In this post, Steve Press tells how one night in the Bronx in 1972, he had brush with fame.

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Before I left New York for the Six Square Miles Surrounded by Reality in sunny Michigan, I worked in the South Bronx. At my last job, I was the 8^th grade drug abuse prevention counselor at Arturo Toscanini Junior High School. While it was the geographic school for the area, with three specific elementary feeder schools, it did have a special music program. Sixth-graders from the elementary schools auditioned each spring by singing a simple song. The 99% who could stay on key made it into the music program. (Just for the record, if I had been one of the elementary school kids auditioning, it would have been the only time in my life that I was part of the 1%.) The good kids were assigned to the orchestra, or if they could really sing, chorus. The bad kids got into band, the pride of JHS 145. Parents did not show up for teacher conferences, but they packed the auditorium on concert nights.

The band director, Danny, became a close friend. He was crazy, but he got those kids making music and sounding almost professional. He did it by throwing chairs at them, skillfully enough, that no kid was ever hit by the flying furniture. Most of those little musicians had never played an instrument before. Nor could they afford to rent one. So the school supplied the instruments, but the kids couldn’t take them home to practice, because they’d be stolen.

You had to be tough to work there. Partly because the principal was even crazier than Danny. And partly because that was what the kids expected. They were, themselves, not as tough as they’d like to think. But the adults, both male and female, in their world were hard. They needed an edge to survive. So those of us, not from their world, but spending a few hours a day as guests, also needed to be tough.

That’s when I developed my don’t-fuck-with-me look. I had seen enough film noir to know the drill, and knew that a cigarette, properly angled, was a necessary prop, a valuable accessory. Somehow though I could never get the fedora placed right.

I don’t remember any of the drug abuse prevention curriculum, but I can recall some important conversations with the kids. Like which was a better TV show: Dragnet or Perry Mason? Dragnet, of course, because the stories were true. I disagreed, but that wasn’t important.

One night I had an event to attend at the school, probably a parents meeting that nobody would show up for. It was dusk as I was walking there from the bus stop. It was a main street, but deserted. I could say it was rain-slicked for that noir effect, but it wasn’t.

Off in the distance, I saw three sketchy-looking guys in their late teens or early twenties walking toward me. I couldn’t get a read on them, so I lit up a cigarette and put on my don’t fuck with me face. They approached me, stopped, and looked at me, but didn’t say anything, like they were trying to figure me out or to see if I was somebody they knew.

One of them started to talk. “Are you that guy?” he asked hesitatingly, “you know that guy who was…” His friend helped him out, “you know, the guy who was in that movie…”

“What movie?” I asked.

“M*A*S*H” the third guy said (though without the asterisks). Now this was Spring 1972, and the TV show didn’t start until September. So I said, “oh, you mean Elliot Gould.”

“Yeah,” they said in unison. “That guy. You him?”

That’s when I made the biggest mistake in my life. I said “no.”

After that it was all “good talking with you”, “have a good night”, “see you around.” But nobody fucked with anybody. And maybe two parents showed up later at the meeting.