Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xxxx)

Having been robbed of my cheap, old-fashioned vinyl record player as well as of my cheap acoustic guitar, my cheap electric guitar and my cheap portable amplifier in July 1971, by the end of July 1971 I could petty much fit all of the remaining possessions I wished to keep—some clothes, some songbooks for guitar, and a cheap portable typewriter—in a big duffle bag, a big knapsack and a small suitcase. So when I got ready to move on from my $57/month slum apartment in late July 1971, there was no need for me to rely on anyone else to help me move out of the Bronx by the first week in August—especially since I had no furniture in the apartment except for the mattresses on the floor and a kitchen table and some chairs that I had previously picked up on the street before some garbage truck pick-up, when I had initially moved up to the Bronx in April 1970.

In retrospect, despite both not having the rent for August 1971 and being robbed of my musical instruments, I probably should have stayed in the rent-controlled apartment without paying rent for the 3 months it would probably have taken the absentee landlord to get a final eviction court order from housing court—even if it meant trying to live on bread and water, for as long as I was without any income, unemployment check or welfare check—and continued to desperately hunt around for some kind of job during the economic recession of 1971. And just desperately hope that some job opening in for me in New York City would develop in September 1971, when the college students with summer jobs quit their jobs and moved back into their college dormitories for another academic year of partying and doing academic shitwork--while the endless mass murder of Vietnamese by the Nixon Administration's war machine continued for yet another academic year.

But since I didn’t have enough knowledge of tenant rights law, or housing law, or rent-control laws or tenant protection rights laws in late July 1971, and didn’t realize that—under the new law that Billionaire Nelson Rockefeller, special real estate interests and New York City landlords had just recently pushed through the Albany state legislature without much mass media publicity in 1971—once a rent-controlled apartment was no longer occupied by a tenant who lived in the apartment before July 1, 1971, the apartment would no longer be subject to New York City’s rent-control laws; I didn’t realize that, by moving from a rent-controlled apartment in August 1971, I was effectively disqualifying myself from ever having a cheap rent-controlled apartment—as opposed to a more expensive post-1974 rent-stabilized apartment—in New York City ever again.

Yet because, by late July 1971, I both doubted that I was going to live for many more months and had completely lost any desire to continue living in my Bronx neighborhood—once the theft of my guitars meant that I no longer had the tools to continue to go to my grave as a struggling, starving, rebel young artist and protest folk songwriter—the thought that I might need or want to retain this particular rent-controlled apartment for the rest of the 20th century never entered my mind.

The thought that did enter my mind, though, was that, since living in the $57/month rent-controlled apartment had enabled me to become a proletarian protest folk songwriter and proletarian folk musician between April 1970 and July 1971, I should try to pass the apartment on to some other tenant who might need a cheap apartment for his or her own purposes, rather than just simply move out of the apartment without passing it on to some other hip young, impoverished person. So near the end of July 1971, I took a final walk to Lehman College’s campus and posted an index card with my phone number on it—on which I also described the apartment and its location, emphasized how cheap it was and indicated that it was now available as a sublet—on one of the campus bulletin boards, in the hope that some Lehman College student would soon contact me.

My original assumption was that my most likely sublet tenant would be some young hippie white guy attending Lehman, who just wished to move from his parents’ apartment, so that he’d be able to have his own space to smoke pot and/or sleep with a lover. But the first telephone call inquiry about the apartment sublet that I received the day after I posted my index card on the Lehman College bulletin board turned out to be from a young woman student at Lehman College. And after conversing about the apartment and its immediate availability for a few minutes, it was agreed that she would come to look at my apartment in the early evening, after her late afternoon class that same day at Lehman.

Since the prospective sublet tenant who had telephoned pretty much had a New York City Eastern regional accent like I did, before she arrived at my apartment I subconsciously assumed that she was a white woman student. So when she arrived at my apartment door in the early evening, I was as surprised that she was an African-American woman student as she was apparently surprised that I was not an African-American man.

But since I was apparently more used to interacting personally, working with and socializing with African-American people in their early 20s because of my past Movement activism, office jobs, inter-racial college friendships and inter-racial apartment sharing experiences than was she, the prospective woman sublet tenant seemed less comfortable, at first, conversing with me about the apartment than was I. And, initially, she seemed to assume that, like most other whites that she had encountered, I would be unable to empathize or identify with her individual feelings, individual needs and individual youthful ambitions.

Yet after I quickly agreed that--since she was the first person to appear in my apartment in response to the index card advertising the sublet--the cheap apartment was now hers to move into on August 1, 1971, if she wanted the apartment—and after we both signed the brief one-page sublet agreement I had drawn up and (without requiring any security deposit) I simply handed her the keys for the apartment and the mailbox for the apartment—she seemed more comfortable conversing with me and talking with me about her life and ambitions, in an emotionally open and emotionally intimate way.

Although she had an Afro hairstyle, she looked somewhat straight since she had come to check out the apartment wearing a tight, low-cut dress and not slacks or jeans. But it turned out that she was preparing for a career in the arts and not a career in the culturally straight world of business and commerce. In her early 20s, she was studying modern dance and soon mentioned how one of the guys she was currently dating had first been turned on to her physically after seeing her perform at a dance concert.

Not apparently having encountered before a man in his 20s who was both into androgyny and unisexuality and who was as much of a male feminist as I was in the early 1970s, she apparently felt that, for a U.S. man in the early 1970s, I was somewhat of a novelty. And she got into conversing with me so much that she ended up spending the next 4 or 5 hours debating with me about what the difference between a man and a woman was, telling me about her recent initial sexual experiences (that she had come to enjoy) with the guy she was most involved with (as well as some of the male chauvinist problems that she had started to experience in her relationship with him,) and getting into a deep philosophical/political/psychological discussion about how to find as much personal freedom as possible, despite the constraints on personal freedom produced by the institutional racism of U.S. society in the early 1970s.

Having spent a lot of time in the dance studio increasing the strength and muscularity of her dancer’s legs, she did not think it farfetched in 1971 to assert that many women were physically weaker than many men more because of social conditioning than because they were “naturally” physically weaker than many men; or that a woman who was trained well in karate or the martial arts might be able to overpower an untrained man of equal size in a fair fight. But she was skeptical that most U.S. men in the early 1970s would ever be willing to either become less male chauvinist, more feminist and more androgynous “new men” (like she felt me to be) or form love relationships with U.S. women who were stronger or their equal in physical or intellectual strength and whom they could not overpower in a fair physical fight or intellectual debate.

Lost in our hours of emotionally intense conversation and philosophical/political/psychological discussion/debate (which was only interrupted when I offered her a glass of wine in the middle of our conversation and we then shared a bottle of wine together during the next few hours), by the time we noticed what time it was on my clock, it was way past midnight. And far too late for her to then start making the 20-minute walk to the nearest subway station through the by-then deserted neighborhood city streets either with me or by herself; and then to ride alone that late on the subway before walking alone through more deserted city streets before dawn, back to the place she was temporarily staying at. So she ended up spending the night on one of the mattresses on the floor that I usually slept on, while I slept on one of the other mattresses that was on the floor of the cheap pad that I was passing on to her.

And when daylight arrived in the morning and we both awoke at about the same time, I handed her the stamped envelope, with the absentee landlord’s address on it, in which she needed to put a check for him for the August 1971 rent, before mailing it to him. I then assured her that--since I had sublet the same apartment during June, July and August of 1970 of the previous summer, when I had been working as a summer camp counselor in the country, with no difficulties from the absentee landlord—as long as she moved her stuff into the apartment, began living there and kept mailing in the rent on time, it was unlikely that the absentee landlord would bother her.

But I also warned her that eventually, when the absentee landlord realized that the tenant who had signed the most recent lease to the slum apartment no longer occupied the apartment, he would probably want her to sign a new lease with him, which might include some kind of minimal rent increase. I reassured her, however, that--since the slum apartment’s neighborhood would likely still be considered too close for comfort to the South Bronx neighborhood by tenants who might be able to afford a much higher rent in the early 1970s—it was unlikely that the absentee landlord would feel any economic incentive to raise her rent during the 1970s or get involved in any kind of too costly legal challenge to her tenancy, instead of just letting her succeed me as the apartment’s primary tenant, with only a minimal rent increase.

Reminding her that I was leaving the apartment for good, myself, before noon that same day, I then wished her good luck in the apartment. And, in reply, she suddenly kissed me goodbye on the cheek before quickly exiting from the apartment. And within an hour after she left, I left my Bronx apartment forever—with a knapsack on my back, a duffel bag in my right hand and a suitcase in my left hand.