AJ WEBERMAN'S EARLY CHILDHOOD

EARLY SIGNS OF DEMENTIA IN AJ WEBERMAN The pharmacies in Brooklyn would sell you anything during the 1950's. I first obtained the ingredients for gunpowder in 1955, when I was ten years old, by looking up any pharmaceutical value the ingredients of gunpowder (sulphur, charcoal, and potassium nitrite) possessed. Then I forged a note that read, "I give my son Alan Weberman permission to buy charcoal because he has a stomach ache and it helps him. Sara Weberman." I bought each ingredient at a different pharmacy.

Some of the pharmacists were skeptical and did not believe I suffered from the condition described in the notes. But they all sold the chemicals to me. What did I do with the gunpowder after I made it? I put it on a round metal tray, placed the tray on the toilet seat in my family's bathroom and ignited it. The tray was so thin that the god dam toilet seat caught on fire!!! My parents could not believe their eyes when they tried to use it!! This episode makes me recall the anti-war slogan - "Nixon, liar, we gonna set your ass on fire!"

HEY KID WANNA BUY SOME SPANISH FLY Thanks to a pharmacy on Flatbush Avenue I got into the aphrodisiac (Spanish Fly) and vomiting pill businesses. I would purchase 20 double-0 capsules by telling the pharmacist, who was getting know me rather well by this time, that I gagged when I took aspirin tablets, so I had to crush them up and put them in a capsule. I filled the capsules with salt and pepper then sold them as either vomiting pills, or Spanish Fly. One of my customers, Sammy Fishman, asked me to meet him Flatbush and Church Avenues. He said, "I gave the Spanish Fly pill to my older sister. I put it in her food. She got really sick." I thought fast. I said, "I mixed up the vomiting pill with the Spanish fly, Sammy. They look alike." I didn’t want to deal with the dude if he was giving them to his sister...the motherfucker might try it on his mother next!

REEFER Marijuana was instrumental in the development of computer hardware and software.

Longhaired, pot smoking, dudes from the West Coast, formed Apple, a company similar to John Lennon's Apple Records. They capitalized Apple on money made from selling toll fraud devices - red boxes and blue boxes - that had first been designed by Yippie Captain Crunch. Crunch wrote the first Word Perfect-like program, Easy Writer.

Because pot improves creativity in already creative people, the people at Apple found a use for the serial mouse, which had been invented by the UNIX people at Bell Labs.

This led to the proliferation of computers using American made chips and software and reinvigorated the American economy. The high tech stocks fuel the market. DIG WHAT STEWART BRAND LAID DOWN:

In the 1960s and early '70s, the first generation of hackers emerged in university computer-science departments.

They transformed mainframes into virtual personal computers, using a technique called time sharing that provided widespread access to computers. Then in the late '70s, the second generation invented and manufactured the personal computer. These nonacademic hackers were hard-core counterculture types - like Steve Jobs, a Beatle-haired hippie who had dropped out of Reed College, and Steve Wozniak, a Hewlett-Packard engineer. Before their success with Apple, both Steve’s developed and sold "blue boxes," outlaw devices for making free telephone calls. Their contemporary and early collaborator, Lee Felsenstein, who designed the first portable computer, known as the Osborne 1, was a New Left radical who wrote for the renowned underground paper the Berkeley Barb.

As they followed the mantra "Turn on, tune in and drop out," college students of the '60s also dropped academia's traditional disdain for business. "Do your own thing" easily translated into "Start your own business." Reviled by the broader social establishment, hippies found ready acceptance in the world of small business. They brought honesty and a dedication to service that was attractive to vendors and customers alike. Success in business made them disinclined to "grow out of" their countercultural values, and it made a number of them wealthy and powerful at a young age.

The third generation of revolutionaries, the software hackers of the early '80s, created the application, education and entertainment programs for personal computers. Typical was Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental-meditation teacher, who gave us the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM's Apple-imitating PC. Like most computer pioneers, Kapor is still active. His Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co-founded with a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, lobbies successfully in Washington for civil rights in cyberspace.

In the years since Levy's book, a fourth generation of revolutionaries has come to power. Still abiding by the Hacker Ethic, these tens of thousands of netheads have created myriad computer bulletin boards and a nonhierarchical linking system called Usenet. At the same time, they have transformed the Defense Department-sponsored ARPAnet into what has become the global digital epidemic known as the Internet. The average age of today's Internet users, who number in the tens of millions, is about 30 years. Just as personal computers transformed the '80s, this latest generation knows that the Net is going to transform the '90s. With the same ethic that has guided previous generations, today's users are leading the way with tools created initially as "freeware" or "shareware," available to anyone who wants them.

Of course, not everyone on the electronic frontier identifies with the countercultural roots of the '60s. One would hardly call Nicholas Negroponte, the patrician head of M.I.T.'s Media Lab, or Microsoft magnate Bill Gates "hippies." Yet creative forces continue to emanate from that period. Virtual reality - computerized sensory immersion - was named, largely inspired and partly equipped by Jaron Lanier, who grew up under a

geodesic dome in New Mexico, once played clarinet in the New York City subway and still sports dreadlocks halfway down his back. The latest generation of supercomputers, utilizing massive parallel processing, was invented, developed and manufactured by Danny Hillis, a genial longhair who set out to build "a machine that could be proud of us." Public-key encryption, which can ensure unbreakable privacy for anyone, is the brainchild of Whitfield Diffie, a lifelong peacenik and privacy advocate who declared in a recent interview, "I have always believed the thesis that one's politics and the character of one's intellectual work are inseparable."

Our generation proved in cyberspace that where self-reliance leads, resilience follows, and where generosity leads, prosperity follows. If that dynamic continues, and everything so far suggests that it will, then the information age will bear the distinctive mark of the countercultural '60s well into the new millennium.

Does the underground ever get credit for this? Does pot ever get credit? All we get is Newt Gingrich blaming the counterculture for Afro-American crime by accusing us of breaking down moral standards in the 1960's. Newt was once in the underground, in fact he was the editor of an underground newspaper. Newt Gingrich smoked pot, and introduced a bill to ease federal restrictions on medical marijuana in 1981. On March 19, 1982 he wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "We believe licensed physicians are competent to employ marijuana, and patients have a right to obtain marijuana legally, under medical supervision, from a regulated source. Federal policies do not reflect a factual or balanced assessment of marijuana's use as a medicant." Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie Bennett, who came down on pot smoker's as drug czar in 1990's, had an addiction problem that he fed in Lost Wages. These men should be put on trial along with Usama Bin Laden for September 11th, as they had the Feds so focused on the drug thing, with THE PARTNERSHIP FOR DRUG FREE AMERICA, that the Islamist scum were overlooked. Another guilty party is Bill Clinton, the happy-time party cat who let the Feds go off in the direction they chose because he was having his asshole reamed by a highlevel groupie! President Clinton smoked pot. But he did not inhale. What a liar. Who would have ever thought to say this?

I WANT TO FILE ASSAULT CHARGES AGAINST THE RABBI WHO CIRCUMSIZED ME!!

I was born on May 26, 1945, in Manhattan although I grew up at 50 Lefferts Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. The first thing I remember is an image of a sick demented looking motherfucker dressed in black coming at me with a knife and praying at the same time. I would like to find this motherfucker today and fuck him up. Hey and what is this bullshit circumcision anyway? It is fucking mutilation, no Rabbi with a knife in his hand is going to improve on millions of years of evolution. Yeah, not only is it unnecessary, it is a crime - you ever heard of murder and mayhem? Murder is when you kill someone, mayhem is when you dismember them. My member got like dismembered. I have no idea of what it is like to have a foreskin. I have read that

numerous nerve endings are severed during circumcision so sex becomes less pleasurable. But diminishing male satisfaction only causes the male to seek more sexual experiences so instead of making you less horny circumcision makes Jews more horny. That's why most male heterosexual porn stars are Jewish. And the shit they tell you, the foreskin infection story is lot of crap. Shit, when I went out to the Midwest I expected to see hundreds of drive in foreskin clinics, to deal with all the goys foreskin infections out there. Like "Foreskins Cleaned While You Wait" shit like that that never appeared. So fuck it all, stupidity in the world cannot be avoided, cause some of it comes upon you while you are still dependant on your parents for life.

Hey, I never had my dogs' balls cut off and I never will. They call it "neutering." What the fuck does that mean? That the dog is "neutral" like Switzerland allegedly was during World War II? I call it castration! These bitches at the dog run tell me, "Oh he has a much less chance of getting testicular cancer if you have him neutered."

No shit! By that same reasoning I should have my heart removed then I would have a much less chance of getting a heart attack. Pugs motto is "Jump 'em Hump 'em and Dump 'em" and he already knocked up a bitch at the dog run. Now he prefers males...he tries to cornhole them unceasingly. I would have hated to have him as a cellmate....so what if my pug is a homo thug? What am I supposed to do?

Return him to Christopher Street Pets?

TWENTY MILLION FRENCHMEN CANT BE RIGHT Like 99% of the people in America believed in Christianity but the Jews didn't. This sowed the seeds of dissention in the Jewish psyche, since the majority was not always right. If we put it up for a vote Jesus would win hands down, at least in America. If we put it up for a vote world wide Mohammad would have a landslide. Nonetheless, I dont go for any of that shit. I had this fantasy of going to Ireland while the IRA was active there and like going on the radio and giving a speech: "What the fuck are you killing each other for assholes? Both Catholicism and Protestantism are both equally absurd delusions. Get your acts together and give up the bullshit." I would have gotten my ass kicked by both sides.

BEING JEWISH MEANT BEING EXTERMINATED LIKE AN INSECT Having been born just as the war ended it was bound to have had an effect on my brain. I don’t remember when it was I found out I was Jewish, it was just always something I knew. What Jewish meant to me then was people waiting in line to get gassed. Why wait in an orderly line? What the fuck was wrong with the European Jews, why didn’t they fight back more than they did? This thought bugged many intelligent kidz at the time.

In Hebrew School we talked of possible extermination in America. The answer was "They will get the Negroes first." We figured the Nazis hated the blacks more than the Jews because the blacks committed a lot of violent crime.

When I studied the Nazis later in life I found exactly the opposite was true. The Nazis didn’t want to gas all the blacks - they just wanted to send them back to Africa. It was the Jews that the gas chambers were reserved for. I also did not know that the Jews were ignorant as to the real intentions of the Nazis but they should have known something was up when they were separated from their children. The only good nazi is a dead nazi. So I modeled myself to be the exact opposite of the Nazis. Why worry about being clean when the nazis bathed regularly? Why listen to classical music when the "civilized" nazis listened to classical music? Why not be a fucking communist, like those who defeated the Nazi scum? Who knew what was going on inside the USSR at the time. I became a short wave listener and tuned into Radio Moscow, which had very powerful transmitters at the time. In my public school yearbook it stated that I listened to Radio Moscow, which my parents felt would follow me through life. Shit, the first time I wrote to a socialist organization the Feds contacted my father. They had a mail cover on the group and since this was my first contact with the left, they told my father I could have another chance if I never contacted a leftist group again. During the anti-war period the Feds contacted everyone who subscribed to the Yipster Times. I had to go to John Shattuck of the American Civil Liberties Union to get them to stop. America is a free country as long as you dont try and exercise your freedom. You are free to obey, free to conform. Shit, you can dress anyway you like, mutilate yourself to your hearts content, but dont cross over certain bounds.

SHUL IS OUT FOREVER I never believed in religion from the word go but was forced to observe the tenants of orthodox Judaism by my father, who dug the lick. I was forced to go to the Prospect Park Synagogue, which had moved from a walk up above a supermarket on Flatbush Avenue. My first memories are of this walk up house of prayer and a dude named Joe Barth, whose wife couldn't have kids, praying like a motherfucker with his tallis over his head. I never prayed, I only pretended to, rocking back and forth and mumbling. What difference did it make. I couldn't understand what I was saying in Hebrew. I was taught to read and write Hebrew but not to speak it. Modern Hebrew is as difficult as Chinese to learn, there are no vowels, so a lot of immigrants to Israel can speak it but not read it.

But a Jewish education, as absurd as it is focusing on superstition like don’t turn on lights on the Sabbath, is a good way to teach you to think. If you can memorize all these commandments your brain would have had some good exercise. Yeah, I have to admit that I believe Jews are smarter than the rest. Many are professionals, scholars, Noble prize winners or like really rich. But what Jews really excel at is figuring out ways to destroy themselves. Both the Jews and the Muslims voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry - the Jews to destroy themselves, the Muslims to destroy America! Kerry would have tried to gut the Patriot Act - hey the Patriot Act is aimed at Muslims, not at the general population. And guess what - the feds did black bag jobs, obtained confidential records and a whole lot of other things long before the Patriot Act was passed. Maybe they couldn't use the info in court but it didn't really matter since there is no justice - just ice - if you go to trial. The Feds have a 90% conviction rate - tantamount to a court martial. If you have the temerity to question their investigative ability you gonna sit for ten years my man! And guess what, while you be waiting to go to trial - if you can't make

bail or are denied bail - you be living under worse conditions than after you are convicted. Hey, I been there sports fans.

I have never read the Bible. I figure I might as well wait until I get thrown in jail to do so.

(First thing I did when they tossed me into The Union County Jail in Jersey was beg for a bible. The dude I was locked up with went to Erasmus, the same High School I attended, so I asked him to sing "On Erasmus, On Erasmus Fight on to your Fame" with me. He was a big black dude who tossed some drugs while the cops were chasing him.

He had the top bunk and his feet dangled down. I felt like Huck Finn on that raft in the river, locked up but free. I had Aron Morton Kay call the dudes wife and tell her he was clinkified at the crossbar inn because the brother couldn't do it himself for some reason.

Who the fuck knows why but from the word go I never fit in the mold. Yeah, I went to PS 241, where I peed in my pants and left a big wet circle on the floor. The teacher tried to figure out who did by reconstructing who sat where. That fucking building was a fucking maze to me and I had to leave little bits of paper in the hallways when I went to the bathroom on the first floor to find my way back. Fear. Fear. Fear permeated the Jewish community that survived in America, fear they didn't know even existed. Death. Gas chambers. Roundups. American Jews came real close to mass death and this left an imprint on their psyches. Then there was the fear that Jews would be labeled as Communists due to the Rosenbergs and so many others. The Rosenbergs were guilty of either trying to steal America's atomic secrets or stealing America's atomic secrets there is no doubt about that. I went through the entire Rosenberg file at the FBI reading room and the sketch that they transmitted to the Russians resembled a diagram of an atomic device that some of my associates in the Underground Press published in a Wisconsin newspaper. What they were also guilty of was gratitude to the Soviet Union for defeating Hitler and saving their lives. America would never have entered World War Two but for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sixty-five percent of Americans were isolationists. The Germans were the largest ethnic group that immigrated here. This image we have of a little old American lady sitting in front of her radio in the 1940's listening to war reports and saying: "Sonny we got to go over there and fight Hitler" is a load of shit. It was more likely "Let’s not get involved in a war for the Jews." Hitler dug Amerika. He wrote in Mein Kampf that unlike the conquerors of Latin America, the Americans did not intermix with the indigenous population. Like the rest of Mein Kampf this statement is historically inaccurate. American slave owners could not stay out of the slave quarters and although blacks were considered only a fraction human they were human enough to fuck the shit out them. This created the race of blacks we see here in America. The first time I saw an African, on a beach in Tel Aviv in 1959, I could not believe it. They looked so much different than American blacks. Well, shit those were Victorian times and everyone was horny. But my take on this is that the Constitution said that Blacks were only two thirds human beings. By implication this means that the other third was animal. So any slave owner that fucked three of his slaves was fucking someone who the founding fathers considered an animal and should have been busted under the laws against beastiality.

Hitler dug America for other reasons. The Americans exterminated the natives or sent them to concentration camps (not death camps) known as reservations. They gave the Indians blankets contaminated with smallpox, germ warfare that even Hitler temporarily shunned. The Rosenbergs had a false picture of life in the Soviet Union, they never visited there but were taken in by CPUSA propaganda. I do not believe they were evil people, just deluded and victims of the Second World War.

FIRECRACKERS My major ambition when I was about 10 or 11 was to purchase an entire mat of firecrackers so I could resell them by the pack to other kids. I saved up my money and along with my buddy, I believe it was Stevie Kirshner, we headed down to Canal Street to cop. Our first problem was our dress. Like we looked like our mothers dressed us, which they did. A dark complexioned older kid approached us and asked if we wanted to buy firecrackers. We said we did and he told us that we had come the right place. As we walked down the Manhattan old city street we stopped and the kid bought us both Italian ices.

Then we went into a red bricked housing project building and were told to give him the money and wait on the staircase. He was going up to see Joey Maldanado in Apartment 15-B. An hour passed. Than two. Soon we realized we had been ripped off. We went to 15-B and knocked on the door. A Puerto-Rican lady answered. She didn’t speak English. I learned two things from this experience - always ask to see the goods before you turn over the money and the Italians will fill your stomach before they rip you off.

This little piece of knowledge came in handy later on in life. It was 1980 and Aron Kay and I were hitchhiking back from a Yippie Conference in Columbus, Ohio. It was a strange night: First we got picked up by a military policeman whose ambition was to join United States Customs so that one day he could take a bribe and become rich. He knew there was no other way this was going to happen. Then a dude in an antique car picked us up. A skinny dark haired Italian junkie from Brooklyn, the kind of guy even the Mafia wouldn't touch. The evil that Brooklyn could produce often gave me cause to wonder. This dude was all scarred up and began to reminisce about the various accidents he had been in. Aron, who had a big scar on his neck from an old auto accident began to chime in about his mishap. I didn’t dig the conversation in the least.

When he stopped off to get gas the dude bought us some food and asked us where we lived and if he could come upstairs and make a telephone call. I told him we lived on McDougal Street in the village. When we got to the Holland tunnel and stopped for the toll I opened the door and Aron and I got out quickly. The dude drove off. The cops saw us and told us if we were still there when they returned we were busted. Luckily we were pretty well known in New York City at the time and someone who recognized us gave us a lift home. I went over to my buddy Lenny's pad on Sixth Avenue. Lenny was a professional poker player who collected antique cars. I picked up a newspaper Lenny had lying about and there was an article about a dude who had placed an a classified ad in a newspaper stating that he wished to sell his antique car, the same make and model car that we had just driven in with the psychopath. The dude lived in

Pennsylvania. When the guy arrived to look at the short, he pulled a gun, tied up the owner and stole the car. That was the last time I hitchhiked...

THE FIRST TIME I GOT TURNED ON The first one to turn me on was my friend Martin Levinson's mother, Risha Levinson. Risha Levinson was a living example of the creativity of second-generation Russian Jewish immigrants.

And the first one was free. Unfortunately this nice lady turned me on to ham, not reefer. But this was kewl cause it was ham for the first time in years of ham free existence. Oh I had had unkosher shit before. Like my mother washed my mouth out with hand soap after I said SHIT a couple of times. She should have used Rokeach kosher kitchen soap. The soap was like a gateway drug. So it was either Risha or my mom that got me started on the stuff.

The next unkosher experience I remember was in a candy store near my public school, PS 241 in Brooklyn. In Crown Heights, all black kids now. It was raining and I was sitting next to Andrew Pulos whose father was a superintendent. Pulos was a dummy, and I attributed this to his environment. I had saved my allowance and I ordered a steak sandwich for the first time. It came on a Kaiser roll, and consisted of several thin layers of steak. The meat had not been koshered. There were still traces of blood in it. Blood.

Blood is tasty shit, the Chinese eat coagulated pig blood. Like Jews kidnap Christian kids and eat them? Hey kids ain't kosher, they have no split hooves.

One problem that Jewish people have is that they are too civilized. Non-Jews dont have this problem, they have another one: civilization is merely a veneer that can be stripped off at any moment. Koshering meat means civilizing meat, as if meat could be civilized?

But the Bible implies that you are what you eat. What this boils down to is draining the blood and salting it to get rid of the blood. Like I think the first commandment is not eat the flesh of an animal while it is still alive. Like it is hard for me to picture a bunch of Hebrews getting together and each taking turns taking bites out of a live cow. They must have eaten smaller animals while they were still alive. It also means only eating animals with a split hoof that chew their cud, only eating fish with scales. Now as a garbologist I was at first offended by the fact that Jews were not allowed to eat creatures that were scavengers like lobsters. I was a scavenger. What in the fuck was wrong with scavengers? Then I realized that these creatures were high in cholesterol and especially unhealthy. It was also kewl to kill animals in a humane fashion, humane for the times at least. Animals are eventually going to die, why not slaughter them before this happens and recycle them as food? That's why eating veal is uncool. Veal is baby cow so the animal is not given a chance to live and reproduce. Chickens that are locked in small cages all their lives are also uncool. But if an animal lives out its life and is going to croak anyway recycle the fucker. But dont pig out on the stuff. One needs about half the size of a normal American portion to thrive.

MY MOTHER

My mom, Sara Weberman, was no dummy. She was the personal secretary of Rita Sands, a member of the Board of Education who was paid $1. a year by the city for her services. This, however, turned me into what is now known as....

THE UNHAPPY CAMPER My father was Orthodox, my mother was secular. This made for strange karma. When my father suspected my mother was buying non-kosher food, he went through our garbage and read the labels. This inspired me to go through Dylan's garbage and become the first garbologist. I went to P.S. 241 in Brooklyn, instead of to Yeshiva, however, during the summertime I attended Camp Maple Lake, an Orthodox Jewish summer camp.

Suddenly, I was forced to pray three times a day, wear a Kippur, and observe the laws of the Sabbath. I took out my frustrations on my bunkmate, Salo Belkin, the son of the President of Yeshiva University. Salo was in an automobile accident, and was retarded.

This, I felt, was a major factor in his being a true believer in Judaism, and I gave him many a chance to demonstrate his loyalty to the Jewish faith.

I brought Salo to a remote part of Camp Maple Lake. I grabbed his yarmulke then ran. I reminded Salo that the Torah forbade him to walk without his head covered in the presence of God for more than four feet. Later I learned that there was no such commandment. It was merely custom that caused Jews to cover their heads, not the word of God. Salo was PARALIZED. I left the yarmulke on the ground just out of his reach. If he stretched his body enough he could get his yarmulke back and be on his way. Salo lay down on the ground on his stomach, extended his arm, and reached for it with all his might ---- but he couldn't get it, proving, God did not exist.

Salo never finished his evening prayers on time. I finished on time, since I never really prayed, but merely pretended to do so, rocking back and forth and moving my lips as if I was reading the Hebrew words that I could not understand. Belkin finished his prayers in the back room of the bunkhouse, after everyone was asleep. I came in there one night, while Belkin was in the middle of the Shamona Esrick, a prayer where you are forbidden to walk or talk, and I shut the light off, making it impossible for him to finish. I reminded Salo "No walking or talking during the Shemona Esrick!!!" Since he was in the middle of the prayer, Salo was forced to stay in the backroom, unable to call for help and unable to move. He was paralyzed by his religion. At approximately 4:00 a.m. one of my fellow campers had to use the john. He discovered Salo and released him. He described Salo as having been "foaming at the mouth or frothing at the mouth."

The esteemed Rabbi Belkin visited Camp Maple Lake. My camp counselors, Alan Dershowitz and Daniel Chill, made me return everything I had stolen from Belkin, so he would have some stuff in his cubby when his father arrived. I gave him back his stuff, knowing I could steal it again after Rabbi Belkin left. While stealing Salo's stuff for a second time around, I found a Kodak flash camera loaded with film. Rabbi Belkin also left a mailing envelope with his home address on it, so Salo could mail him the film and he could have it developed. I called my friend Tanny Berman. Tanny and I entered the

bunkhouse when it was empty, and got the camera from Salo's cubby. I pulled down my pants. Now most kids would have mooned the Rabbi, but I had Tanny take close up shots of my pecker. (I had one public hair at the time). I mailed the film to the Rabbi.

Salo got to keep the camera because it would be evidence against him when his father tried to determine whose hairless pecker was in the pictures. Salo had been Oswalded!

I never could figure out what happened to those pictures, no one complained, or mentioned anything about them, ever. Alan Deshowitz did the O.J. Simpson case.

Danny Chill was an attorney for Bernard Bergman, who ran a series of old age homes where old Jewish people were neglected.

We were all super-horney in those days. One of my fellow campers, Norbert Ecstein, heard that there was a prostitute by the name of Mary Vega in Manhattan. When we returned from camp, Norbert got the Manhattan white pages and called up every Mary Vega in it, to inquire if she was the Mary Vega who was a prostitute.

TIMES SQUARE...NOW THE ONLY ONE TO FUCK IS DONALD DUCK I began to cut class and head for Times Square, in order to pursue my interest in African culture. In those days the courts had decided that the breasts of African woman could be shown in movie theatres since they could not possibly arouse passion in the white man. (I am not a white man, I am a Jew, but I assumed the law also covered me) So I became a devotee of movies such as "Bare Africa" "Naked Africa." This brought me to 42nd Street, and Hubert's Trained Flea Circus, the last freak show on Times Square. By the time I got to Hubert’s there were no trained fleas, at least I don't remember seeing any. I don't remember anything about Hubert's except for a snake dancer who danced to Tequila and a midget or two. The place latter became a peep show, which was sort of a freak show in itself, and then was torn down

by Disney. Someday I hope to head the Times Square De-Development Board, where I will supervise the destruction of The New Times Square and recreate the old one - with its dirty movie theatres, Modells, Richard's Dive Shop, titty shows, hot dog luncheonettes, stores selling transistor radios and stilettos, dirty magazine stores and Tanfastic - one of the raunchiest whore houses ever...

Around the time I became a habitué of Times Square, I obtained stock certificates from bankrupt companies (my dad was an attorney), and sold them to the kids on my block, assuring them a high rate of return on their allowances. When my father received complaints from the kid’s parents he said, "You are nine years old and you committed a Federal crime!! This is a violation of the Securities and Exchange Act!!" I reluctantly returned all the kids stinking allowances and apologized to their parents telephonically.

THE GALLO BROTHERS: BROOKLYN CIRCA 1959 Strangely enough, my association with the Gallo crime family started after I became a Jean Shepard listener in the mid-1950's. Shepard told of life in Chicago during the Depression and came up with a lot of good Americana.

His sponsors were mostly located in the Village and included Ed Fancher of the Village Voice, the Paperbook Gallery, Ying and Yang restaurant, the Cafe Bizarre, Marlboro Books - all that survives in the Voice. Jean Shepard died on Sunday October 17, 1999 in Sanibel Island, Florida. Shepard's obituary stated that he had two children that he never acknowledged were his. They apparently hated him, proving, that the great artist is not always the greatest person. A good example of this is Dr. Destouches, also known as Louis Ferdinand Celine.

Although he was a Jew hater and Nazi collaborator there is no denying that he wrote some great books such as Journey to the End of Night. One day circa 1958 I brought a Jean Shepard LP with me to Erasmus Hall High School. A homeroom classmate approached me. He said, "Hey man, are you a listener?" Like Shepard would have all his listeners flash their electric lights on and off at 4:00 a.m. so that they could identify each other and groove on each other. His listeners were termed "a cult". I said, "Yeah, I'm a Jean Shepard listener." (Shepard also said that names were symbolic - pointing to his own name) The classmate was Neil Hickey, and his mother was one of Joey and Larry Gallo's sisters. The Gallo brothers were notorious gangsters in Brooklyn. Joey had a pet lion at his headquarters on President Street. When the cops caught him with his pet, Joey had someone come forward and take the rap for him. Joey got shot in Umberto's Clam House. Dylan sang a song about, him, called "Joey," but I was buddies with his hippie nephew. Dylan was just a sports fan. Neil told me that while visiting his grandmother, Larry "Kid Blast" Gallo ran into the house, grabbed Neil, took him to a bedroom, and threw up the mattress from his bed, then took aim at the door with a handgun. No one appeared and Neil split. I am sure Neil shit in his pants. The Gallos favored admitting blacks into the mob. When Joey did time, he was the first white to get a haircut from a Negro barber. Neil asked me what kind of music I dug. I said, "I dig like My Fair Lady" the only kind of music I knew about at the time. Neil took two steps back and said, "Man, you don't dig jazz?" I said, "Like Bennie Goodman?" He says, "No man, like John Coltrane." I became close with Neil, who introduced me to Dennis D'Amico. When my parents found out I was hanging with Italians, they freaked.

They wanted to know if they were dark skinned Italians, or light skinned Italians. My parents were like weird. When ever there was a report of an accident, or murder, on the radio or television, they would listen for the persons name and then say "Not a Jewish name." I did not get along with them and on

return from college I found a note written in my blood in which I vowed to kill my mother later on in life for the repression I had suffered when I was a child. I vowed never to chicken out, even if what my mom did to me seemed trivial later on in life. I purchased a starter pistol. Whenever I had a fight with my parents I would come out of my room and pump a few blank rounds in their direction. I was a strange, immoral kid. Before I became a beatnik and leftist, I was into scams. I purchased condoms from Mark Krause, who worked at a Pharmacy near my school, PS 241, put pinholes in them, then sold them to kids. Krause admitted later on that he also put pinholes in them. I once stiffed Krause for scumbag shipment and he came after me and twisted my arm until I paid up. Krause contacted me via email and is now a stage manager and a cool guy. It turns out his parents sent him to military school - the ultimate threat back then - so that was why he did not attend the same high school (Erasmus Hall) that I did. The kids would attach the condoms to water faucets, then turn on the water and watch them explode. Here is a candid photo of one of my customers checking the product: Neil and I played the African drums. Our hero was Babalundi Olatungi, whose record, Lumumba Died For All Africa, was recalled by Columbia Records. Click HERE to hear OLATUNJI!!! I purchased a congo drum at Macy's and Neil got a set of bongos. We liked to jam, so we went over to Neil's grandmother's house every Saturday. Mrs. Gallo was a short, red-headed lady, who would also say "See you later, alligator." Why she spawned a bunch of gangsters was beyond me. Neil and I formed the Progressive Bible Readers. We read from the first page of Genesis with bongos and congo drum accompaniment in between. It was weird. It was like "In the beginning" (thump, thump, thump) God created Heaven and Earth (thump thump thump)". I told Dylan about the Progressive Bible Readers and he did a song that parodies it, "God Gave Names to all the Animals, In the Beginning." One day Mrs. Gallo tells me this: "Whena Joey wasa boy the Monkey Grinder used to come around and a give Joey money." He shook down the monkey grinder!!! Joey later went into the juke box business and juke boxes began appearing in butcher shops, dry cleaning stores etc. We would confront Neil: "Hey, we heard your uncle beat up another butcher today." Gangsterism had lost its romanticism.

We had all become Socialists or Communists, and my career as a con man ended abruptly, because this kind of thing went against Socialist principles. It was wrong to cheat people. It was something the capitalists did.