No Mom No Dad

Tragedy always comes along unexpectedly, and you’ll never know how you’re going to react. Here are three tragedies I will never forget. The first one involves an auto accident. Me and my friend Bob Kopp were headed east on the Long Island Expressway when we a approached a portion of the highway that had a large grass medium between the east and west bound traffic. The grass medium sank in a gentle curve in the middle. There was a station wagon just ahead of us and they were in the lane closest to the medium. Suddenly the station wagon’s left front wheel drifted into the grass medium, as I said it had a gentle curve towards its center and because it had recently rain that made the grass soggy. This caused the station wagon to tilt to the left as the wheel sank deeply into the soggy grass. Suddenly the entire left portion sank very low and the station wagon began to tumble sideways and flipped over and over on its roof. After what looked like several spins it came to a h

Simon my sister’s uncle also known as "whitey" because he always wore a white T-shirt, and "shimmy" a nick-name he got in prison. Simon liked to go fishing, but like I said that costs money. So, the cheapest way to go fishing was to take a subway and bus and fish off  the Canarsie Pier off of Jamaica bay, Brooklyn, I myself was not fond of fishing off the pier with a cheap fishing pole and some fish scraps, I did however enjoy anytime I could be near the ocean. Off to the left of the pier was a small beach, but adjacent to that was a landfill of compacted trash, it was known as "New York’s dirtiest beach". I really didn’t think about how polluted the water was, so on hot days I went in the water to cool off. Horseshoe crabs use to congregate adjacent to the pier in what looked like mating season. Horseshoe crabs are my opinion quite ugly. So, I use to throw rocks at them trying to crack their shell and kill them. I never succeeded to cracking their s

I went to grammar school PS123, junior high school PS162, George Westinghouse Vocational and Technical high school, and finally to RCA Institutes. At George Westinghouse I majored in electrical installation. My first job was at some factory where they expected you to work on live wires, something told me that it was too dangerous, so I quit after two days. My next job was installing heating controls for an electrical contractor. I would install Honeywell heating controls for boilers shortly after they were turned off, and  the sole of my feet got really hot climbing atop of those boilers. The New York the electrical code required rigid conduit made of steel, not those flimsy aluminum pipes or god forbid Roamex. The main problem with rigid conduit is that it is a bitch to bend with a tool known as a hickey, I only weighed 140 pounds, so it was exhausting. I took a test with the New York City Transit Authority (MTA) and passed; I landed a job as an electrical helper. I worked