Do I know you?

The fall of 1981 marked the beginning of my sophomore year at Columbia University, and what I thought would be a year full of positive changes.  My freshman year and the summer after had been kind of tough.  As a native New Yorker, at a time when Columbia had a housing shortage, I was unable to get a dorm room.  I spent the first semester living at home in the Village and commuting uptown, and had a hard time making friends and working my way into college life. 

For my second semester, I lived in a fraternity that made animal house look like a chapter of the John Birch society.  I started making friends on campus and and fitting in a bit better (living in what was easily the largest warehouse of illicit substances west of Lenox Avenue certainly helped), but it was all so drug addled and bizarre that rather than spending spring break attending the frat's week-long acid test, I retreated home and let my parents nurse me back to health and sanity.  In the last month or so of the term, I had started a dating a senior girl who moved away after graduation.  We traded visits over the summer, but it didn't really work out, and we wound up going our separate ways.

By the time the summer came to a close, I was ready for a bit of renewal and redemption.  I still hadn't gotten housing from the college, so I wound up throwing my lot in with a colorful character named Michael Offen.  Michael was a bit of a hustler in those days (and for all know, still is -- last I heard, he worked for Bear Stearns).  He was the spitting image of Marty Feldman, with wild bulging eyes, curly hair,  pointy features, and an amazing ability to charm people into whatever schemes he had going with girls, jobs, or school.

His father and uncle were involved in some sort of agribusiness, which led Michael to tell people that his father jerked off bulls for a living.  His uncle (who visited us a couple of times), bore a striking resemblance to George C. Scott in his Patton days, and had been an intelligence officer before he turned to romancing livestock.  The family had houses full of extra furniture, which was part of Michael's sales pitch for the tiny hovel he found for us  at 142 West 109th Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, a region the student guides warned us to avoid. [I still remember the address because I've been around that neighborhood for one reason or another enough times over the years that it has stuck.]

The first time we went to the building to check things out, there was an elderly disheveled hispanic woman cleaning the hallways.  In a mix of hand gestures, and Spanish (she seemed not to speak English), she conveyed the notion that she was the super and would show us to our prospective new digs.   We walked up to the third floor and arrived at a knobless, lockless door.  We pushed it inward, and it fell off its hinges, revealing only gloom.   The super made gestures suggesting it would be fixed, so we wrestled it to some sort of stability and proceeded.

The apartment consisted two small bedrooms, one of which had no door, a small living room, a large kitchen, and a bathroom.  The bathroom had a tub without a shower, and no sink or mirror.  The apartment had no closets, though there were hooks on the walls.  The floors were rough unfinished wood, and the entire apartment was painted in high-gloss red enamel.  Dead cockroaches littered the floor and a vague odor of decay filled the air.  The apartment faced airshafts on all sides.  As I stuck my head out the kitchen window to see if there was anything to see, a chicken carcass whizzed by and crashed into the debris-strewn courtyard below.

Despite missing the opportunity to read the entrails of the chicken, we interpreted all the omens to be good and decided to take the place.  Sure it needed a little work, but we were young, school didn't start for another couple of weeks, we'd get the lease in our own names, and the price was right -- 350 bucks a month.  Besides, it was the only apartment available  that had real rooms. The others were all "railroads," and neither of us liked the idea of having to traipse through the other's bedroom.  We made arrangements to return to the real estate office that had sent us there, eager to hand over our first and last month's rent and sign on the dotted line.

Later that day, we got our semoleans in order, and headed to an office on the upper west side to meet our landlord and close the deal.  When we arrived, the "super" was there waiting for us, now well dressed, coiffed, and made up.  The real estate agent introduced her to us as Mrs. Parada, the owner of the building.  She greeted us in lightly accented, fluent English.  I don't remember whether I was just to too stupid to see the mess we were getting ourselves into, or whether Michael pulled a Michael and convinced me that it was all copacetic, but no matter.  We paid our money, took our chances, and spent the next week or so schlepping in our belongings, and getting the place as livable as possible.

The months that followed (surprise surprise) were absolute hell.  We had an unexplained power outage that took days to resolve, a fire in one of the next door apartments, noisy neighbors, flocks of chickens and other detritus streaming past the airshaft windows, and a front door that continued to fall off its hinges.  More importantly, as one of the coldest winters in recent memory descended upon us, Mrs. Parada showed her true colors, providing neither heat nor hot water for weeks at a time.  We stalked Mrs. Parada and complained to every public official we could, but none of it helped.  We took cold baths, and froze.  The only solution was to spend as little time as possible in the place, shuttling between the library, the Hungarian Pastry Shop, the Marlin Cafe, and friends' apartments.  Given the unfavorable male:female ratio in pre-co-ed Columbia, romance was rarely a refuge.

As we soon discovered, our surroundings also had some interesting, uh, economic activities.  Car stripping was one of the main industries in the neighborhood.  Every week or so, a new car would appear on the block.  Men would emerge from adjacent buildings, plug power tools into the streetlight bases, and gradually reduce it to little more than a few bits and pieces sitting in a puddle of oil.  Other cars would sprout new fenders, bumpers , and trim, which were, miraculously, the same color as the car that had shed its skin.  There was a curious specialization to this.  Our block was the Toyota-stripping block.  One block west was strictly Datsuns.

The other big business in the neighborhood was, ahem, distribution of chemically active horticultural products.  Liberally sprinkled around the neighborhoods to the east and north of Columbia were pot stores.  Literally, these were stores that sold pot, either openly over a counter, or through a bank-teller like cage.  The one I remember best was on Amsterdam Avenue, just below 110th Street.  It had two signs, one above the door that said "Joe's Meat Market," and another painted on the window reading "Right-On Variety."  I soon discovered, though, that there was more to the neighborhood than just retail outlets.

Not too long after I moved in, I went down to my parents' place for dinner, and my father drove me home.  My father, who grew up on the upper west side, and knew every inch of Manhattan like the back of his hand, was very concerned about where I was living.  He had been trying to talk me into moving back home.  Hoping to convince him that everything was OK, on the drive uptown I told him not to worry.  The neighborhood was poor, but the people were nice and it wasn't dangerous.

At the height of my spiel, we turned the corner onto my block and were stopped from proceeding by a police detachment.  The street was full cops wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying rifles.  There were snipers visible on the roof of one building.  Learning that I lived on the block and was heading home, the cops let us through.  As we reached my building, a couple was dragged out of a building a few doors down from mine in handcuffs.  It was a major heroin bust that made all papers.

Fast forward to the end of the year, and I had had it.  I sublet my share of the apartment to my buddy Tom Meltzer (sorry Tom), and moved back down to the Village to lick my wounds, and devote myself to earning enough money to stake myself to slightly better digs.   As vivid as my memories of that apartment are, it strikes me that I remember almost nothing of any of my neighbors, except for another pair of friends (Gavin and Phil)  suffering through a year of Parada-hell in the building next door.  This is somewhat out of character, because in every other place I've lived, I've usually gotten to know or at least taken notice of my neighbors, many of whom I can still easily recall.

Fast forward another 27 years, and the subject of forgetting or failing to notice people has become current.  Doing the math, my sophomore year beginning in 1981 puts me in the Columbia College class of 1984.  A certain fellow named Barry-something-or-other (who has subsequently found a nice place to live) was class of '83, as were a number of my closest friends, including several with whom I am still in regular contact.  So far, I've only come across one college friend who has any recollection of him.  Still, he's obviously a hot topic of conversation, and every issue of every Columbia publication has had at least one item about alma mater's most illustrious alum over the past year or so. 

Recently, while catching up via email with a high school friend who went to grad school there, we of course got on the subject of Obama's days at Columbia, and did you know him, and funny how no one seems to have, and all that, and he called my attention to a couple of items.  One was an essay entitled "Barack Obama '83, My Columbia College Roommate" in the most recent alumni magazine.  The author talks about how as junior transfer students from Occidental College in the fall of 1981, neither he nor Obama could get housing from CU, so they wound up sharing an unheated dump of a railroad flat on 109th between Amsterdam and Columbus.  Hmm.  It seems the president of the United States of America and I lived on the same block, under similar circumstances.

The other item was an article in something called WikiCU (a Wikipedia-like site devoted to Columbia trivia) about Obama's days at Columbia.  Most of it is lifted straight from the roommate piece (or vice versa), but it also includes some additional detail, namely pictures of said dump and (a drum roll please) its address.

"#3E, 142 West 109th St"

Upon reading this, your faithful correspondent picks his jaw off the floor, and runs around his office shouting "holy shit!  Barack Obama was my frickin' next door neighbor!  Barack Obama was my frickin' next door neighbor!  Barack  Obama was my frickin' next door neighbor!"  Now I suppose it's entirely possible that Barry is reading this and now running around his (significantly rounder) office and shouting "Holy shit! that guy who played at the Postcrypt all the time was my frickin' next door neighbor!"  Then again ... 

But even now, I must sheepishly admit that I still don't remember him.  However, Barry, if you were the guy throwing chickens out the window, I've got a bone to pick with you.