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after we both went off to college. I knew that he had gone to Columbia as an undergraduate (I find it hard to believe that he didn’t go to Har- vard), and, when I was in my last year at law school, it occurred to me that he might well still be living on the Upper West Side. The Manhat- tan phone book proved my instinct to be correct. I called him, and we arranged to save the catching-up for our meeting the next day at the West End, a bar on Broadway and West 114th that was popular with Columbia students ranging from Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1940s to Mark Rudd in 1968.
Joe was clearly a fixture at the West End. When we spoke on the telephone, he told me exactly where to find him, and he was true to his word. He was seated at a booth that was immediately to the right as I entered the bar, and he was nursing a bourbon. I assumed, and he con- firmed, that the booth that he was in was basically “Chassler’s booth.” I was obviously not the same person who had gone to a Mamaroneck High School football game with him about seven years earlier, but, at least in terms of appearance, I was much closer to the Harvey Yaver- baum that he remembered than he was to the old Joe.
At first, but for his lean build, he seemed to be an entirely new per- son, and maybe that’s because he was. Joe was wearing a well-worn olive green World War II–style cloth jacket, jeans, boots, and fairly long hair. He was also wearing a pair of glasses the lenses of which were triangles that were tinted a very dark rose. We were indoors, and I could not see his eyes. I surmised that, if I could see them, they would show the effects of habitual drug use. He volunteered that that was the case but did not say what kind of drugs he was involved with. It was also clear that alco- hol—in Joe’s case, bourbon—was a mainstay of his existence. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but I chose to have bourbon as well and probably had more at one sitting than I had had before or have had since.
The Wild Turkey was easy to drink, as we sat for about three hours catching up. He said that he was making his living by ghostwriting por- nography, among other things that he viewed as less challenging. He was also writing poetry, something that he had always done when we were kids. I quoted the triplet “walking, stalking, never talking,” which I
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