The Way the Future Was: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

few years later by dropping out of high school without graduating.) Not all of it was unpleasant. There was a lot of how-to-do-it in the curriculum, and we found ourselves operating machine tools and casting molten iron into greensand cope-and-drag molds, and that was fun. Lab work in chemistry and physics was enjoyable, and the math courses were challenging, but the rest was a washout. Both Dirk and I were readers, and so it our custom to read our textbooks all the way through in the first week of any term, and so the rest of the term was unendurable tedium. But the excitement of the world outside never waned.
     
    I count it one of the great good fortunes of my life that I grew up with all the resources of one of the world's greatest cities within my reach. Young kids of the 70s, I do devoutly pity you, stuck in your pasteurized suburban developments except when Mom chauffeurs you into town. I had the city streets, always exciting in themselves, and I had the subways.
    Of all the modes of mechanized urban transport man has devised, the subway is the most nearly perfect. I love them all, from the creaky tiny cars of Budapest to the shiny streamliners of Toronto, under ground and above. Moscow's is beautiful. London's is marvelously efficient. Paris's runs engagingly from the super-technological to the quaint. But first loves are best, and New York's subways are what I grew up on. In the days of my youth the five-cent fare was sacred, and so for a nickel you could be carried from the Bronx to Coney Island, from sylvan Flushing to Wall Street. If you were a young boy and willing to take minor risks (jail, electrocution, things like that), you didn't even need the nickel. I was six years old when I learned that you could ride free from the Avenue H station of the BMT just by climbing over the exit doors. If I chose to visit friends in Sheepshead Bay, I could ride there free, and ride back at the same economical rate just by climbing an embankment, stepping carefully over the third rail, and entering the platform of the station there. When we moved to Kings Highway there was another embankment, equally easily breached. The Seventh Avenue subway station, near Grand Army Plaza, could be penetrated by winding oneself through the exit stiles. They kept adults out, but there was enough give in them to let a hundred-pound kid slip through. Of the major lines, the BMT's defenses were the leakiest; the IRT was built on a less carefree plan, but you could take the BMT to Queens, where the two lines ran together, and thus enter the forbidden pathways of the IRT at only the small cost of an extra hour or so of travel time.
    If you chose to go somewhere past the ends of the subway lines, there was a further natural resource of free transportation in the form of trucks and trolley cars. They weren't as much fun. You were exposed to the weather, and there was always the chance of falling off. Or of being caught; while once you were into the subway system, you were as serene as any paying fare. But the whole city was open to exploration, and I explored it systematically from the age of six on.
    I didn't always steal rides. There were times when I walked because it was my whim to walk that time, as any lordly millionaire might wave his limousine away for a nice day's stroll. Walking is the best way to know a city, which is why I feel quite at home in, say, London, and even now am a stranger in Los Angeles. And for most of my high-school career, my companion in exploration was usually Dirk Wylie.
    Sometimes we explored geography, sometimes other things. Not a part of his Collection, but hidden behind the Amazings and the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels he had publications of another sort. They had titles like Spicy Western Stories and Paris Nights , soft-core porn that I had never seen and that inflamed my pubescent glands a lot. In return I conducted him to his first burlesque show, doing the same for his.
    It wasn't my first burlesque show. Not by,