37 Smoke-filled room in a corner basement Part 1

This is a two part post. My friend Margaret spent time in a "hospital" and I wanted to write about the time I worked in a New York nursing home. I need to explain how I got a job at one in 1974. It was after my time at Rainbow Diner and my visit to a man in a motor trade. I also hitched across the country and saw some beautiful things. Why didn't I look for something else? Well, New York was a shit hole then. The economy sucked. I could have lived a life of crime I guess, but that wasn't me. Maybe some other things too... but I just wanted to live my life. So young, I needed to figure out if there were more wondrous things. Why in God's name did I come back to this dark puddle of smell and garbage?

So I met E in the very early 70's. Probably spring of 1971? There was no reason for me to know her except through my best friend "I." They both went to the fancier Catholic school and had cabanas at the beach. E was very rich. Her father owned at least one, but probably more, nursing homes in New York. I'll describe in the next post just how corrupt that was. She lived in one of the rich towns, I think Hewlett but maybe Garden City. I never went there. We always met at her family's beach house.

Not us. But you could see it in their eyes. Can't you?

We hitchhike to her beach house. E meets us and asks us if we would like a bacon and grilled cheese sandwich. Every time we went. Boy, she was pretty damn tough for a teenager. Teenagers were tough then. All that running around like kids, we were like worldly adults by the time we hit puberty. E always had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth.

After we eat, E went to the other room and came out with a big bag of seconal, reds. Not a few... a big bag. I tried them before, tried almost everything except heroin. The only pill I ever liked were Quaaludes. Very euphoric.

Here's the deal. E would trade the seconal that she "got" from the nursing home. I think she said she just went into the room and took them. There were no questions asked. The deal was we would bring her shirts that she wore to the rock and roll clubs. She went to the fancier places. We went to the grittier places. Underage didn't matter. I don't know what bands she saw or whatever. I think she just went to meet fancier people that got high.

Oak Beach Inn. Not my place. Birthplace of Long Island Iced Tea.

How do you explain the drug culture of the 70's? It just seems humans must do things. So here's what we did. My friend and I would go to the more expensive department stores and put the puffy shirts in our bags and head on over to the beach house. I don't know... maybe she gave some of the shirts to her other rich friends. Probably never wore them twice. Pretty sure E had a car or had someone drive her there. We hitchhiked or took the bus. Ha Ha. Used a pay phone to call her. We never took the "goods" home. Ha. If you had seen our health and smiles you never would have suspected.

A & S was always a good one.

E liked either halter tops or shiny shirts. I liked halter tops, but not shiny.

Bacon and grilled cheese. Cigarette hanging out of mouth. Beach house. Bag of seconal. We had the "balls" to hitchhike with bags of drugs.

What did we do with all those pills? We didn't take them. Maybe a couple. We traded them for lots of stuff we did like. Hashish and LSD. We shared that stuff. Maybe go out for one of our fun nights. Maybe just hang at someone's house or maybe we went to see music. Oh... the front of the Rockpile/Action House. Just the crowds out front. That was a fun place to be. I suppose I'll write a little about that too. This is a story about how I got a job at a nursing home.

Old fashioned LSD

So this didn't go on forever. Less than 6 months. But that felt forever and went by like a bullet at the same time. Like a wave.

The plan was that if either of us were caught, the other one would run. It eventually came to that and I ran like hell. The good news is that "I" didn't suffer the worst consequences. Back in those days they called the parent. Her mom was upset for like a couple of weeks and then things went back to the way they were before. It just had to be that way. There were no more bacon and grilled cheese sandwiches, but I didn't care. It wasn't' my idea anyway. I had other things on my mind.

So that's how I knew E. Don't worry, my friend "I" went on to have a standard life too. I don't know about E, she wasn't really a friend. Do I feel guilty about the nursing home? No. You'll see. They shouldn't have had all those pills. Bookkeeping was crap to cover up all kinds of things I guess.