A Time To...

  “You’re wasting my last cigarette. Here, watch me,” Big Frankie told Tommy as he took the lit Lucky Strike from Tommy and placed it in the corner of his mouth and inhaled. While holding his breath for a second, he raised his finger as if he were about to say something, and he pointed to his mouth. Then he formed a circle with his lips and began blowing a stream of smoke rings that magically appeared from his mouth. The rings expanded as they floated in the air inches from Big Frankie’s face. Al and the others were very impressed. Years later, Al was less impressed when he saw a trained chimpanzee do the same thing and when he heard that Big Frankie died of lung cancer.

  Tommy then took the cigarette from Big Frankie and tried to repeat the trick, but he just coughed and coughed while Big Frankie and the others laughed and laughed.

  Big Frankie had gotten his name because there were two Frankie’s in the neighborhood. The other one was a year younger and was short for his age. So even though Big Frankie was just average height and weight, he had gotten a second first name that didn’t make sense to anyone outside the neighborhood.

  Al and the other fourteen-year-olds liked Big Frankie and wanted to feel as cool and confident about everything as he was. And Big Frankie liked the attention and respect the younger boys gave him. It made him feel even more cool and confident. He especially liked the way Tommy openly mimicked him—everything from the way he walked and talked to the way he dressed. As a result, Big Frankie took Tommy under his wing. They became like the brothers neither of them had had.

  So it wasn’t surprising when Tommy had told Big Frankie that he wanted to join him as a member of the neighborhood gang, the Disciples. But Big Frankie said, “You’re not ready. You can’t even smoke right. You’ve got a lot to learn.”

  The Disciples had been more a social club of guys ranging from sixteen to twenty years of age than a fighting street gang. It had been all about having fun and strutting around their neighborhood in expensive jacket sweaters emblazoned with the words The Disciples on their backs in script. They had chosen the name because it sounded sophisticated and they wanted to let everyone know they were worldly, a lot more so than the streets they patrolled.

  They wanted to let everyone know that they were special. They didn’t see themselves as being like the Disciples in the Bible, but just the opposite. They saw themselves as little devils or bad boys out to have fun and shake things up. But Little Devils on their backs wouldn’t have given them the cool defiance they wanted to express about themselves. And if they confused people about whom they were and what they were about, so much the better, because people and the world in general had confused them.

  They knew they picked a good name when a rival gang from an adjoining neighborhood formed six months later and called themselves the Apostles. The backhanded references to the Bible by both gangs were inspired by the notion, born in the sixties, that God was dead. The assassination of President Kennedy, the Cold War with Russia, and the escalation of the Vietnam War helped support that notion in many.

  The birth of the hippie lifestyle of drugs and free love had grown out of it. The world had seemed to turn upside down. Old truths had been replaced by new ones. Al, like many at the time, had embraced what they considered a healthy skepticism about life. Hey, I could be dead tomorrow, like Kennedy and those fighting in Vietnam. And since heaven and hell are really just fantasies, I’m going to do everything I can to enjoy life before I’m dead too.

  “How strange,” Al reflected now as he looked back on this part of his life, that his perceptions and realities had changed so much since then. But before he could dwell on this thought, the conversation from that scene resumed where it had left off with Big Frankie’s words of wisdom: “You got a lot to learn.” That comment rang in the boys’ ears. What else did we need to learn about being a man before becoming a Disciple? They wondered. They got their answers in bits and pieces later that year.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Peacemaker

  “You’re a dead man, Mr. Apostle,” blasted “Crazy” Jimmy of the Disciples as he pointed his finger like a knife at a lone Apostle while a crowd of shoppers around them on the street watched intently. Something had apparently just happened between the two rival gang members on the corner of Steinway Street and Grand Avenue, where Al had just gotten off the neighborhood transit authority bus. He was with a few of his friends to do some window shopping.

  “Hey, man! What’s your problem? You’re crazy!” the baffled Apostle responded as if he didn’t know why Crazy Jimmy was so angry with him.

  “Crazy? You callin’ me crazy? Only my friends can call me crazy,” Crazy Jimmy spit before shoving the Apostle in his chest.

  “And you don’t know who you’re messin’ with, Mr. Disciple,” the Apostle snarled while shoving Crazy Jimmy, when his confusion turned to anger.

  “Brothers! Brothers! No! Don’t do it. You really don’t want to fight,” spoke a calming voice from the gathering crowd. It was some kid about Al’s age with long, stringy hair, wearing tattered jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. Across his chest, on the T-shirt, were a circle surrounding the word War and a line dissecting the circle. He walked between Crazy Jimmy and the equally agitated Apostle.

  The two adversaries looked at the peace-maker in stunned silence; then they looked at each other and broke out laughing. The odd-looking peace-maker with his non-threatening appearance and demeanor broke the escalating tension.

  “Peace. Peace,” the young man calmly asserted as he raised his two hands with his fingers forming the peace symbol. As he turned to share his message with the crowd gathered around him and the two gang members, Al couldn’t believe his eyes. It was Phil Nichols, AKA the Chameleon. Phil was the first live hippie Al, and probably everyone else in Astoria, had seen. Phil looked and sounded like those from San Francisco who had been profiled on TV news reports in recent weeks.

  With the threat of hostilities apparently over, Phil made his way back through the crowd. He didn’t hear the brief exchange of “later” between the Apostle and the Disciple as he walked away. Al’s curiosity propelled him to Phil.

  “Phil! Phil! Wait up!”

  Phil stopped, looked at Al, smiled, and said, “Hey, man. What’s up?”

  “You, man! You’re up!”

  Phil smiled inquisitively at Al as if to say, I don’t know what you mean.

  “How did you do that? Those two guys were just about to go at it and you stopped them,” an impressed Al told Phil.

  “Oh, oh, yeah. Too many people are into fighting,” Phil said coolly.

  “But they could have beaten you up for messin’ with them. Weren’t you afraid?” Al wondered.

  “Afraid? No. I guess I didn’t think about that.”

  Phil’s new persona reflected the innocence and naiveté of the hippie culture that had been born during that time of great social upheaval.

  “How’s your band coming?” Al asked to make conversation.

  “Band? What band?”

  “You told me you were learning to play guitar so you could join a rock band like the Beatles.”

  “Far out, man. Far out! You remember that? Wow, that’s cool. But no, that didn’t happen. Turns out that I’m no musician. You know what I mean, man?” he said without a trace of a clipped Cockney accent. His speech now flowed and hung in the air like the smoke from his new water pipe.

  “So what are you into now?”

  “Ha, that’s a good one. Survival, man ... I’m into survival. Can you dig it?”

  “Yeah. Oh, yeah man,” Al said, hoping that Phil would say something that would give him a clue about what he meant.

  “School’s a drag. Don’t care about my classes. So I just write poetry to keep sane. My parents are nuts; and, they make me crazy, so I smoke pot. And I don’t have any money, so I sell pot,” Phil said matter-of-factly as if he were repeating from a script he’d read many times. “Hey, man. I just got some great new grass. How about a nickel bag?”
>
  “No, thanks. What kind of poetry do you write?”

  “Deep, really deep stuff about my life.”

  “That’s cool. Give me a sample.”

  “No. Not now, man. I don’t want to bring you down. I just finished one and it’s a downer, man. I didn’t mean to write it that way, but that’s what came out. My poetry is funny that way.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s not going to bring me down. I just aced my big history test,” Al assured Phil.

  “Yeah, OK. Here ya go: ‘The world we live in is the sea, everyone swimmin’ just to be. Like the man who gasps for air, I live each day in such despair. There is a rock, I see. I can hold on; then I reach with my hand to find it gone. I hope when the time comes to breathe my last breath, I’ll find a rock to save me from a drowning death.’”

  “Hey, man. That’s good—heavy, but good. Sounds like you got a lot goin’ on.”

  “Yeah, nothing I can’t handle. My poetry gets it out of my system. Somehow a lot of the crap in my life leaves me when I put it into words. I’ve got to write to prevent my mind and soul from being constipated,” Phil said. “You know what I mean? Can you dig it?”

  Al nodded his head even though he didn’t know. How could writing do that? And what the hell is a “constipated mind and soul?” Phil made it sound like his mind processed life experiences the way his body processed food. Al surmised that a better metaphor for Phil would have been “pearls of wisdom” because these precious jewels were created by irritated clams: no irritations, or pain and suffering, then no poetry.

  As Al reflected on this, he thought it was a shame that Phil didn’t become a filmmaker. He could have been another Bergman or Fellini. But, like all of Phil’s personas, his hippie phase didn’t last long—just long enough to give Al a memory he’d never forget.

  CHAPTER 28

  Dying to Live

  “You have a choice. You can vote to keep fighting and hating each other, which will bring us all misery; or, we can respect and love each other and have peace. But this can’t happen if those with power don’t spread it around!” blared Phil’s voice from the bullhorn in his hand.

  It was cold outside in the school’s fenced-in, asphalt-surfaced playground, where Phil was standing on one of its concrete tables, with his feet covering its inlaid checker/chess game board. And the more he talked and responded to hecklers, the more it appeared that Phil was engaged in a verbal chess match.

  “And a chicken in every pot!” shouted one sarcastically.

  “Chicken? Pot?” Phil responded. “Oh. OK. Yeah, chicken. What are you afraid of? Peace? Don’t be afraid. Don’t be chicken. And don’t you mean some pot in every chicken? I can dig that! But haven’t tried it that way.”

  A wave of laughter and more heckling followed.

  “Let them eat cake!” shouted another.

  “Chicken? Cake? Sounds like somebody didn’t get enough lunch today,” Phil said, deadpan, which drew some chuckles and a few more students to Phil’s impromptu election campaign rally. “That’s another reason you should vote to elect me your class president. I’ll make sure we get the food we want to eat in the cafeteria. No more mystery meat, Brussels sprouts, and succotash.”

  “Promises, promises!” shouted another skeptically.

  “That’s sad, so sad. And I don’t blame you. You should be skeptical, but I’ll do something about that, too. Why don’t we trust our leaders? We don’t trust ‘em because they say one thing and do something else. That’s why. All they care about is themselves. They do and say whatever it takes to get elected. It’s really all about their hunger for power and their empty promises.”

  “So why should we trust you?” a girl shouted from the crowd.

  “Yeah. You’re no different. Why do you want to be class president if you don’t want power and glory?” shouted another.

  “Hey, Mr. Pie-In-The-Sky! Say something! Come on. We’ve got your number,” yelled another from the crowd that had quickly evolved from being interested bystanders to fun-loving jousters to angry, disillusioned victims. Somehow, Phil suddenly became a lightning rod, discharging pent up anti-authoritarian feelings that swelled the more he talked about how he was going to make their lives better.

  Al was among those in the crowd, and as he looked back on this scene the feelings he had had at the time returned. He had been amazed that Phil had the nerve to speak out to a group, that he was so passionate about what he was saying, and that he had an answer for every heckler until he finally ran out of one-liners.

  Al empathized with him, and he became tense with anxiety as Phil’s silence grew. Al wanted to put words in Phil’s mouth to end his silence ... something ... anything. But all he could think of was, “Ask not what your school can do for you; ask what you can do for your school.” And while it didn’t really fit the moment, it would at least break Phil’s silence, which increased the crowd’s antagonism the longer it lasted.

  But just before Al got the words out of his mouth, Phil said emphatically, “A dead man doesn’t want, need, or care anything about power and glory. All that matters is getting it right. That’s my agenda. If that’s your agenda, then vote for me. If not, then don’t.” Nobody in the crowd offered a response, and in silence, Phil got down off the table and walked away as the bell rang to signal the end of their lunch period.

  “A dead man?” Al repeated to himself. No, it can’t be. Phil is too young to die. He’s my age. What is he dying of? Were the thoughts going through his mind as he caught up to Phil, who was walking into the school building to his next class.

  “You’re dying?” Al whispered to Phil so the other students around them couldn’t hear.

  “Hey, man, I hate to tell you this, but so are you. We’re all dying,” Phil said with a playful smile. “We’re all terminal. Some just go sooner than others. Most just don’t think about it. I do.”

  “Oh. Is that what you meant? You’re not really going to die anytime soon?” Al said, somewhat relieved.

  “How the hell do I know? I hope not.” Phil grinned. “No. I don’t have cancer or a brain tumor, as far as I know.”

  “So you just said you’re a dead man to shut the rowdies up?”

  “Look, man. I’m just having some fun with you. I’ve got to get to my class. If you really want to know what I meant, meet me in Astoria Park, under the Hell Gate Bridge after school today,” Phil said as he entered his class, leaving Al in the hallway with a curious look on his face.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Hell Gate Treasure

  Under the Hell Gate Bridge was a special place for Al and anyone else who knew the story of the sunken gold treasure that rested directly below the span that now carried long freight trains to and from Queens and Manhattan. Ever since Al had been told that a fortune in gold went down there with a Dutch ship in the seventeenth century, he had fantasized about recovering it for himself and his family. He just had to figure out a way to get the gold without being killed by the water’s powerful undertow, which had claimed the ship, its crew, and its cargo. Many had tried to claim it but lost their lives instead of finding their fortune. So when the bridge had been built above it, the name Hell Gate had come to mind and stuck.

  Al was mesmerized by the hundreds of swirling fingerlike funnels of water that pulled down anything on the surface of the East River as it flowed under the Hell Gate.

  “So close, yet so far,” Phil said when he arrived, interrupting Al’s reverie.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The gold. Man, you’d think they could take one of those little submarines down there and just attach some cables from a big crane and pull it up.”

  “If it were that easy, somebody would have brought it up a long time ago,” Al said while tapping the railing he was leaning on.

  “Yeah, you’re right. So close, yet so far,” Phil repeated, more profoundly this time, as he leaned over the railing next to Al.

  “Have you ever wanted s
omething so bad, but something or someone prevented you from getting it, even though it was right there in front of you?” Al wondered.

  “I can think of a few things.”

  Al understood Phil to mean he would have had his parents’ marriage survive. Being a rock star had probably been another of Phil’s “so close, yet so far” wishes.

  Al had had one of his own wishes at the top of his mind at the time—dating Helene Colangelo—which he had kept to himself.

  “So you’re not dying?” Al asked.

  “No, man, I’m not dying. But I thought I did a few times,” Phil chuckled. Al stared at Phil with irritation written all over his face.

  “You don’t believe me? Well, I guess I wouldn’t believe me either if it didn’t happen. It’s… it’s hard to explain. I’m not talking about being dead physically. My body didn’t shut down,” Phil said while searching for the right words. “But everything else inside me did. Suddenly, I was just a blank page with no past, only a here and now.” He looked out on the East River before going on. “It was kind of scary and exciting at the same time because everything that was familiar became strange; I had to learn about everything all around me again, but this time with new eyes.”

  Suddenly, this scene froze as Al watched it play. Then he said out loud to himself, “What is this? Am I dead now? Is this a dream? What’s happening to me?” No soothing, mysterious voice spoke to him as it had done earlier. The only response was an unsettling silence that lasted about half a minute before the scene resumed where it had paused.

  “I don’t know what you mean. Your body’s dead when your heart and brain stop working. You died some other way?” Al asked.

  “Yeah, you’ve heard of people whose body died and they have an outof-body experience? Well, just the opposite happens to me. My body is functioning, but it has nothing to tell it what it should be doing. That part of me is dead.”