Point Lookout

A few years later I got together with Frank, the crazy artist, to share an apartment in Point Lookout. It was the only apartment building left in the area. A two story old style stone building at the entrance to the town. Point Lookout was at the east end of Long Beach and there was only one road into it. The ?town? was just six blocks wide and twenty blocks long. Most of the residents lived year round in the isolated beach and fishing community. It was miles of empty dunes and sand grass before the next housing community west, Lido beach, and fifteen miles of designated bird sanctuary north to Freeport, which had become the major fishing dock in the area.

The town was self-contained, and a few months after we moved in a snowstorm made the roads out impassable. It was a Friday and we couldn?t get in to work to get our paychecks so we had no money.

We went around the stores in town asking for credit and every where we went they welcomed us with open arms. It was a sleepy residential community with some seasonal exceptions since there was no parking at the beach or anywhere past a few hundred feet of the main road. Through town there wasn?t a large summer influx, and the beach was reserved for residents only. There were a couple of popular bars and restaurants that brought in outsiders, and some of the people that just used their houses for the summer rented them out to the athletes that had their training camps in Hempstead. Running into Jets or Islanders was common, and if there were a football player in the little grocery store he?d take up the whole aisle.

The town wasn?t racially diverse, and in fact it was lily white. There had been some blacks at one point, and Harry Chapin told the story in his song ?The night that made America famous.? It was just before Christmas and the only other apartment building in town caught fire. It was populated by working black families, mostly maids and laborers that worked in the town. The fire Department was only five blocks away, and they were having their Christmas party. When they got to the fire they found the residents outside passing bottles around and enjoying themselves. The firemen thought that was a good idea too, and moved their party over. They started drinking and playing ?I?m dreaming of a white Christmas? over the loudspeaker while they watched the place burn to the ground. Needless to say, Harry Chapin wasn?t a popular person in town. He had been a taxi driver in Long Beach and also refereed to the town in ?Taxi? when he dropped off his fare on Parkside Drive, the street I lived on.

I knew all of this from working in the Getty station years before. The owner, Rubin ?Ruby? Scheinwald, was a great auto mechanic and was well respected in town for his skills. He didn?t live in there of course, and he never minded the racial segregation. He lived in a totally Jewish community in the Five Towns, and had bought the shop to go into semi-retirement. Every once in a while someone would come in with a car that was obviously not a local and seemed to know Ruby well. I finally asked him who these people were. Out of the side of his mouth that his cigar wasn?t permanently affixed to he told me they were the people he was trying to get away from. He explained his semi-retirement. He had a shop in Lawrence, one of the Five Towns, and he was an honest, competent mechanic. He was inundated with more work then he could handle and needed to slow down. He closed the shop and opened up another in the West End section of Long Beach. Not only did he get the local business but also his customers from the Five towns followed him. He closed that one and moved to Point Lookout. It was a good thirty miles away and some still followed him, and you could see the reverence in their eyes.

He still had the shop when I moved into town and I?d drop by once in a while to get some pointers, which were always given without hesitation. He had a bit of a Robin Hood mentality. He?d give people that didn?t have much money a break and then charge top dollar if they did. He didn?t even want to sell gas, he just wasted the Getty logo, so he dept the gas prices much higher than the other station in town, letting them get the business from people that wanted to make sure they had enough fuel to get to the next station.

I had known my roommate Frank since college, and easily fell into the roll of his straight man. He pretended to be an artistic lunatic and pulled it off very effectively. We were referred to as the ?Twin Towers.? Frank was about 6?4? with very pale northern skin and thinning blond hair, kind of like an over grown cherub. The craziness was his mask for his intelligence, and when you got down to brass tacks was a lot more practical than I was at the time. He was much more neurotic though, and covered it all with the crazy act.

We were both big fans of the artwork of Marcel Duchamp and of the surrealists. It didn?t take long before our apartment was surrealized. The space had originally been two smaller apartments, one large room each, both with kitchens and bathrooms. One of the kitchens had been removed and Frank used that as a bedroom. We used the large room on his side as a workshop and the one on my side was the living room and my bedroom, with the working kitchen and my bathroom next to that. I did most of the d?cor for the living room, painting the walls in solid primary colors with some geometric relief. I hung some painted auto parts that I had salvaged from Ruby?s and on the walls, along with some prints and a few photos Frank had taken. We confused the hell out of Ralph, our landlord, but we quickly found out that he was drunk so often that he was only stopping by to get away from his wife. She was actually pretty nice, and it was probably her money that bought the place. He was an off-the-boat Italian who had a hard enough time speaking English when he was sober and was indecipherable after a few drinks. He didn?t know how to read either, although we never found out if he had been able to read Italian or not.

Frank and I saw police cars and an ambulance across the street at the other gas station in town and went over to find out what was going on. The cop said it was some nut as he got into his car to drive away. A few months before we had seen a fire in one of the waste cans in the bay next to the office. The attendant was sitting behind the desk, unaware of the fire. We ran over to warn him and he was able to put it out with an extinguisher before it spread. After the ambulance left and the cops were gone he told us about this latest incident. He said some lunatic had come in waving his arms and yelling he was having a heart attack and to call an ambulance, he was going to die. He got the crazy guy to calm down somewhat after he called 911, and the guy went to lay down, but rather than lay in the office he went into one of the oil-soaked bays. When we went back into the apartment our upstairs neighbor came over, barely able to contain himself. When he stopped laughing he told us that it was our landlord that had run over to the gas station. Ralph had come over to his place drunk, of course, and they had gotten him to smoke some pot. Ralph got stoned and started singing in Italian. His heart must have started to race, getting a rush off the pot and booze, and he ran out of the apartment, yelling that he was having a heart attack and heading over to the gas station. We didn?t see Ralph for a while after that.

I had been working at an electronics house up in Freeport that made military spares. Since they were replacement units there was no demand for the parts. And the government inspectors, DCAS, went over them with a fine tooth comb. I started as an assembler and studied the spec books, eventually becoming the department lead as well as building the Quality Assurance samples. Before a long run of assemblies five pieces would be built that were gone over with a micro-comb by DCAS. Those pieces would be kept as references and the following units would be built exactly like them. I enjoyed the job, it was the first time I had a set of rules to work from and I could quote from the military standards like a poet could quote from a favorite author.

One of the girls that started working there was a real brassy blonde from the south and we started trading quips. We began to go to lunch together once in a while and then sleeping together. She?d torture me with her fingernails and then leave me with blue balls when I complained too much. Then she told me that she was married to a black amateur boxer, but she wanted to have my baby. It wasn?t my idea of a good time and broke it off.

On one of my birthdays I got a call from the front office, and when I went up there received a bouquet of flowers with the note, With Love, from Frankie and Ricky. Everybody got a good laugh out of that except me. I was pissed off and Frank and Ricky were wary of me for awhile. After a few months had gone by and I had settled down enough I announced a Taco Night. I?ve always been a good cook and my tacos were a favorite reason for us to get together. I paid special attention to these tacos, starting the meal days in advance. As I slowly cooked the meat I added as many hot peppers as I could, letting the heat settle into the background as I kept tasting and adding more. When it was time for dinner they didn?t notice the heat at first, and as it bloomed they couldn?t stop eating, telling me they were the beat tacos I?d ever made. Once everything was eaten the heat really came on and fortunately there were two bathrooms in the apartment because 1/2 hour later they were both occupied, burning even more on the way out than on the way in. Since I had been tasting it for days I just laughed it off while they suffered. Vengeance is not necessarily a dish best served cold.

Frank was an absolute whiz at buying used cars. His father was a machinist and had a sideling buying and selling cars he repaired. Frank had learned the buying part and people would almost give him the car. He had shtick down to a science and had gotten a 50's era Dodge in incredible condition for a song. It needed some engine work and I helped him rebuild the heads. I?d borrow it on occasion to impress a date, and had taken out one of the girls at work to a comedy club to see an ?X-rated Hypnotist? farther out on the Island. I didn?t know they did wet tee-shirt contests as well, and my date was more interested it than I was. I only had a couple of beers through out the night before driving her home. It was after 1 am when I dropped her off and headed back on Sunrise Highway. The road was empty and I was driving well below the speed limit when a car crossed in front of me and appeared to stop. Even though I was only doing 45 I had no time to brake and hit the car squarely in the passenger door. The Dodge I was driving was one of those huge 50?s tanks and threw the mid-sized Chevy down the road. The passenger door opened and the woman didn?t have a seat belt on and fell out of the car, bouncing on the road along with the car until it stopped, pinning her under a wheel. I was knocked around a bit, but wasn?t injured, and I ran over to help. As I got there someone was running up behind me, telling me he was an EMT and to let him take over. There wasn?t much he could do, and she was dead before the ambulance arrived. He had gotten there so quickly because he had been in the bar on the corner and had heard the crash. The driver had been drinking in there as well, and from where she was parked she must have blown two red lights to get into the intersection without turning her headlights on.

When the detectives later interviewed me they wondered if it might have been a suicide, of if she just froze in the incoming headlights like a deer. When I went to court for the disposition I met her children. They weren't much younger than I was. Although I was absolved of any responsibility I refused to get behind the wheel of a car for years. Frank was able to get a generous insurance payment for the car but I felt bad about that as well. I stayed out of work for a couple of days, calling in sick. When I went back I didn?t say anything about the accident, but my supervisor called me to his desk and showed me the article in the paper and I told hem the whole story.

A few months later another supervisor that had left called and asked me to come and work for him in a power supply company that did some military work out in Farmingdale. It was forty miles away but he didn?t mind if I hitchhiked and would be late once in a while. I took the job and lasted for about six months before I got fed up with the place and moved over to another company in the area. I didn?t like the way the Power Supply company was run, and I was unfortunately proved correct a few months later.

Power supplies converted electricity for different purposes and one of the components that are used is a capacitor. They come in many different sizes and styles, and if you think of electricity as a wave a capacitor is used to smooth out the crests. The bigger the wave the bigger the capacitor needs to be. Some of the units had caps that were the size of beer cans, and they have polarity like a battery. Most larger ones have a blow out plug that releases the pressure if it?s hooked up backwards, but they?re more expensive and the company switched over to the cheaper, un-vented caps for the commercial units. One of the electrical techs was trouble-shooting a supply that wasn?t working, and as he was leaning over the unit, trying to figure out what was wrong the cap exploded, destroying one of his eyes.

I was seeing a woman that was working there and I got her out as quickly as I could, finding her a job in another division of the company I was working for.

After I had a heart scare I decided I needed to start driving again, and went to motor vehicles to renew my license. Computers were just starting to be used, and the woman at the counter told me that something was preventing me from renewing, but didn?t know why. I assumed that I had on old traffic ticket down in Long Beach that I hadn?t paid and went over to the police station in my old neighborhood to find out what the problem was.

I spoke to the desk Sargent and explained my situation. He checked his records and came back to tell me that there was a warrant out for my arrest for vehicular manslaughter. I don?t know if it was the shock on my face or the local politics, but I told him about the accident and that I?d go to get it straightened out, and he let me leave. Long Beach was still the only democratic town in what was refereed to as the ?Republican Machine? of Nassau County. All county employees had to kick back a portion of their wages to the party. It was well known, and blatantly illegal, but the practice was so entrenched that it be almost twenty years before the hold was broken. Long Beach does things their own way and that may have had something to do with the Sargent letting me go while the Nassau County police might not have.

I contacted a lawyer to get it straightened out. For $375 he would get it fixed, which was a good chunk of change at the time. We met in the Judge?s chambers and they spent the first 45 minutes talking shop. Most of the conversation was about what part of the law practice was making the most money at the time, and the fastest growing service was writing pre-nuptial agreements. After they were talked out they spent five minutes on me and I was free to go.

Frank had started working in the city and was taking the train in, so I bought his car, an old mid-sized Buick that he was rarely using for a few hundred dollars. I started job shopping, working for an agency that moved people around from company to company following the contracts on short-term builds. I developed a good reputation as a reliable and competent prototyper. DCAS inspectors that knew me told my supervisors that as long as I was building the units they wouldn?t have any problems.

Point Lookout was a good distance away from where most of the jobs were, and Frank and I moved to Melville. His commute time would be the same, we weren?t paying much more to rent a house than we were for the apartment, and my commute was cut by at least a half an hour each way.