I Want to Celebrate All the Things in My Life Until Swamiji

I want to celebrate all the things in my life that led up to my meeting Srila Prabhupada.  I am thankful to everything that happened.  Thankful mainly that I survived.  Recently I started thinking of the places I had lived in around 1964, 1965; rehashing.  After I got out of the Navy, I rented a tiny, slum apartment with no hot water down on Suffolk Street.  After six months there, a real estate agent came to the door and said I had to leave; they were going to tear the building down.  He helped me find another place, which was a real dump.  It was one block north of Houston Street, more into the stream of things, in a predominantly Puerto Rican neighbourhood.  It was a basement apartment without lights.

That summer I was like a young boy playing in a treehouse.  I played at being a Lower East Side hipster with a part-time job; smoking marijuana, wasting my youth, very unhappy but playing a game of “forget by getting high”.  Once again the real estate agent came to the door and said that I had to get out; they were going to use the building for something else.

I was so burned out from taking LSD and being hurt by “friends” that I moved back in with my parents on Staten Island.  After that I got a job in the city on the Lower East Side.  Then I almost killed myself during an LSD trip by jumping out a window.  I broke both my heels falling from the fourth floor.  After six weeks in casts I moved back again to Staten Island, to my own apartment.  While still hobbling around on crutches, I decided that I wanted to get back into Manhattan where the action was.  Staten Island was too far for me to travel to my job on Fifth Street in Manhattan.  Actually, I was strategically placing myself for what was going to happen very soon – but I did not know it.

I remember the night I moved from Staten Island.  I had some furniture from my boyhood room, a bed and a bureau, and I had to move it.  I called up a freelance mover in Manhattan and they came and picked me up.  I did not tell the landlord, but just checked out and brought two cats with me.

On the ferry I tried to act urbane and hip to impress the guys in the cab of the truck.  It was night-time when we pulled into Suffolk Street.  And there it was – the congested, steaming, passionate city.  The air was filled with Spanish accents, music, and a violent atmosphere.  As we pulled in front of the building one of the movers said, “Why are you moving here?  You had such a nice, quiet place.”

The other mover said, “He wants to be part of the action, right?  Staten Island is dead.”

I especially remember that moment with the two movers.  The first guy’s remark had really hit it on the head: “Why is this young guy moving back to the city?”  And as I relive that frightening and yet courageous move that I was making to try to get back into the action, searching for whatever I thought I could find in the city, suddenly I recall that that was the apartment I was in when I met Prabhupada!

If I had met an astrologer back then, and if he had been accurate in his reading, he would have looked at me knowingly and said, “Oh, you are about to meet a very special person, and he is going to make a momentous change in your life!”  But I had no such anticipation.

That apartment on Suffolk Street, and the nearness of it to the time when I would meet Prabhupada – the fact that it was the place where I lived when I first met him and began to chant Hare Krishna under his direction – makes it very special in my personal history.