Workin' At Travelers Aid-ISS Revisited (13)

During the 2 hours that it took to drive out of Brooklyn and onto the highways leading to Route 17 and up to Liberty, NY, the four of us in the car shared a few joints and, while driving, Joe's co-worker also drank a can of beer.

But, during the middle of the highway drive up to Liberty, NY, Joe's co-worker suddenly became nauseous, drove his car slowly into the highway's break-down lane, got out of the car, vomited for a minute or two, and then quickly returned to his car's driver's seat and continued to drive up the highway towards Liberty, NY.

Yet before the car reached Liberty, NY, however, Joe persuaded his co-worker to stop off at one of the campsites in the Catskill Mountains, around Monticello, so, while we were passing through the area, could check out what the scene there was like.

And what we soon discovered, after driving around one of the campsites, was that the campsite was overcrowded with a lot of culturally-straight families who had parked their oversized campers next to the oversized campers of other culturally-straight families. So that the campsite resembled a New York City street or highway traffic jam in the country filled with similar-looking campers, rather than cars. 

Then, while laughing and still high on pot after our brief visit to the campsite, Joe's co-worker soon drove his car and us away from the campsite and again continued driving up the road towards Liberty, New York.

But by the time the four of us arrived at the summer house in the country of the social service professional who had "invited" Joe and his Joe's co-worker/colleague to spend some time on the weekend there, it was nighttime. And after Joe knocked on the front door of the house, the white upper middle-class liberal social service profession who had extended him the invitation to visit answered the door and seemed surprise to see that Joe had followed up so quickly on his invitation, by showing up that same night.

 And, after entering the house's living room and standing there for a few minutes, Joe and the rest of us were quickly led back out of the house, through the front door by Joe's social service professional colleague, to the front yard and then into a barn that was located around 15 yards to the right side of the house. And then, we were quickly told that the four of us could sleep on the hay loft there that night.

Apparently what had happened was that Joe's co-worker, who lived in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn and was also a friend of a member of the 1970s Movement-oriented rock band, The Human Condition, which a late 1960s and early 1970s former Newsreel radical left filmmaking group member, named Bev, had organized (after she had left Newsreel and decided to focus more on becoming a revolutionary socialist Movement singer-songwriter and rock band leader, who sang in a bluesy way that reminded one of how Janis Joplin had sung in the late 1960s).

And for some reason, despite having apparently casually invited Joe and Joe's co-worker colleague at some point to spend part of a summer weekend crashing at the upper middle-class social worker colleague's summer country home, the white upper-middle-class professional social worker colleague at the Staten Island Drug Addiction medical health care center of Joe's wasn't eager to allow Joe, Joe's co-worker, the brother of Joe's co-worker and me--all of whom weren't part of the U.S. liberal professional upper middle-class like he was--mingle or perhaps share a joint or get drunk with the 1970s radical left musicians he was allowing to use his inherited summer home as their place to hand-out in and practice at during the summer.

So naturally, when Joe, Joe's co-worker, the brother of Joe's co-worker and I were in the barn along with each other, sharing a joint and preparing to get ready to stretch out and sleep there in our clothing for the night, the brother of Joe's co-worker quickly blurted out: "He seemed to want to get us out of his house right away, as if we weren't good enough to hang out there."

And Joe, Joe's coo-worker and I generally agreed, right before, Joe jokingly said, "I wish I had some heroin on me to inject right now," prior to everyone else in the barn now agreeing with Joe.

To be fair to Bev (who had apparently noticed how quickly her band's host had pushed out of his summer house and into his barn when we arrived there late on the previous evening), she appeared inside the barn the following morning, in a white bathroom, to make sure we were awake by then; and to let the four of us know that there was some breakfast leftovers in the house for us to eat, if we felt like it. And, if I recall correctly, I think the four of us, who were already awake when Bev appeared in the barn, quickly walked back to the house and grabbed a few bites of the breakfast leftovers.

Then, before Joes co-worker started to drive the car of his back to New York City later that morning, I can recall joining Joe, Joe's co-worker, and Joe's co-worker's brother in tossing a football that was previously left on the grass , in front of the upper-middle-class professional social worker colleague at their workplace's house, to each other for around 10 minutes.

And, during the ten minutes of tossing around the football, Bev seemed to remember who I was and walked up to me, smiled and said, "Great to see you're O.K.;" before then quickly walking back into the house there, in a way which seemed to indicate she had no particular further interest in conversing with me.

Despite the fact that three years before I had once advised Bev, in a letter to her, that it might make much more political sense for her to get more into being a singer-songwriter radical feminist musician than just working as a Movement organizer for a Newsreel left documentary filmmakers group which (in the absence of then having access to some kind of mass media distribution way of airing its films) was not likely to be able to create enough revolutionary feminist consciousness in the 1970s among U.S. working-class people that would be required for creation of a revolutionary feminist and democratic socialist society in the USA.

 

Workin' At Travelers Aid-ISS Revisited: (12)

 Perhaps because by the mid-1970s Joe still felt nostalgic for the days when he had shared joints with me, or often interacted with me, within the Richmond College Social Change Commune late 1960s hippie student scene, when most of us still assumed that a cultural, political and economic Revolution would happen in the USA in the 1970s, and, to him, I apparently still symbolized that time he felt some nostalgia for, in a friendly way Joe offered to drive me back to my slum apartment on the Brooklyn waterfront; before driving himself back to his mother's apartment in Queens in which he now lived?

Or it could be that, because he might not have yet realized how economically impoverished I still was in the mid-1970s and how much of a dump my Brooklyn apartment was, Joe might have been wanting to check out my apartment to see if it could possibly be a hipper place for him to live than was his mother's apartment in Queens, perhaps?

So many decades later, I no longer can recall much of the conversation we had while Joe shared a joint with me as he drove from Manhattan, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and towards my apartment near the Battery Tunnel entrance from Brooklyn, along the streets I directed him to take. But what I do recall is that in our conversation I made the observation that "in the Sixties, we learned that the System was morally corrupt, when it failed to stop its endless war in Vietnam, despite all the the student protests. And in the 1970s, we've learned that the System in the USA can no longer provide automatic economic affluence for most of the working-class people who went to college in the Sixties, after they leave the campus.

"In the Sixties, the System hit us morally. And now, in the Seventies, the System is hitting most of us materially and showing us that having to work in a capitalist economic system when you're in your 20's is still a total drag for most people."

And I also recall that when I noted that some of us from Richmond College were getting closer to reaching the age of 30, after which it would be unlikely that they would be able to do much more to change the world, Joe looked a bit uncomfortable, since he was a few years closer to reaching 30 than I was at that time.

After Joe's car arrived in front of the slum apartment building in which I lived, he expressed an interest in checking out where I lived. So I invited him to park his car and come inside with me.

And once inside, Joe looked around the apartment, seemed to notice how little furniture I owned and commented: "Well, at least you have a lot of space in this apartment." And, apparently quickly concluding there was no way he would ever consider moving from his mother's apartment into my apartment as a roommate paying a cheap rent, instead of continuing to sleep rent-free in his mother's rent-stabilized apartment, while living in his car the rest of the time when not at work.

As a recovered heroin addict, Joe was then getting paid to work at some kind of healthcare facility on Staten Island in the daytime, on Monday through Friday, as a drug counselor. And a few weeks after I bumped into Joe at the Judy Collins concert at South Seaport I was surprised when, early on a Friday evening after work, he and another recovered heroin addict , who was also now being paid to work at the same health care facility where Joe worked, knocked on my door and invited me to hop in the car of Joe's friend that was parked on the street outside.

It turned out that Joe and his co-worker had been "invited" by one of the yuppie male social worker professionals, who also worked at the Staten Island health care facility where they worked, to, if they felt like spending part of their weekend in the Catskill Mountains, stop by at a summer house in the country, which their yuppie workplace colleague had apparently inherited from his parents (after they retired and likely moved then to Florida).

So on this particular Friday night, Joe and his co-worker were driving up to this country house near Liberty, New York, and Joe, perhaps because he had felt sorry for me when he had visited the apartment I lived in and realized how economically impoverished I now was, decided that he'd offer me the opportunity of also getting out of the city during that hot summer weekend.

Not having previously planned to do much alone in my apartment in the evening after work at Travelers Aid-ISS on that Friday or on the upcoming Saturday or Sunday, except maybe go to Coney Island's beach, perhaps, I quickly followed Joe out of the slum apartment in which I slept in and hopped in the car of Joe's co-worker, who was driving; and then sat down in the back seat, next to the brother of Joe's co-worker; who was a tall white guy who lived with Joe's coo-worker.

As I later learned, the older brother of Joe's co-worker had worked as a bouncer in some Brooklyn bar, before later, when in his early 20's, becoming eligible for a disability welfare payment, apparently due to either previous drug use causing him to flip out and then being labeled "mentally disable" or "slow-learning; and therefore not required to do work from 9-to-5, despite still being able-bodied.

By the time I met the brother of Joe's co-worker, though, he considered himself now able to do some kind of 9-to-5 manual work , if required to do so. But somehow, despite having indicated to the government agency which had initially certified him as disabled, that he could now work 9-to-5, because of some bureaucratic mistake by the government agency, disability check payments were still being mailed to him--even 5 years after he had indicated to it he felt able to work.

So when, apparently after attempting a second time a few years later to again indicate that he was able to work 9-to-5, the government's disability checks still kept arriving in the mail, the brother of Joe's co-worker then, just shrugged, and decided he might as well just keep living off his disability check payments; and, rather than spending his days or evenings working at a dead-end job, just spend his days and evenings at home in his apartment smoking pot, listening to vinyl records or watching television shows, in-between preparing his own meals to eat.