and tickets to the latest and impossible-to-get Broadway shows.

Today this may look like bribery, but it was really gratitude.

It’s easy to see why. My father helped negotiate contracts between his contractors, the big manufacturers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He knew and was respected by all the key players, Union and manufacturers. He was a confident of many senior Union officials. They asked for and valued his judgment. But he always had his members’ interests at heart. The contractors knew it. They also knew he was smart and honest as well as being well-connected.  And that he was more interested in having influence than having money. The ultimate net-worker, he made the matches and smoothed the way to keep the shops working and profitable, the machines humming, the workers employed. He knew the individual strengths of each of the shops and matched them with the appropriate jobs. Most of all, in a competitive industry with no small egos, he knew how to find the common ground that made the industry work. One does well, all do well was his MO. It used to be this country’s.

Now, of course, that idea would be a novelty.

Scottie Was Late.

                                   Scottie was late.

Scottie was late. He was always late. Even today, when I was going to get a new mother. I had special permission to be excused from PS 90 for the afternoon, so time was important. Scottie was a screw-up, a first cousin, but much older. There is a big difference within generations when a family begins with 18 children--- give or take a few depending on who is telling the story. My father, who was the youngest and last to leave home said 18; his older siblings long flown the Polish coop to London, Glasgow, and the west Bronx, said fewer, but what did they know? Over the years and great distances people lose count or weren’t there to continue counting. Hitler took care of those who stayed put, and that was most of them. Far-fetched? Benjamin Franklin was the 15^th of 18.

When I was 18 I went to Dublin to meet my cousin Eddie. Another first cousin, he was the son of my father’s oldest brother, Sanny, who started as a tailor and finished as a horse player and story-teller, taking naturally to the Irish life. Eddie was born in 1907 so he older than me by almost 40 years, and much older than my father, his uncle. He died in the Jewish Home of Ireland at 92. I hope I have his genes. The home was run by young Catholic girls from the country. They were far more observant Jews than the Jews and kept everything strictly kosher, not even allowing a birthday cake in the door which we had arranged to be delivered from afar.

Scottie, or Stanley as he began, grew up in Glasgow. His parents stopped there on the way to the Bronx from Poland. Many ears later, after they had raised 4 children, all of whom had picked up broad Scottish accents and presumably learned to support Rangers or Celtic before they were aware off the Yankees. The family resumed their journey to 1820 Loring Place, just off Tremont Ave. Scottie’s mother Rachel was my father’s oldest sister. He was a tall, slim, great looking young man with a shock of blond hair. He was a charmer and knew it. I suspect it was surprise later to discover he needed more than charm to get by. He got married, got married again (my father grumbled: again a wedding present?). Then he got married again. By then he wasn’t such a great looking kid, but a man who looked too much like a kid, too old to be one. A Scottish-American Jackie Coogan. Rachel must have been in her 50s but she seemed ancient, ageless, however old witches get to be in the nightmares of 6-year-olds. She may have been kind but she didn’t feel it. She made lumpy porridge and made us eat it, even cold. Her pastries, which she used to roll out in long rows on the dining room table, were heavy, indelicate, from Poland, not Vienna. She was heavy, with underarms that sagged, and heavy-handed. What she wasn’t was my mother. My father parked us there while he tried to restart his life after my mother died at the end of a two-year-long breast cancer. He needed to find a job, go to work, pay the rent (which friends had been paying for a year), and find a mother for us who happened to be a wife for himself. Rachel as caretaker did her best and we were eternally ungrateful. She just seemed from another age. Meanwhile, what the new Ida took on at the not tender age of 39 was impossible to conceive of: a ready made but broken family. And a couple of seriously screwed up kids who showed little mercy until long after and probably far too late, when they realized how lucky they were. She was, as my sister described her, “a beautiful soul”.

The Mad Barber of the Bronx.

The Mad Barber of the Bronx.

He was wide-eyed and his face ghostly white. And, to my 8-year-old-eyes, very old. He had just enough flesh hanging over his bones to seem like a skeleton in hot pursuit as he ran passed the candy store.  Or, in his white barber’s coat he could have been a horror comic cover with a surreal hospital theme: a post-mortem doctor chasing an unwilling corpse, scalpel at the ready. I see him now, tall and gaunt and deadly earnest, long legs carrying him much faster than they should have been able to, down Sheridan Avenue and up McClellan Street, with an open barber’s razor held high in his right hand.

We needed no encouragement to stay ahead, our faces contorted with fear and excitement, eyes and ears pulled back as if by the wind. Exquisite terror urged us on. We ran for our lives. Meanwhile, six blocks away, at 161^st and River Ave, the Yankees would be winning, or Mickey or Yogi or The Scooter would make sure they would be by the end of the 9th.

All was normal in the west Bronx.

The barber, a German, an immigrant---surely a survivor of the war, but on which side?---had a small shop on a side street off the Grand Concourse. We’d tease him by dancing around the front of the shop, banging his window, one leg tensed for escape. He showed no reaction while he clipped and shaved his customer, until the moment our awful teasing and ignorant chants (“Heine”? “Kraut”? “Nazi”?) dredged up what-ever demons lay shallow in his skull. In one movement he was away from the chair, out of the door, razor high. We were gone, around the corner and up the hill towards the Grand Concourse, the Bronx’s parade route version of the Champs Elysée, laughing and screaming. Then right on the Concourse towards 167^th Street and the refuge of the alleyways that ran under the Art Deco apartment buildings standing side by side, sentinels of safety.

We headed for their dark storage rooms and dusty furnace rooms and finally, at the back, concrete rear “gardens”. You wanted to get in amongst the rusty bikes and dusty baby carriages of grown-up babies, and disappear, schhh and silent, in the blackness. You did not want to get caught out back where there was only one way in and out, and the walls were too high to climb.

Today the same buildings, with their tongue-in-groove flooring, spacious sunken living rooms and Deco multi-colored tiles, and a 25-minute commute on the D Train to Columbus Circle, are waiting to welcome a new migration of young families seeking sanctuary from Manhattan, this time not from the terrible old ghetto-like lower-east side, but from the new uber-fashionable lower-east side where restaurants are French and rents are terrible.  Unfortunately, in both neighborhoods the sour pickles are gone.

Besides playing hooky and going to Yankee Stadium (Bleachers, 50¢) this early test of manhood and sadism (the two almost always go together) was the most exciting thing an eight-year-old could wish for: a rite of passage and a dumb shit thing to do. How long could you wait before you ran?  Who would wait the longest? The Barber was a mystery. What nightmare exploded in his brain from a tragic or malevolent past? Was he a refugee from a concentration camp with faded purple numbers on his forearm, or one of its guards---a Nazi who had been interned in America and after the war, and, as the 40’s dragged into the 50’s, simply let go.

Here amongst Bronx streets named for mostly useless Union generals, he found a little private war where, for us, every engagement ended with an egg cream, a long pretzel and an elevated heart rate. From adrenalin rush to sugar rush, and the candy store. What bliss.

The A Bomb.

Heavy wooden seats were thrown up on their hinges and exploded against the backs of the chairs. The clatter filled the room, punctuating the sound of 30 eight-year-olds suddenly freed from order to live joyously in the chaos of the moment. Somewhere a high-pitched voice, first stern and commanding, then cajoling, then imploring for, of all improbable things, silence. We knelt beneath our desks, arms pressing our heads down to our chests. A classroom rehearsing for an airline’s instructional video of what to do in the “unlikely event” of a crash landing? Not us. We were preparing not for the unlikely but for the inevitable, for the imminent even: we were getting ready for the end of the world.

It was our destiny.

We were readying ourselves not from the danger below, but from above. Moscow’s bombers were droning in our ears overhead. And if not today, they would certainly be tomorrow.  It was so exciting, it was scary. So we closed our eyes and hunched down to protect ourselves from the flash, and the shower of glass from the blast that would follow.

But that day, at least, fate intervened. Moscow must have had agents in the school yard. They discovered our drill, and realized we were invulnerable as we crouched, protected by our ink-stained, pocketknife-initialed and bubble-gum-bottomed desks in class 3C, PS90, the Bronx. In the end the bombers turned back and there was no Third World War that day. Of course, that was just one instance when hostilities were averted.

If we were protected during the day by old oak and layers of ancient shellac, the Russians might come at night. So night after night as the drone of approaching airplanes reached maximum decibels directly over Apt 32C, 1166 Grand Concourse, loaded with A bombs, bringing the blinding flash that would obliterate the Bronx and the world--- which I could see in my mind’s eye burning from frame edge to frame edge like old silver oxide film---I fought back with a secret weapon. Lying in bed, chest tightened, breath held, face turning scarlet and eyes tightly closed, I visualized the flying phalanx of Tupolev TU—95s, aka “The Bear” (speed 550mph, range 7000+ miles), and made intense machine-gun-like sounds at the back of my throat, aiming at each plane’s four engines. Ack, ack, ack, ack!  I started with the lead plane so the rest of the squadron would know they were under attack.

Eventually, the psychic barrage began to have an effect. One by one the planes dipped their enormous wings, turned and headed for home.

But relief was temporary. Soon there was another small buzz on the eastern horizon coming from Long Island and the Atlantic. Then it was not so small, getting closer and closer and louder and louder. As always, they were coming straight for me, ignoring Idlewild and LaGuardia, Yankee Stadium and Lindy’s on 52^nd Street. Once again I had to go into rapid defensive mode, under the covers, eyes shut tight, keeping focus: ack, ack, ack, ack! In that blackness I could see everything: the fleet of planes in the moon-lit blue-black sky, the empty, unsuspecting street below, almost white in the moonlight, my borough, my building, my bedroom. I was at the epicenter and had to remain vigilant until the light of dawn crept through the blinds.

I don’t know how many sleepless nights I personally saved New York from utter destruction before going to school. Nobody does. I like it that way.