A Year in the Joseph Cult

The "Poet" and the Pedophile

I got a lot of benefits from spending most of my senior year of high school with Joseph, from late summer 1966 to late spring of 1967. He lived five houses away in one of the 36 new, identical split ranch houses in a two-ended cul de sac in the hamlet of Searingtown, New York, in Long Island's Nassau County. He was 23; I was 16.

I had a difficult time adjusting to the new neighborhood, a few blocks away from Herricks High School, when we moved in September 1963. I'd felt violently uprooted then, the beginning of ninth grade, from my exceptional and varied group of friends at Valley Stream North High School (VSN), part of Franklin Square about five miles south and five million light years away. Our part of Franklin Square was a blue collar, middle class town, greasers and athletes and geniuses and troublemakers and no particular defining line between such groups. I had friends in all of them. I was so insulated in our pre-teen rock and roll culture that at times I hardly noticed that adults existed. But I was, for reasons still not understood, so underperforming academically that I passed eighth grade by a whisker: maybe a 66 average. My parents blamed my hoodlum friends outside. They decided to move, without telling me or my younger brother, until the deal was done.

The first day of Herricks, I was asked: "Are you a diddlybop or a sport rat?" Diddlybops, a small and ineffacious minority, wore black socks; sport rats, the majority, wore white socks. Other schools would more typically call them greasers or hoods, vs. preps or jocks. (The director John Waters once told me that in his Baltimore high school, the hoods were known as "drapes," for the way they'd drape their arms around a parking meter.) The reason for the question: I was wearing green socks. Or purple socks. Fashion or style was never a question at VSN. At Herricks one was judged and classified by the color of your socks. (There were no people of color at all.) I had moved to a school in 1963 where you were either one thing or the other thing, a rigidly enforced social hierarchy, and I was neither.

My first reaction was mute depression for the entire freshman year, which included the murder of JFK, the rise of the Beatles, the resurrection of rock. But I had no one to talk to about it. There was a girl in my grade, another newcomer who lived across the street, named Audrey. Sometimes I would walk home from school with her. She'd talk about her musical crush of the week: First it was the Beatles, then the Rolling Stones, then the Dave Clark Five (so far, so good), then Herman of Herman's Hermits, then Freddie of Freddie and the Dreamers, at which point I realized she had no taste in music and was probably insane. The Gary Lewis crush was inevitable.

I had a different kind of insanity, an anger that might be described now as "Columbine rage." All the new kids, at least the few in my grade, were similarly isolated, even from one another. Joseph's younger sister was a tall, pretty, quiet girl in my grade. We never spoke, and what may have been an overzealous nose job gave her schnozz that ended in an upwards point, making her appear aloof and unapproachable.

I drifted through the next grades, made a few friends that eventually became part of a third wave: garage rock bands. Finding Ginsberg's "Howl" and Kerouac's "On the Road," I realized I wasn't the only person in America stuck in a penal colony of low-consciousness parenting and officious school administration. The Beatles' "Rubber Soul" and Dylan's "Bringing It All Back Home" brought me together with a few like-minded spirits, and I started writing poems and song lyrics.

Joseph had appeared at various times during my first three years of high school, offering nothing more than a wave from his Corvette Sting-Ray convertibles, fetish objects for most teenage boys. I was not immune. I didn't note at the time that Joseph's downshift of his four-speed stick as he passed my bedroom window was his mating call.

Joseph was 23, I was 16, when he moved back home after failed attempts at grad school, the final one being the University of Toledo law school. His parents supported him when he moved back home in late summer, 1966. He had no job except for washing and waxing his Corvette daily, his torso bare, and the most fantastic music blasting from speakers facing the street from in his bedroom. He was into the dynamic soul music played by Frankie Crocker, the smooth, jive-talking disc jockey on WWRL/1600 AM during prime Joseph car washing time. Motown, Stax, Southern soul, James Brown, Otis Redding, even indie label stuff like Lou Courtney, who had a regional hit with "Skate Now." Or the Fantastic Johnny C, "Boogaloo Down Broadway," or Dyke and the Blazers "Funky Broadway."

In his cars, we prowled the streets from suburbia to the East Village and Chinatown, where I felt the validation that comes being likely the only kid from Herricks eating dumpling soup at Hong Fat on Mott Street in Chinatown at 3 AM, stoned on weed and black beauty amphetamines. We'd have the radio dial tuned to the Symphony Sid Show on WEVD-AM/1050. Once a Yiddish/Socialist station (EVD stood for Eugene V. Debs), Symphony Sid's late night show featured the bebop jazz he had once championed at Birdland and elsewhere in the 1940s. In 1966-1967, his show featured both jazz and the New York Latin music explosion of salsa, boogaloo, and always, it seemed, the anguished "Four Women" by Nina Simone. My musical knowledge and interests grew exponentially, and in a few years I was able to break into magazines like Rolling Stone and Fusion in Boston because I knew the roots of various Santana spin-off bands: I knew the original Tito Puente "Oye Como Va" years before Santana recorded it.

Naturally, I was drawn to this music, and Joseph was always on, hyped up and jive-talking himself. What he told me about Toledo was that he had fallen in love with a black woman with a child. That she broke his heart, or he broke her heart. That she introduced him to the marijuana dealers of that black Toledo neighborhood, who taught him the protocols of  what was known colloquially as tea/boo/gage/reefer consumption and business. That he learned to deal on a kind of non-profit basis: He'd buy a kilo of Panama red or Acapulco gold for a few hundred bucks, break it up into one-ounce baggies he'd sell for maybe $30 per oz., to a few regular customers. When he made his nut back, he'd keep the rest to smoke free. When I went with him on his rounds, I tended to be very stoned, and stayed quiet. Our age difference unnerved one of his regulars, a couple of gay longshoremen who both looked like Ralph Kramden, who lived in Hempstead. They kept thinking I was a narc; Joseph laughed and said, "He's no narc; this is Wayne the Drug."

You never forget your first time. In the late summer and early fall of 1966, there was a lot of interest in weed and psychedelics in our culture. I had responsibly read everything I could about marijuana and still legal LSD, and came to the conclusion that this was my gateway to a life other than the stultifying bourgeoisie culture of our cul de sac, and pretty much all of Herricks, and its diddlybops and sport rats. The terms are long gone, were gone within years of graduation, as a proliferation of "stoners" upended the bifurcal social status. A Herricks "Comunity School," for underacheivers like me, provided both an educational and social life raft for teens who didn't fit the jock/hood divide. By then, these were goths and Deadheads.

When he offered me a puff of a joint in his garage, Joseph was protective: Just a few tokes, get used to it, most people don't get high the first time, anyway. The next time was something else: in the passenger seat of his Corvette, the wind and radio blasting, the high wakened the dormant serotonin in my brain. Everything looked and felt like sparklers on the 4th of July. Everything was hilarious. It was as if the dope had been enhanced with laughing gas. (It wasn't.) At that moment, I was all in. If this meant I would be some sort of dope fiend, so be it.

I had already found some expanding group of friends who had weekend beer parties: Three Colt .45 malt liquors was my limit, but also my requirement. I got wrecked, loved being high, and went home and puked. Joseph had been a drink-til-you-puke guy at a high school elsewhere. The thing about pot was, no puking.

Soon, I was with Joseph every day after school. We'd hole up in his bedroom, smoke dope, listen and talk music. I was also taught to be truthful with Joseph, because he was my Main Man. He was the person I could trust about everything. He took notice that I didn't have a girlfriend, and why that wasn't working out for me. He gave me pep talks.

We'd listen to and talk about music too: Our favorite albums were Otis Redding's Dictionary of Soul, and The Miracles Greatest Hits From the Beginning, a comprehensive two disc set released in 1965 with no bad tracks, no filler, a testament to the greatness of the songwriting and production of Smokey Robinson, and the elegant moods of the Miracles.

A few things were starting to creep me out about Joseph. For one thing, the seven year age difference. My first reaction was, ah, finally someone understands my ineffable coolness. But I seemed to be his only friend, except for a few people who would buy pot from him. He said he'd been a tough ladies man in high school, but he never had a date. I took him at his word that the relationship in Toledo had left him shattered.

I also noted that in order to not get a job, his Corvettes would conveniently get stolen every few months. He'd collect the insurance money, and at first, buy a slightly used one. Then his insurance company would no longer cover his Corvettes. So we'd drive around in his sister Eileen's Cutlass convertible, or his dad's Cadillac convertible. The truth was, I felt much less cool driving around with Joseph in these other cars. His cachet dropped several levels by my own instinctual measure.

But I did like getting high, every day. Even when I didn't want to get high, had homework that needed to get done, Joseph was waiting for my at 2 pm at the bottom of "the Hill" at Herricks, where those of us who lived on that side of the high school, the Searingtown and Albertson people, trod a dirt path through the woods to Reed Drive. He'd stick a joint in my mouth, and we'd drive the few blocks home to his house.

Once there, we'd talk, sometimes lip-sync along to the music, play air drums or guitars or pianos. Cal Tjader's Latin jazz (he'd had a hit with "Soul Sauce" aka "Guachi Guaro" a remake of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo's Latin bop workout) was another favorite. Years later, around 2000, I did the liner notes for an oddball Tjader compilation, so I guess I owe some of this success to Joseph, who was responsible for these additional arrows in the rock critic quiver.

I would often just space out in his bedroom. The vibes were getting weirder. Joseph would have infantile screaming fits at his mother when she got home from work in the late afternoon, and he would brag of punching out Larry, his father after being forced to work for a day in the family jewelry store. I'd sit with my arms around my knees, against a wall, while Joseph would be stretched out on his bed. Joseph would ask why I was sitting so far away? I moved inches closer. "Come on up here and sit on the bed." What was I supposed to say, I don't want to sit on the bed?

So I sat on the bed. He'd put his hand inside my thigh. Move his hand higher. Undo my belt, the button on my pants, and then the zipper. I'd feel his hand on my dick. And he'd start massaging it. I had to fantasy myself into an erection, which I managed most of the tine, until I ejaculated. Tissues, wipe up, over and done.

Joseph had his spiel: that he was my "Main Man," providing me with a safe space to deal with my latent homosexuality. I'd just think, "Well, Ginsberg did this, and Dean Moriarty in "On the Road," maybe it's something you have to do to be a real beat poet.

As is often the case with a pedophile like Joseph, he had groomed me until my trust was absolute, get to know my weaknesses, and act. This didn't happen every single time together, but often enough: at least once or twice a week. I didn't much like it, and sometimes I'd resist by refusing to get hard. He'd say, "I want you to come in the worst way." Since every word we spoke to each other was subject to close reading, I started to obsess: What is the "worst" way? Was he going to suck me? He didn't have much interest in that. It was all about the power, the control. I'd deny him that by saying, "man, I'm just not into it today." It was like rewiring my sexual response system. It messed me up for a very long time.

Sometimes, I'd delay or change my route home. Joseph would call at 3 pm. "What's doin'?" he'd ask. I'd tell him I had to do some work, and he'd say, I bought Otis Blue today, and I'd say, OK, I'll be right over. Otis Redding was our soul spirit. When he pulled this stunt, at least once a week, I'd feel resentful, and manipulated. But then the question was always: Where would I get my pot? I didn't have any contacts. The sport rats didn't smoke yet, the diddly-bops had a connection named Bruno. But you had to have to go through layers of guys to buy from Bruno, and Joseph not only made me paranoid by calling these guys "a walking bust," but belittled the quality of their weed. He may have been right. I took no small joy in the fact that I was one of a very small handful of people at Herricks who smoked pot in 1966. Not even Dylan and the Beatles really went public with it until late in the year.

We also were obsessed with Arthur Lee's Love. When the junkie's lament "Signed D.C." came on, he'd do a kind of "air heroin shooting" exposition. He never did hard dope then; he was afraid of needles. Once cruising in the East Village, I told him to pull over where I saw a nightclub advertising The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. I knew from reading Paul Williams' Crawdaddy that this was Warhol's movie/light show with music by the Velvet Underground. After five minutes, and the sight of whips on stage, Joseph had a panic attack and dragged me out of there. I wanted to stay, told him to give me some money and I'd take the railroad home. No dice. "Bastard," I thought.

Joseph never charged me, but he almost never let me take any home, either. Control was his dynamic. Because we were such good pals, Joseph had procured for us some very pure LSD in December, 1966. It came in factory sealed Sandoz (the one legal licensed pharmaceutical company still making LSD, or so I was told).

Joseph went first, he didn't go berserk. I smoked some pot and hash and listened to music. I had to go home, and the next day he told me what a great experience he had. LSD, he said, was "like a douche for the brain."

I took my first trip at his house during Christmas holiday break, when the rest of his family was in Florida. I took the acid, felt that slight kick in the stomach as the drug was coming on. We were listening to Mongo Santamaria, then Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels as I felt my legs melting into the carpet. I went to the piano in the living room and began banging on keys. Maybe acid would intuitively lead me to play free-jazz, like Cecil Taylor.

Joseph told me to knock off the noise.

I sat down next to him on the couch. I said to myself, as LSD was continuing its upward spiral, if this son of a bitch would molest me, even, as my "Main Man," he was my designated guide for the first trip.  He did molest me. We got it over quickly. I was relieved I could enjoy the rest of the trip undisturbed. But I was annoyed by the breach of protocol. I wandered around the kitchen and saw Mrs. Joesph's collection of butcher knives neatly arranged in a wooden rack.

I said to myself, you know, I could take one of these big blades, stab Joseph in the gut, twist it upwards, until he was dead. He'd be totally off-guard; he'd bleed out before he could react. Then I thought: I would have to go home with blood all over me, tell my parents I had killed Joseph, the cops would come.

I played out the scene: It was a really cold December night. I was a minor, now 17. I could get a lawyer who might be able to negotiate an insanity plea (the demon LSD and molestation!) They might let me off with a stay in a mental institution until I was 21. Maybe even 18! But I realized that the Nassau County Jail would be a terrible place to finish the rest of my trip. It would be cold, the cops could be mean, my jail mates meaner. Talk about a bummer, man. I said, "nah, I better not kill Joseph." I left the knives alone.

Instead, we drove to the Herricks shopping center. "Cool Jerk" by the Capitols was playing on the in-store radio. The brightly colored cover of the Cool Jerk album was in the store's small record section. The epiphany was that "Cool Jerk" might have been the greatest psychedelic record of all time, better than the Blues Magoos or Thirteenth Floor Elevator.

Towards the end of senior year, I began to create more distance from Joseph: Graduation, finals, applying to colleges. It was hard. He took up with one of my other friends who was a codeine addict working for the post office. This friend called me and said, "I don't know if you want to go to the police or something, but Joseph wants to kill you." Apparently, I had betrayed him by "using him for his drugs." Which at first blush was ridiculous; on second thought, absolute truth. He'd drive around on weekends and stalk me on dates, bumping my car from behind at traffic lights. Eventually he backed off. Nearly got married himself, but of course, he messed that up.

The last time I saw him was 1969, my first weekend home from Bard College. Another Herricks school mate had become Joseph's subject for mind games, manipulation, and drugs. Tommy W. Tommy had been a very popular kid. He was good looking, smart, chicks liked him so much that he is said to have invited friends to watch him get a blow job from one of the more desirable sport rat girls.

Tommy also had a compulsive death wish. I was with him a year or so earlier when he took his parent's car out for a joyride. With six of us in the car, he floored it down one of the Searingtown suburban straightaways, 60, 70 mph, and slam on the brakes, not knowing who or what might be driving on the perpendicular road ahead. He could have taken out an entire family and us: ten dead, perhaps. We were lucky: Tommy wasn't, and a few days before I'd come home from Bard, he died behind the wheel, while doing drugs on Nassau Boulevard in Garden City Park.

Joseph was bereft. He told me he had taken his car, by then a Buick Riviera, I think, and drove it to Tommy's house, and signed it over to his dad. Who accepted it!

He asked if I would go for a ride. I said no, but then he pleaded. So I got into one of his family cars, as he was swigging from a bottle of Dewar's scotch. He apologized for ruining my life, for fucking me up. I said no, it’s cool, man. I think I even hugged him, that’s how terrified I was. We were parked on a new road in an unfinished housing development. As Joseph crawled deeper into his hole of shame and self-pity, I nervously looked at his pants for any sign of a metal bulge. I hit open the glove compartment, just for the heck of it. Find the gun. I smelled murder-suicide fumes in the air with the tears, the weed and the whisky. I kept my hand on the door latch, and when Joseph seemed immobile and incoherent, I opened the door and ran for my life.