The
Block
Stories
Of My Growing Up
Albert Vetere Lannon
©
Copyright 2020 by Albert Vetere Lannon
2021 Winners Circle Contest Runner-Up
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I
lived in many places as a kid, mostly in New York City: born in
Brooklyn in 1938, then Upper West Side; East Bronx; Baltimore,
Maryland; Elizabeth, New Jersey; Biloxi, Mississippi; and East 12th
Street between Second and Third Avenues. That’s where I grew
up, one-quarter block from the screeches and sparks of the Third
Avenue El during the early 1950s.
I
lived with my parents and my kid sister Karen at 212 East 12th
Street, a five-story walk-up across from a paper factory. We
actually lived in three apartments on the second floor that had been
renovated into a single unit. To help make the rent my folks rented
out a room to comrades. Dad, an ex-seaman, was the maritime
organizer for the Communist Party whose headquarters was several
long blocks west of us. Mom was an office worker for Party-related
lawyers and organizations.
The
first tenant I remember was Dora Lipschitz, who was deported to
Poland. Next were Gerhardt and Hilde Eisler; Gerhardt was the
brother of composer Hans Eisler, and reported in the press to be the
Comintern’s number one spy in the U.S. Hilde was a clothes
hound stuck with one small closet in the large room they occupied. I
remember Gerhardt as kind, always treating Karen and me to vanilla
wafers until, facing prison, he secretly stowed away on a Polish ship
to make his way to East Germany and become a government official. Hilde
soon followed, becoming editor of a popular magazine which had
an “art” photo of a naked woman in each issue. Then came
an old Russian, Boris Sklar, brother of a close comrade of Dad’s
from Chicago. He was quiet and unassuming and, to me, always smelled
of the tobacco-like asthma medicine he used. He got a smaller room
and I moved into the big rear room where I could keep some snakes and
turtles.
Mom
and Dad were busy with Party work as the McCarthy Era intensified;
the top CP brass had been convicted under the Smith Act for
“conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the US
Government by force and violence.” My folks were too busy to
have time for me as I entered adolescence, and I wanted attention. If I
couldn’t get positive attention, I soon figured out how to
attract negative attention, and catching and keeping reptiles was one
way to do that.
Dad
had set up a tropical fish tank, ostensibly for me, but he kept
complete control of it. One day I exploded and demanded, “Do
you like snakes?” He said, “No, I hate snakes!” I
said, “I’m going to keep snakes!” And I did. We
spent parts of summer at a party-friendly farm-turned-vacation-cabins
place in Wallkill, New York, Briehl’s Farm. I caught garter,
water and black racer snakes there and brought them home.
One
day I was sitting on the stoop next door when an older boy from
across the street, Carl Herrmann, came to join us. I thought I’d
impress him, and said, “I’ve got a black racer.” Carl replied, “I’ve
got a baby boa constrictor.” A
baby boa! That was every wannabe herpetologist’s dream, and
the beginning of Carl becoming my mentor, my surrogate big brother. The
baby boa came from one of Carl’s regular visits to the
United Fruit docks, where tarantulas and snakes sometimes stowed away
among the bananas.
A
snake story: On June 20, 1951, the day after Karen’s seventh
birthday, a corn snake from South Jersey was loose and heading out
the front window onto the fire escape. My Baltimore cousins, Judy
and Frances, were in my room and saw it and hollered, and I caught it
and put it back in its home-made cage. Judy and Frances were staying
with us because the House Committee on Un-American Activities was
issuing red-hunting subpoenas in Baltimore. Their father, Frank
Pinter, was assumed to be on the list and the family wanted to spare
them the trauma.
Shortly
after recapturing the corn snake the FBI showed up at our door to
arrest Dad, one of 17 “second string reds” arrested in
New York for Smith Act violations that day.
(My
sister Karen and I in front of 212 E. 12th
St.)
Carl,
my best friend Johnny-Boy De Maria (son of the last ice man on the
Lower East Side) and I would hitch-hike to the Ramapo Mountains on
the New York-New Jersey border across the Hudson River, or to the
South Jersey pine barrens to look for snakes, lizards and turtles,
and to get away from the mean streets, the impending trial, and our
parents; to be the kids we were and desperately wanted to be. Sometimes
other buddies -- Carlos and Albert Cabrera, Johnny Sepp --
came along. The nickname “Nature Boy,” after Nat ‘King’
Cole’s hit song, was hung on me. (For
more on the amazing pine barrens, a semi-wilderness in the middle of
the northeast megalopolis, see Walking
the New Jersey Wilderness
at http://www.storyhouse.org/albertl9.html.)
Carl,
then 18, with neighbor Donnie Yurcak, 15, and me, 13, went
snake-hunting in South Carolina over the 1951 Spring Break from
school; Carl and I caught an 8’6’ diamond-back rattler,
just three inches short of the known record length. That snake,
along with the many others we captured and brought home, got Carl a
job as a reptile keeper at the Staten Island Zoo, and I joined him as
a volunteer that summer. (For more on Carl and that eventful
excursion, see Snake-Hunting in South Carolina at
http://www.storyhouse.org/albertl6.html)
Johnny-Boy
lived down The Block on the other side of the street in what could be
termed a tenement, in the same building with the older (and much
cuter) half-Filipina Margie Aquino. We were a diverse neighborhood
in flux, with Italians like Johnny-Boy and me (well, Dad’s
half, anyway; Mom’s people came from Finland), Irish like our
pal Bobby Burns, African American like Gene Gordon, Jr. –
Rooster --, son of a CP newspaper writer, German like Carl, Jewish
elders, others; there were a few Puerto Ricans from the US colony,
but not yet in the numbers to come.
Johnny
and I got together with two girls who had run away from home far out
on Long Island and ended up on 12th Street. We
were
ultra-sympathetic to them, hoping to get lucky, but Bob, who ran the
candy store, overheard our conversations and called the authorities
to get the girls.
It
was an era between gangs. The Sicily Boys and the Corner Boys had
grown up, some entering the lowest ranks of the Mafia; others formed
the Saturn’s Riders Motorcycle Club. New gangs were a couple
of years behind us. The Jokers, who developed a fearsome reputation
city-wide, were the kid brothers we pushed around and taught how to
fight. A block over, on 13th Street, the Black
Aces s.a.c
(social athletic club) was formed of Italian, Puerto Rican, Irish,
Jewish and African American teens, an anomaly in the racially and
ethnically compartmentalized world of the New York streets. They
didn’t last long, but not because of ethnic differences. The
local cops, while tipping their hats to our local mobsters, broke the
club up, raiding their clubhouse and taking their colorful green and
black club jackets.
Across
from Johnny and Margie’s building was a Jewish Home for the
Aged with an awning. We used the cross-pole of the awning to chin
ourselves, and a nearby bus stop sign with a heavy base as a weight
for body-building. Around the corner was the third-run Stuyvesant
movie theatre which had at one time been a Yiddish theatre. The
Stuyvesant became the Phoenix Theatre in 1953, pioneering
Off-Broadway plays and probably marking the start of the East
Village. Often on Saturday mornings I was tasked with taking Karen
to the Stuyvesant, which I resented. Her exuberant presence
inhibited any chance of picking up a girl who might be there and
willing to make out.
(For
more on the Phoenix Theatre, see My
First Theatre Experience
at http://www.storyhouse.org/albertl10.html.)
For
awhile a cross-dressing night club operated next to the theatre;
sometimes they left a side door open and we stole cases of soda pop
from “the queers.” I had taken on Dad’s hatred of
homosexuals, not Gays in those days, but “fags” and
“homos” and “queers.” They were fair game
for beating up and robbing; indeed I attempted my first mugging with
a friend in Central Park at age 13, but the man’s shouts scared
us away. It was many years before I accepted that Gay was just
another of the many variations of normal.
On
the other corner was the candy store, run by Abie and later by Bob, a
dour Italian. That was our hangout, sitting in the booths sipping
cherry cokes or egg creams (no eggs, no cream) and dropping nickels
in the juke box as “race music” became rhythm and blues
became rock ‘n’ roll. White artists tried to co-opt
black music, but Pat Boone singing Little Richard’s
“wombombaloobombaboombamboomtuttifrutti!” was simply
sacrilegious!
My
first job was at the candy store; I was 13, underage and paid 32
&
1/2 cents an hour, half the minimum wage, but got free sodas and a
tuna salad sandwich. A good part of my wages went into the juke box,
and my parents insisted I pay them token rent. Although we had a
sort-of rule that we didn’t steal from those as bad off as we
were, I did steal cigarettes from the candy store and started smoking
at 13. Lucky Strikes like Dad, and Chesterfields like Mom, but then
Pall Mall because they were longer. Willy, a Puerto Rican who spoke
little English, was the short order cook.
I
learned to drive on The Block. New York had alternate sides of the
street parking rules, so cars had to be moved every day except Sunday
to avoid ticketing. On Jewish holy days when driving was not allowed
for those who followed the faith, we kids would, for a quarter, move
their cars to the other side of the street. That’s how I
learned to drive, usually with stick shift. I don’t think I
ever had an accident.
Street Fighting Boys
My
first and last fights started in the candy store. I was thirteen
years old, pudgy and nerdy, and had found a blue workman’s cap
in the street. Mom washed it for me and I wore it regularly. In the
candy store four sixteen-year-olds took the cap from my head and
began playing Salugi, tossing it among themselves to keep me from
getting it back. I cursed at them and they forced me outside, where
I ran for home, three-quarters of a long block away. I hollered for
help as I ran, but no one responded. Near home, I slipped in a pile
of dog shit and went down.
They
were on me in seconds, and stood me up against a car while waiting in
line to take turns punching me, beating me bloody until they got
tired and walked away. That changed me – I would never be
beaten like that again. Over the next few months I went from pudgy
nerd to hard rock, working out with weights, slimming down as I added
muscle, taking lessons in street-fighting from all who offered. That
included Dad, who advised me never to carry a knife; a can opener
would work just as well, inflicting damage but not killing anyone,
with the benefit that it was no loss if thrown away. I bought a
switch-blade anyway. I grew my hair into a DA (duck’s ass),
wore pegged pants or dungarees with a garrison belt whose buckle was
sharpened to a razor’s edge for fighting. I didn’t wear
a cap again for many, many years.
My
new look and the rocky way I carried myself headed off some fights,
and I won others. I was a competent street-fighter, going for the
groin, the eyes, the nose to make a lot of blood. I never started a
fight, until I did.
That
was my next-to-last fight, and I deserved to get beat. I was fifteen
and going steady with the red-headed daughter of an Irish cop who
lived in Greenwich Village. I had been to a left-wing musical
Hootenanny and took a teenage Village aspiring dancer, Margie, home,
kissing in her hallway. At the next Hoot Marge brought Carol, a
non-political girlfriend, to the concert to meet me. I was too much
of a hood for Marge, and I took Carol home by subway that night. The
kissing was great, and she clearly liked me, and soon we were going
steady – my first real girl friend. It was with Carol that I
finally lost my virginity, as did she, after months of my trying,
begging, complaining about “blue balls.”
I’ve
only hit a woman once in my life. Carol and I were making out in her
hallway when she kneed me in the groin. Without thinking I struck
out. When the dust and tears settled she told me she had always
heard that boys were vulnerable there and wanted to find out for
herself. My bad luck!
Carol
loved to ice skate and went with friends to Wollman Skating Rink in
Central Park. I didn’t go because I was a lousy skater and
didn’t want to be seen in public doing things where I didn’t
look good. One winter’s day she went with a small group and an
old boyfriend from a Russian gang slapped her. I had heard about the
ex-boyfriend Vlad’s rep, and it scared me, but I could not
admit that. So instead of avenging my honor by going after Vlad, I
took it out on a schoolmate at Stuyvesant High, who had been there
and did not intervene. I put all the blame on Richie.
I
goaded and cursed him for three days before he agreed to fight me,
and we met in the park close to the school, with a small group of
classmates who were, like me, part of the hoodlum minority at the
elite school. Richie was 6’4” and a boxer; I was 5’8”
and a streetfighter. I threw the first punch and he began boxing me,
his reach keeping me from getting close enough to effectively fight
back. At one point I was on the ground and Richie towered over me,
saying “Have you had enough?” I aimed a kick up to his
groin…and couldn’t reach it. A couple of punches later
I gave up. My schoolmates promptly became Richie’s pals.
I
was seriously considering giving up street-fighting after my defeat,
complete with two black eyes, but I still had a fast mouth. I was in
the candy store sitting across from Nick the Greek, and “sounding”
on him, making clever but rude comments. He finally erupted, “Go
ahead, burn my ass one more time!” I took out my cigarette
lighter and reached under the table, and that was it. Outside we
went, most of the kids in the booths following.
We
threw some punches and wrestled each other to the sidewalk. My right
arm was pinned, and Nick was hitting me in the ribs, so I went for
his eyes with my left hand. That forced him off me, blinded, and
ended the fight.
I
broke up with Carol on her 16th birthday; my 16th
was a month earlier. Her period was late, and I was ready to do the
“right thing” and marry her. Then she called to say her
“friend” had arrived. Relieved at my narrow escape I
said it was time to call it off. She said bitterly into the phone,
“Happy Sweet Sixteen to me,” and hung up. Many years
later, in recovery from alcoholism, I tried to track Carol down to
make amends; I think I found her, the widow of a NYPD detective, and
wrote a sincere letter of amends. She never responded, as was her
right.
One
almost-fight was headed off by Johnny-Boy. We were at a Sweet
Sixteen party uptown, invited by our pal Paddy Walsh. I had recently
been hospitalized with mononucleosis with a secondary liver
infection. The doctors said “No drinking for a year,”
and I was honoring that. But there was a lot of drinking at this
party, in a church basement. I wasn’t drinking, and Johnny-Boy
didn’t drink, and as the evening wore on I found myself with a
half-dozen drunken teenagers surrounding me claiming I had beaten one
of them up and they wanted revenge.
I
was sober and hadn’t beat anyone up, but things looked bad
until Johnny came swashbuckling over, those ice-toned muscles
rippling, to ask with a smile, “Whassup fellas?” The
avengers faded away, and we headed for the subway to go home.
There
was one other almost-fight after that, when Dad was in prison and Mom
moved us to Washington Heights. A neighbor comrade’s son had
gotten into a beef with some kids who called in their older brothers,
members of the Egyptian Kings gang, and we got word that two Kings
were down at the Riverside Drive wall waiting for Freddie. I offered
to join him, two on two would be fair, but the Kings weren’t
there to fight. They wanted to negotiate the terms of a gang fight –
fists, knives, guns? I tried to goad them into settling the beef
then and there, two on two, but no go. I threatened to bring up the
Jokers from 12th Street, and they were impressed
and
seemed to back off.
The
Egyptian Kings’ President and War Counselor left, and Freddie
berated me for handling it all wrong, being a tough guy instead of
conciliatory. A few days later he went looking for them to
apologize. They kicked his ass. Some months later they made the
papers by killing someone. Times were changing in the mean streets.
Meanwhile
Freddie’s father, the good comrade who drove us to see Dad in
prison in Petersburg, Virginia, every other month for two years, was
displaying an inordinate fondness for adolescent girls, including my
sister. But I didn’t find that out until much later…lucky
for him.
School Daze
In
rebellion at the government for arresting my father, and at my father
for getting arrested, I worked at being a rock, a hard guy, a JD, a
popular term for juvenile delinquents. The movie “Blackboard
Jungle” was about us! Besides
street-fighting
and a bit of shoplifting – the big pockets on cargo pants made
stealing 45 rpm records easy -- I cultivated an attitude against all
authority, especially teachers. I was in the ninth grade at Junior
High School 60 a couple of blocks away down 12th
Street –
fortunately on the opposite side of the street of the Youth Guidance
Center; walking in front of that building sometimes invited real JDs
to urinate out the windows.
We
were preparing for high school and, being in one of the top-level
ninth grade classes, a number of the kids were going to take the test
for Stuyvesant, an all-boys school on 15th
Street which
emphasized pre-college academic work. Students came from all over
the city to attend the elite public school. Our home room teacher,
Mr. Goodman, was evaluating students’ chances of passing the
Stuyvesant entrance exam. I had decided to take the Stuyvesant exam
simply because it was closer to home than the general ed Seward Park
High. When he came to me, Goodman said, “Lannon, maybe you’ll
pass.” That guaranteed that I passed with flying colors,
because I’ll show them!
I’ve
always wondered that if I had gone to co-ed Seward I would have ended
up as a veterinarian upstate New York someplace? Because in
Stuyvesant my rebellion blossomed, and I soon fell in with a small
minority of students who, like me, were street kids out of place
among the decidedly upper middle class majority. The records show
that I was enrolled in an algebra class, but I have no memory of ever
attending it. I did well in history and English because I read a lot
of historical novels and had some knowledge of different eras, and I
wrote poetry and stories trying to make sense of my life.
I
fell in with the Stuyvesant bad boys when I had a fight – with
who or for what I don’t remember – and as I was winning
his friend jumped in. Immediately a big guy I didn’t know
jumped in against the helper, keeping it two on two, a fair fight. We
won, and I met Big Ernie, a street-wise Italian from the lower
Lower East Side. I joined up with his school mob and we had some
fun.
We
wise guys did things like, in the bathroom where we met for a smoke,
carefully pull the toilet paper from a roll at one end of the stalls,
loop it over the stalls to the other end, stuff that end into the
toilet, and flush it, jamming the flush lever, and watching the roll
sail across the top of the stalls until the roll ran out. Or in wood
shop with a teacher who liked to cut up small pieces of wood and
throw them at us when we weren’t looking. One day when he was
turned away a bunch of us, sitting on a small platform, quickly lit
cigarettes, took one big puff and let it out, creating an instant
haze over us. Of course we put the cigarettes out immediately so no
one was caught.
Yeah,
there were teachers like that at Stuyvesant, easy targets for our
generalized anger. Our mechanical drawing teacher loved to tell us,
“Go defecate in your Stetson; that means go shit in your hat. Haw haw!”
I cut that class a lot. And, of course, we had
fights outside the school or in the nearby park.
Stuyvesant
fielded a football team and DeWitt Clinton High was our arch enemy
for reasons I never knew. With Big Ernie and his guys -- and with
the support of some gym teachers – we would get bussed to the
games and do our best to beat up Clinton and other opposing high
school team supporters. One time, out in Far Rockaway, Big Ernie and
I got separated from the rest of our guys and the Far Rock supporters
literally kicked our asses back to the school bus.
The
highlight was in my senior year, although I was about to be left back
a semester having flunked chemistry five times and physics three. If
you failed a course like Chem 1 with a grade near the pass mark, 65%,
the school advanced you to Chem 2. If you passed that, you got
credit for Chem 1 as well. Actually, a pretty good system, but it
didn’t work for me. I failed Chem 2, took Chem 1 again in
summer school, and flunked again….five times total.
The
school was getting tired of our little group’s shenanigans, and
a new principal was brought in to turn things around. He announced
at a school assembly that, starting the next Monday, all students
were required to wear a white shirt and a necktie. My home room
class sat together in the balcony of the auditorium, directly
opposite the principal. Without any conversation or planning, we
stood up as one with our hands out and thumbs down, booing. The new
principal’s face turned red and he stormed off the stage.
The
principal’s edict ticked off a lot of the goody-goody students;
we created an informal coalition for Monday, and most of the
students came in as dressed down as they could be; torn tee shirts,
dirty jeans. The next day the principal issued a retaliatory order
cancelling the annual Senior Boat Ride up the Hudson, and the
traditional end-of-semester Senior Day. That pissed everybody off,
including some of the teachers. Some of them got together and
organized a boat ride which turned out to be better-attended than the
school-sponsored ones. My group, seeing that success, decided we
would have a Senior Day as well. No school on Senior Day!
We
set a date and distributed flyers announcing No School on
Senior
Day! That morning came and very few students went into the
building, most milling around in front. The shop teacher we hated
came out to intimidate us but someone threw a knish at him and he
ducked back inside. A few minutes later we heard the wail of police
sirens and we scattered. My group ended up on 42nd
Street
where old movies could be seen for 25 cents before 9 a.m. It was my
first real organizing experience, and I learned that a plan needed to
do more than just bolt. We should have had a common destination, or
staged a sit-in – but we were young and inexperienced and just
striking back, without politics or program. But it was a first.
After
the summer when I didn’t graduate we moved to Washington
Heights. I returned to opening day at Stuyvesant to get a free
student subway pass, and quit school at 17. It wasn’t until
age 51 and sober that I became teachable and obtained my high school
GED.
Street Games
With
a playground many blocks away and no organized recreation readily
available, we played street games. Skellies was a starter, chalking
a square on the sidewalk, with smaller, numbered squares inside the
boundary. We shot bottle caps with middle fingers from number to
number, attempting to land inside the smaller box and winning a point
if we did. If you missed, the next player went. Johnny-Boy recalls
playing Skellies with ceramic tiles, but it was bottle caps for me.
Hide
and Seek was played often, with hiding out on rooftops allowed. A
more complex variation was Ringalevio. Two teams were formed and one
went off to hide. After counting to one hundred the other team
begins a search. An area, usually a stoop, was designated as a jail
and captured opposing team members – tagged while chanting
“Ringalevio one-two-three,” were kept there. They could
be freed by a member of their team getting to the jail without being
captured and touching them while shouting “Ollyollyoxenfree.”
Ringalevio could go on for hours.
Ball
games were popular, including Stoopball, King and Stickball. All
involved a pink Spaulding rubber ball that bounced well, known as
Spaldeens and available at a toy store on 11th
Street and
Second Avenue for twenty-five cents. Stoopball had the player that
was up bounce the Spaldeen off the stoop, trying to catch the edge
of a step so the ball would go higher than the kids fielding it could
reach and thus make a home run.
Stoopball
King
was played against a smooth wall, like the front of Bobby Burns’s
apartment building, or the telephone building at 11th
Street and Second Avenue. The Spaldeen was slapped to hit the
sidewalk and then the wall in front of the other player; The idea
was to cause the other player to miss, so we learned to cut/slap the
ball and put some “English” on it to make it curve and
not go where expected. Punchball was another variation. But the
biggest team ball game was Stickball, modeled on the Great American
Pastime, Baseball.
Stickball
At
one time a family of Gypsies lived briefly on The Block, and a
Stickball game of older guys, with cash betting, was scheduled. The
game progressed, with many onlookers, until some angry motorist who
wasn’t allowed to drive down The Block while the game was on,
called the cops. They came and took the bat, and, unforgivably, took
the Spaldeen as well. Protests erupted and one of the Gypsy team
members said something a cop objected to. They arrested him, stuffed
him in the squad car, and drove away.
We
were pissed! We decided to march on the police station some blocks
away, but by the time we got there the Gypsy had been released
without being booked. I don’t remember if that game ever
resumed.
In
the hot and humid summers someone with a stolen City wrench would
open up a fire hydrant and the smaller kids went nuts splashing each
other and themselves. Inevitably the cops came to turn it off, but
they never tracked down the wrench. Other games involved wearing
roller skates and grabbing onto the back of a truck to get pulled
along, Johnny-Onna-Pony, Tag, and my favorite, Co-ed Touch Football.
The Big Split
When
I was almost sixteen I came down with Infectious Mononucleosis; a
secondary liver infection put me in Beth Israel hospital for almost
two weeks, and the doctors ordered me not to drink alcohol for a
year. During that time, after splitting with Carol, I hung out in
the club room of the Saturn’s Riders Motorcycle Club. I was
too young to drive, but they let me play the juke box and schmooze. The
Riders were made up primarily of older Italian boys from 12th
Street and 21st Street and many had paisans
in the
lower echelons of the Mafia.
Marlon
Brando’s “Wild One” had a huge impact on us teens,
and I threw a small fit to get my parents to buy me a black leather
motorcycle jacket and a pair on black leather engineer boots. If I
couldn’t drive a bike, I could at least look cool.
The
one time I actually rode on a bike scared me off for life. I sat
behind a Rider on his Harley-Davidson, and, showing off, he revved it
up, threw it into gear, and almost did a somersault! I picked myself
up from the street, bruised and bleeding. I was lucky. Sometime
later a Rider had three girls on his bike and fatally crashed into a
milk truck.
At
some point in the mid-fifties Organized Crime split over the issue of
dealing heroin in the white community. They had been distributing it
in Harlem for years. It was a profitable trade, and some saw more
money to be made by expanding the market. Others expressed concern
that it could put their children
at risk. The split
turned violent at one point and I remember heavily-armed police teams
in cars stationed throughout the neighborhood.
The
12th Streeters in the Saturn’s Riders stood with
one
faction and the 21st Streeters with the other,
so the club
split and disbanded. I was newly going steady with Fran, a tall
blonde from 21st Street. The former Riders gave
her a
serious hard time over dating a 12th Streeter. I
had to
do something.
I
went to the candy store and talked to some older guys. I explained
the situation and said I needed a gun. New York has very tough gun
laws. but Albie One-Eye said to come back at six o’clock with
ten bucks. I did, and had a loaded .32 automatic to avenge my girls’
honor. Now what? I, grudgingly but with secret relief, let
Johnny-Boy and Carl talk me out of going on a shooting spree.
I
kept the gun and carried it around for awhile, but never fired it. I
hid it in my room at home in a table drawer that had some reptile
terrariums on top, sure it was safe from my parents’ prowling. But one
day I came in and Mom brandished the gun demanding, “What’s
this?” I lied, saying it was a blank pistol I had borrowed
from Ray, a left-wing teenager whose parents they knew well. With
all that was going on with them, my folks accepted the lie and I soon
sold the gun.
Fran
and I didn’t last long, but mainly because she refused me sex
unless I did certain things to pleasure her. I had no knowledge of
women’s pleasure in those days, and was unwilling to comply,
even though she told me time and again that a former boyfriend, Joe
Bop, had told her, “You ain’t a man until you do that.” I was man
enough for me.
COMMIEBASTID
– LEAVING THE BLOCK:
(New
York “Second-String Reds” arrested in June,1951, for
violating the Smith Act: “Conspiracy to teach and advocate the
overthrow of the United States Government by force and violence.” My
father, Al Lannon, is 4th
from the right
in the standing group, the only man not in a suit and tie.)
It
was the day after my sister Karen’s seventh birthday. Mom
shook me awake at six in the morning, saying, “Wake up, get up,
they’re arresting Dad.” I was thirteen. Two burly FBI
agents stood by while Dad dressed. No, he couldn’t go to the
bathroom alone. No, he couldn’t shave. No, he couldn’t
hug his family. But Mom insisted he be allowed to eat his morning
milk toast because of his ulcers, and they relented. They took him
away in handcuffs, one of three arrested on our block along with
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Israel Ampter. Mom told me, “Go to
school. We’ll show them we’re not afraid.” But I
was; I was freakin’ terrified.
In
9th Grade English Ira Slade brought a copy of
the Daily
News with the arrests and photos on the front page to the
teacher, Mrs. Rosenfeld, whispering, “That’s Albert’s.
Father!” The teacher declared bitingly to the students,
“Albert should be happy he lives in America. If he wants to be
like his father he has the freedom to do so, not like in Red Russia.”
Later I challenged her definition of “hibernation” and I
was right; I would find ways to fight back.
In
the hallway between classes Mrs. Kaplan, a gym teacher caught me
alone and whispered words of sympathy. A student turned the corner
into her vision and she hastily ducked inside the gym door. It was
the McCarthy Era when the Red Menace was all around us, and fear was
heavy in the air. Red Diaper Baby Patricia Lynden wrote years later
about the electric chair execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as
spies for the Soviets, “The system would kill us to contain
us.”
Freddie
Nelson was Jr. H.S. 60’s bully. He followed me through the
halls at lunchtime chanting, “Commiebastid, commiebastid.” Having to
stop at one point Freddy wiped the sole of his shoe on my
dungarees. Something snapped, and I wiped my shoe bottom on his neon
blue double-white saddle-stitched pegged pants. We fought and,
swinging wildly, I landed a lucky punch that knocked his head into
the wall and dazed him. The buzzer for the next class ended the
fight, and after school Freddie caught up with me and offered to be
friends. It was not long after my being beaten up by the four goons
had propelled me on the path to tough guy, rock. Soon, Freddie and I
were terrorizing the school together.
Many
students kept their distance from me, but some, like Frankie Guerra,
admitted that his old man was in prison too, not for politics, but,
hey, prison was prison and thus we were buddies. The Communist
Party’s youth arm, the Labor Youth League, became a haven for
me, a refuge among like-minded kids on the left. Or so I thought. We
all felt the fear.
I
had lived with fear for a long time as my parents’ politics
became more and more marginalized, more and more despised. I read
historical novels and science-fiction to escape – the past and
the future because the present was just too scary. But two weeks
after Dad’s arrest I got drunk for the first time and knew
immediately that I had found a quicker, better way to escape the
fear. Some alcoholics talk about “crossing an invisible line;”
I jumped it first time out, the beginning of over 30 years of
drinking alcoholically until I hit bottom and sobered up at age 50.
My
best buddy in the LYL was Richie Stein, son of Sid Stein (aka Sidney
Steinberg). Richie’s father was one of the Party leaders who
“went underground” to escape arrest. Richie adopted my
rocky demeanor: low-slung jeans, garrison belt, cigarettes rolled up
into a tee-shirt sleeve. We went to Hoots, LYL dances and meetings
together. Richie and I fell out at the Coney Island beach when he and
some other young comrades tried to de-pants me in the water. I
flailed and kicked, chipping one of Richie’s teeth, and he got
mad. T.S.
While
Dad was in prison Mom moved us from The Block to Washington Heights,
652 West 160th Street, again on a block with
several
comrades close by. I was new blood for the uptown LYLers, and
Phyllis, daughter of the CP’s public “expert” on
the USSR, immediately grabbed me up. She had me call her boyfriend,
and later husband, to tell him she was breaking up with him. We
didn’t last long, mostly because she was a strong young woman
whom I couldn’t control and I needed to control my
out-of-control life.
Elaine
lived two flights up and we began dating, eventually becoming engaged
and then married for 33 years, raising two children. Her parents
were fellow-traveling immigrants from Puerto Rico; while the CP did
not often practice what it preached, being raised around the
multi-racial, multi-ethnic comrades of my parents meant I had no
issues with Elaine’s ethnicity. She was simply an attractive
young woman who liked me, so I liked her back.
At
a “gathering” – party was too cheerful a word in
those perilous times – a discussion began over the use of
ethnic and racial slurs. Richie Perry, son of an interracial couple
whose Dad was a co-defendant of my father’s, objected to the
clear racism of using those words, and I supported him. The
“gathering” broke up when I smashed my fist through a
wall to keep from really hurting a bunch of LYLers. For both Elaine
and I that was the end of our LYL involvement. She had thought, as I
did, that it was a safe place, a refuge from the daily racism she
encountered, and was devastated.
I
was working as an apprentice painter, where intense exposure to
benzene for two years may well be the cause of the incurable multiple
myeloma I suffer with today. When the new union contract provided
for a first-ever coffee break, I was the only one of a half-dozen
painters doing hallways to sit down. The foreman came by, asked if I
was sick? I told him I was taking my break, the one in the new
contract. When I returned to the shop at noon the superintendent
told me that the contract said “coffee break” and you
were not allowed to leave the work area. If I had coffee I could
have a few minutes to drink it; if not, no break. They laid me off
for a week as punishment and the corrupt union local backed the
company.
Transferring
my tough guy persona to left-wing youth politics meant, for me, being
redder than the red. Like Dad. The LYL was defunct. The Communist
Party was in crisis after the 1956 Hungarian Revolt and the Stalin
Revelations. Like Dad – and always seeking his approval --I
defended Stalin’s terror and suppression of the Hungarian
workers. Fred Jerome, son of CP intellectual and Dad’s
co-defendant V.J. Jerome, came to see me and recruited me into what
became known as “The Call Group.” He had a manifesto of
sorts for a new left outlook on youth that essentially called for a
return to a hard-line Young Communist League.
A
dozen of us New Yorkers, with comrades and contacts in several
cities, signed “A Call To Youth” and it was published in
the Party’s theoretical journal, Political Affairs.
We
garnered some attention, positive and negative, on the left and,
flushed with success, called for a founding convention of FURY,
Fraternal Union of Radical Youth. The CP’s top leadership
called us in and read us the riot act – no YCL, no FURY. We
demanded a vote of those present and carried it overwhelmingly. Then
the tops told us that those who were CP members would be expelled if
we went forward.
Fred
and most of the others caved, and soon Elaine and I moved to San
Francisco, following my parents when Dad couldn’t get work
after two years in prison. The FBI would tell employers who he was
and he’d be fired, and the CP leadership, with whom he was at
odds, wouldn’t help; indeed, a CP bookstore job he was set to
get was vetoed by the latest CP head, Gus Hall. His old comrades in
the International Longshore & Warehouse Union would help him.
The
rest of my story is far from The Block, except that I drifted away
from the organized left and became a union activist. From what I
saw, working-class Reds like Dad were generally better unionists than
revolutionaries. Dad died in 1969 still ardently defending the
Soviet Union against the “revisionist” US Party
leadership. His eighth known heart attack took him; Mom died during
open heart surgery in 1992 still believing that the CIA had bought
off Soviet leader Gorbachev to destroy the USSR.
An
active union steward in the ILWU’s Warehouse Local 6, I was
selected as a rank-and-file Overseas Delegate in 1965, supposed to go
to China with a Canadian and a Hawaiian ILWU member. ILWU President
Harry Bridges wrote a column critical of the Chinese Communists and
our invitation was withdrawn. We eventually went to England,
Scotland and Wales instead, which I suspect was much more fun.
I
extended my ticket
and added Berlin, Prague, Paris and New York to my itinerary, gone
for five weeks with Elaine seven months pregnant in San Francisco. I
fell in love with Prague; “socialism with a human face”
was emerging, with open satire and criticism of the government in
shows and conversation. Not to mention the great beer. When, in
1968, the Prague Spring was smashed with Soviet tanks my last
emotional ties to communism were severed. I wrote a letter critical
of the invasion to the Party’s paper, People’s World.
It was published side-by-side with Dad’s letter praising the
Soviet action. I was free to think my own thoughts without
reservation. I was, and remain, a militant unionist, pragmatic but
clear about which side I am on. I cannot abide true believers of the
left or right, so-called vanguards who believe they are entitled to
rule by any means necessary. Just a different set of bosses who
want to perpetuate their power over the rest of us. Democracy –
use it or lose it!
(For
more on Albert’s later political and labor activity, see Busted
at http://www.storyhouse.org/albertl8.html)
(For
a look at how a later generation of communists’ destructive
activity inside unions nearly destroyed ILWU Local 6, see Angela’s
Children at http://www.storyhouse.org/albertl11.html)
John
De Maria and me on 12th
Street
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