Welcome To The Jungle
At age 11, I got banned from Tower Records
At age 11, I got banned from Tower Records.
To be clear, this was not an official directive from the CEO of the now-defunct music chain, but from a power even more forceful, my grandmother. Babushka, as we called her, lived on the Upper West Side, and I spent a lot of time with her growing up. While I moved five times between New York and Maryland before I turned 12, her apartment was a constant. Whether we were living down the street or in a distant, leafy suburb, my brothers and I spent weekends with her to give my parents some relief from running a zoo filled with three boisterous boys.
On each visit, my grandmother took me and my brothers to buy G.I. Joe's from Woolworth, followed by a kids' meal at Burger King. She ordered the fish filet, which she somehow made seem so elegant as she ate it with a fork and knife. Such activities and gifts were everything to me as a kid, but as I got to be older, I came to understand that New York City was more than just plastic toys and fried fish with my grandmother on 79th and Broadway. As I turned the corner of being a decade old, I understood that the city was a hub for vice and exploration.
My Virgil on the journey through the layers of sin as a pre-teen was my friend, Benjy. We met in elementary school and kept in touch as I moved from the Upper West Side to Maryland and then to Westchester. All the while, he remained firmly rooted in Manhattan and became my own urban reflection. Over the years, we remained the same height, but he was endlessly more mature and knowledgeable about the ways of the world. Before I knew what boobs were, he had touched them. While I remained terrified that drugs would turn my brain into a cracked egg on a hot skillet, as Nancy Reagan looked over at me, shaking her head with endless disappointment, he already knew how to roll a joint. While I remained confined to my grandmother’s apartment or, on rare occasion, the pizza place 200 feet away, he could go downtown. Not just the innocent downtown of Petula Clark where you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares, but the seedy downtown of Neil Young, where the hippies all go, and they dance the charleston and do the limbo.
And, I wanted to go downtown, too.
It wasn’t so much that Benjy used peer pressure on me. It was more that I, too, wanted to know about boobs and weed, a neighborhood that wasn’t just the Upper West Side, and stores that sold more than G.I. Joe's. New York City exposes you to life in all its extremes, simply by being here. As best as my family tried to shield me from this place, it was like trying to block out the sun. But, New York City is a light stronger than any pair of parental sunglasses or grandmotherly black-out shades can block. Thus, each visit with Benjy made me want to know and experience more of the sins of this wonderful city.
“I mean, what do you even do with boobs?” I asked.
“Can’t smoking weed kill you instantaneously?” I inquired.
“What if you miss your bus stop while riding alone and end up in gang territory?” I wondered.
For each complex question, Benjy had a simple answer, delivered with the calm of a New York City man-boy. The streets were his rite of passage, and I sat at the feet of my peer-elder as he passed along the wisdom of the five boroughs. Boobs were to be caressed. Weed would not kill you. And, if you missed your stop, you just got off at the next one, crossed the street, and took the same bus in the opposite direction.
While endlessly curious, I also wasn’t the kind of kid to really break the rules. I was endlessly moody and would push boundaries and annoy my parents, but I never snuck out of the house at night, siphoned booze from the liquor cabinet, or stole the car while my parents were asleep. My vices were mostly sugary cereal, Sega Genesis, and music. By music, I should clarify that I only had one cassette tape - a mustard yellow copy of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which I received at age six from my grandfather. I spent years listening to it over-and-over on my bright yellow Sony Walkman, nearly wearing out the ribbon.
As I got older, I realized that my Walkman also picked up the radio, notably Z100 - New York’s #1 hit music station. With the flip of a switch, I could exit Vivaldi’s beautiful, non-verbal tapestry of the natural world and enter Axl Rose’s universe, where he described every curve and crevice of the female anatomy, along with vivid descriptions of how to use and misuse it. Each night, I kept my headphones in as I went to bed, waiting for the DJ to play Guns N’ Roses. My parents naively assumed that I was drifting off to a summery Baroque dreamscape when, instead, Axl was taking me down to the Paradise City where the grass was green and the girls were pretty.
I stayed up fantasizing about owning Appetite for Destruction — wearing out the ribbon until I knew every beat, word, and hidden meaning of every track. The challenge was that life in the suburbs had little access to music stores, especially ones that I could get to on my own, as asking my parents to drive me would inevitably invite one of them asking the clerk if Guns N’ Roses “was appropriate music for children."
Of course it fucking wasn’t - that was the whole point.
So, naturally, I brought my quandary to Benjy on my next visit to the city. With his calm demeanor and wise, prepubescent voice, he said, “Just go to Tower Records.”
“What? Where? A tower of records?” I replied.
“It’s a music store on 66th and Broadway, just a quick bus ride from here. They have everything!” he offered.
It sounded easy enough, I just needed a way to sneak out of Babushka’s and get there by myself. Benjy offered to be my alibi, which seemed innocent enough as we often met for pizza down the street. He prepped me with which bus line to take, how much was the fare, and where to get off.
On that fateful day, I told Babushka that I was going to meet Benjy for pizza, and she lovingly gave me some money and told me not to eat too much, as she was making a big dinner. I was to be exceptionally careful, not talk to any strangers, and only go to the pizzeria.
Nowhere else.
“Got it?” she asked.
“Got it!” I replied.
“Okay, mutzelah putzelah, have fun!” she said, and sent me off with a kiss.
It was almost too easy.
I walked east towards the pizzeria, worried she might be watching from the window. Once out of sight, I booked it to 75th Street to catch the M7 bus. I had ridden that bus hundreds of times with Babushka, but never alone. I held my change firmly and stood near a mom-looking woman so that others would think I was traveling with her. When the bus arrived, I followed her onboard, dropped my money in the slot, and asked the driver to tell me when we got to 66th Street. I nervously sat up in the front, surrounded by the many grandmothers who smiled at me.
If only they knew.
At 66th Street, the bus driver looked back to me and pointed to the open door. I was ten blocks south of my grandmother’s apartment, but felt a continent away. I scoured the block and eventually found the temple to music. It was, without question, the coolest place that I had ever been. The place was a supermarket of sound, filled with rebellious cashiers in their teens who wore all black, smoked cigarettes, had piercings, and looked like they were already bored of sex. Everyone there was so cool, and I felt immediately shy and self-conscious. Thus, I kept my head down and tried to find my way through all of the cassettes, each covered in 18 inches of plastic housing to avoid theft. Too nervous to ask for help, I wandered through the store hoping Guns N’ Roses would fall from the rafters and land on me.
“Can I, like, help you?” a clerk said. He looked to be in his early twenties, and wore a red bandana over his long brown hair like Axl Rose. The sleeves were ripped off of his black shirt, and he had covered his name tag with a Poison sticker.
“Ummm …," I didn’t know how to even respond to his coolness - the dude didn’t even need a name.
“Umm, yeah. Do you, like, maybe, have any Guns N’ Roses?” I said in a whisper.
“Oh, hell yeah, we do!” he said, walking me over to the Rock N’ Roll section.
He started rifling through the cassettes, and then grabbed Appetite for Destruction and elevated it into the air, like Moses holding the Ten Commandments.
“Rocket Queen will, like, blow your mind, man!’ he said.
“I really like Welcome to the Jungle,” I said, mirroring the likes of the commoners.
“That’s cool, I guess,” he said, “But Axl has sex with a woman in the studio during the recording of Rocket Queen.”
The earth stopped turning. I just stood there in silence, feeling as if I had just lost my entire virginity and all of my innocence. A day before, I was listening to my favorite movement of The Four Seasons, Spring, in my suburban bed, surrounded by pictures of hockey players. Today, I was sneaking off to Manhattan to buy a racy cassette tape about fornicating and destruction, purchased with laundered pizza money from my grandmother.
“My name is Chad,” he said. “Come back and find me if you ever want some other recommendations.”
“I, I, I will!” I said with great excitement as I threw the cassette into the yellow Tower Records bag and ran to catch an uptown bus. Onboard, I snuck to a corner in the back, pulled off the plastic wrapping, and read through the accordion-style album cover. It was littered with graffiti, lyrics, messy missives, and a half-naked cartoon woman surrounded by demonic, sex-fueled robots. I was not in Vivaldi’s Kansas anymore, and this new place was pretty fucking awesome. I put the tape into my previously monogamous walkman, which had been used to the light petting and hand holding of classical, and was now thrust into a drug fueled orgy of Rock N’ Roll. Hearing those first bars of Welcome to the Jungle, on my own Walkman and not at the mercy of a radio DJ, made me feel alive. I was now all grown up.
I got off the bus at 75th Street and sprinted back to the apartment. No one, especially my grandmother, had any suspicions that I had done anything wrong. I hid the tape in my clothing drawer and went back to Vivaldi, Burger King, and G.I. Joe’s. But at night, I hid under the covers and surreptitiously changed the tape, so I could fall asleep to Guns N’ Roses.
I’m still not sure how she found it and whether there might have been a snitch in the family, but a few weeks into living a double life, Babushka found Appetite for Destruction. All it took was seeing a half-naked woman and bottle of liquor in the album lining and she lost it. My grandmother had no curiosity about Axl Rose’s poetry or interest in the pain and hope of Slash’s guitar solos. This album was simply the tool of the devil and completely inappropriate, especially in the hands of her beloved mutzelah putzelah - an impressionable 11-year-old boy destined to be a lawyer, doctor, and president of the United States.
“But …" I tried.
“Please... I begged.
“I promise I’lll …” I implored.
Babushka was having none of it. She grabbed me and the cassette, and told me to take her to the sin factory that had sold this weapon of minor destruction. We rode the bus in silence to Tower Records, and I felt that my life was over. At 11, the only thing worse than death is public shaming and embarrassment by your grandmother, in the coolest place you’ve ever been around the coolest people you’ve ever encountered. Before we entered the store, I tried again to stop or stall her. But, this woman had taken on the Communists and Nazis, was fearless and on a mission. Babushka was on a warpath to destroy anyone who dared to corrupt her precious first-born, Vivaldi-loving grandson.
As we entered the store, I tried to make myself as small as humanly possible, even trying to will myself out of my body and anywhere else to avoid the impending embarrassment. Babushka walked straight to the counter and demanded to speak to the manager. A guy in all black with long hair and piercings introduced himself as the manager and, likely, immediately regretted every life decision he had made up until that moment. Babushka handed him the cassette and started to yell at him for what seemed like three days. I was so dissociated from the moment, but recall her screaming “inappropriate” and “you should be ashamed." If the manager dared to even open his mouth and say a word, Babushka only got angrier and elevated her diatribe to “This is why American children are losing out to the Japanese!” and “I should call your mother.” The entire store was looking at us, at me, including Chad who, despite his once cool and indifferent demeanor, seemed to be cowering in the classical music section. I tried to catch his eye to say sorry, but he refused to even acknowledge my existence.
Babushka didn’t ask for a refund or store credit. She was there to destroy that store and put the fear of God into any employee who dared sell me, or other impressionable youth, anything that wasn’t produced in 1790. When she sensed that the store and all of its patrons had enough, she continued on for a bit longer and then grabbed me and stormed out of the store. The only words she said to me after were “You are never, ever, ever to go to Tower Records again! Do you understand me!?”
“Yes, Babushka,” I replied.
We rode home in silence, as I fought back tears from the embarrassment and having lost my new favorite album. Forever forward, I would be stuck with my mustardy Vivaldi, winding and rewinding through the magnificent seasons. I would have my first slow dance to Spring, lose my virginity to Winter, walk down the aisle to Spring, and live a boring, unassuming life of commuting and wedding anniversaries at Applebee’s to Fall. Meanwhile, the snare drums, shrieking, and raw sexuality of Guns R’ Roses would forever tempt and tease me, appearing close, but out of reach of ownership in advertisements, Top 40 music countdowns, and at friend’s houses.
I was so terrified of my grandmother that I did not step foot back into Tower Records or buy Appetite for Destruction, this time on CD, until I was 18. While she had clearly said “never, ever, ever," I took that to mean “never, ever, ever or until you are legally an adult and can be tried by a jury of your peers." While Babushka tried her best to reject my welcome to this jungle, the lure of New York City and its many Axl Roses and Paradise Cities proved endlessly more powerful.
No matter how many times I listen to the album, the opening bars bring me to that bus ride home from Tower Records, my inaugural solo adventure into this city of sin. My first feeling of being alive and in possession of contraband. My slippery slope to other New York neighborhoods and experiences that would elevate and stimulate.
“Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games
We got everything you want, honey, we know the names
We are the people that can find whatever you may need
If you got the money, honey, we got your disease
“It's a jungle, welcome to the jungle
Watch it bring it to your n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n knees, knees”
If I Can Make It There is a collection of stories about the things and people, including me, that move through New York City. A celebration of the characters who crawl through endless traffic, slog through the subways, and stroll under the shade of scaffolding.
Like our fragmented and broken transportation system, some stories race with enthusiasm to a red light and others remain hopelessly stuck behind a double-parked Mercedes with New Jersey plates and blinkers on as the driver screams over the honking, “Just hold on for a minute! I’m only stopping in for a quick dinner at Sardis.”
And, all of these stories could occur nowhere else but the greatest city on Earth - New York Fucking City.
Awww, Tower Records!