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.

Workin' At Travelers Aid-ISS Revisited (11)

 While working at Travelers Aid-ISS and living on Van Brunt Street near the Brooklyn Battery tunnel in the mid-1970's, I came to feel that the way to replace the then-existing militaristic U.S. imperialist society's undemocratic political system was for the 1970's New Left Movement in the USA to start calling for establishing a culturally-hip, anti-imperialist and anti-militarist classless and democratic "youthocracy" in the USA.

It then seemed that the vast majority of people under 30 in the USA were still much more antiwar, anti-capitalist and anti-work ethic, as well as more leisure-oriented, politically hip and non-materialistic than were the U.S. citizens over 30 and all the old fogey U.S.-elected officials and U.S. power elite members, who had previously politically repressed the New Left Movement of the 1960s and then taken away the post-World War II economic affluence that most U.S. white working-class people had had, prior to 1973.

But although I then wrote a few columns for the New Jersey-based alternative newspaper, The Aquarian, in which I called for a "youth-led Revolution" in the USA, that would establish a socialist youthocracy in the 1970's, no youth-led revolution in the USA happened; and no political system of "youthocracy" was established in the USA in the 1970's.

Instead, the U.S. corporate media encouraged a more politically reactionary "me" generation of U.S. youths to develop and an older generation of "hip capitalists"--some of whom were born during and after World WarII--who began to transform the U.S. capitalist economic system; which then, on the surface, appeared to be more "hip" and less overtly culturally straight, and  less money-oriented, than what 1950's and early 1960's U.S. capitalist society had looked like.

I also at this time, then began to again feel that the corporatization in the 1970's by the hip rock capitalists, as previously symbolized by the early 1974 Dylan comeback tour, in which concert ticket prices were higher than anyone else's previous concert tour ticked prices, was something that the New Left Movement of the 1970's needed to prioritize in exposing and resisting.

So I also then wrote a column or two urging hip youth to again start resisting the hip capitalist complex's takeover of the youth cultural music scene in the 1970's.

And to get more of a sense of what the Rock concert scene was still like in the 1970's, I even took a Long Island Railroad [LIRR] out to Long Island one summer weekend day and snuck into an overpriced Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young outdoor concert; while on another Friday or Saturday night I went to an outdoor Eagles and Beach Boys concert in Jersey City, where a young stoned teenage girl jumped on my shoulders during  the time when the Beach Boys were signing their "Good Vibrations" pop song.

While working at Travelers Aid-ISS in the early summer, I also spent one evening going to a free concert at the South Seaport venue in Downtown Manhattan area, near where the Fulton Street Fish Market used to be located at, that 1960's folksinger Judy Collins was then giving a one-night performance at.

Although when I had attended a Judy Collins live concert in the mid-1960's I had found her performance both entertaining and artistically interesting, after hearing her perform for free at the South Seaport in the mid-1970's, I felt that Judy Collins had, by then, become more of a careerist and commercially-oriented, mainstream-type pop female vocalist-type singer than a folksinger; and less artistically interesting and less entertaining than she had been in the 1960's.

The main reason, though, that, so many decades later, I still remember attending this free South Seaport Judy Collins early summer concert, is that it was there, after the concert had ended, that I bumped into an old Richmond College Social Change Commune member that I hadn't seen since the Spring of 1969, named Joe, who had also been attending the free Judy Collins concert that night.

Enrolled in the experimental college on Staten Island, Richmond College, in the late 1960's, when he was then in his mid-20's, Joe, a white guy of average height who, despite seeming to be high on pot all the time, never dressed particularly like a hippie, was then a supporter of Richmond College SDS; probably because he opposed the Vietnam War and because New Left groups like SDS favored the legalization of pot use as early as the late 1960's.

But although Joe might be willing to attend a demo or sit in the audience to hear a white New Left activist or a Black Panther Party organizer speak about the need for Revolution in the late 1960's, he wasn't the type of antiwar student hippie who would ever consider doing any Movement organizing work, himself. And, insofar as he thought politically, in the late 1960's his political leanings pretty much reflected Abbie Hoffman's then politics and concept of Revolution more than late 1960's National SDS's politics.

Yet Joe, in the late 1960's at Richmond College, was someone whom you could always count on to offer you a joint to share at anytime or place, in a friendly way; and he was politically perceptive enough to both recognize sooner than nearly all the other students which of the U.S. liberal-left or radical left academics were more into their careers than making the Revolution and which of the Staten Island Black Panther Party members were the most likely ones to be NYPD infiltrators.

Before I bumped into Joe again in the mid-1970's, my recollection is that, around the last time I had seen him in the Spring of 1969, Joe, who had been rooming on Staten Island with an apolitical African-American student at Richmond College who shared his interest in being high all the time, was now moving into a Staten Island apartment with his new white woman student womanfriend.

But, by the time I bumped into Joe by accident at the free Judy Collins concert, Joe was then residing in his mother's apartment in Queens, working at a mental health facility on Staten Island with ex-addicts as some kind of drug rehab counselor, and spending most of his non-working weekend and evening hours away from his mother's apartment and "living in his car," as Joe put it

By using his mother's apartment in Queens as his place to sleep each night, Joe was able to avoid having to cough-up a lot of money to pay rent on his own apartment, thus enabling Joe to more easily afford to pay for both his car's gasoline costs and for all the recreational drugs and marijuana that he might want to buy each month.