CHAPTER 10: HOW I BECAME A HARE KRISHNA
This is chapter 10 of my memoir, ‘From There to Here: a Story of Survival’. I am writing it serially on Substack, rather than traditional publishing which takes such a huge cut of the proceeds. The first 3 chapters are completely free, and then if you want to support my writing the memoir you can subscribe to get later chapters as they are written. I *just* finished chapter 10, the earlier chapters (all of which are archived for you) are:
1. In the Beginning
2. My Grandparents, a Study in Abuse Parenting
3. To Grandmother’s House We Go
4. My Dad
5. Babes in Hell’s Kitchenland
6. You Can Take the Girl Out of the City But…
7. It was a Dark and Stormy Night
8. “And Find Somewhere Else to Live!”
9. The Lost Years
10. How I Became a Hare Krishna
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Chapter 10: How I Became a Hare Krishna
As I mentioned at the end of the last chapter, when I was 13 I left Massachusetts, and went to Hoboken, New Jersey, where my father was staying in a rooming house. He managed to get me the room next to his. It was in an old house, with a shared bathroom in the hall, pretty much the type of derelict house that one would associate with “rooming house”.
Hoboken is just across the river from New York City, so in a sense it was a homecoming, even though after having spent enough time in the country I would actually never want to live in a city again. But I was still just bouncing around from place to place, finding places to live where I could, and so that is how I found myself back with my father, in Hoboken, in a rooming house.
I should add that Hoboken in the early 70s was nothing at all like Hoboken is today. Back then it was a very rough town, with a bar on nearly every corner, frequented by longshoremen and Sinatra’s people. The movie On the Waterfront could have been a documentary. On the plus side, we were very close to the Maxwell House coffee factory, and so the air often smelled heavily of coffee, which I didn’t consider a bad thing!
Of course, as I was only 13, I had to go to school. Hoboken was just a short train ride away from New York City, on the PATH (the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation) train which went under the Hudson river through what were affectionately called the Hudson Tubes, and the train was often referred to as “the Tube”.
So I enrolled in an alternative middle school in the city which was known as a “school without walls”. Basically there was a location that was a home base, but the students would take classes at and participate in activities in places all over the city.
This is where I met my best friend Sumi Furiya, daughter of renowned mandolin maker George Furiya. Several years ago Sumi and I reconnected, and she is as beautiful and wonderful as ever.
This is also the time when my father would take me visiting with his best friend, Joe Paladino. Joe and my father had been friends ever since they had played music together in high school (my father on cello, I’m not sure what Joe played). Joe was something of a fairy godfather to me, I know he had given my father money when we needed it, and on a few occasions before we moved to Vermont we had used Joe’s apartment while Joe was staying with his girlfriend, Barbara. I used to love playing Joe’s record albums, especially the soundtrack from Hair.
However one of my most vivid memories from back then, when I was around 6 or 7 years old, was of us staying at Joe’s apartment and my father going out drinking one night, leaving me in the apartment. I cried hysterically, all alone in that apartment, because I was terrified that something would happen to my dad and he wouldn’t come back.
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