I was a young guy in my late twenties when I worked for a small trade newsletter publisher on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the “Ford To City: ‘Drop Dead!'” nineteen seventies, the area was still part of the gritty New York City of yesteryear. There on the Upper West Side were sawdust-floored stores that sold candies and nuts, Kosher meats, dairy, smoked fish, bread, cakes and cookies.

Of the bakeries, my much-older co-workers told me: go to Grossingers on Columbus Avenue for the brownies and go to Lichtman’s on 86th Street and Amsterdam for breads, black-and-whites, and cakes. And they were right.

Louis Lichtman came to New York from Hungary and the word around the neighborhood, for forty-something years, was that his cakes were sublime. So when I wanted to impress my young wife’s fancy-pants Westport aunts and uncles, I ordered a huge mocha cake.

On a hot day in late summer, I picked the cake up and placed it in the back seat of my very used, non-air conditioned Toyota Corona. Back then, what young city-dweller could afford a car, never mind one with a/c? We drove merrily up the Merritt Parkway to Westport, windows open, AM radio blasting. Our hearts swelled with anticipation.

We arrived, proudly offered the Lichtman’s cake box to our hosts, and stood back for an anointment of high-praise. This was, after all, a special order mocha cake from Lichtman’s!

My wife’s aunt opened the box, to reveal a very melted, very crooked, special order cake. It was still tasty, but it was aesthetically compromised. “Oh….” she said with disapproval that stings even as I write this so many decades later. “I can’t serve THAT!”

The dinner party survived, I survived, my wife survived and Lichtman’s certainly survived, for another ten years. But, in the late spring of 1987, Louis Lichtman’s landlord jacked the man’s rent 500 percent. The Hungarian immigrant cried as an auctioneer sold off the baker’s equipment and fixtures to a room full of his competition. They, too, would soon fail, as gentrification smothered the city’s commercial oxygen supply like cultural kudzu.

Today, the southwest corner of 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue shelters an architectural hardware store, a dry cleaning shop, and a custom shade store. Back in ’87, Lichtman’s rent increased five-fold, from $1300 a month to $6,500. I wonder what these storekeepers are paying now?

I suppose all that is beside the point. Here’s the real story: only three years after the auctioneer’s gavel signaled the last sale of his store’s baking equipment, Louis Lichtman, the man who crafted my melted mocha cake, died of cardiac arrest, at the age of 78.

In three years, he was done.

That was almost thirty years ago. My career has carried me a long way and I am no longer the young guy with a beat-up Toyota, so eager to impress supercilious suburban relatives. And yet, when I think of Mr. Lichtman’s story arc I cannot help but to compare it with my own.

For our tales are more alike than one might think. We both came a long way. We both learned, honed and loved our respective crafts. We both cherished our city and stayed with it, even as we were ground down by it. And finally, he faced the road’s end, a fate no man escapes.

As for me, do I dare ever to retire?

The imminent closing of the wondrous Paris theater caused me to post this remembrance of movie days past, republished today by Gary Axelbank. Check it out — it’s a nice beach read 🙂

WEEKDAY MAGAZINE – The ‘Wonder’ of Movie Theaters in the Bronx

Much love to Thomas Beller and Jacob Margolies for giving my Father’s Day remembrance a home in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. I hope you memories are fond ones.

Here’s my tale, published today:
https://mrbellersneighborhood.com/2019/06/happy-fathers-day?fbclid=IwAR3ShwwmZln8GwSHIOUoxVy02hShaUqb1bFJs2li4wLcyH0sNU1NIoIICJs

You mean you missed it? Well, here it is:

I Want to Go Out Like Leonard Cohen.

I was just a post-punchball street kid from The Bronx when I started college at CUNY. Steps from the Number Four el train, I signed up for classes with a creative writing professor named Jerome Charyn. He came from The Bronx too, and he made it, in the world of letters.

I wanted to learn from him and expand my life, which until then was a tightly proscribed four-mile wide radius, from Inwood to the Southern Boulevard, from the derelict Yonkers pier to the big ballpark on River Avenue.

“Just a crazy kid with a dream.” That was me.  I wanted to make a life with words.  Audacious. At sixteen I had no idea what that really meant, except that for some reason it made everyone I knew fume, then spit: “Where do you come shinin’ off?”

Charyn introduced me to new friends, in print, and to that, I said “bring it on!”:  Roethke, Rexroth, Kees, Ginsberg, Kinnell, Plath.  John Hawkes, Kesey, Bellow, Borowski, Cleaver, Baraka, Claude Brown, Ellison, Baldwin, Elkin, Burroughs.

And then he assigned Leonard Cohen.

Leonard Cohen? I knew Cohen from his songs, free-form FM favorites such as “Suzanne”, “So Long Marianne”, “Sisters of Mercy.” But books?

Yes: “Beautiful Losers,” a book that made my provincial puppy head explode, as I knew it would, as soon as I picked up the Bantam paperback in the college bookstore.  The jacket read: “The most daring new novelist on the scene today! Unexpurgated!” For me, it was “Naked Lunch” to the third power.

The years passed.  The world took its toll.  And Cohen was proved right, again and again.

“The ponies run.  The girls are young.  The odds are there beat.  You win awhile, and then it’s done.  Your little winning streak. You live your life as if it’s real, a thousand kisses deep.”

And: “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.  Everybody knows the fight is fixed…the poor stay poor, the rich get rich.  That’s how it goes; everybody knows.”

He kept at it and so did I. 
https://www.amazon.com/Home-Front-Martin-Kleinman/dp/098250411X I always had my day job, and I always kept making stories.  Cohen kept making songs and, then, got back to touring; for him, the fight was fixed: he was cheated out of royalties and needed the dough.

Some celebrities become an “oldies act.” They trade on past glory, befouling their legacy.  They go for the easy applause, or the cheap laugh, or the familiar movie character — the bit they know will work.  Not Leonard Cohen.  I saw the Cohen exhibit recently at the Jewish Museum, in Manhattan.  You should go. This was a man, a real mensch.  He kept pushing and plugging, never complacent. In the exhibit’s startling video of Cohen’s life-work, the seventy-four year old teases about an earlier time in his life: “I was sixty then, just a crazy kid with a dream.”

The decades passed. He never stopped challenging us, or himself.  I saw him at Barclay’s in 2012, a spry seventy-eight. “I promise you we’ll give you everything we got,” he said early on, and he sure did.

To the very end, his lyrics rendered the harsh illumination that makes the cockroaches dance crazy on the late night kitchen counter of life. His secret chord still holds pan-generational appeal, as evidenced by the mixed crowd at the Museum.

His truths are eternal: “There’s a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.” So, when at last I see the dealer, and I’m out of the game, I hope it’s like Leonard Cohen, who gave it everything until it was time to relent and sing, with pride, honor and grace: “Heneni, heneni – I’m ready, my Lord.”

I’ve been away from my own blog since last September. But I’m coming back. A new collection of stories will be published later this year and there are lots of things on our mind here at The Real New Yorkers.

Congestion Pricing?

Specialized School Admissions?

MTA Performance?

Commercial Rent Catastrophe?

We’ll get to all of them. Hang tight. Meantime, read my latest story, just published at Typishly.com.

On this date in 1970, Jimi Hendrix died.

But he’s been with me for the last 48 years.  Frank sang “My Way” yet, for me, Jimi’s life spoke more powerfully to the notion of living on your own terms.  Screw the naysayers.  Just go for it.

Did I ever tell you my Jimi Hendrix story for Real New Yorkers?  I thought not. Once upon a time, in the late 60s, my friends Larry and Billy decided to head down to Manny’s on music row in Manhattan, to buy some strings and drum sticks and, in the process, drool over gold top Les Pauls and sunburst Strats.

They asked me to come with them, but I was lazy, and said “nah, not this time.” I’d gone with them before, and we ended up spending most of our time standing on the sidewalk and ogling the go-go girls from behind the velvet rope of the Metropole, which was around the corner from Manny’s.

This time was different.

They walked to the Grand Concourse and took the IND downtown.  Later that Saturday, they accosted me — in a fevered state — while I sat on the stoop.

Billy took a sales slip from Manny’s from his shirt pocket.  “You really blew it, Kleinman!!!” they shouted.

They shoved the slip in front of my face.  On it, in rococo ballpoint script, were these words:

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Be groovy

Jimi

I could not believe it.  But they saw him. They spoke to him. And I missed the chance of a lifetime.

I tried to stay “groovy” — in my own way — all these years.  I tried to “do it my way.” I really tried. And I’m going to keep trying, no matter what.

Thanks Jimi. Really, man.  Thanks so much.

Alev Hasholem.

https://vimeo.com/244514890

It would be much worse if today was a Colorado-blue sky day.  At least the rain makes it different.

Look to the future, but honor the past.

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A vacation in Ireland can teach a guy a lot.  It’s an ancient, wind- and rain-swept land, kicked around for centuries, sometimes bowed AND bloodied.  It retains a wild beauty, both rough and compelling, and its people are funny, thoughtful, hard-working and earnest.

What a trip to Ireland gives one, is perspective.

In my mind, I’m 25 years old, in my physical prime, ready for anything.  I’ll speak now in metaphors: some of my generation grew up in Athens.  I grew up in Sparta.  There, as a child, one’s worth was measured by strength.  How far can you hit a baseball?  How many “hard nucks” can you take without crying, even as your knuckles bled?  How fast can you run the 100 yard dash?

In my mind, I’m 25.  But in the real world, I am many decades older.  In recent travels, my pace has slowed and, in Ireland this month, my pace came to a standstill, for I could no longer walk more than 1/4-mile at a time, without enduring excruciating pain.

Across from Trinity College, in a lovely home furnishings store, on a cool and damp day, I broke out in a sweat and nearly fainted.  I told my wife: “I need to take a cab, get to the hotel, put my feet up, and gobble some NSAIDs.”  We were to leave the next day and this was our gift-giving time, as well as a time for independent exploration of Dublin.

I knew I deeply disappointed my wife, who loves to linger in stores and select the perfect gifts for friends and family.  I also knew I had to get off my feet.

The knees, the knees.  I’d had knee problems since I was a teenaged football player and baseball catcher.  The pain and locking and popping came and went over the decades.  Shortly before I left for Ireland, and after an idiotic visit to an Internet medical site, I was convinced I was having a clot in my right leg, which was causing my right knee to swell and lock.

Days before departure, we went to the emergency room at Lenox Hill.  Tests were taken.  No clot.  I was told: “your problem is orthopedic.”

And so I made an appointment with a knee guy — a “very good man” — for the day after our return.

We came home from Ireland and the next morning went to see my new orthopedic surgeon.  X-rays were taken.  Both knees were bone on bone.  I will eventually need replacements in both.  For now, a cortisone injection in each knee, while I get my head around my fate.

Naturally, upon returning to my computer, I went back to the Internet, like the jerk that I am.  Here’s what I found about the knee replacement process.  Take a look, if you dare:

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Now this.

I come from Sparta, and I never stopped playing sports, but bit by bit I’ve disintegrated.  Now I can barely walk.  I remember as a young man, walking alongside my aging father, who told me in his gruff way: “Slow down, this is as fast as I can go.” And I remember thinking: “I’m not even walking very fast.” We’d zoom up the hills of the west Bronx, us kids, never a thought to cardio fitness.  We walked everywhere.

Now, not so much.

But, back to Ireland.  As I waited for a cab, I sat outside in the mist, near the Trinity campus, I was joined on a bench by four American women older than me. We began to talk.  I complained about my pain.  They, too, were resting.  “I used to be able to….” I started.

One lady interrupted. “‘I used to’ is in the toilet,” she said.  “We ALL ‘used to…’ something.”

And then, the light bulb went on.  These women were well-on in years, and still travelling.  They had a cheery attitude.  They did not try to dress “young” but their outfits were attractive and contemporary.  They were out there in the world, comfortable in their own skin, smart as whips.

Comfortable.  That’s the key.  I need to become more comfortable in my own, actual, age.  Not give up, not by any means. But simply admit that there are things I can still do, and things that will be more difficult.  So be it.

I need to be more like Ireland.  Have I told you? It’s an ancient, wind- and rain-swept land, kicked around for centuries, sometimes bowed AND bloodied.  It retains a wild beauty, both rough and compelling, and its people are funny, thoughtful, hard-working and earnest.

Yes, I need to be more like Ireland.

It was a big mistake to forego our Cape Cod beach vacation this year.  I’d reasoned that we were going on two overseas vacations this year, and we are not made of money.

But the daily disasters keep piling up, and my back aches from the 24/7 tension, and then the capper: today I read a  Verlyn Klinkenborg-style essay in The New York Times about the author’s unplugged vacation on Long Pond, in Belgrade Lakes, Maine (see photo above).

Ah, Long Pond.  Many years ago, when I was a twenty-year old Bronx primitive, I vacationed there with a school friend.  It was my first plane ride, LGA to Augusta.  Less than an hour, as I recall.  We rented an AMC Ambassador, and drove to Castle Island Camps.

We had use of a fourteen foot outboard, with a ten horsepower motor.  We fished for large mouth bass.  We ate them for dinner, with corn, salad.  We had blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream for dessert.  After our evening meal, we repaired to the main house “living room” and sipped Jack Daniels from paper cups.  We were far from the war, from the draft, from the grit and daily danger of NYC life in the early seventies.

Those who remember those days as some sort of golden era are very much mistaken.

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Fast forward forty-five years. Cape Cod offered similar respite, albeit far less spartan.  Our rented house was deluxe, the appointments sublime.  We made new friends, new memories.  Lobsters, grilled steaks, fresh corn, all roasted on a grill large enough to host a Texas bbq.

We watched kids fish for fluke from the jetty.  We watched neighbors hilariously try their luck on paddle boards, with varying degrees of success.  We watched a wounded sandpiper deal with its bad leg, nibbling along the shore with his mates.  That gimpy sandpiper returned to our beach, yards from our door, every morning and evening.  One leg was bent at a forty-five degree angle and he hopped about with determination.  I’d watch him while lazing in the New England summer sun.  At first, I was sad for the little guy, hobbled.  I thought: if something happened to his other leg, he was done.  Done! Then, I realized how brave he was, how he coped with the hand he was dealt.  His buddies pecked at the sand with him and never left him behind.

It was a big mistake.  We should have taken the house again.

You can learn a lot while doing nothing.