1. WADO Radio - 12-8-Ohhh

1.  WADO Radio – 12 -8 –Ohhh
          (updated 6-9-14,  7-22-14, 7-23-14, 7-18-15, 12-18/19-15)

In his earliest memories, he was dancing around a pole to Yiddish Klezmer ‘78’s in the cellar with Sister Claire. The leathery brown portable wooden record player, looking like Pop’s winged-tip shoes, seemed dug up from a Bolshevik battlefield. With power on to volume, getting electricity though a cracking power cord, the earthed wall replacement plug threw off sparks that threatened a power outage.

A slippery, felt, mustard-colored turntable top spun madly. The original iron tone arm, stiff like Les Paul’s elbow, had a twist screw that locked in place a needle. Sound, through primitive electrical amplification shrieked out from behind an oval, wood-mesh facade covered with course fabric; a speaker still pumping sound after sixty years of wear. Red shellac discs with ancient Hebrew lettering around the center spindle hole were new when first placed there. Like a loyal wife, was laid not on any other spinning table.

Pop pushed the swollen door upstairs open and came down the rickety steps to the cellar; he had to check why the furnace was giving not enough heat. Northern winds swooped down on Brooklyn blowing out the pilot through the chimney. Behind the stairs in the low-ceiling, 20’x40’ cellar space, a sinister-looking shack of grimy nailed hinges creaked open in the darkness of bogeymen where no grandchild would dare go alone.

Jonathan Livinsky and his big sister, Claire, were spinning around, hands-on tight, to a wrought iron support cylinder, in the center of the front room. Pop paid them no mind. In their own merry-go-round, a primitive pole dance, the tossed-back heads of glee and laughter ringing out to a Klezmer instrumental, clarinet honking over a sawing string section; it was spiffy! It was music, and it was Rosetta stone for Johnny Livewire. “Tootsie Mootsie darling dear…” Even the inner grove was danceable. Johnny and Claire spun around the pole after each other until, dizzy, they dripped to the dusty cement floor. They could hear the upstairs door open and a woman’s voice call out:

“Se-dra-ter kinder,” she shrilled. “Shiman, make it slower!” Bubby was not coming down; she had more important things to do in the kitchen. The old house was rocking. Shiman didn’t hear in the noisy furnace stall. Claire obeyed and turned the record player off. Dim light filtered in from the small front cellar window. Bubby had prepared dinner the day before the Shabbos and was going to “bench lich,” light the candles; the food would soon be warmed and dinner ready. Bubby didn’t mess with electricity or music on the Sabbath but it was okay for the kinder to do so, up to a point; no music or TV during candle lighting.

“Oy Rosie, I’m making heat,” called back Pop when the children went to tell him. A few steps across from the furnace bin, there was another forbidden room of darkened planks. Johnny and Claire had a chance to enter and explore it behind Pop. Behind him they slipped in and zipped under his arm. Pop went to get the homemade sauerkraut he had fermenting in a cool jar on a casually made wooden shelf near his workbench.

Saturday evening after a walk through Scandinavian Bay Ridge with Mom; Dad on shift at Idlewild Airport coming later. Leaves on the maple trees in Borough Park had turned golden and fallen well before Rosh Hashanah eve. They passed the row of white stone town houses with high patios, passed the roller hockey rink where the goyum boys made noise knocking their rolls of black electric tape around, across the street from the Monastery of the Precious Blood, a massive medieval church and retreat, a forest of tree limbs over red brick walls, perhaps tainted with the precious blood itself. It was enough to make Johnny and Claire shiver as they skipped and sang, “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.” Down a block of trashy little apartment buildings near Ft. Hamilton Parkway they went and into the Yiddish side of town. Straight from the Lower Eastside, the theater awaited with “Galloping Comediennes” with 78 RPM’s on Bubby and Pop’s Victrola; “The Good Ship Lollipop” with “Peter and the Wolf.” She was eight and he was six, they rode on horses made of sticks. Later, she would laugh and say, “Remember when we used to play ‘Bang Bang’?”

When Johnny slept over, on those rare nights his parents went to an affair, she sang him to bed with a lullaby. “Ahh-ahh-Joniliah,” sang Bubby. In the late afternoon, around tea time, it was Bubby singing “Yisroael, Yisroael, Du vas leban du vas blean…” All he knew is it was a song about Israel. The TV played Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour and Lawrence Welk, and sister Claire took to playing the accordion. There was never any radio on, and only Mitch Miller’s choir singing “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” on a portable record player his aunt had gotten free for opening a bank account at a new branch, but Johnny has music etched into his soul at an early age.

At Shabbos service for children, he lit the menorah candles sang the Hanukkah prayers and songs, though never as well as Claire, and he learned the Hebrew verb conjugations musically at Sunday morning lessons with Miss Greenspan.

Such sad melodies so many of the songs seemed to have. The melancholy melodies were his first blues songs, the half tones of Jewish prayers, the crying voices of the great cantors on those large 78’s, all seeped in. They opened doors in his mind that let the dim light out, but not the bright sun in. Johnny understood immediately his predicament in the world: the blues couldn’t be washed away.

Earlier, Leonard Livinsky sat in the workshop he’d made in the tenement apartment they occupied since it was new in ’49, like their marriage, It had happened the day before, a Sunday, a day of rest. Lenny relaxed by tinkering with electronics. A soldering iron, solder rolled in thick cardboard spools, flux, resisters, vacuum tubes, and copper wires in different plastic colors that he knew how to connect to make music come out of self-assembled receivers from Lafayette. The cluttered little room, just a clothing closet, the dowel stick wardrobe removed from one side. On the other side, overhead, an ancient three-band shortwave radio with and alternating modulation, too. Under the homemade wooden shelving, a rack of clothes, still in dry-cleaner plastic sheath, stood distributed on wire and articulated hangers, wall to little wall. The clothes in thin casements clung to Lenny’s naked back, peeled occasionally when he stood to reach or bend, brushed against him as he sat before a work table; two mismatched pieces of discarded hard wood, a half-inch thick inch thick, one an original moss green piece from a cabinet someone had thrown away, the other a tan fine grain sheet, varnished or shellacked, shiny in places but dull where Lenny’s leaning had worn it down. These two pieces of wood, not one, but two pieces, in lieu of too expensive lumber yard wood, were spliced together underneath with nails on a narrow strip of wood, two inches wide. Even the molding was procured. Everything in Leonard Livinsky’s life was like that; put together from scraps, his family included.

Johnny sat to his father’s side on a vinyl cushion chair dragged in from the kitchen, placed away from “the work” of his father, as he had been warned to do. The smell of soldier wafted through the tiny space oblivious to the danger. The tiny closet that became his father’s workshop, every nook of shelves above laden with boxes; shoe boxes, recycled wooden drawers from forgotten dressers, three feet over the work table, and the three feet under the work space, barely room to stretch his slipper feet. Side and front pegboard walls with screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches, pliers, clamps, measuring triangles and a steel ruler hanging, each in its place; screws, nuts, washers of all sizes that he would need one day on a project. A homemade stand with three metal rings to rest a soldering iron on a metal base sat smoldering, still plugged in to the light fixture’s naked bulb handing from an eye. “Go ask your mother when dinner’s ready,” he said to Johnny without moving an eye off the transistor in the green motherboard. It was the only way Johnny was allowed to help his dad work; running errands. “Go get me a pack of Pall Mall, will ya? Here, you know what to get, right?” Leonard did not want his son sitting there; he was making him uncomfortable as he assembled the amplifier. Dad and mom would talk about Johnny. That’s what they did as ‘The Late Show” became “The Late Late Show,” the same Syncopated Clock tick-tocking the musical string section. In the evening, dad made music machines from scratch, for fun.

Johnny came back soon from up the block, passed the kitchen where Claire stuck her tongue out at him for no reason, walked through his parents’ bedroom into the closet in the corner and handed dad the cigarettes and change. “Put it over there,” he gestured with his left elbow. Johnny sat back down on the chair he had dragged in from the kitchen. “Don’t you have homework or studying to do?” Johnny didn’t and, no, he didn’t have anyone to go outside and play with, either; all the neighborhood kid goyum were having tradition late afternoon Sunday lunches with their families.

Dad reached up and then tipped his chair a bit to get to a higher shelf over the work bench for something he needed, dangling naked light bulb an inch from singing his chest hair, bending slightly the jerry-rigged tabletop with a soldier holder hot attached with no on/off switch; pull the plug out; that’s all, holding a soldier iron carved to perfection while off duty in Calcutta’s World War II Asian theater. He reached up with the right hand, steadying himself with his left, grabbing the top of the wooden box he was sure contained what he was looking for, a box that had more weight than he expected, and it came crashing down, glancing off his baling head, drawing blood, onto the tabletop, then to the bench and the linoleum closet floor. The sound of smashing glass, spilling glass in pieces on the floor, not glass but black pieces of round plastic platters, mostly intact but a few shattered and cracked, under the bench and the wardrobe. Johnny flinched. “God damn it to hell!” yelled Lenny as he stood, hands on hips, and pondered the mess.

“Now look what you made me do!” but Dad was joking, right? But Johnny was worried. “I didn’t do it Dad, I promise, I was just watching, I didn’t do it, please, please.” Johnny knew what might happen. He started backing away from the work closet.

“What in God’s name was that?” came his Mom’s voice loudly from around the bend in the kitchen. She’d put a pot down and was coming.

“I didn’t do nothing.”

“Alright alright already, Shut the hell up, damn it!” Johnny looked down as Mom entered.

“Look what Dad did;” Johnny held his forehead with his left hand and pointed for his Mom to see with the right. Dad looked down.. There scattered on the floor were a pile of black 45 r.p.m. records, records that Dad had stored in the work closet.

“Ooooh, I’m telling Claire,” said Johnny undiplomatically. The records were Claire’s. It was her collection of Bobby Rydell, Johnny Cymbal “Mr. Bass Man”, The Royal Teen’s “Short Short,” and so on; her pride and joy collection, most of the records she owned.

“You tell your sister and, I swear, I’ll kill you; do you hear?”

“Claire, Claire, you know what Dad did,” went Johnny through the rat maze tenement rooms to the kitchen.

“What do you want?” said Claire. Johnny never got to tell. The heavy hand grabbed him by the shirt. Claire stuck out her tongue at Johnny again and thumbed her nose. Lenny flung Johnny onto the bed.

“You lousy kid! Now you’ll it. Now you’ll get it.”

Dad pinned Johnny down with his foot on the sofa, removed his leather belt and proceeded to whip his son, mercilessly, incessantly. Mother screamed and pleaded, “Leonard, Leonard, no, you’ll kill him, stop!” But Leonard went on. “I’ll kill him alright,” Johnny screamed at the top of his lungs, cried bloody murder and begged his father to stop saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but nothing helped, escaping was in vein. Claire stood behind her father and held her mouth in a chuckle, her eyes crossed when Johnny looked up for support.

Johnny’s parents were talking about him. What was wrong with him? Stop the music, that’s what Dad did. Johnny stopped the music from being destroyed. Johnny, the scapegoat for the music, was as meek as a lamb. Maybe that’s where he learned to tolerate ridicule. Johnny would come out of it one day. His father ousted him.

      Sister Claire and Johnny's father were record owners. Claire loved her 45's and so did Dad, but dad also had long-players; LP's. With father gone living with another woman on Long Island somewhere and Claire busy with her rah-rah zips-boom-bah crowd, all the records were Johnny's; Claire later claimed "Hushabye" and "Little Star" as her own but shrugged off the rest. One of Mom's friend's, who felt badly for her about what her husband had done, did things for Johnny who was a young man in need of a good role model. They didn't know that Johnny had already chosen two-thirds of one; one third Ms. Elsa's sensuous kissing in the hall and one third Moses’ long hair, attire and marijuana. Johnny brought the music to the party of his life. 

He was coming around on The Beatles after voting for the Four Seasons on the Vee-Jay Battle of The Bands LP. The Four Seasons were domestic while The Beatles were foreign. The Four Seasons were older and more mature. The Four Seasons were well kempt with short hair; The Beatles wore strange collarless suits with hair in bangs down to their eyebrows, just like girls.

When his parents divorced, it was Johnny’s fault; he just knew it, but what could he do? He cried under the blanket wishing Dad would come back. Then, he realized how liberated he would be without the threat of his father. His Jewish friends mocked him, so he played with non-Jews. Then, they abandoned him, too, for killing their savior two thousand years before, so he went to play with the Chinese boy who didn’t know anything about Europeans, and felt secure.

Music became Johnny’s recluse. Dad had left his stereo, his 45’s and LP’s. Once, when he was ill, his father returned asking if he could get him anything when he came to visit. “(You Know You’re Gonna) Hurt Yourself,” sang Frankie Valli. By the time of his Haftorah reading at his Bar Mitzvah, Johnny was a record collector. Mom took him to the Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park for his first concert; The Four Seasons. He won tickets from 77 WABC to see Steppenwolf do their first hit, “Born to Be Wild” live at the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan. It was the time he saw Goldie McJohn, the long-haired organ player, keel over backwards knocking down a stack of Marshalls. It was so cool. Johnny knew then what he wanted to be; a rock star. He sang in the school chorus every year. But there was more. He discovered his Dad’s stack of Playboys in the closet one day. Nothing was the same after that. Mom had to tell him to stop wetting the bed. Then came junior high school and the girls became very interesting. Even the teachers were sexier.

“”Did you ever meet him in front of the pawn shop and kiss him under the balls?” The club roared with laughter. It was like the fat stripper in the casino in the bungalow colony; dirty laughter, some drunken laughter, cigarette smoke cleavage, some fancy woman, seated, taking a guest’s private part into her mouth in the phone booth.

Johnny found the Belle Barth record along with the Shelly Berman and Allan Sherman records in Dad’s abandoned collection. He put them together with Port Said, the Middle East music with the glossy color cover of a belly dancer with jewels covering her nipples. The sexy records with dirty jokes, Couples, the novel by John Updike, with the erotic chapters; Johnny found them all to his liking. The girl next door who whom he played gynecologist, even spying Claire naked in the bathroom after a shower through the cat screened window.

 Everything was there to be discovered by Johnny; homosexuality: daring to take a lick of his little friend’s penis, a lick he found distasteful, a chase in the basement by the superintendent’s brother for what he knew it was after, unwillingly, at last, unless he ran away. Rape: he ran, not wanting to be done unwillingly, either. Homelessness: the bald man he saw through the basement window, asleep on a flattened cardboard in the apartment building basement. Young lust: the disheveled boy and girlfriend exiting the basement, emerging through the laundry room; the discovery of empty sausage skins with jelly inside from where they had lain. Lesbianism, in junior high school no less.

She was as tender to her as a man could be, so Johnny imagined.

He had only kissed a few girls, in slow motion. He noticed their eyes were open, waiting for him; both the girls he kissed. He had kissed his grandfather and some other male relatives, never got a hard-on; only out of respect. Did women get hard-ons when they kissed each other? Did something on them get hard or did they just melt? How could it be possible to do both at the same time? The hardness of sex, the melting was love. Johnny knew what it was.

The cosmopolitan woman with short blonde hair was his English teacher, Ms. Elsa. The woman in her embrace at school in the deserted corner of the third floor may have been a parent, it was Open School Week. Johnny wasn’t sure who she was and didn’t try to get a better look. He had not seen her before, but he recognized his teacher.

 They looked so beautiful together like that, though they were both women. He knew the stranger wasn’t a teacher in their junior high school. It was Ms. Elsa, who liked “Light My Fire” and played it for the class. It may not be okay to do this, but he wouldn’t tell anyone, just in case. He wouldn’t want Ms. Elsa to have trouble.

The combination of the hit with the dreamy B side, “Crystal Ship” opened the doors of perception to Johnny who was, in the course of a summer, ready for anything that would come his way. Ms. Elsa had brought the 45 into class the previous June in the lame duck weeks of the school year. The portable record player the monitor had brought up from the AV room barely played, sounded shitty, and probably ruined the record as it did to all discs placed on its sandpaper disc surface. She had run off thirty-five copies on the mimeograph machine in the closet in the main office. The smell of blue alcohol must be an entry drug for LSD with a pit stop for marihuana, because he had been prepared for this all his life; it’s what school was about in the 1960’s; preparation.  

In ’67, the summer of love, he wasn't old enough to create, but Johnny was young enough to absorb, like a blotter does with acid, the essence, not the mundane; everything. He knew how to get high without inducing catalysts but the catalysts provided a social context for him to do publicly what he had been doing privately all his life. His head had gone spinning on amusement park rides in Nelly Bly and then graduated to Coney Island. He had gotten dizzy on stolen cigarettes from Mom's handbag for years.

In ’68, Mom took him to the Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park for his first concert; The Four Seasons. Then, he won tickets from 77 WABC to see Steppenwolf do their first hit, “Born to Be Wild” live at the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan. It was the time he saw Goldie McJohn, the long-haired organ player, keel over backwards knocking down a stack of Marshalls. It was so cool. Johnny knew then what he wanted to be; a rock star.

Jaynell's was the store on 13th Avenue where he got one free 45 for each ten he purchased. “Rock Me,” with its 1:06 minute bridge, was the eleventh, but it kept skipping on Dad’s Garrard. Despite exchanging it a few times, it still skipped. Johnny kept it and played the B side, “Jupiter’s Child.”

He liked getting high as a child likes spinning in a playground. The liquor bottles in Mom's cabinet were now more water than booze from all the times he'd sampled and refilled them; Mom wasn't a drinker and neither were her guests. The only thing Johnny hadn't ever done on purpose was sniff glue from paper bags like some of the older boys did in the well of school yard near his apartment. He decided it couldn't be good for you after seeing the gang tripping over themselves and staggering out angrily; How could it be good for you if it made you stagger or angry?

      When his sister, Claire, came home with her hippie boyfriend one day, he had a role model. She had met Moses through a friend at her high school. Scraggly unkempt dirty blond hair past his shoulders must have taken months to get there; he wasn't an overnight hippie. If Johnny started that afternoon, he could look like Moses by the time he entered high school in September. He would have to shuck his white corduroy Nehru jacket though to get that grungy effect. Moses wore what could only be called Indian carpet bell bottoms. Johnny swore he'd seen the same pattern in a store on Atlantic Avenue once when his Mom had brought him to a neighbor's pet shop and they stopped in next door for mahmul and baklava. He could almost smell the incense drifting from Moses' pants, a musty scent he was told, as from the sex glands of a deer. The water buffalo leather flip flops completed the look. The ornamental belt wasn't necessary to keep Moses’ pants up; Johnny was impressed that a belt need not be worn for a function. 

      Moses asked Claire if he could do 'it' there and pointed to Mom's bedroom. Sam said uh-huh and went to the bathroom. Johnny followed Moses who removed a baggie from his pocket and waved it in Johnny's face like a hypnotizing charm. The contents were green shredded leaves, not unlike parsley. Johnny was excited about his first experience with marihuana. The 'it' Johnny soon found out was the rolling of a joint on Mom's night table. Moses sat on the bed and poured some of the content out. Johnny kneeled at the table a few inches away, so close that Moses jokingly asked him not to sneeze, please. So that's what it smelled like. So that's what it looked like. Soon, he hoped, he would find out what it tasted like and felt like to have tasted it. 

      Almost reverently, Moses rolled yolk-colored paper, the kind of paper Johnny noticed covering tampons. Moses pinched a large amount of the green leafy bits and placed it on the crease of the paper, If Johnny had known about seeds and twigs, he would have been skeptical; there were none in Moses’ stash. Moses rolled and Johnny sat close drop-jawed as he licked the length of the end and fastened it along the side. "Voila," said Claire enjoying the experience of providing Johnny his first experience. 

      "Where to?" asked Moses when Claire returned from the bathroom.

      "We could go up on the roof? It's safe up there," said Claire, wide-eyed with anticipation. Johnny wondered if it were her first smoke, too, the way she acted. "No one goes up there except on the Fourth of July to see fireworks or to adjust their TV antenna."

      "The roof it is. Lead the way." The two pilgrims with their guru took to the stairs that Claire pointed out. Moses led the way. It was a no brainer to reach the top; all you had to do was go all the way. They walked up five flights. He pulled the latch out of the eye screw in the door to the roof and light streamed into the dark echoed apartment halls. Out the three stepped onto the softened black tar of the heat blisters, careful to avoid wet spots. Over waxy brown wires that littered the roof floor like snakes and connected to primitive aluminum antennas with black electrical tape, antenna all facing northwest toward the Empire State Building in the far distance of midtown Manhattan. The three sojourners found a spot of sandpaper gray, dry roof paper, sat down in a circle. The joint was lit by Moses, puffed, held in Moses’ lungs, and exhaled in a flourish like the blowing up of an invisible balloon. 

      Then it was Claire's turn. Johnny was wrong about Claire. She hadn't smoked before, she indicated, and didn't want to this time, either. “How about you, Johnny?"

      "Sure!" Johnny didn't know how to take the joint from Moses’ fingers so Moses passed the joint, back and forth, from one had to the other, in demonstration mode, until Johnny got the gist of it. 

      "Let's go to Manhattan. There's a groovy place there that has twenty flavors of ices." 

      Moses had a Karman Ghia convertible. Claire naturally sat at on the other side of the stick shift and Johnny squeezed in sideways in the back seat, if you could call it a seat; more like a plank to keep the front seats connected to the back and a space for the lowered convertible top. The weather was fine and the air was a fresh breeze down Ft. Hamilton Parkway along Greenwood Cemetery to McDonald Ave and a right at Bishop Ford Parochial school and onto the entrance of the Prospect Expressway. Everyone's hair blew in the breeze across the Gowanus and Johnny kept on saying, "What will it be; Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, or the Battery Tunnel. Yeah, the Battery Tunnel! Wow, going through a tunnel like this. He had never seen the roof of the Battery Tunnel before and now, for the first time ever, to see it like this; wow! "Take the tunnel, take the tunnel."

      "Sounds good to me," and Moses maneuvered to the left lanes that brought him to the Brooklyn side toll booths. All the cigarettes, alcohol, roller coasters, and even the holding of breath with nose pinched could not equal the phantasmorphic rush of bliss that this was. Johnny’s kept thinking about the Crystal Ship; how it was being filled with a thousand girls, a thousand thrills and a million places to visit. This was the first of a million. Life was all about living to be a million. 

      No music in the tunnel, and what a time to enter. With "Penny Lane" on WMCA just beginning, it was a double Beatle block. Johnny, Moses, and Claire joined in just as Paul sang "…of every head he's had the pleasure…" “…to know," they all continued," and the people that come and go, stop and say hello." Johnny made the noise of the piccolo before the next verse. "…never wears a mack in the pouring rain, very strange." All three went “brump bump bump, Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes." Johnny simulated the piccolo trumpet and they all joined in, in harmony, “there beneath the blue suburban skies....” Three minutes later, the song ended, mid-tunnel, but Johnny was a Good Guy DJ, and he started right in with the second half of the Beatle block. "Paperback Writer," then all "writer, writer…writer…" Claire and Moses were George's guitar as they sang: "Dear sir or madam would you read my book…" Amazingly, they all admitted later at the park, unbeknownst to them, when the signal on the radio returned as they left the Battery Tunnel in Manhattan, what was on the radio but "Paperback Writer" itself! Johnny learned what it meant to be 'tuned in and turned on' that day.  

      The Karman Ghia made a right under the Westside highway and followed Hudson Street to Waverly Place. They parked near St. Marks Place and walked to the ices cart near Washington Square Park. Johnny was amazed how Moses knew how to go everywhere he imagined. He couldn't have imagined better. 

      "Oh, by the way, Johnny, that was parsley you smoked," said Claire in front of Johnny, arm in arm with Moses.

      "What did you say, Claire?"

      "That stuff you smoked on the roof? It was parsley."

      "Are you sure? I got high from it?"

      ""She's sure, Johnny," said Moses talking over the shoulders between them" We weren't sure how you would react."

      "It was a test," said Claire apologetically. “I wouldn’t smoke that for anything.”

      "A test? What kind of a test is that? Thanks sister."

      "Are you okay with that?"asked Moses.

      "Of course I'm okay. What did you think I am; a cop?"

      "Okay okay, we're cool," and Moses reached into a sachet he had over his shoulder. "This one is for real."

      "Don't get hung about it, dude, It's strawberry fields forever for you."

      Johnny went home and started a radio station.

Johnny never saw Moses after that day; He guessed his sister had broken up with him. He never saw his sister smoke again after that; maybe that's why they broke up. The next outfit Johnny remembers Claire doing something with was the cheerleaders at her high school, her next boyfriend on the football team. Johnny, on the other hand, got off the soul train at that station and never looked back. The tone arm was on the record for good. 

That’s how it went in Johnny’s life; people came, then they left not telling him why they were going. Someone knew the truth but they weren’t telling him. They did things to him. It happened when he wasn’t aware.

As a result, Johnny had a good feel for beautiful strangers. Over time, it accumulated and had no release. As often happens, he knew he had a complex but he didn’t know what to call the clogged-drain feeling that was long and narrow, a drain that, if a psychiatrist could straighten out, would stretch around the world. Instead, it was a place for waste that never cleared the pipes. Johnny could feel it backing up, like a voice behind his back, talking, sometimes many voices talking with each other about what to do with Johnny, something he couldn’t do for himself.

He first noticed the feeling when he was eight. Sharing a bedroom with his sister Claire, two years older than he, In the bedroom at night, traces of dappled light teasing the darkness with headlights of car and buses heading up the street, swinging across the ceiling through first floor apartment windows, slats of Venetian blinds magic theater, Claire fast asleep, Johnny lay awake in bed, face up to the dappled light. Closed bedroom door, the living room next door, his mother and father there talking, smoking. Black and white television broadcasts, past Johnny Carson theme song he could hum by heart. Someone change the channel; he could hear it flipped through baffled white noise of stations that had gone off the air for the night. Through “The Syncopated Clock” of The Late Show, muffled mother and father’s talk. Talk about him. He had reason to believe they were talking about him. Nothing wrong with that; every child should be discussed by parent with spouse. These conversations never came back to him; no outcome. They didn’t know what to do about Johnny. He didn’t know how he’d become a stranger to them.

In ’67, Johnny compared "Strawberry Fields Forever" with "Genuine Imitation Life" and he got off the Four Seasons bandwagon. The Four Seasons were starting to dress like the Beatles, Not the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan; they were messy, not hippie, and they couldn't hold a tune. For politics, his teachers liked Peter, Paul & Mary Johnny took them for moral support; The Doors for his soul kitchen.

Johnny started a radio station.

      Mom told him to turn the music down. Johnny made it louder. His father's abandoned stereo system in his Mom's living room complete with Lafayette amplifier and Garrard turntable, were now his. On the roof, Johnny smoked cigarettes he'd stolen from Mom's handbag, a sip of whiskey from the vanishing wet bar. He played it loud when Mom was away at work; Vanilla Fudge, Cream, Iron Butterfly, Frigid Pink, The Kinks, The Doors… Louder and louder, wilder than the last, but could they carry a tune?

Johnny was a singer.

Johnny's Top 40 radio; When Mom came home from work, after a while, that wouldn't do. Turn it up when she goes away until she comes storming out and tells him to turn it down again. Eventually he got a pair of headphones.

      The summer of love, Johnny loved his records. Friends could be inducted into the house, his audience. "This is the new song from The Doors, "People are Strange." Johnny picked up where Ms. Elsa left off. The music she injected into him would be too unstable to contain. He had to let it out.

Summer closed and winter was coming in to Brooklyn. Johnny was in high school; Led Zeppelin and Bloodwyn Pig.

Claire’s friend was waiting for Johnny’s sister to come back from ballet class. His Mom was picking her up. She had a new record she had just bought, something called Led Zeppelin II. She put it on Johnny’s Dad’s stereo, turned up the volume and laid down on the sofa with a pillow between her legs. “Way down inside, honey you need, I’m gonna give you my love, a whole lotta love (zoom) a whole lotta love (zoom) a whole lotta love (zoom).” They girl was a few years older than Johnny, but he understood what she was having. He wanted some of it. Humping the sofa cushion, Johnny didn’t dare disturb her, though he wished she would do it to him.  

The record collection grew. Mom's friend’s husband was a record distributer; gave him the newest releases; "Itchykoo Park" "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" “Time Has Come Today.” Better than that, their kids had outgrown record collecting; they gave Johnny boxes of 45's;’ "Hound Dog" to "Monster Mash." Before long, anyone Mom spoke with about Johnny had boxes of records to give him.  

Johnny's radio station could not be contained; there was air. He didn't care. The radio station played in his mind all day long, lyrics memorized, sung at the top of his voice, substituting for a microphone. High school was starting Monday. "Now it will really get interesting." 

      Claire had another new boyfriend. Johnny liked him. He played in a band called Pecker Frost and he was the coolest thing Johnny had seen since Moses. His drummer, He had beads around his neck. Vinny, the younger brother of Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge, was Tony’s drummer. Tony Benedetti played guitar, the first guitar Johnny ever touched. Though drugs around him, Johnny was sure that he knew them well. Then, Samantha broke up with Tony; He wanted more than she was willing to give; something,

Claire reverted to high school friends rebelling against home with Johnny and Mom, but not against society. Her new boyfriend wasn't what Johnny had imagined. He looked like a line-backer. His name was Reeve. He fit in with his sister Sam’s rah-rah period; Senior Sing Contests.

 Reeve was friendly to Johnny; he was deep. Peter, Paul and Mary were too light of social comment. Dylan cared only for himself. Reeves introduced Johnny to Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, and Biff Rose. Reeve was with bushy brown eyebrows held up by heavy dark-rimmed plastic frame glasses. He had a mustache. He pushed Sam around. Reef was fine. "It's always the old who lead us to the war, always the young who fall," said Phil. Vietnam was a threat. Reeve wore a green army jacket. "There ain't no great day coming tomorrow because it's here today," said Biff Rose. "Good morning, Mr. Blue," said Tom Paxton. Johnny knew the song from a version by Clear Light, the heaviest group he knew. Blue Cheer had no cure for the summertime blues. Only Jefferson Airplane put it all together. You had to be on LSD to appreciate The Grateful Dead. This was where it came from! Johnny added it to his hit parade. Reeve knew reality.

      WADO Radio 12 8-Oh in New York was on the air. No one could hear it but Johnny’s mind, An internal dialogue between songs, classes, bus rides, subway trains, and meals, toilet seats, just before bed on the distant stations from Ft. Wayne, Indiana, Philadelphia, and Toronto. Drifting in and out as Johnny drifted off to sleep, stoned on a cigarette, sex with a blanket. WADO Radio, better than WMCA, WABC, WINS and the brand new FM stations WOR WNEW, and WABC; soon to become WPLJ. Johnny’s radio station went deeper into the mind. When Johnny graduated from junior high school he brought his internal radio station with him.

   In junior high school, Johnny realized he had got something going, some talent in music and poetry. He was the only student in English class that could see a relationship between Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and the idiom, “not seeing the forest for the trees.” In fact, he was one of the only students in class to pay any attention to anything that wasn’t written in paragraphs with highlighted study words. Without much studying, he aced every test in English, music, and social studies. By listening to the lyrics when his dad played anything on the stereo, from Sarah Vaughn to Allan Sherman, it cemented his affinity for lyrics and music. He fell right into the groove. The joy he derived from catching the author’s intent in a lyric or poem was intangible, nothing but inspiration itself.

The mechanics of movable type at The New York Times printing plant didn’t thrill Johnny as much as watching actors on stilts act out Shakespeare on a medieval stage. He wasn’t going to become a reporter. That people could have dialogue in poetry was a revelation. What he heard from classmates and neighbors was words, only words about time and money, shopping lists, outlines of notes to memorize, formulas to apply to science and math equations. Even art, though it may be pretty and sometimes valuable, was never worth a thousand words, though one descriptive word could surpass any sculpture, thought Johnny. It was only words that could take your heart away. It was all one ever had to seduce with as one passed through puberty.

Lafayette Electronics on Coney Island Avenue near Church Avenue had a new record section. He remembered going there with Dad once to get a do-it-yourself amplifier kit. There was another Lafayette near Discount City on Bedford Avenue near Church, within walking distance to Bubby and Pop’s new apartment in Flatbush. He went to buy a new record he heard on WPLJ FM called “In-A-Gada-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly. Full priced, he anxiously brought it home, removed the shrink wrap and discovered it wasn’t Iron Butterfly disc inside; instead there was a disk by a group called Fresh Cream. He hated it; no pyrotechnics. He returned the record and got his money back, then he went to a record store on Flatbush Avenue near the Kings Theater to get the album he wanted.

It was September 1971 when Johnny Livinsky entered high school, There, he found something that moved him as much as words; poetry in motion. Johnny’s will was good and In Mr. Green’s art class, in his sophomore year, Johnny met his first high school sweetheart. Linda. Linda was attracted to Johnny because Johnny stood up to Mr. Green’s bullying one day.

‘Draw a sketch of what you see when you look out your bedroom window;’ that was the homework assignment. His classmates brought in pictures of apple trees and flowers and puffy clouds drifting over the smoking chimneys of private houses, birds singing from branches but Johnny couldn’t recall ever seeing an apple tree in Brooklyn, and the only birds he ever saw were flying rats (pigeons) and sparrows. There was an occasional dirty seagull at Coney Island beach.

Johnny drew a red brick wall punctuated by a fire hydrant for his homework assignment. Mr. Green was livid. He scolded Johnny in the middle of class for having no imagination. “You told us to draw what we see when we look out our bedroom windows and this is what I see;” said Johnny.

“That’s not what I wanted.”

“Then you should have said so.”

“I’m not going to engage in these discussions with you, Mr. Livinsky. I want to talk with your mother.”

Linda sat transfixed on her stool, looking at Johnny, dreamy-eyed, head in hands, her elbows resting on the drafting table. She had never seen a boy like this in Paris, France. So brave! So much nerve! This handsome young man was speaking back to a teacher. This had never happened in Paris. Johnny noticed her looking at him.

Linda’s eyes were green with long dark eyelashes like frames around art; Freckles began at her narrow cheekbones and dissipated around her curved lips, soft parted lips, naturally red like a rose panted onto the slender vase that was her face. Shiny black hair, extending below her shoulders, spilled over a maroon turtle-neck sweater-blouse, in a thick arc of bangs over her eyebrows; Johnny had never seen a girl like this in Brooklyn. Linda spoke English with a French accent; that turned Johnny into jelly. From Bay Ridge to the chilled Scandinavian blue-eyed blonds of Sunset Park, Linda was the only tasty imported flavored of his life.

“I would like to see what you see through your bedroom window. Yes?”

“From inside or out?” Johnny joked.

“Ne comprend pas…I’m sorry; my English is not good,” said the cutest sixteen-year-old in the art class.

“I can teach you some English, if you’d like, if would practice speaking French to me.”

“We can, can’t we?”

“I would love to treat you to ice-cream and we can chat. May I walk you home?”

“You don’t know where I live.”

“You can show me; I have time.”

“18^th Avenue; but not today. My mom will take me today to shops for clothes.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes that would be nice. I leave after period ten. It’s good?”

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Oui. Tres bien.”

The kisses of Linda couldn’t impress Johnny more. He was glad that he came; she was feeling the same. They weren’t mechanical kisses. They flowed like wisps from an incense sensor through to Johnny who sat relaxed in the art-nouveau recliner in her mother’s living room. She sat softly in his lap, sideways, facing him, taking his cheeks between her soft dove-like hands, bringing his face to hers in a kiss of inclusion and intrusive. Her tongue mingled with his, darting, then twining inward to meet his retractions.

Johnny forgot that there was something he wanted to do with this girl. She removed his agenda and showed him sensuality, a sensuality Johnny had only recently realized in a romantic scene from a black and white film. Getting her was no longer his goal. He lost himself with her and forgot he was a Brooklyn boy with a Parisian girl; this is what they must mean to love Paris in the springtime, as the song said, the Paris of lovers who stroll along the Seine.

He felt something in the pocket of his jeans; it was a condom, just in case he needed one. He wouldn’t need it; it was time to leave. Her mom would be home soon from work. He said goodbye. She said au revoir.

Titus Oaks was also near Bubby and Pop’s apartment, next door to Erasmus High school, where Robert Merrell, Barbara Streisand, and Neil Sedaka had graduated. Next, Johnny discovered the East Village in Manhattan. Free Being Records on Second Avenue near St. Marks Place, low priced used record stores. A revelation! Johnny could buy three or four albums for the price he used to pay at Korvettes’s for one, then, he could sell back the ones he didn’t kike, if they weren’t damaged.

      He was 17 years old in the summer of ’71. Johnny Livewire needed a job. He searched through the want ads and found something he thought he could do: messenger. Being a messenger at the American Blueprint Company suited Johnny fine. He hated the thought of being cooped up in a building all summer. He could spend his time grooving in the streets of Manhattan and New York City grew him in. The handsome, six foot tall, haggard youth with long wavy brown hair to his shoulder, parted in the middle, Romanesque nose, facial hair he didn’t bother shaving, in his black, unmarked, v-necked t-shirt, black high-top steel-toed construction boots blending into black denim jeans, wrapped his hard body with leather belt to fit. Johnny’s deep, sharp, hazel-green eyes carried the warmth of his soul to many a high school coed convinced and willing to feel his tenderness, mold herself to his tenderness, and become a woman with him, almost become a rebel with him. LSD, marijuana, Hiram Walker blackberry brandy and Marlboro red; the chute was greased and many a young lady slid him in.

      Mom didn’t take too kindly to Johnny’s wide-open disregard for house rules. At least she didn’t bother him about smoking cigarettes in the apartment; she smoked Tareyton herself. But she only gave him $5 allowance a week. In the fall, Johnny would be a high-school junior. He had to work the summer just to try to earn a dollar. He took the West End BMT up to Times Square on 42^nd Street and walked to 5^th Avenue. The American Blueprint Company, with offices on the fifth floor, south side, would be his headquarters. When he learned they would give him carfare to deliver the parcels, he had an idea: the first day of work he left Brooklyn early to avoid the rush hour crush and carried his bicycle onto the ‘T’ train, riding it past Bryant Park and the Main Library, chaining it to a parking sign pole on 41^st Street; no one would know. He pocketed the tokens. 

      The time he saved he would have wasted underground or walking perusing the Midtown records, especially King Karol. He would leave a deposit on a record he wanted and pick it up before heading home. Many a record was the first test copy in New York, like a Blues Image or Iron Butterfly album. His collection grew and his rock knowledge deepened. The rest of his earnings went for slices of pizza, nickel bags, and Forex natural lambskin condoms. 

      Hank sat on one of the dozen mismatched chairs in the grubby messenger lounge. The wobbly ceiling fan kept the smudged windowless room barely cooled in the summer swelter, the air tinged with the smell of blue ink and oil from the presses outside in the large, worn, high-ceiling workroom stuffed with drafting tables looking like a bland pool hall. The tangy smell of unwashed clothes wafted off of Hank and tinged Johnny’s sorry nostrils and he sat waiting for his next assignment reading his pocket copy of Quotations of Chairman Mao protected by its shiny red plastic cover. 

      Hank sat a few feet across from Johnny, shoes off, cross-legged, only brown-spotted tumors on his downturned balding head, picking fuzz bunnies from between his toes through the hole in his sock. Hank waited his turn, too. Philip Unger, an unkempt overweight man-child in his late twenties waited, too, doing a word jumble. They didn’t mind waiting; they got paid by the hour. The trip meant carfare and tips from clients to Johnny; he took their turns, gladly. Hank was saved for special deliveries the manager didn’t think Philip, Johnny, or the other young messengers could find. Johnny sat like a roach in a corner come to life by the manager’s call:

      “Johnny, come here,” the manager called into the drudging room holding a three-foot long cardboard cylinder. “Bring this to this address on 65^th off Madison. Take the IRT.”

      “Okay boss,” Johnny said jumping to his feet, placing the two tokens in his pant pocket. Stepping into the dilapidated hall to the original hand-cranked elevator, Johnny waited for the filthy worn uniform of an old black elevator-operator to reach his floor, pushed open accordion door and closed in, cranked, for the slow trip down. He walked around the block, unchained his bike, and headed up Madison, swerving through the Midtown congestion to the client, delivered, tipped by, and returned to base.

Johnny was just about to enter the building when a headline on a stack of NY Post newspapers outside a curbside kiosk caught his eye. “3d Rock Star, Jim Morrison, Dead at 27.” The date was July 9^th. It said he had been discovered almost a week before. Devastated, Johnny went to Zum-Zum, the fast food restaurant next to the blueprint building, for bratwurst with the snap when you bit into it, sat and read the dreadful news. His hero was gone.        

     

   Johnny met Vinny Fibriano in the student cafeteria one lunch period. He was Johnny’s first friend in high school. Vinny, with sharp green eyes, tight curls in his Art Garfunkel hair, was always sitting alone. Johnny thought there might be a reason. Johnny was a loner, too, a loner who wanted to be around other loners. If Vinny were anything like him, he wanted to be alone because he was different, alone because he was ostracized for being different. To be different meant to be especially interested in drugs, sex, rock ‘n’ roll, art, or revolution. Any one of those differences from the typical Brooklyn ethnic jock, dork and cheerleader would be fine. Ever since Johnny decided to break on through to the other side, the sky was the limit, the sky was his mind. To push himself to where no one had ever gone before was where Johnny Livewire wanted to go. Life was too boring following a leader.

“Can I sit here?” The cafeteria was full of sixth period students, not a bench seat was empty except for those near students no one talked with. Vinny was one of those students.

“It’s vacant. Why not?” He moved his tray closer to himself to make room across the table for Johnny to put his own tray. The looks Johnny got from classmates he didn’t like made Johnny feel justified in taking the first step. “My name is Vinny.”

“Mine is Johnny,” are you a sophomore?”

“No, I’m a junior,” replied Vinny as he bit into his ravioli.

“You smoke?” asked Johnny, more as a joke than an actual question. Johnny didn’t even look up from his peaches in syrup when he asked.

“What kind of a question is that? You don’t ask anyone a question like that,” said Vinny disturbed.

“You look like someone who smokes.” Johnny still didn’t look up from his mashed potatoes and gravy

“Why do you say that?” asked Vinny looking up to catch Johnny’s eyes.

“Your hair,” said Johnny. “No one in high school had hair as long, tight, and curly as yours”.

“Well for your information, I got my hair from my parents.”

“Are you into music?”

“Why? Are you?”

“Yeah man, Rock ‘n’ roll. I’m a singer.”

“Are you in a band?”

“Not yet, buy I will be. I sing in the school chorus.”

“The school chorus is not rock and roll,” said Vinny shaking his head in disbelief at what he thought was a wannabe dork, but Vinny was wrong, very wrong, and Johnny was right about Vinny, very right. Vinny made Johnny his first apple core pipe with a Bic pen as a shotgun tube. Later, they tripped together. Johnny’s first time.

It wasn’t long before the two young men became friends outside of school. They lived in the same neighborhood getting off the West End line at the same station; 5oth Street. 

Vinny lived with his family on the third floor over a store front facing the elevated tracks on New Utrecht Avenue. Johnny later learned that Vicente’s family was an adopted family that Vinny lived with; he was a foster child. The 1927 walk-up was original to the Borough Park Project in the then suburb of Brooklyn. Now, only the neighborhood’s poorest tenants would suffer living within feet of a rattling subway elevated train.

 With his foray into FM progressive beyond the top 40 of WABC, WINS, and WMCA, his pot dealing friends at The Square weren’t the good boys who went to synagogue every Saturday morning, the ones who became Boy Scouts and didn’t do drugs. They were left coughing in the dust of his speeding life.

Johnny gravitated to “The Square” led by Vinny who lived up the elevated tracks passed the 46^th Street Lowe’s Theater, to the pigeon park across from Adelman’s Deli and Weinstein’s grocery of bagels, smoked fish, and kosher pickles in wooden barrels. The Square had been the place for old Irish and Italians men to cool their heels until the teenagers started coming around and making a racquet. They crowded them out and they made their way back to the makeshift bacchi courts under the Culver line shuttle. With religious Jews moving in from the west and crossing 13^th Avenue, the secular Jews, Italians and Irish were squeezed to the edge of Sunset Park by Puerto Ricans up from 5^th Avenue and into suburbs of Long Island or even New Jersey. The Square was squarely in the middle of a changing neighborhood.

The pair of tattered wooden benches lined two sides of The Square triangular island; only subway riders alighted there and quickly moved on. Old men went home at dusk; pigeons grabbed their last morsels left them by the kindly gentlemen. The teenagers took over. The psychedelic drug music lovers took the Ft. Hamilton side while glue-sniffing hooligans found the shady New Utrecht side more to their liking. Ethnicity determined the resting place of a few cross roaders; but they scouted both sides of The Square for their friends and deals. Musicians like keyboardist Jimmy Bianca and bass playing David Canola were Italian like but had more of an affinity with the pot-smoking musicians. Johnny Livinsky (“Livewire”) was the only Jew amongst them. He was an emissary from the secular Jewish fringe to the west of Ft. Hamilton Avenue, one of the few Jews not afraid to mix with the goyum, svatza or not.