Hari Krishna baby......

In 1969 a lot things changed. The surety and the rock hard unity that was the basis of the church and neighborhood was starting to shatter. We didn't know it at the time but the process was begining where the kids riding bikes with baseball cards in the spokes were to be replaced by people with tattoos sipping $2 cups of coffee while walking a frou frou fucking dog on a leash would take over the place where Nunzio and Enzo and Guiesseppi used to hang out on the corner and sing Dion songs.

There was a convent on the corner of Kane and Henry Street that housed an order of cloistered sisters. The Nursing Sisters of the Poor. They worked in hospitals and hospices but had little contact otherwise with the outside world. Well quite of few of the sisters had decided to leave the convent and go out in the world of the wild and wooly 1960's. There weren't enough of them to make it worthwhile to maintain this big structure so the church put it up for sale. And it sold pretty quickly. To the Hari Krishna's.

Now this was long before we knew anything about cults or eastern religions or new age or any of that stuff. We just saw these people in orange robes banging tamborines. They would come and go from the house and didn't have much contact with the neighborhood. Of course there was a reason for that.

One day in one of the first weeks after the cult  moved in they had a couple of the Krishnas start to talk to some of the kids who hung out at PS 29's School yard which was across  the street from the Krishna's new temple. One of them went and told his father who was a connected guy. Now he wasn't connected to Con Edison if you know what I mean. So the next day this guy and couple of his friends from the Wimpy Boys Social club knocked on the door and asked to talk to the head freak. When they came downstairs Big Louie grabbed him by the neck and held him up against the wall. They politely informed him that tif any of the bald headed freaks talked to the neighborhood kids they would burn down the temple and everyone in it.

So the Hari guys sort of kept to themselves after that.

It was what you called neighborhood community policing as it were.

I miss those days.

I fit in then.

I don't fit in so much anymore.

Wait I have to go to the front of the store. Somebody wants to bring a frou frou fucking dog into the store.