Stories
The First Leap:
from Neosho to New York
David Rounds
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Most of the time when I lived in New York (1957-1962) I was occupied with college life in Morningside Heights at Columbia, and did not do very much in the city. Occasionally I would get out, however, such as the trips to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. I really got into New York life in 1959 when I took a year off from College to get a job, write a novel and see a psychoanalyst.
I found a little room in the Hotel Alexandria on 103rd Street and Broadway which was as cheap as you could get and so it attracted the poorest of the poor, including a great deal of drugs and criminal activity. That year the New York Times ran a story on the Hotel, saying it had the highest crime rate in the city. I first learned about sex from the prostitutes there. My neighbors were very colorful. I wrote a short story about the Latvian immigre next door who had been a choirmaster in the old country and who went berserk one night when the full moon rose over the city. Then there was the Black African chemist who had married an American woman to get residency in the States, and the gay couple who spent their time learning languages by the dozens, and the young hoodlum whom I threw down the staircase when he came after me with a knife (I was a pretty mean fighter in those days!).
I went dutifully to see the psychoanalyst a couple of times a week and kept records of my dreams (I still have the notebooks), but never succeeded in understanding the cause of my depressions and suicide. With hindsight, I think it is our society that is sick and not those of use within it who have suffered from extreme individualism, unemployment, drugs, the breakup of the extended family, alienation from the land, loneliness, sexual prudery (combined with the commodization of sex) and unreasonably high expectations of work and love.
I still enjoy reading the diary that I have kept from my two weeks of job-hunting in New York, as it gave me an inside view of how the city ran. I took odd jobs for the time being through the Columbia employment service. Once I was the baby-sitter for the muscular dystrophy poster boy while his mother went on television. Another time I worked for one of the first judo studios in New York alongside of the mother of the owner. He was an ex-marine, very muscular, but rather naive, and his mother was convinced he was being hoodwinked by his business manager. Eventually I got a job as a clerk-typist at Recordak, a division of Kodak that spun off to do microfilming. My office mates were a colorful crew, including a woman who had been a professional softball player. At noon during the lunch break I would comb the second-hand bookstores in the neighborhood of my job (8-14th streets between Broadway and 4th Avenue). I spent most of my earnings on books, buying all of Freud and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and a fine collection of poetry books, among others.
At my little room, I worked on my first novel, started writing page poems, and listened to classical music on the radio. This was when I started singing in the Riverside Choir where I met good friends including Kay Winkler (photo at left), a beautiful red-headed girl friend from Western North Carolina who was a pianist and singer at Julliard and Bill Mathes who oriented me to Rice Peak.
I got to live off campus my senior year in an apartment on Claremont Avenue with two Iranian friends, Eshagh (Jewish) and Ghassem (Muslim) (photos at left). Our third roommate was Andi Owens, a Black guy from Minnesota who was directing theatrical productions around Columbia. At one point, being the only one with a driver's license, I had to drive a flatbed truck from lower Manhatten up to Morningside Heights carrying a huge paper mache statue of the Sphinx for a production of Anthony and Cleopatra. Years later I would reconnect with Eshagh after he retired from the Chase Bank and took a house with his wife Rosie up in Vermont, and with Andi who made a little African museum in Harlem called Genesis and who conducted walking tours of Harlem.
My second novel, By What Ways, has a chapter about my recollections of New York seen as the backdrop for a funeral procession.
Years later, I would start going into New York regularly from Connecticut, first to work at the Communist Party headquarters, later to attend functions at the United Nations. My notebooks from the 1980's are filled with a kind of diary that I kept on the train as I went back and forth to New York. I still have a special place in my heart for the city, and the many times I have stayed at the Vanderbilt YMCA near the UN.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme