Four Days In New York: Memories Of A Living Past

In New York City recently at an outdoor memorial for Robert Reilly, a former apartment mate and friend who died at the age of 94 — and among other friends I had not seen for many years — I thought of William Faulkner’s often quoted comment: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I had flown to JFK from California where I have lived for the past 50 years, more than half my lifetime. When Faulkner wrote his memorable words about the past, which appear in the novel, Requiem for a Nun, he must have been thinking of himself and probably about the American South which adheres to its memories as much if not more than any other region of the US. Some of them along with the myth of the “lost cause” ought to be forgotten.

I can still remember the all-Black campus at Winston Salem State University in North Carolina and the classroom where I taught composition, and two survey courses, one on British lit and the other on American lit. I especially remember chauffeuring Jerome Jones, a Black professor of American history, and his white girlfriend who sat in the back seat and cuddled; a reversal of sorts. That cheeky past is alive and well. I traveled to North Carolina on a Greyhound bus and experienced culture shock when I arrived.

Faulkner wrote about the past in novels such as The Sound and the Fury, Light in August and Absalom Absalom, which I first read and that blew me away when I was an undergraduate at Columbia College in New York in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. New York was the best thing about Columbia. Some of that past came back to me with a vengeance during the few days and nights I spent in New York in May 2024 when Columbia students and students elsewhere were protesting against the war in Gaza and were arrested by the police.

Some things rarely if ever change. I did not try to enter the Columbia campus. With cops everywhere that would have been impossible. I remembered the streets where I protested against the war in Vietnam and where I was arrested, but I didn’t go back to see them, either. My memories are enough.

I don’t agree with Karl Marx who said, “History repeats itself; first as tragedy, second as farce.” The arrest of over 700 students in 1968 seemed tragic at that time and still does, and the arrests of protesting students in 2024 also seems tragic. In ’68 I was arrested along with more than 700 other protesters; a few of those students, including my ex wife Eleanor, were in the crowd at the memorial for Robert Reilly. None of them seemed to have any regrets about the past; no big regrets anyway. It was a no regrets crowd. I asked around and didn’t hear any wishful thinking about what they might have done, or could or should have done. Regrets are a dead end.

Eleanor and I had plenty of time to reminisce and share and compare memories. I had forgotten that she was arrested in ‘68 and that the police dragged her down a gravel pathway to a paddy wagon and that by the time she arrived her knees were bloody. Not long after the Columbia bust we went separate ways, she underground where she took the alias Rita and me to Mexico City. After her days in the underground she became a lawyer and then a judge. She’s married and has two grown boys.

Bob’s widow, Barbara Schneider Reilly, was born and raised in Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s. She greeted me and other friends at the memorial. A blown up picture of Bob with a smile and a beard made me feel at home. I reminded Barbara of the stories she told me about her father, a German soldier, who was a prisoner of war in France during World War II, and who walked away from a detention center and all the way home. I have memories inside memories and memories of memories. There were speeches and reminiscences at the memorial and there was wine, cheese, crackers and table grapes. Nothing fancy.

In December 1969, Bob tried to stop the police who were beating me on East 51 Street in Manhattan. They beat him and arrested him, too. In the 19th precinct he tried to stop the cops from beating us again; no go. Our ACLU lawyer, Paul Chevigny, said that what the police did to Reilly and I was the worst case of police brutality he had ever seen in two decades. My photo appeared on the front page of the Village Voice and in a story that appeared in The New York Times. It was my ten minutes of fame.

After the memorial I went back to Brooklyn, the borough where I was born. That evening, Paul, Dana and I ate at a packed, noisy Italian Restaurant on Court Street. Then we walked back to their apartment and binge watched their favorite series, Nordic Murders which entertained and captured me instantly. The series has characters and scenes you’d never see on Netflix: a man sitting on a toilet taking a shit. There are few activities I like better than sitting on a comfortable sofa and watching TV with friends. We also watched the evening news and followed the latest about Donald Trump and the testimony of Stormy Daniels. New York made Trump and Trump, with money from investors and with connections, made much of New York. Now perhaps the trial in New York would be his downfall.

I met Dana in 1968 at Columbia; Paul more recently. He’s an architect who deals with the city’s bureaucracy; Dana is a retired lawyer who worked for New York City and later New York State, trying to enforce the laws about smoking and battling lawyers for the tobacco companies. I can’t think about the past without thinking about her. In 1969, after that beating by the police in Manhattan — five days after two Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were murdered by law enforcement officers in Chicago — Dana nurtured me and helped me heal. The cops cracked my skull and I needed 50 stitches. They also broke four of my fingers which have never healed properly; they’re a daily reminder of the beating I received.

Years later, when I was recovering from a bout of depression and suicidal ideation, and after ten days as a patient in a psychiatric hospital, Dana nurtured me at a summer cottage she was renting in the Massachusetts woods. It’s hard for me not to idealize her. I have thought of her as a real life Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 Gothic novel that features Bertha, a mad woman in an attic, and her Byronic husband, Mr. Rochester who is blinded by a fire that burns down Thornfield Hall, his ancestral home. Jane Eyre to the rescue.

I lived in Manhattan from 1959 to 1964 when I was a student, and again from 1967 to 1974 when I was a college teacher and an editor for a newspaper called University Review. And I also lived in Brooklyn in 1990, during the crack epidemic when thousands of people lived in the streets and New York seemed a city on the ropes. I was researching my biography of Abbie Hoffman, who became instantly famous when he and his friends tossed dollar bills from the gallery to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1967.

Going back to New York feels like going home. I know the neighborhoods, the subway stops and routes, the museums, the police precincts and the streets where I rioted and was arrested. In some ways the city never changes. At the memorial for Bob, my ex and I mostly avoided discussion of the 1960s and 1970s, which might have prompted an argument. Instead, we shared our memories of growing up in lefty families during the era of McCarthyism when our parents were persecuted for their political beliefs.

The further back we went in time the less volatile the memories; the closer we came to the present the more volatile they became. Faulkner was right. The past is never dead. It isn’t even past. It was alive and well at the Manhattan memorial for Bob Reilly and in Brooklyn with Dana and Paul. I arrived at JFK in NY on a Thursday and I departed on a Monday from JFK which is in the midst of humongous expansion and development. Four days in NY was enough. Perhaps on another trip I might not recognize it. New York never does stand still.