Old Neighborhood Read Online Free

moment, or more likely, tried to blame the other for an injustice. In this way, they created ancient history out of the daily events of their lives.
    Half of my college courses were in business subjects and half in English, history and the social sciences, the idea behind the curriculum of business colleges in the 1950s was, I think, to turn out people who could understand a business story in Time magazine. The curriculum was not demanding and I worked in the business department of the school newspaper after classes. I ravaged the city’s landscape for cheap dates, ice skating, square dancing, and I went on “intellectual” dates to Broadway plays, the last row of the theater, and to the Ascot Theater in the Bronx, which showed foreign films. I considered myself a complex person, one part businessminded, one part intellectual. I was going to be a well-rounded corporation executive. I am embarrassed to think of myself in those years, traveling by subway to school each day, wearing a jacket, shirt and tie because it was what the young businessman would wear. I could not wait to be forty.

CHAPTER 3
    S AM THE BOOKMAKER AFFECTIONATELY called me “Joe College.” In my view, “Joe College” referred to people at out-of-town schools who wore white bucks, drove MGs and had girlfriends with straight hair. I was the little kid Sam knew who had read comic books in the back and was now in college, and that was an achievement to him.
    “How you doing today, Joe College?”
    “Well, Sam, some syrup, some milk, some seltzer and you’ve got yourself an egg cream.”
    “That’s for now. You’re gonna be a big-shot executive.”
    “Can I bet on it?”
    “I’m telling you—the world is losing a fine bookie.”
    “They still have you, Sam.”
    “Me? I’m nickels and dimes. You’ll do terrific. You’ve always been a nice kid.”
    “As Leo the Lip said, ‘Nice guys finish last.’”
    “Not you, Stevie. You’re a class individual.”
    I did not believe him, not when I went, out of curiosity, to stand under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel at Christmastime where, according to rumor, college people picked each other up, and discovered by eavesdropping that many of them were staying at the Biltmore—people my age staying at a hotel. I had budgeted myself to buy an out-of-town college girl a drink.
    I became the business manager of my college newspaper, selling and writing ads for local merchants, and qualifying to attend a convention of college editors and business managers which was being held in Detroit. I went by plane, my first plane trip and my first stay in a hotel—for serious panel discussions on “The College Newspaper in America,” and even more serious party-going, necking in hallways and, for some, alleged actuals in bathtubs. This was my first exposure to people my age from different backgrounds. I noticed—I did not think I was imagining it—that the boys from the “better” schools were clearly more poised than I, they were better dressed, in tweed jackets and rep ties, while my best jacket was tan linen bought wholesale. I made a move for a pretty girl from Bennington, we were discussing theater and I thought my background did not matter, when someone from Yale broke into the conversation and eventually spirited her away. All those poised people from rich schools. I wanted to rip off my nameplate with the “CCNY” on it. I had never felt so low-class and poor.
    Fanny Pleshette helped my confidence. A junior at Barnard, her phone number came to me through a cousin of Jerry Rosen’s and I called her in the “You don’t know me, but …” tradition. Fanny was a chubby brunette who referred to her former boyfriends as “lovers,” who lived with her mother in a doorman building in the East Sixties in Manhattan and who had been to Europe. She was on a first-name basis with her parents, Jim and Flo, as in “Jim and I had lunch today …” and her parents were divorced. This was not a girl from the