Meet the neighbors

The first neighbors I ever recall were from this apartment building at 92nd Street and Northern Blvd. In Jackson Heights, Queens. It's where I grew up as a little boy.

The neighborhood, once the home of working class Jews and Italians, is now incredibly diverse, with people from all over the world, crammed into what I remember as tiny, square foot-challenged shoeboxes. Perhaps that's why we, the kids and their mothers, spent so much time in the plaza/park in the center of the building, where it looks like they're doing some remodeling.

I have fond and funny memories of this place. Funny, because in retrospect, I realize how ominously close we were to mobsters and low rung mafioso, who not only lived in the building but who also used to join my father for weekly poker games in the living room.

It wasn't til later in life that I realized my father had a thorough understanding of The Family, not to mention quite bit of contact with the guys in the shiny suits. I suppose, at the time, there were many young scrappy Jewish CPA's, with an eye out for a side hustle, who did.

And fond because it was here that my family became good lifelong friends with the next door neighbors, the Silversteins (name changed because... well, because).

It was a friendship that lasted close to 40 years. In fact, when the Silversteins escaped the confines of The City and moved to Spring Valley, NY, they convinced my parents to follow suit and shortly thereafter moved to the adjoining and aptly named burg of Suffern.

We even sat shiva for my father at the Silverstein's house.

Sadly, we have lost touch. Separated by time, geography and the neverending need to write banner ads and email blasts to put food on my table.

Even sadder, perhaps, is that since that time I, and now we, have never enjoyed that type of neighborly fraternity.  Indeed it's been quite the opposite. A life living next to drunkards, drag queens, porn stars, defrocked rabbis, street bullies, meth head plumbers and many more.

My internal hard drive is near capacity with stories and recollections of these misfits. And so I'm going to do what any writer would do, I'm going to commit it all to, brutally honest and probably embellished, ink.

I'd like to have the book done by December.

But probably won't release it until 2021, just to avoid the curse of ©2020.