On the Bowery 1977

Walking through the Bowery.

Memories abound from the last century.

In 1962 my father had a business meeting in New York with executives from AT&T. He drove our Ford station wagon with my mother and his two adolescent son south from Boston and we stayed at the Manhattan Hotel on West 34th Street. While he was with fellow electrical engineers we visited the Empire State Building, saw the Rockettes, ate at Tads Steakhouse, and viewed the Statue of Liberty. On the way back by Yellow Cab we rode along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. A sunny day much like that of the photo.

Spotting a man sprawled on that narrow meridian strip, I asked, if he were dead.

“No, he’s just drunk.” My mother answered with a disapproving glance.

I knew what drunk was since an old man hung out at the gas station in our suburban town. Red Tate. A Korean war veteran. My father, a WWII veteran, sometimes gave him a buck for a bottle of wine. There weren't many bums in my hometown. It was a dry town without any liquor stores, but Red Tate always had his bottle of Thunderbird.

In the next block were three more collapsed men. Lost to oblivion.

I later lived in the East Village and frequented CBGBs, passing countless enlistees to a state of inebriation on the Bowery. I never joined them, but not for lack of trying.

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The Bowery 1962

In April 1962 my father attended a business meeting in Manhattan for Ma Bell. While my father was at his appointment, my older brother and I accompanied my mother to Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty and rode a taxi north through the Bowery heading to the Enpire State Building. As we passed along the Bowery, I asked my mother, if the men sprawled on the sidewalks were dead.

"No, they're drunk like Red Tate."

Red was our town drunk. He has served with the Marines in Korea. He drank wine at the gas station and slept in a concrete bunker in the abandoned army base in the Blue Hills.

"You don't want to end up here "

My mother took us the Empire State Building. From the top the metropolis stretched to the horizons and into the Atlantic.

My father met us at Tad's Steak House. We asked about the men on the Bowery.

My father told us that some soldiers came back from the war damaged and drink helped quiet demons.

"Like the devil?" Asked my brother.

"No, something much worse."

During WWII my father had tested radar-directed 20mm cannons on B-26s In Kentucky. Thousands of miles away from the front line the fatality rates were 15%. My father never said what was worse adn I have no idea either. foto by Meryl Meisler

Boy Scout Shota

In the summer of 1962 my brother and I set out  with a large contingent of fellow Boy Scouts for a Sixty-Mile hike in emulation of JFK's call for a physical resurgence of youthful health. We departed from Adams Pond Camp south of Ossipee, NH and tramped through burnt forests and passed fields filled with tall cornstalks. The only memorable campsite was atop Evans Mountain next to a supposedly haunted house surrounded by blueberry fields.

None of us was older than twelve and the next day the temperature rose into the 90s and the scout masters promised their weakening troops a swim at New England's most beautiful pond. We picked up our pace and ended up a muddy hole rimmed by thirsty cows. The scout leader shooed away the cattle and the oldest adult explained that tradition required a naked run around the pond.

The boys from South of the Charles River rejected this demand.

"Then you get no food tonight."

"Fuck you then," said a Eagle Scout from Southie.

The rebels outnumbered the obedient, but the leaders and their adherents stripped off their clothes to trot around the waterhole.

We went into the pond wearing our shorts.

That night we ate nothing.

The Scout Leaders and their followers sat around a bonfire and ate fried chicken washed down by 'bug juice' or Kool-Aid. None of the rebels joined them. We slept together with the older boys standing guard. 

The next morning we rose before the dawn and trekked to the nearest road.

A farmer in a big truck stopped for us and asked, "Are you boys on that 'hike'?"

"We were," said a boy from Dorchester.

"I thought as much. Jump in the back and I'll drive to Adams Pond." He looked over his shoulder, as if the Boy Scout Leaders might stop him from aiding thirty-plus boys. 

As we approached the camp, the oldest boy from Southie warned, "Don't say nothing. Those motherfuckers will get you or us. I wish we could stop them from hurting our fellow scouts, but no one will believe us. Be prepared."

1962 was almost sixty years ago.

Not yesterday, but I still see the young boys running naked around a dirty pond.

Fuck the Boy Scouts.

ps the last entry in the Boy Scout Handbook was about 'noctural emissions'.

Elephants on Acid

What happens if you give an elephant LSD?

On Friday August 3, 1962, a group of Oklahoma City researchers decided to find out the what.

Warren Thomas, Director of the City Zoo, fired a cartridge-syringe containing 297 milligrams of LSD into Tusko the Elephant's rump. With Thomas were two scientific colleagues from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce.

297 milligrams is a lot of LSD about 3000 times the level of a typical human dose. In fact, it remains the largest dose of LSD ever given to a living creature. The researchers figured that, if they were going to give an elephant LSD, they better not give him too little.

Thomas, West, and Pierce later explained that the experiment was designed to find out if LSD would induce musth in an elephant musk being a kind of temporary madness male elephants sometimes experience during which they become highly aggressive and secrete a sticky fluid from their temporal glands. But one suspects a small element of ghoulish curiosity might also have been involved.

Whatever the reason for the experiment, it almost immediately went awry. Tusko reacted to the shot as if a bee had stung him. He trumpeted around his pen for a few minutes, and then keeled over on his side. Horrified, the researchers tried to revive him, but about an hour later he was dead. The three scientists sheepishly concluded that, "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD."

In the years that followed controversy lingered over whether it was the LSD that killed Tusko, or the drugs used to revive him. So twenty years later, Ronald Siegel of UCLA decided to settle the debate by giving two elephants a dose similar to what Tusko received. Reportedly he had to sign an agreement promising to replace the animals in the event of their deaths.

Instead of injecting the elephants with LSD, Siegel mixed the drug into their water, and when it was administered in this way, the elephants not only survived but didn't seem too upset at all. They acted sluggish, rocked back and forth, and made some strange vocalizations such as chirping and squeaking, but within a few hours they were back to normal. However, Siegel noted that the dosage Tusko received may have exceeded some threshold of toxicity, so he couldn't rule out that LSD was the cause of his death. The controversy continues.

Bernie Was There 1962

Bernie Sanders was there from the start.

He remains true.

He has my vote once he truly addresses the occupation of Palestine.

ps This photo dates back to a CORE sit-in 1962.

Conversely Hillary Clinton was working with the Barry Goldwater Campaign.