More Than A Feeling.

1976 was the first year I can remember where I knew what year it was…when I first became aware…other stuff I wrote here about times before that was just extrapolations, figuring things out and working backwards…I remember a big deal being made when people rang in 1976 because this was going to be America’s 200th anniversary…200 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence…

It was the “whitest” year I had in this time period, my momhad just transferred me over to a school where most of the kids were white,this was before I started going to Joan Of Arc junior high a few years laterwhere there were like two other white kids and this was before I started goingto the Goddard-Riverside Camp in upstate New York, where there was maybe four…

It was weird going to a school with so many white kids, it was hard to relate to them and ironically, right away when I got there the two kids from school I would pal around with were both black…one was Michael Greene and the other was a kid named Ben (forgot his last name)…Ben lived on 96th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway…when I would go to his house it was the first time I had been in REALLY shitty, ghetto-type housing…creaky floors…old building from the 1930’s or earlier…Freddy Roman’s house was a little bit like that…

Michael’s dad was a superintendent for a building…and so we’d play tag or whatever, run around the basement…HIS apartment was kind of ghetto,too…crap everywhere…I was big time into records, 33 lp’s and also 45’s…I had a rack for them and I would always put them back neatly…I guess even then I knew how to take good care of my stuff even though I would smash things and break them if they didn’t work…I couldn’t get my record player to work one time and I just beat it up…smashed it all to shit…but at Michael’s house he had his 45 records all in one big pile…no paper sleeves to protect them…even then I knew the records would just get scratched up…there was a 45 of Diana Ross and the Supremes - "Stop! In The Name of Love"...Michael was like, what's this?   stop in the name of the law?  I was thinking "no stupid".  I said "stop in the name of love".  I'd heard the expression stop in the name of the law on TV and places but even at the age of 10 I knew the title of the song was a play on the phrase.  Now that I think about it, the records must have been his parents'.

He used to make fun of my mom for wearing sandals in the winter…tell mamma jokes and what not…then I would insult his mom and he’d get mad for real…not even telling yo mamma snaps but just pointing out what was true…even then, just by looking at his parents I could tell they were alcoholics.  I didn't know what alcoholism really is, I just know that it's people who drink a lot and look funny...misshapen…his mother looked kind of like Billie Holiday if she had lived to be 60…she looked a lot older than she was…his father was big and fat with a fat face, walking around with dirty clothes…so it’s funny people tell a bunch of jokes that aren’t true and I just point out hey, your mom is this and your dad is that and they get mad for real…crazy kids…Michael had this glare when he was pissed…he’d stare right at you and not say anything…he did that one time when a teacher, Ms. Bolzano (what’s a black lady doing with a name like Bolzano?  Had she married an Italian?)…Ms. Bolzano took his baseball cards and tore them up and threw them in the trash…he just glowered at her while she did it…like he was gonna kill her…but that's all he ever did, to my knowledge...

We were obsessed with baseball, and baseball cards…I remember that year watching The Bad News Bears and another baseball movie that is quite underrated that I still love, “Bingo Long’s Travelling All-Stars and Motor Kings”…with Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones, and Richard Pryor…we loved Doritos…this was before they started putting them in these silver-type bags…they used to come in regular plastic bags like Tostitos do now…they came in taco or nacho cheese flavor…but me, Ben, and Michael were always in class having to hide our baseball cards and Doritos from the teacher…

there was a Mexican restaurant on the west half of Broadway,between 96th and 95th Streets…Mexican food seemed weird to me…all those strange names for the food…burritos, tacos, enchiladas…and there were pictures of the food on the walls in there, and the pictures looked weird, and the names of the dishes were weird.  What the hell is this stuff??...the name of the place was Taco Rico, with the Fowad discount clothing store across the street...with the cheap clothes out in the street, hanging from these clotheshorses...with cheap hangers…and so anyway, since I switched to P.S. 75 from P.S. 163 and had to walk the half mile there each day, I started learning more about the world of upper west side Manhattan and how to get around…just a little…

One night Ben, Michael and I went to see a movie…it was a double bill “Uptown Saturday Night/Do It Again”…it freaked me out because Jimmy Walker was in it…J.J. from Good Times…I used to love the show “Good Times”, I used to watch it all the time…I was still young and it made no sense to me…I’m watching this movie and thinking, “what the heck is J.J. from Good Times doing in a movie”…

But he wasn’t J.J…in the movie, Jimmy Walker played acriminal…and so I couldn’t believe my eyes…he was cursing, using the F and Swords, beating people up, slapping women, drinking, doing drugs…robbing people…itwas so weird…wow J.J. violent what the hell happened??...it made no sense to mebecause on T.V. he was such a nice guy, the type of person you’d want for afriend…now he’s being mean to people I think in one scene he’s got a guy downon the ground and is kicking the crap out of him and cursing at him…

And so I remembered what I saw for the next week or so…Iremember I couldn’t wait for next (whatever night Good Times was on), so Icould watch it…and so…the next time I sat down to watch an episode of GoodTimes, I was waiting for J.J. to do something bad…he’s turned evil now,right??...he’s changed??...nope…I watched the show and he was the same old J.J…Iwatched the episode and I kept waiting for him to curse or hit someone but hedidn’t…that’s when it started to dawn on me that the people on T.V. and inmovies are just acting…