I slept so well Thursday night into Friday morning that I woke up thinking it was Saturday. A very good night’s sleep, I would have preferred another hour or two, but that’s not how it goes these days, and I guess I’m fine with that. Bill is on the road, Mike is at his crib in Jersey City, and things are back to relative normalcy.
I sit at my desk in Manhattan on 5th Avenue listening to the story of Jamaican music. I recall buying this for Julio back in the day when it came out. He was buying one for me, and I was going to buy one for him, but Richard Gere beat us to it. He was buying a copy for Cindy Crawford, to whom he was married at the time. This was all in the basement of Tower Records on West 4th Street and Broadway in the 90s.
It was a nice morning, and then at noon, when I got my lunch hour, and turned out to be raining, so my wandering around the area was somewhat curtailed. I walked down West 19th Street past where the Magickal Childe store used to be. It is now a store specializing in vinyl records. I went with Laszlo Papp in the early ’80s.
Laszlo was into things that created a shock value. Laszlo and I worked together at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich back then. My mother remembered working with him before I started working with him, telling me that he was such a good boy and left work on a Friday looking like such a good boy and coming back on Monday morning looking like he was a member of The Sex Pistols.
Laszlo and I were born on September 12th, so we had that in common as well as liking a lot of the new music that was happening at the time, punk and New Wave, or what is now known as postpunk. He was somewhat of an influence on me, so much so that I quit a job because he sort of mocked me for still having that job.
In hindsight, was it a mistake? I don’t know. It wasn’t a good move at the time, but it set me on a path that I am still on to this day, 41 years later, hahaha. I used to give lots of money to Lazlo to buy 45s for me when he went into the city to buy records for himself.
He got tired of doing that and suggested that I go along with him, so I did, which opened up a whole new world for me, a child and product of 1970s suburbia. I did have some adventures with Laszlo, some good, some bad. He still tolerated my naivete or innocence, which, to his credit, did me good.
The last time I saw Laszlo, he was smoking an El Rey de Mundo cigar on Astor Place. I walked up to him and said hello, complimented him on the cigar, and he gave me another cigar of his own, which is good manners for cigar smokers. I have searched for him online, and he doesn’t have much of an online presence or anything with regard to social media.
Laszlo really enjoyed hardcore punk, which is where we diverged musically. I’ve often wondered how he’s doing, he was a few years older than me, so he probably still is. It was awfully nice of him to let me tag along on his New York City adventures.
I am currently taking an online course in sexual harassment…apparently, I’ve been doing it wrong.
