Nort: Finding Myself in the Big Apple in the Sixties

This is a personal-historical memoir about an introverted and insecure youth growing up in a traditional Italian family in Buffalo New York during the 1950s who is suffering from what he calls a middle-child syndrome and searching for ‘personal know-how’; the rules governing how to get along in the world of adults and and connect with other people. Trapped inside his own personal world without any directions or rules to help him make his way in a confusing adult world, he looks for guidance from odd sources; watching how other kids behave, trying to interpret the connections between their actions and the consequences they bring, and the aphorisms of Charlie Chan movies. But none of these provide the wisdom he is seeking. The first in his family to attend college, he discovers a whole new world of people and ideas very different from his culture-driven childhood and youth, which leads him to leave his traditional life style behind, and, in his twenties, break away by moving to New York City in search of adventure and his college girlfriend, Nicole. The author finds an apartment on the Upper East Side of NYC and hooks up with an old college buddy, Les, as a roommate. But soon, a colorful cast of characters—misfit apartment dwellers—appear from all over New York City and begin to take over his apartment. Drugs and drug dealing become the norm and the author soon becomes lost again in a now different world as he tries to maintain a normal life while working and going to graduate school in the middle of this drug laced world of colorful characters who now constitute his larger roommate pool. But, because of them, he is also exposed to some totally new experiences; good and bad LSD trips, drug busts and hilarious adventures, all while trying to re-establish his relationship with Nicole. Therapy provides him only temporary relief but it is not curative. And, to his surprise, it is through three experiences in this strange new world with some of his new roommates that he learns some of the wisdom about life and himself that he had been seeking all along. He eventually returns to Buffalo with a new job and a new girlfriend but struggles with applying the wisdom he acquired in NYC to his new life back in Buffalo. Once again, he looks for understanding from others. So he continues his search. He tries to understand his journey through Carl Jung’s archetypes, G.I.Jurdjieff’s work on identity states and John Welwood’s attempt to integrate the psychological insights of the West with the spiritual realizations of Buddhism, but all of these provide only an intellectual path to the help he is seeking. Later, he discovers Buddhism and finds that the Buddhist teachings finally provides the wisdom he has been seeking and he gets to live those lessons in a party where he breaks out of his self-imposed and confining middle child syndrome and, for a few precious moments, experiences real connections with the other partiers. He has finally found the know-how that he had been searching for all his life. This story takes place during the events of the fifties, sixties and seventies. His personal journey is told within the context of the parallel social-political revolution that was going on in America; the Viet Nam war, the civil rights, women’s and environment movements, political assassinations, the hippie phenomena, drugs, music and a counter-culture lifestyle. Each chapter begins with a specific political and cultural event that occurred during this personal journey, establishing a timeline for the events that were occurring during his own personal journey. Personal experiences are interestingly interwoven and contrasted with these larger events as they simultaneously occurred during those times. The story is told in a humorous first person narrative style with commentary on the cultural and political events that were occurring at the time.