Train Tracks (16 page)

TWENTY-NINE

Louie and His Crazed
Monkey

I
once read
a story about monkeys invading the capital of India. Just weeks before, the
deputy major died after falling off a balcony while fighting off a pack of
monkeys. The story I read
*
said that the animals were attacking again, with one
woman seriously hurt and two dozen other people given first aid in the East
Delhi neighborhood.

So the monkeys are out of control—rogue monkeys
running into residences. I guess if I go on with the story I'll be accused of
simian phobia—and I'd be liable to face a boycott from some monkeys around the
globe, and I can't afford that because if the monkeys were to boycott my
products there'd be no conservatives left to buy them, I suppose.

Liberalism turns all animals “cute”: a bear is
“cute,” a monkey is “cute.” Monkeys are dangerous, with big teeth! This reminds
me of the story of “Louie and His Crazed Monkey.” We go back now: Ladies and
gentlemen, put on your resting caps. We're going back in time. We're going back
to the Lower East Side of New York.

Dad owns a small antiques mart. Little ol' Michael
is cleaning bronzes in the store basement, and there's Louie the Drunk from the
bowery. He wasn't a bum—he worked, but he was an alcoholic. Dad would have him
in on the weekends and he'd clean the bronzes—and whatever else he did down
there. I loved Louie. Louie was a great guy.

You've got to understand, this guy was an alcoholic
of the old school: skinny like a rail, white guy, smoked unfiltered
cigarettes—but one of the nicest guys on earth. He wore the rubber apron. He
cleaned bronze statues with cyanide! Then, of course, I took over because Dad
wanted cheap child labor, and where else was he going to get it? As a result, I
got to know Louie over the years. He taught me various things. Once we had Louie
over to the house—I'll never forget it—I was so proud that my father took this
guy, who I liked, all the way out to Queens and invited him to dinner. I don't
know what came over him. Maybe it was Thanksgiving. Louie had dinner with us at
the table, and the guy was surprisingly erudite. He knew things.

After dinner we did games, and Louie the Drunk
showed me how to bend nails. He showed me mind over matter by taking a nail and
showing me that if you put your thumbs on the center and pull back with your
other fingers and focus your mind on it and keep up the pressure, the nail will
bend! I was shocked because I was a skinny kid with little hands—and I bent the
nail! He taught me mind over matter—but it is all molecular, as a result of
constant pressure producing heat, which permits you to bend the nail.

I learned that in life it's the same thing: It's
all willpower. Now there's another element to the story. So, Louie is this king
of a guy, interesting but an alcoholic. Years go by. He lives alone in
Williamsburg. In those days Williamsburg was a slum, zero—you know, oilcloth
city; leftover apartments from the last century. No one wanted to be there but
the poor. So he lives there alone. He's very lonely. He gets a monkey—he wants a
monkey! Now, nobody in those days had a monkey. Dogs, yes. Cats, yes. Who had a
monkey in those days? Louie gets a monkey. Louie didn't just get a spider
monkey, one of the skinny little monkeys. Louie got a woolly monkey. Now, woolly
monkeys are really strong: They've got a chest on them and strong hands. Louie
is in love with this monkey. For a couple of months they're inseparable.
Wherever he goes, there's the monkey; the monkey's on his shoulder, while he's
cleaning, and he's happy.

Now Louie was the kind of guy that if he went to a
bar on the Lower East Side he'd throw money in the jukebox, and he would whistle
and sing and buy everyone drinks until he was broke. I remember the name of that
bar to this day: Hammel & Korn. Whatever money he made from my father, he'd
get paid it and two minutes later he'd be in the bar. Later, he'd stumble out
into the street. Sometimes he'd sleep on the Bowery and didn't care. He lived
for the booze—that was it—but he had a heart of gold.

So, Louie gets the woolly monkey. Finally he has
someone to fill his empty nights. As I said, they were inseparable. Well, as
time went on, we got a call: Louie's in the hospital; he's in critical
condition. “What?” The monkey went crazy in his apartment, attacked him, almost
ripped him to pieces. He suffered for six months in the hospital. I don't know
which hospital, probably Bellevue because that's where they all wound up. The
monkey went at him—you don't know what a monkey's like when it goes crazy. You
try to stop an enraged monkey without a weapon! He ripped his neck; he ripped
his face; he ripped his arms; he ripped his legs; he ripped his crotch; he
ripped his behind.

Louie was ripped up pretty badly, but we learned
that during the fight, he grabbed his pet and threw it out the window. It just
shows you that if he hadn't done it, he'd be dead today. A liberal probably
would have tried to talk to the monkey, but Louie knew that the instincts had to
kick in: It was him or the monkey. He decided that it was better he live than
the monkey. He didn't consult the liberal playbook on how to deal with a crazed
monkey—he just fought with it and killed it. I think that's what the bottom line
is here, but the point is, even a lonely drunk needs companionship at night. In
his case, he found the monkey. It was probably the right thing for him to
do.

But it goes back to the story I opened with, which
is that the monkeys are rampaging in India. Rogue monkeys are breaking into
houses, even into the house of the daughter of the ruling Congress party. They
broke into the Indian parliament. Trouble boiled over in late October when the
city's deputy mayor fell to his death while driving away monkeys from his home.
He waves a stick to scare them away, tumbles over the edge, and boom! He drops
dead—falls off the balcony and dies.

So, right now you can see that Louie was a pioneer,
in a way, in the sense that he understood that monkeys were dangerous long
before they did in India, when they turned it into a sacred animal.

THIRTY

End of Day
Glass

I
remember
learning this when I was a kid in my father's antiques store: Let me tell you
what end of day glass is. Don't you sometimes enjoy a multitude of stories
without the distraction of a logical connection? End of day glass is similar to
stream-of-consciousness storytelling. Some of the most colorful glass is
variegated glass. You know, all sorts of colors were in those vases made with
variegated glass.

“Dad, what's that?”

“Well, Michael, that's end of day glass.”

“What is that, Dad?”

“Well, at the end of the day in the glass shop,
they have different colors that were left over from the various things they were
making, and they melted it and then put it all together and it became this
beautiful, multicolored glass. All the different colors were melted down and
made into a thing called ‘end of day glass.'”

My dad knew so much—never went to college, but he
was worldly wise and knew reality. I was blessed. Not saying that if you go to
college you don't know reality; I'm not an elitist nor am I anti-elitist. I'm
highly educated. Not everybody who has a higher education is an idiot: Let's not
get carried away with these categories. But, my dad was a smart guy who happened
to not go to college. He could always surprise me with his knowledge. I was very
lucky in that way.

THIRTY-ONE

Working the System

H
ere's the connection to my awakening as a social worker: I learned that you shouldn't trust someone to deal honorably with you just because they smile when they speak your name. Sam the Butcher taught me that one. So, while I'd work with my welfare “clients,” I could spot a phony a mile away. Here's when the scales started to drop from my eyes.

As a young social worker I made something like $5,500 a year. I was fresh out of college and had no furniture in my apartment. I had a mattress on the floor and orange crates for lamp tables, but I wasn't complaining: I had a job and it was a start. After all, as a child I had to manage with what we had, which wasn't much.

I'll never forget the day I visited one of the so-called welfare clients and what happened when I came back to my supervisor in the New York City Department of Social Welfare (or whatever it was called) to file my report. She wanted to know if they had furniture. When I said they didn't, she told me to take out a pen and paper.

She said, “Michael, write this down: They're setting up an apartment, Mr. and Mrs. Whomever. Every civilized family needs a bed—write down $350 for a bed. They need two lamp tables—write down $120 each. In the living room, they need a coffee table—write down $120. They'll need a sofa—write down $300.”

This went on for a few minutes. The whole time I'm thinking about my empty apartment and how I could use all of those things. But not wanting to lose my job, I knew better than to speak up as my supervisor told me to have a check cut for $5,327.92, so this welfare leech could have a “decent home.”

With that exchange in the back of my mind, I figured that if I had said anything to my supervisor—like why in the world is the government handing out checks to people who refuse to work faster than Santa on Christmas Eve—she'd probably say, “Don't worry, Michael: This is their entitlement.” By the time my supervisor was done rattling off a list of “entitlements,” the total “owed” to the welfare cheats for furniture was something like what I would have earned in a year. I was supposed to authorize a check to Mr. and Mrs. Whomever to furnish their welfare apartment so they could lead a standardized life. Me? I went home to a mattress on the floor and two orange crates—and I was the professional with a college degree!

That's when I knew the system was broken. That's when I knew the system was sick.

THIRTY-TWO

The Final Straw

T
he moment I decided to go to the top of the teaching profession, that's when I slammed into another ugly truth about liberalism that put me on another political course. I left teaching and went to graduate school, where I laboriously worked on two master's degrees and then a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Major-league publishers had published six or eight of my books by the time I graduated.

When it was time to get my teaching job, I was told, in effect, “White men need not apply.” Keep in mind, I had a nearly perfect A-average in my graduate courses; my master's dissertation was published in a major scientific journal (the
Journal of Ethnobotany
from Harvard); my PhD was published as a book! This combination would have automatically ushered me into the halls of academia in any other past generation. That's when the worm turned; that's when I became radicalized; that's when I saw the true color of liberalism! Here I had two young children and I had killed myself to get that degree, but because of the social engineering of the radical Left, I was told to put aside all of my aspirations.

Affirmative action, a misguided liberal policy supposedly used to promote equal opportunity, almost destroyed my family and me. Here I was a “man-child in the Promised Land,” denied my birthright for matters of race. According to the ACLU this immigrant son had “to put his life on hold” so the less qualified (i.e., “others”) could move ahead. The rest is history.

I will not bore you with the details or whine. I do very well indeed today, but the government didn't hand it to me. Affirmative action didn't get me to where I am today! It's been a long road of crawling on broken glass. Everything I ever achieved, I achieved with hard work, dedication, sweat, tears, and pain. By the way, none of those qualities are taught today. I guess you could say I'm a fighter; I do not now, nor have I ever, expected someone to hand me an entitlement, especially not the government.

I fight and work for what I want in life—always have.

THIRTY-THREE

Working on Cruise
Lines

H
ave I told
you about the force 10 storm? Let me tell you. It's a true story.

This was one of the most frightening moments of my
life because my family was on the ship with me. When I was a younger guy, when I
was on the islands as an anthropologist and ethnobotanist, I took great slides
with my Nikon F, in the light-meter days. Those were the days of real
photography. I'm not saying you can't do it with digital. You can, because I
have a digital camera, and I'm very fond of it. I really don't know how to
compare the two. I'm very happy with the digital pictures, but the day of
holding the light meter and stepping back—that was another story. Hearing the
shutter click on a Nikon F was visceral photography. Those were exciting days of
taking pictures! You took slides in those days.

Does anyone do slides anymore? I don't think so. I
don't think anyone does a slide, but the quality of the depth of the picture was
phenomenal. I have some pictures, for example, of kids—and these were mixed-race
kids, incidentally—in the Cook Islands, circa 1970 or 1971, laughing on a
roadside as I went by. I started to talk to them, right after a light rainstorm.
Blondish hair, green eyes, dark skin.

Because I had great slides, I approached some
cruise lines about presenting slide shows of the islands the ships traveled to.
I was always in love with big ships. As a kid in Queens, New York, I was
landlocked, I grew up in a family that didn't know boating from a lox. I used to
drive on the West Side Highway when I first got my car in New York. The great
cruise ships of the world would line up on the Hudson River piers, and I would
drive by them. They were the most beautiful visions I'd ever seen! Each ship was
filled with the promise of a thousand lifetimes to me. I don't know what drew me
to the sea in that way, but I said to myself that when I got older, whatever I
did, that I'd have to go to sea in some way or another. Now, I didn't go into
the navy—fate did not take me there. Perhaps that would have been another life
and a great life unto itself, but, as I say, I went to the islands collecting
medicinal plants and took these great pictures. Then, as I had children but
still wanted to get out there and didn't have the money to do so, I marketed
myself in a proper manner. I went to the cruise lines and said, “I can lecture
your passengers about the islands,” which was true.

So, I got a free first-class cabin for my wife and
I, and another one for the kids. I took the kids out of school often, and I'd
get the question, “Should you take your kids out of school for a month at a
time? They'd fall behind in lessons.”

I remember saying, “Look, son, I'm taking you out
of school for a month. This is a great privilege to go on a ship. You're going
to have to take your lessons with you. We're going to do the lessons on the
ship, and you're going to keep a journal.”

“Sure, Dad.”

Needless to say, three days out and the journal was
still blank. The pages were blank; the schoolbooks were still sitting on the
shelf. The kids were wheeling around on the deck of the ship, bothering all the
old people who hated children. They were the only children on the ship, in some
cases, because who else had a child on a ship in those days in the month of,
let's say, October or November? Nobody.

So, one of the ships we got on was not a big ocean
liner. It was small: 5,000 tons with a very shallow draft that let it into
shallow waters, as in the Antarctic. So my family and I went back and forth
between Tahiti and Fiji in two cabins. The ship didn't have many passengers.
Remember, for the average cruise ship then, a big ship was 35,000 tons. Today,
they're 100,000 tons or 125,000. They're monsters! They're hotels with
propellers! I don't particularly like monster ships.

So, I'm on a 5,000-ton boat with a very shallow
keel. We leave Fiji, and we're supposed to be out there, back and forth, for
about twenty days, island-hopping to Tahiti around Christmastime or New Year's.
Well, we got into a hurricane. Now, you got a light, shallow-bottom ship in a
storm, and this ship is rolling. In the middle of the night I heard a pounding.
They put us towards the bow of the ship, in forward cabins—not exactly the best.
I hear banging like someone's hitting the steel hull with a sledgehammer, so I
wake up and say, “Something is wrong. Why is the ship sounding like this?” I get
up, go in the passageways—nobody is awake. Like a ghost ship.

Being a survival type, I knew something was wrong.
I throw on a windbreaker, climb up to the bridge, and there is the German
captain, who is normally as nattily dressed as you would expect of a sea
captain. Now he is unshaven, in an undershirt, and his eyes are in another
state. They weren't in a state of panic, but they were locked: locked onto
another place in another time, and he looks at me as though I'm not there—he
looks right through me! His hands were locked on the wheel. It wasn't a
state of panic, but his eyes were looking somewhere away—maybe, you would say,
like a soldier when people refer to the “thousand-yard stare.” That's what he
had, the thousand-yard stare.

He had gone a little nuts from the pressure. He
said, “Lecturer, all the time Fiji, Tahiti; Tahiti, Fiji. Lecturer, Fiji,
Tahiti; Tahiti, Fiji.” He had reached the breaking point. We were in a terrible
storm, and it was very rough, very bad. I feared the ship would go down. After
this experience, I became kind of disinterested in taking my children on long
trips on small ships.

Now, I would ask you, if you came from a family
that took you away on long trips as a child, did it affect you positively, in
the long run, or negatively? Here's the interesting twist to this whole story:
It was actually liberal thinking in those days that, if you took your child out
of school for a long trip and they were exposed to the world, they would get
more out of that long exposure than they would from sitting in a classroom. That
was actually a liberal philosophy, which I went along with and ascribed to—and
it turned out to be correct!