After a game, especially in the summer, we went to the bar and grill. Mike took us to his large back room where he had a big refrigerator and a gas stove. He stored everything there – cases of beer and soda, glasses, old tables and chairs, paper goods, discarded advertising signs and the like. Mike believed we needed substantial food, especially following a hard fought game. He also said that drinking a few beers under his supervision would not do us harm. He sat us down at a big rectangular table in the middle of the room, put a big pot of water on boil and started to make us spaghetti. While we waited, he served us beer from pitchers he brought in from the bar. A single light bulb in a reverse metal hat dangled from the ceiling, giving the room an eerie feeling. When the spaghetti was ready, he served it to us on plain, white, thick, porcelain dinner plates. He covered it with a splash of olive oil and his thick meat sauce that had been simmering all day on the stove. We ate the food hurriedly and with joy. Mike warned us to drink the beer slowly and we did. We knew that we were breaking the law, but Mike did not seem to care. Cops from the precinct hung out at Mike’s and they knew what was going on. If we sat at the bar, there would have been trouble. The back room was the same as Mike’s living room. He had no fear that anyone, especially the police, would stop him. He believed that if we drank under supervision, and drank only beer, though we were only fifteen, no harm would come to us. He said, “I will help you learn to hold your liquor.” Some did. Others did not. Going home, I chewed gum to get my mouth clean of the smell. It must have worked because my parents never suspected I drank beer.

Radio opened other worlds to me. I followed the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Knicks. I listened to jazz and the blues under the covers late at night, pretending to be sleep. Adults, meaning my parents and their friends, described that music from Harlem as “race music.” They thought it bad for the soul and a corrupter of my morals, whatever they were at that young age. They never realized those voices and music were only about soul. That is where I first heard Billy Holliday, Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charlie Parker. The music was uplifting and moving, and is still a part of my life. I wanted to learn clarinet to play like Benny Goodman. My mother did not allow it. She said I would blow my brains out and ruin my lips. Instead, I took piano lessons for ten years. I cannot play a tune, except for the opening chords of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

I was always on the edge of rebelling against my staid, conservative home, family, and neighborhood. I never did because I could not identify my rebellion, though I somehow knew rebellion was necessary to life. I continued to chase girls with little success. I managed to satisfy my father and mother, at least on the surface. I drank more beer and on occasion got drunk. I smoked more cigarettes, some of which I bought myself. I had sore throats and a slight smoker’s cough at 17. I went to Saturday afternoon movies and learned to shoot pool in the Leader Pool room, a dank, narrow place above the Leader movie theater on Coney Island Avenue.

I lived a seemingly normal, typical first 17 or so years growing up in a lower middle-income home in Brooklyn. I grew up in an era of penny candy, home milk delivery, men who collected junk in horse drawn wagons, thirty-five cent hair cuts, nine inch black and white TV screens, radio serials, Saturday movie matinees, cartoon festivals, and fifty cent bleacher seats at Ebbets Field. My life was, well, about the same as the other kids in my neighborhood. As a child, I knew little other than normal discontent.

When did my life change? What made it change? On reflection, it had to be my leaving home and going to college. Then deciding, for whatever reason, that I would never return to my roots. Something about the staid life I led churned inside me, said now things will be different. It was if a switch turned on in my heart and head, a switch, by the way, that is still on and will always be as long as I live. Something had to be going on inside me when I went away to college. It was not just getting up in the morning, going to class, eating, sleeping, hormones on fire. I was not much of a philosopher. I never thought much about the meaning of life. Existentialism became my creed. Life was suddenly in the doing. Breathing. Learning. Experimenting. At the ripe age of seventeen and a half, I was alive without restrictions for the first time.

About eighty miles from Brooklyn in a conservative Pennsylvania town named Easton at a small college called Lafayette I felt free to discover myself. I kept notebooks about my life. I filled them with my thoughts. I included my adventures. I wrote about anything I considered important.

These are some of the images and memories of my childhood in the years before I went to college. I hope they hint at the reason for my notebooks. These memories are my archeology. Perhaps they help answer why I started keeping notes with such fervency when not yet 18 years old. And a life of words that followed.

This completes the introduction to “Notebooks.” I will start posting the journals in the next several weeks. Until then, if you have any questions, thoughts or comments, do not hesitate to send me a note at rsteinman@dvnetwork.net.