It was 1972, the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) was on strike, and I had joined the ranks of the commuting world on the LIE (Long Island Expressway)!
Having commuted with the LIRR, I had accumulated a few friends, and they were
old-timers. Playing pinochle, every morning and on the ride home, it became a religion. Over the years, I learned to get to know and enjoy all kinds of people. They were doctors, lawyers, accountants, maintenance men, railroad workers, store clerks, artists, musicians, hairstylist, you name it, and I developed a liking to them. I love to hear what people think, and whether I agree with them or not, life becomes very interesting.
One of the things I learned from the game of pinochle is when you play with pros; you better not make a mistake! There is nothing more inexcusable than the slightest error in the game. Being how I was taught by my father pinochle, along with how to handle a hammer and a paintbrush (“Let the brush do all the work!”), I soon learned that I better think before I discard, or else there would be a lecture. The same held true for the gang on the LIRR.
The ‘Geech’ was a fellow who worked for Texaco Oil, in the Chrysler Building, in New York City. I think he was the head of maintenance, or “Maintainance” as he called it. Andy was his real name, a former truck driver, with not a serious bone in his body. My kind of guy! Andy loved the game of cards, and pinochle in particular. We would play with all the old veterans of the game, men who were past the age of retirement who still worked and commuted every morning and evening on the LIRR. When a regular was out that morning, ‘The Geech” would invite one of the women to join us. This one woman who’s name was Esther, was a foil for Andy, who would tease her unmercifully, and she loved it. With her salty tongue, she gave it to him. In pinochle, there are 48 cards, and the cards are doubles of the four suites from 9 through Aces. Andy played the same card, an ace of spades about ten times, when the most you could play it was twice! He took all her cards that way, leaving us in stitches, from the stifling our laughter. He never took her money!
One morning, Esther fell asleep on the train, all talked out. We didn’t have enough people for a game of pinochle so we chewed the rag. Andy stops the trainman in the middle of his rounds and slips him a few bucks, and takes from the trainman a hand full of seating tickets. When you give the trainman your ticket, he punches up a small seating ticket and sticks it in the seat to tell him he saw your ticket. It is the end of the ride, and we have no more stops to make before our destination. While Esther is asleep, ‘The Geech’ takes all the tickets and tears them in half, and places them over Esther! Her head, shoulders, arms lap and wherever they would sit. She was a pile of torn tickets. When we came to the final stop, Jamaica Station, she awakens, and looks at herself, in wonderment, never once thinking it was Andy!
On the LIE, we were in heavy traffic one night coming home on the Queens Boulevard. Stop and go with Andy and me in the back seat, and he is looking at a lady in the next car. “Watch this, Joe” The lady was an elderly woman, looked like
Someone’s mean mother-in-law or landlady, and Andy got her attention. She looks at him, and he sticks his tongue out at her! For no reason! She immediately gets flustered and tells her companions in her car, who start looking over at us, and there sits Andy, pretending to be looking forward, unaware!
When we went back to the LIRR, one morning Andy didn’t show up. That followed many more mornings, and I got worried, I called him at his home, and his wife told me had had a stroke. Of all the people on that train that he helped in one form or another, (He helped me move from my apartment to my house) I was the only one who called him! He said I was a real friend. He died soon after.
Please pray extra hard for MMB (My Man Bill) and for my brother-in-law John and all those that need our prayers.
