Good old college days

I spent my college years at the school of hard knocks- many of my girl friends spent theirs at the school of hard cocks. So, it worked out well for all of us, and what a time it was. Birth control- very very few births and very little control, and lots of mind-numbing drugs. I look back and see how the curricula were down-graded, a gentleman's C became a B, short skirts in front rows were always good for a B- if extracurriculars were included a ladies A. Two things I remember from college:

On my first day I had my first black professor (instructor or whatever his title was)who shocked us deliberately by saying that if Christ were alive today (then), Christ would be classified as a paranoid-Schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur. For a Christian raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church this was anathema, it contradicted everything I'd ever been taught. I gave the idea a fair evaluation. You see my father was a paranoid-schizophrenic so in both ways this comment affected me. I did not like the teacher- color aside. He was arrogant and he purposefully sought to shock us. I do remember I asked the instructor that by the definition he'd given us, weren't our state mental hospitals were full of people who thought themselves to be the Risen One.

This took him back a bit- I don't suspect he expected a college freshman to be so quick to question his statement. But, to his credit, he agreed. I suspect this was the beginning of a lifetime of questioning- thanks to the teacher who had forced me to think differently.

A second major revelation took place on the last day of college. At the time I was out of if most of the time, deliberately numb. I had come into my Psychology Final late, loaded and looking it. I'd been cutting and arriving late all semester.

The professor, many thanks sir, did ask me why. Ironically, it was the day my father and mother were finally divorced or had their marriage nullified. I told the professor I had been looking after my father's business and that that morning my parents were divorced. A convenient lie- but it worked- I got a D and was able to graduate. It was a gift....My college education had many stops and starts, many calamitous events- divorce, questioning the religion I had been taught. I experienced lost love, lost family, lost values and was myself lost in a traumatic time. I had no family, no one to advise or counsel me. So blundered through making mistakes and loving it. I had what most of my peers thought they wanted- no parental control. Yet, I didn't want it.

I will digress to a funnier and happier occasion. One of the jobs I had in college was as a taxi driver. It was a Monday morning, my first day on the job. I was sent to an apartment building to pick up my first fare. He took his time walking down the long sidewalk to my cab. Got in and without greeting, he told me to take him to an office building in Towson, MD. I was unsure of the way so I took the routes I knew. When I pulled up the meter read 65 cents. The grumpy old codger got out of the cab and handed me 50 cents. I said Sir the fare is 65 cents. He said that I went the long way and that the fare was always 50 cents and 50 cents was all I was going to get. I took the money, and pissed as I was took off. I wondered how the heck was I going to earn money to eat, pay tuition, rent, books and grass, if I kept being stiffed. It was my initiation- every new cabby got to drive this fellow- who it turns out was a millionaire.

Well, that never happened again- I learned to ask fares if there was a particular route I should take to their destination. I learned to skim tips. If a fare was 75 cents, and the fare gave me a dollar bill, I'd take the dollar and say thanks, not giving the person a chance to ask for change. It usually worked. Well on with my original story. It was the last day of my career as a cabby for this cab company and as fate would have it, Mr. First Fare had called for a cab. I now knew the area well and I remembered the jerk that had stiffed me. As I remember it was a cold, rainy day, rain slashing with a whipping wind. When the apartment building door opened, I recognized the guy as my first fare, the guy who had stiffed me of 15 cents. The side walk was about 50 feet from door to curb and as I said the weather was atrocious. I watched the man walk to the cab, umbrella in hand, as he reached to open the cab door, I stepped on the gas hoping to splash him. He stood there a second calling after me.... I opened my window and waved a not so friendly finger flag at him. I could hear him yelling that he knew the company's owner and was going to report me. I finished the day, an average day, expecting to be fired or called into the office by the boss. When I got back, the other cabbies, stood up and gave me a cheer. The old buzzard was known to one and all as a cheap, nasty bastard. My fellow cabbies applauded me for sticking it to the guy. I'll related one other cabby story. It was May or June , 1968, the anti-war movement was in earnest. I had taken a fare from Towson to down town Baltimore, a nice fare. As I drove up Greenmount Avenue the streets were filling with black people. This was an almost all-black area but the shortest way from downtown to the Towson suburbs. Suddenly all Hell broke loose, thousands of people were streaming into the streets. Groups of people were rocking transit buses trying to overturn them. Rocks were flying through the air, shots rang out, a glass bottle hit a side window of my cab, people were coming after to me, throwing bricks which bounced off the cab leaving dents. A mob was about to jump the cab and perhaps drag me out. I was scared shitless. Ordinarily I didn't mind driving up Green Mount Avenue, occassionally I'd even snag a fare to Towson. But whatever the hell was going on, I wasn't going to stop. I ran the light at Green Mount and North Avenue and sped up, hoping to get out of the area as soon as posssible. I was still in danger and when I radioed the cab company to ask what was going on, one of the other cabbies came on to tell me they, "they killed that nigger." I said who? He said Martin Luther King. No wonder the ghetto had gone berserk. I drove that cab as fast as I could, disregarding signals, cutting in and around traffic. When I got back to the cab stand the other cabbies were standing around looking smug and self-satisfied. I broke ranks with my cab mates who were boasting that this would teach them niggers a lesson. My only comment was that it was not going to be a good time to be driving a cab and turned in the keys. Being a poor white kid from East Baltimore I was now in North Baltimore and had to get back to my neighborhood. The streets were packed with cars, stalled, stopped, or abandoned. Looters were smashing windows as I headed south on my Vespa motor scooter. The day was getting late, my fear level growing. How was I going to avoid being dragged off my scooter and beaten.

I took to the alleys, the sidewalks and as the sun began to set I didn't turn on my light. I circumvented downtown, 33rd Street (former home of the Orioles and Colts), skirted the areas around City College that were still predominately white and got to Edison Highway... In the dark I made my way to safety in Highlandtown. For days the city was under curfew and no one was allowed out after nightfall. Luckily I had that little scooter..I could dart down alley without lights to my friends houses where we played ping pong, cards, watched the news and got loaded. And that was the last day of cab driving for that company. But there were 2 cab companies in Towson at the time.

The first one I worked for had cabs which were bought second hand in NY- not allowed by law. Those cabs were in terrible conditions, hardly road worthy, bald tires, smelly. The owner was an Italian fellow, no names please. If you know the area and the time, I'll say the cabs were blue. The other company was owned by a family, their cabs were newer and white- no names. The second cab company was the better. One last reflection on my cabby days. One day while working for the white company, we had a woman dispatcher, unusual for those days, but even more remarkable was that she was blind...yes blind. Yet she could direct you anywhere in the area better than the sighted fellows. I really liked her- she was rather heavy, not very good-looking but a total marvel and easy to talk to. I still wonder how she could direct cabs to destination she'd never seen.

I was never robbed, nor seduced by a fare. One lady, rather odd if you will, did tell me that her mother had died in my cab the week before. I didn't speak until I got her to her destination and I certainly never asked her if it was the exact cab or a cab I was supposedly driving when the woman's mother died.

Cab driving was something I said I'd never do again...the split was 55% for the company and 45% for the cabby. I think that's how it went but it may have been the other way. You learn a lot driving a cab- how to eat a burger and drink coffee while driving; how to judge a tipper from a gyper; how hard it is to make a buck. How seniority gets priority. I drove for quite a while before I got a Towson to BWI fare...at that time a $15-20 ride. You learned what the dead times were- early afternoon, and when and who to talk to as you drove. I guess I thought I was going to see hot chicks and get laid a lot. Very few hot chicks have to ride in cabs, so forget that and as to being laid- no fare ever invited me up to her place. To be brief, it was a lousy job, plenty of time to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, not enough tips, and barely enough money

to make it worth the time- especially for a college student.

But one last footnote to this blog- I never attended my college graduation, I was driving a cab that day. Now, the reader may take out a kleenex and wipe a tear. So sad, poor guy, etc...

But remember I had no family to invite. My Dad was in a Veteran's Hospital and I didn't have the money for a cap and gown, plus my rent was due and I was out of grass.

Note to reader- some parts of this blog are fictitious...even the writer doesn't know which parts though. All geographical names are as true to real as I could make them. The dates for the assassination of MLK and my memory of the event may be incorrect but it did happen and in the way I described it.

The Petrified Forest

Having just watched Humphrey Bogart's first major movie Petrified Forest, I must say it was riveting yet fanciful. The dialogue rolled like a stream with Leslie Howard and Betty Davis captivating the screen. Electric exchanges between Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart teetered on the absurd and the profound, augmented by a setting that both attracted and distracted. Most interesting that two of the characters were Black, cast not for PC but as real life people, one a criminal and the other a driver for the rich couple whom Bogart's gang has robbed of their car. The dialogue between the two Black actors was as important then as now. Drama at its best- as is often said, "they don't make them like they used to" really is appropriate for this movie. 1939 usually is cited as the year which produced the greatest American movies. Just say the 30's movies were special, and black and white movies, though some dislike them, were an art form never to be repeated. As with The Ox-Bow Incident and To Kill a Mockingbird, Petrified Forest would not have had the effect it did had it been in color. Why were those movies so special- perhaps because Hollywood knew what people wanted and would pay to see and perhaps that movie makers felt an obligation to use the new medium to say something, to be ART. Money was tight so for a movie to be popular and profitable, it had to be artistically done and produce an effect on audience. Today's movies are in the words of the Bard, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

No doubt television led to the demise of great American movies. The movies went from pure protein to pablum and then television came along and is little more than mental bubble gum. Televisions best use is sports. And now even sports are being molded by commercial breaks, ruined by talking heads, dreadfully unnecessary. And then there is the 'news'. The medium doesn't report the news, it chooses and creates news. And the news isn't really new, it is the same sad rehash of sorrow and human misery and evil brought to us from differing sites by roving maggots with production crews in tow. A death toll, a tearful replay by the unapologetically rude cameras and the half-educated on the spot reporters who use bad grammar and lack propriety. Nothing is sacred except the commercial break.

Critics, thinkers, intellectuals, faux philosophers and panel after panel of hired experts all infest the small screen which has become a big screen with small ideas and themes. Man playing with the bigness of his littleness (sorry e.e.). Sad to say that technology has had a detrimental effect on the quality of television and the quality of life. The multiplying villainies of improved technology and a lack of respect for the suffering and woe of human beings side by side. We were happier before television, perhaps in our ignorance, naive to the world, satisfied with our little lives, unaware of the vast suffering of strangers.

Now, television shows fester into movies which then multiply into sequels, the hydra-headed monster. There was a time when movies meant something, when there was art - no more. I've seen two movies at the theater this year, both dreadfully tedious and worthless. I admit there are still great movies being made but when measured against the number of releases, the great ones are merely the tip of an iceberg beneath which a monstrous collection of garbage rests.

Modern thinkers have long railed against the 'wasteland' of television some even and cite the TV shows of the 50's as being the classic or grand era of the medium. Was it? What is there on television that lifts us from the flat plane of our vapid, narrow world- almost nothing. Many have said commercials are the most carefully created things on TV- no doubt. What I often wonder about is effectiveness of commercials. Do they really work- not on me, well not that I know of that is.

I was born in a world that no longer exists and live in a world that no one could have anticipated. As a child I had no television and didn't begin watching it until I was nearly 10. For that I am truly grateful.

My apologies to the reader, as my pronouns have drifted from the impersonal voice of argumentation, I apologize for the invasion of the first person into this blog. It signifies that it is time to close today's entry. More to follow soon.