After our civil rights journey, I took a year out of seminary as part of a theological school program designed to expose seminary students to the real world. The deal was you were supposed to find a real (non church) job on your own and then meet weekly with fellow participants to reflect upon the theological meaning of it. I jumped at the opportunity. I saw this as a chance to get out of the minister track and to make it big in the Big Apple.

And in my case there was some low hanging fruit. One of Davidson College’s chief benefactors, H. R. Richardson, had founded Richardson Merrill, the company that made Vicks VapoRub and other popular medicines. He had retired, was then in his eighties, and needed someone to help him with his memoir. Since my father-in-law was president of Davidson, I had connections and bingo, landed my first big job in the Big Apple as an editor of this industrial icon’s book. It seemed to me to be  a perfect fit and the opportunity I had been waiting for. I worked next to his corner office on the top floor of a skyscraper on East 42^nd Street. I even had my own spacious office, with a window facing the Chrysler Building, I concluded that  miraculously I had become president of a major U.S. corporation.  How much easier could it get?

The problem was that Mr. Richardson was never around, and the entire floor seemed like a tomb. After spending several weeks trying to make sense of his generally incomprehensible prose, I met with the old man and showed him what I had done, which included, among other things, correcting his capitalization of practically every other word in the manuscript. “I don’t know what they teach you at Davidson these days, but you are inflexible and you are fired!” he muttered,  turned his back and stomped out of my office. I had been there only three weeks.

Okay, maybe this did not turn out quite as I expected, but I knew there were plenty of other jobs just waiting for me. As I left the building, I noticed an employment agency, thought, what the heck, and went in. During my interview, the employment specialist asked me what I had been doing in my last job. I replied that I had been editing a memoir. “Oh,” she said, “the old man from Vicks? You are the fourth person to come in here. How long did you last?” She was not able to help me because they did not handle entry-level positions, so she suggested I look in the classified section of the Times.

My strategy was to scour the classified ads in the New York Times, find the largest employment agency, and offer myself to the New York workforce. One company seemed an obvious choice since it advertised on practically every page. I went there first thing the next morning. While I was waiting to be interviewed, a young woman gave me a questionnaire to fill out, which I brought with me to the interview. The employment specialist introduced herself as Marsha. After noting that there was virtually nothing on the list I could do— stuff like typing, stenography, or filing—Marsha looked me in the eye, frowned, and said, “Joseph, there is really nothing you can do. We have no place for you.”

“What do you mean, no place?” I exclaimed. “I can do lots of things—I am a college graduate, a graduate school student, and I have just been editing a memoir. This is ridiculous!”

“OK,” she replied. “You are a clerk. But we don’t have any clerk openings right now.”

“I am not a clerk!” I exclaimed, almost shouting. I was furious.

Just as I was reporting the humiliating interview to Embry over dinner, the phone rang, and it was Marsha. Her voice sounded much kinder than it had that morning.

“Joseph,” she said. “I am very pleased to say we have a job for you, and it is a very good one.”

“I am not interested in being a clerk, so thanks, but no thanks.”

“Oh, this is not for a clerk. It is for an editor. You did say you were an editor, didn’t you? And you do know all your proofreading symbols, right?”

I had no idea what a proofreading symbol was, but how could I say no? I was to report for work the next day. The company was Spartan’s Korvette’s, which I assumed was a New York publishing house of some sort. I was elated.

When I returned to dinner, I told Embry to forget everything I had just said. The employment agency had recognized my skills after all, and I had just landed a big editing job with a major New York publisher. Not bad, I thought. I am in back in business. The most encouraging thing was that people seemed to instantly recognize talent when they saw it. Embry looked at me with some skepticism but wished me good luck.

The next morning I put on my best suit, got on the subway, and headed to Midtown. The company was located on  the sixtieth floor of a sparkling new skyscraper. When I reached the proper floor, the doors parted and in front of me was one of the swankiest lobbies I had ever seen—red carpet, paneled walls, priceless art on the walls, comfortable modern furniture. A huge sign behind the receptionist read “Spartan’s Korvette’s.”

Big Leagues, baby.

“I am the new editor,” I beamed.

“The what?” the receptionist replied. After I had repeated myself a couple of times, she suddenly seemed to realize what I was talking about. She directed me to go through the door, down the hall, to the fourth door on the right, where I would be directed what to do next.

The décor inside the hall was the opposite of  the receptionist area. The walls were gray and bare, and the floor was vinyl tile, not carpet. I wandered down to the fourth door, which turned out to be some distance away. When I opened it, I found myself staring into a room  the size of a football field, with rows of gray, metal desks all lined up, almost as far as the eye could see. There must have been a thousand of them, all occupied by busy workers with stacks of paper in front of them along with adding machines and typewriters. The room hummed with the sound of typing and adding machines clicking.

I reported to the person at the front desk, who appeared to be a supervisor, and told him I was the new editor. He seemed as puzzled as the receptionist and asked me to repeat what I had said. “Oh yes,” he replied finally and directed me to aisle D, seventeenth desk. I counted carefully and arrived in front of a plump, small man probably in his fifties wearing a white shirt and loosened tie. He looked up from his desk, which was covered with stacks of paper. When I announced that I was the editor, he pulled over a chair, placed it beside his desk, motioned me to sit down, and handed me a stack of what appeared to be computer printouts with lots of numbers.

 “Take these,” he said, “and when I read a number, you check it off.”

After we did this routine for a few minutes, I asked what this was all about, to which he responded, “Wait till coffee break. We are working now, not talking.”

About an hour later—it seemed more like a day—a bell rang. The clicking stopped, and suddenly the whole room was alive with chatter.

“OK,” I said, “It’s coffee break time. What is this all about? What do you want me to edit? And what is going on?”

“You are editing,” he said.

“Well, what kind of publishing house is this anyway,” I asked, bewildered.

“Publishing house? This is not a publishing house. This is the bookkeeping department for Korvette’s Department Store, the second-largest department store inNew York. Why would you think this is a publishing house?”

“Well, they told me that the job was for an editor.”

“Oh yeah, that,” he replied sarcastically. “We always ask for an editor to be sure we get someone who can read.”

I lasted  two days.

But my spirits were still high. I knew that the perfect job was waiting for me. Next week: Making It Big in the Big Apple: Macy’s.

So you think we live in a contentious time now? Man, this is nothing compared to what it was like in the late 1960s. The civil rights movement had been replaced by urban disturbances. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had both been killed, everyone seemed to hate everyone else, and we lived in a fascist  police state.

Fascist police state? How could that be, you ask.

Well, seeing is believing; and I, too, admit  that I was a little skeptical when Don came out of his apartment and announced definitively that we lived in a fascist police state. Don was our skinny, long haired, next door neighbor in apartment 6 D in our run-down  apartment in the Upper West Side of New York City on Riverside Drive near 125^th Street. We never saw much of Don; and to give you an idea of how long ago this happened , he was one of the first guys that I ever met who had really  long hair—in his case, really long, curly, blond hair. He was the First Hippie. He could easily have been mistaken for Jesus in a Renaissance painting.  But we did hear him from time to time playing his guitar, usually around 3 am. On one occasion when  he left his door open when taking trash to the trash chute, I peered in and saw a completely empty room with nothing on the walls and only a messed up bed and box springs on the floor. Someone said they thought he was a PhD graduate student in physics at Columbia.

It is worth noting why Don was standing in the hallway in the first place. Our building was on fire. Well, we weren’t sure whether it was on fire or not, but there was smoke coming out of the trash chute. I was in the hallway for the same reason since I smelled smoke and immediately asked him what he thought we should do.

“Well, I sure as hell don’t want to disturb Joe Poitras. The fat bastard hates my guts and has threatened to beat me up more than once.” Joe Poitras was our super and ruled 530 Riverside Drive with an iron fist. Everyone was terrified of him. Joe was probably in his mid forties, was never seen without wearing a grimy undershirt, had a huge pot belly, no neck, always seemed to  have a three-day beard and spoke with the quintessential Nu Yawk accent. His wife probably weighed as much as he did; and at least one night a week all the way up on the sixth floor, you could hear them screaming at each other and throwing pots and pans in their basement apartment.

Actually I was not all that scared of Joe Poitras because he liked me. The reason he liked me is because a very savvy Episcopal priest in helping us find our apartment bribed him  to secure the rent-controlled lease and alerted me that in New York, regardless what you did the rest of the year, it was absolutely imperative to give the super a generous Christmas tip. That is what I did, but apparently others in the building, like Don, were not clued in.

That is when Don turned to me and exclaimed for the second time, “We live in a goddamn, fascist police state!” Since the smoke was starting to thin out, I assumed we were not going to perish in a fire after all and asked the natural question, “What do you mean, ‘fascist police state’?”

“This is what I mean: last night I was minding my own business like I always do, bothering no one and playing my guitar. It was about 3 am; and all of a sudden, there is a knock on the door; and these three huge cops come bursting into the room. I jumped up from the bed and immediately went spread eagle, up against the wall, the way you are supposed to do when attacked by the police. But they never even frisked me, though since I only had my jockey shorts on I’ll admit there wasn’t much to frisk. In fact at first they didn’t even say anything to me, and of all things headed straight for the bathroom where they started flushing the toilet over and over. I stayed up against the wall the whole time fearing that if I made a move they would beat me. But it was worse than a beating; it was deliberate torture. Do you know what it is like to hear a toilet flushed over and over? It is some kind of new torture tactic aimed at people like me. They are trying to drive us out of New York City. Then after awhile when it was clear that I was beaten down mentally, they came back and said only, ’Ok, motherfucker, another trick like this and it is curtains for you’. Now is this a fascist police state or what?”

Sounds like a fascist police state to me, I agreed.

A  few minutes later, Embry came in the apartment carrying a load of laundry. “Well it is good news that the apartment house does not seem to be burning down,” she said cheerfully.

“Well, the apartment house may not be burning down, but we live in a fascist police state!”

“A what?”

I immediately told her the whole story—the three cops, the toilet routine, the torture, the mental brutality, the harsh words to our strange but harmless neighbor. And all because he was a hippie. That is how bad things had become in New York City. It had become a fascist police state.

Instead of agreeing with me, Embry threw back her head and laughed. A completely inappropriate and insensitive response. I was shocked.

“Let me tell you my story: just when you were talking to Don, I was talking to Mrs.  Finklestein.” Mrs Finklestein was our neighbor across the hall in 6 B. Well over 80, she was a tiny lady who walked, stooped over, with a cane, and had been widowed for a long time. She lived alone in her spacious rent controlled apartment overlooking Grant’s tomb, but for all we knew she had no children and no friends. We never saw another person enter her apartment.

“We were talking in the laundry room about the smoke and wondering if anyone would get up their courage to call Joe Poitras when she turned to me and said, ‘You know we live in a city where nobody cares any more. Nobody. Last night was the worst night of my life. Nobody cares, not even the police.’ She went on to say that in the middle of the night for some reason her toilet started over flowing and the only way she could keep it from flooding her apartment was to keep  flushing  it, over and over and over. Fearing Joe Poitras, the only thing she could think to do was to make an emergency 911 call to the police, not once but twice. ‘And you know what?’ she said,  ‘The police never came, they never came. They never let me down in the past, but today things are different. We live in a city where nobody cares about old frail people like me, not even the police. That’s how bad our world has become.’ ”

We never saw Don again in 6 D or Mrs Finklestein in 6 B because we soon moved out of the city. But I am sure Mrs. Finklestein went to her grave mourning the loss of caring in New York City. Don remained convinced—at least for a period—that fascism was just around the corner—and New York’s finest had another concrete example of how these awful hippies were ruining the city.