[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the '80s. I am Meg.

[00:20] Jessica: And I am Jessica and Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

[00:28] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines

[00:35] Jessica: And I handle pop culture.

[00:37] Meg: And today we are sitting here with an actual 84th Street Bomber who is going to introduce himself right now and Travis has just walked us through the wonderful Yorkville. And so we've gotten a little mini tour.

[00:52] Jessica: Yes, the location of the highs and lows that have been described on this podcast. Some of our childhood best times and traumas in Yorkville. Who are you, Travis?

[01:03] Travis: Who am I?

[01:04] Jessica: Introduce yourself.

[01:04] Travis: Well, Travis Myers, how are you? Lifelong Yorkville resident. All right. And yes, one of the notorious, at least notorious on your program, 84th Street Bombers.

[01:16] Jessica: Huzzah. Yay. Thank you for being here.

[01:19] Meg: And we are here.

[01:20] Jessica: Where are we?

[01:21] Travis: We're at Bailey's corner, which in my time was known as Nash's Cash Box on 85th Street and York Avenue.

[01:28] Meg: And it's interesting because we are relatively the same age and we grew up in the same neighborhood, but we had very different childhoods.

[01:37] Travis: Yes, well, we came from, although we lived just blocks away from each other, we lived in very different worlds, I'm gonna say.

[01:45] Meg: Where'd you go to school?

[01:46] Travis: I went to Julia Richman High School and I went to Wagner Middle School.

[01:49] Meg: I want to hear about Julia Richman. Very much so.

[01:52] Travis: Okay. Well, Julia Richman, for your listeners out there, I would say to make it easy, is break out your Wikipedia and take a look at it. It was one of the worst during my time, it was originally an old girls school, and then sometime, I don't know, in the '70s, late '60s, early '70s it became a co-ed school. And in my time, it was one of the worst performing high schools in New York City. Even though it's right here on 68th Street and First Avenue. What can I say? It was an awful place to go to. It was a ridiculous place to go to school, all right? It was one of the few places every borough in New York City, all right, has to have a place where a 16 year old who's just come out of Rikers Island can go to school. Because it's a law. Everybody can go to school, right? That's how it is. And it's the way it should be. The only thing is, and we can argue this point, is, should people right out of Rikers Island be going to school with the general population? Okay. And sadly, that's where my mother, you know, had to send me to school.

[02:47] Meg: Because it was the local public school.

[02:49] Travis: The local public school, exactly. They actually had cages down in. When you would go to see the guidance counselor, they had two cells where kids that were misbehaving were actually locked up in the cells. That's my hand to God. That's the truth. And, you know, like a lot of New York City schools, not just Julia Richman, but on the outside, you know, all the windows have giant gates over them. That's to keep the kids from throwing shit out the windows. You know, to protect. It's not to protect the kids from people getting into school. It's to protect people walking by from getting hit with books or toilets or whatever they wanted to throw out the windows. And, yes, that's where I went to school. And it was just a ridiculous place to go to school. And because of that, I didn't. I quit school when I was at the age of 15, which was very commonplace because only 37% of Julia Richman actually graduated. So which is a. What is that? Two thirds did not. And I'm one of those statistics. So.

[03:43] Meg: And so my next question is, I mean, because you were hanging out with a lot of kids in the neighborhood, how did you meet them?

[03:51] Travis: Well, mostly you meet. How do you meet anybody? You know, you run into people. You know, a lot of it, as we talked about before, was geographical. You know, basically for us, a lot of us lived and hung out on First Avenue. All right. You know, mostly everybody pretty much east of Third Avenue. And First Avenue was one of the last ones to go to the gentrification which was happening in the late '70s, early '80s. Okay? So a lot of, you know, poor kids. When I say working class kids, but poorer kids still lived in all these old tenement buildings that were being warehoused. Warehousing is illegal now. Of course, people still do it. When I say people, these giant corporations, you know, literally would buy up blocks and board them all up, you know, and try to force you out or buy you out one way or the other. And sooner or later, you know, everybody would be forced out of the buildings that they lived in, you know, or grew up in or their parents lived in. Some of these buildings had families that lived there for generations, but in the '80s, they were forced out for development. You know, in fact, quite often, a lot of the projects that we have in our neighborhood, you know, the Isaacs Houses up on 92nd Street, a lot of people don't realize is they were filled with families who were relocated when they were developing midtown. So when they did the same thing decades before and built all those high rises in Midtown and, you know, the business areas. Okay, those were all tenements also. All right, like if you remember where.

[05:19] Jessica: Where your PJ Clarke's is.

[05:22] Travis: One of the last few buildings, or Smith & Wollensky's is. Exactly. Those buildings are still there. Those cute little buildings are still there. But if you remember the movie Dead End, it was old Humphrey Bogart movie, which had the Dead End kids who turned into the Bowery Boys. All right, that took place on, I think, 51st street. The street sign is 51st Street, so it would be 51st Street and the river. Okay, and if what people don't know too, like York Avenue, which you're from York Avenue, right?

[05:48] Jessica: Right.

[05:48] Travis: Can you tell me what its original name was?

[05:51] Jessica: Oh, no, I don't know.

[05:52] Travis: Avenue A, really? They changed it to being nicer.

[05:56] Jessica: Well, what I'm really interested in, because, you know, we've talked about, Meg and I have talked about where we live and what our buildings were like. We talked about trick or treating. It's almost Halloween time. What it's like to trick or treat in my giant building. But you described to us, not on the podcast yet, what those apartments were like. What was it like to live in these unrenovated buildings where you guys were, you know, that were not the white brick '60s buildings, '70s buildings that we were in? It was really interesting to me to hear that.

[06:30] Travis: Okay, well, what a lot of people. Okay, so for us, again, when I say our group, because we are mostly interested in the guys that we all hung out with on 84th Street, right? We had all different backgrounds and lived in all different buildings, all right? But we were poor kids, so none of us came from high rises. And a lot of us lived in old tenement buildings, all right? And those tenement buildings typically were only 12, maybe 13ft wide, and they were what was called a railroad flat. So they were long and skinny. And usually there'd be two apartments on each floor, all right? And because back when they were built, you know, plumbing was different back then, quite often two apartments, or even four apartments would share one bathroom, or rather share one toilet and then the bath. The bathtubs were located in the kitchens, so you could heat the water up and put it into the bathtub. And hence, that's where the old word, a cold water flat comes from, because there was no hot water, you see, there was no heat in the buildings. And it was all back when they would burn coal. You know, we're going back these buildings were built in the 1800s, you know, and so, yes, they're very different, and a lot of those never changed, and that was part of why they were tearing them all down in the '70s, '80s to build these high rises. They were old, beat up, banged up, old tenement buildings.

[07:42] Jessica: Or some of you guys were living in apartments with a setup that really could have been in the late 19th century. You were living in a different time.

[07:52] Travis: A lot of my friends didn't have telephones. Now, my mother was always a modern woman, all right, and we always had a telephone growing up, but many of my friends didn't. And it wasn't even, you know, poverty was part of it. But another was that their parents grew up without one, so they didn't need one. We're spoiled today with our cell phones in our pockets. We can't go two minutes without it. But believe me, back then, we didn't need it.

[08:13] Jessica: Let's walk through a day of you're 15 years old, you're living in Yorkville, and it's time to have your social time.

[08:21] Travis: Okay? Well, if I had actually decided to go to school on that day, all right, usually it'd wait till after school time. And for us, our corner was 84th Street and First Avenue. Predominantly, we'd bounce around a little bit, but that was our main spot. And, you know, I would go and walk over and sit on a car or sit on the stoop and wait, and sooner or later there'd be two of us, and then there'd be five of us, and next thing you know, there'd be 10 or 15 of us. You know, for the most part, you know, we didn't do. We would play sports in the street. You know, we'd play football in the street. Stick ball. If you didn't have a stick, you play punch ball. We'd actually use your fist to punch the ball. Once those little hollow spaldy and split in half. We had a thing called half ball because we would play with anything we could play with. As we got older, you know, drinking beer was a big part of our life. Smoking marijuana, of course, that happened also. Hard drugs came later, but we weren't, it really wasn't a drug culture for us, I'm happy to say for a few of us, they did go in that direction. But again, that was more once they got into their twenties, not so much when we were kids. Alcohol was a big part of our lives, though. Yes. Biggest thing was, I guess, back then, we call it goofing now. Snapping. We'd sit around and insult each other all day, and that was it. I'd make fun of you, you'd make fun of me. You know, God forbid your socks didn't match or whatever it was. You were going to get a verbal beating that day, but everybody took it well and everybody gave it well.

[09:41] Meg: And you had a clubhouse, right?

[09:43] Travis: Oh, yes, on 85th Street. At that time, there were so many empty buildings and abandoned buildings in New York. We had a clubhouse which was an entire building on 85th Street between First and Second Avenue. And that was our clubhouse. You know, we all but slept there on occasion. We would sleep there even though it was a place you didn't want to sleep. And with the exception of the top floor, where a fairly insane German woman and her family lived. When I say an older German woman. Cause remember, this is the late '70s, so this is like World War II era people who immigrated to New York, and they actually owned a dry cleaners on Second Avenue, and they lived for free. They lived rent free on the top floor of that building with a bunch of, you know, hooligan teenagers running around on the first and second floor.

[10:29] Jessica: When you said that it wasn't a good place to sleep, tell us a little more about why.

[10:33] Travis: Well, it was, you know, an empty building, you know, drunkies could be walking in and out of there, homeless people, rats, mice, whatever, you know, roaches, actually. Nazis and Nazi's and Nazi's

[10:44] Meg: Nazi in the attic.

[10:46] Travis: Well, I can't. I can't attest to the Nazi thing, but you never know.

[10:50] Jessica: If you listen to the podcast, you know, that that's one of my favorite topics. So there's a Nazi on 85th Street.

[10:56] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, field trip. Field trip. Field trip.

[11:04] Meg: All right, so you guys were hanging out and, you know, you were playing in the street and you were drinking beer. Did you get into any other kind of mischief?

[11:13] Travis: Well, mischief happens. This is New York City. Yes. There was always, you know, some minor criminal activity that would take place quite often that would end up in worse criminal activity. We did have, you know, friends who went on to, you know, in their later years who did sell drugs, dealt drugs. You know, there was a drug spot in the neighborhood that was very popular, that was run by my friends. Yes. So, yes, that is a thing. There were a few of us later in life who, you know, had committed homicides. There was a racial incident one time. It's only a racial incident because that's what the news decided to write about. It was actually a situation where, and again, it was popular in the news at the time. Probably how, you know, what helped to get us a moniker as this 84th Street gang nonsense, which is actually new to us, believe it or not. And I'll get into that in a minute, but I was actually there for that incident, and we were hanging out in Enzo's Pizzeria, which was on Second Avenue and 85th Street. Two kids who used to hang out, I knew them from school, and they were from Second Avenue, and, like, 82nd Street in that area got into it with three kids from Harlem. They got into a fight. It was actually an Irish kid and a Puerto Rican kid against three Black kids. And then one of the white kids got stabbed, and one of the black kids got stabbed. And it was a whole thing, and I was there for it, but after the fact, luckily, and of course, that brought a lot of unwanted police attention to the area. And luckily for me at that time, anyway, I had already signed up for the Army, was on my way out of the neighborhood. That was a day that really, in real life, was nothing more than a mugging gone wrong, if you will, where these three kids tried to rob the other two kids, and those two kids stood up to him.

[12:44] Meg: Did they survive?

[12:46] Travis: Everybody survived. Yes. It was all minor. It was. All the injuries were minor. But as the media often does, they like to inject race into a situation that was. It was a crime, but it was three Black kids trying to rob a White and a Puerto Rican kid. Okay? And if I'm not mistaken, one White kid got stabbed, and one of the Black kids got stabbed. But it exploded all over the newspapers and the news, and people were talking about it, and of course, you know, they were mad at us. So again, we got the unwanted police attention that came with that.

[13:16] Meg: Well, that was another question I had, actually, was what your relationship was with the police, considering you eventually did become a policeman. Did you have, like, what was it like dealing with the police when you were younger?

[13:29] Travis: Pretty much like most young people. All right, we didn't hate the police, but we weren't fans of the police, because the police would tell us to get off the corner, and we're having a party on the roof. All things that we shouldn't be doing, you know, we asked for all the ill will that we got, you know, but if we were drinking too much on the corner and they came and chased us off the corner, we were mad. They would come in, and I remember, geez, two guys. One of them we used to call Ski cause he had a Polish name. And the other guy, they would come grab us on a stoop, we'd have a case of beer. They take the case of beer, throw it in the trunk and said, hit the bricks. Now, we'd be unhappy, but we didn't get arrested. We didn't get summonses. We didn't get. Our parents called. Looking back at it, they were doing us a favor, you know what I'm saying? At the time, we were unhappy with them. All right? I personally have been struck by a police officer twice in my life as a teenager. Once I was. I. Geez. Well, the first time I was younger, I was hanging out. There used to be a Carvel on 85th Street and First Avenue. Now it's a Starbucks. Used to be a movie theater right there, too. And we were hanging out really late at night. I mean, I was, like, 14/15 years old, and it was like, 01:00 in the morning. All right? Some cars had come around the corner too quickly and had an accident, and the police had come, and they were making their report, whatever. And they're talking to us, and we're telling them everything we saw, blah, blah, blah. This, that, the other thing. And this one cop, you know, very stereotypical 1970s cop. Big, broad shouldered Irish guy with the old wool uniform with those gold buttons. Guys that looked like. Back when cops looked like cops, you know? And he looks at me and he realizes that I'm, like, 14 years old. He says, what are you doing out here so late? I said, what's it to you? And he cracked me across the side of the head with one of those big, meaty Irish hands right now. He didn't call my mother. He didn't haul me in. He gave me a good smack in the head. Why? Because I did ask for it, you know? I got fresh with him. He was actually looking out for me. What are you doing? 14 years old? What are you doing here out in the street at 01:00 in the morning in New York City in 1978, '79, whatever it was. And what did I say? What's it to you? Like, I'm a tough guy, right? Well, he showed me who the tough guy was, you know, that said, the second time I got smacked.

[15:29] Jessica: Kind of an in loco parentis feeling going on here.

[15:33] Travis: Yes, exactly. It was a St. Patrick's Day parade. Now, if anybody can remember back to that time, okay, St. Patty's Day parade was a party. You were allowed to drink in the street. People would come with big coolers. And I remember bringing coolers up there and standing on the coolers to look over people's shoulders going with my parents and watching this parade. And it was band after band after band after band. And it was packed, the place. It was a great thing to go to. And so we had gone. We had all cut school that day, and we had all gone up there. It was probably like, I don't know, at least a dozen of us. And we're all drinking pretty good. I remember we were drinking Blackberry Brandy that day all right.

[16:05] Jessica: Bad situation stuff.

[16:08] Travis: That's good stuff. Especially on a chilly St. Patty's Day, you know? So we're up there, we're hanging out, and I can remember it was, what is the name of that school? Mount Saint something. But anyways, girls Catholic school when they're coming up. And there was this beautiful, I mean, beautiful Spanish Puerto Rican majorette thing with the, you know, with the stick going up and down and her, you know, kind of high cowboy boots that they wear with the short skirts. And of course, I'm with all my friends, and I'm a stupid 16 year old 84th Street tough guy, right? So what do I do? I run out there to get this girl's number. Cause I think that's a good idea, right? And as I'm trying to chatter up, you know, I just get grabbed by the back of the neck, and this big, heavy fist comes down on the back of my head, and I get thrown on the side of the concrete. And I said, okay, you know, we didn't say my bad back then, but basically, I'm sorry. I did the wrong thing. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I got up and ran back into the crowd.

[17:01] Meg: I mean, honestly, you did do that in front of maybe thousands of police officers if it was a St. Patrick's Day Parade.

[17:08] Travis: If I may, I did ask for what I got.

[17:11] Meg and Jessica: Field trip. Field trip? Field trip. Field trip.

[17:18] Jessica: You mentioned that you were talking to and playing with and hanging out with kids who were not Irish American. What were race relations like in the 84th Street gang?

[17:30] Travis: For us, we were all mixed. I mean, everybody was different, you know, myself, you know, if you look at me, you probably think, oh, yeah, the Irish guy from Yorkville, right? I got eight different bloods that go through me. Granted, they're all Caucasian, they're all White bloods, you know, but Eastern European, Irish, English, Swedish, Norwegian, I can go on. I got eight of them. All right. My friends were mixed up, too. We had a lot of Hungarian kids, because there was a large Hungarian group, gypsy kids that lived on Second Avenue, all right? And some on First Avenue, a lot of Irish. Because the Irish there. Lots of Puerto Ricans. You know, I would say we had more Puerto Ricans on the East Side then than we do now. And again, it has to do with poor people being pushed out. Well, same with the Irish. Yeah, a lot of people have Irish last names, but if I will. They're not Irish. Does that make sense to you? They're not the Irish working class that Yorkville was known for. Yorkville, as you know, was a German neighborhood. It started as a German neighborhood. Do you ladies know how Yorkville actually started? The greatest naval disaster in American history? It went on fire in. I don't want to say, I don't know, the very early 1900's when all the Germans still lived in the East Village. It was like, I don't know, 600 people died in this fire. It was a terrible, The Slocum I want to say that sound right? The Slocum. Okay. Like, kind of like a tour ship. They were going up and down the East River on a little luncheon tour. But the thing was, it was all women and children that died. Cause that's who was on this thing. Cause it was a church group that went out. So what happened was, you had all of these families that were now only fathers. They lost all their families. They were poor. They were destitute. They had nothing going on. Many of them moved up here, okay? And 86th Street was the next big street, because they were just building this neighborhood at the time. And so a lot of these men, who were now forlorn, family less, you know, they got factory jobs and moved up here to the newer area that was being built, and it became like a mini Germantown. And then, of course, as they had new families, it became very, very German. If you remember, even now, there's still one or two places around. But when we were kids, Bremen House.

[19:23] Jessica: And Kleine Konditerei and all of those. Schaller & Weber is, like, the only holdout that I can think of.

[19:30] Travis: Heidelberg is still there. For us, cause Heidelberg was always a little expensive. Ideal Restaurant on 86th Street.

[19:35] Jessica: Loved The Ideal. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

[19:38] Travis: I mean, it was the stew.

[19:39] Jessica: They made some kind of a stew. My brother and I would go and, like, belly up to the counter, and.

[19:44] Travis: We're like, yeah, potato pancakes that were the size of the plate. I used to eat at The Ideal all the time. All the time. I loved it. And so it was very, very German. And, you know, and then the Irish came, you know, and they were all the working guys, the working families that did everything for the city. I mean, everything. When we were kids, and we were. We were the leftover of that. Like some of the photographs that I showed you before the Jurek brothers. All right, there was Lutzian and her sister Ophelia. Father drove a cab and the mother had a little hot dog wagon on 86th Street. If you ever had a hot dog by a bleach blonde woman on 86th Street, that was Anya, which means mother in Hungarian, but that's what we all called her. And she was the hot dog lady. And that's how they worked. My father was a carpenter. He was a before we got what they call the old Irish divorce. You're familiar with that term, right? You know, you go out to get a pack of smokes and you never come back. That's what happened to us when I was about eleven. But prior to that, you know, he was a carpenter. He drove truck, he drove taxi for a little while. These were working guys. Lots of cops, firemen, sanitation workers came from this neighborhood. Very big, you know, steelworkers. 580 Union, 32B. You know, most of your maintenance men and doormen all over New York City came from Yorkville. It was just that way, just the way groups moved to different neighborhoods. Quite often, jobs come from different neighborhoods, too. Like, I can't tell you who's sitting at the bar here, all right? But I would venture to guess any one of these old guys here are probably 580 guys. Iron workers. Because that's what we did here. You go up to Ryan's Daughter Pub, you go up here to Phil Hughes Bar, you're gonna find iron workers. That's what people do in this neighborhood.

[21:10] Meg and Jessica: Field trip. Field trip. Field trip. Field trip.

[21:17] Meg: When you guys were hanging out and you ran into someone like Jessica on the street or walked by her, what did you think?

[21:24] Travis: Well, first we'd probably be asking for a number. You know?

[21:27] Jessica: Don't forget, I looked like I was nine. Probably not.

[21:32] Meg: I guess I'm asking about like, you know, the relationship to prep school kids.

[21:36] Travis: Well, for the most part, nobody cared. I mean, we would have prep school kids that would come in and out. We had a very, very nice young girl who I liked very much, who was a Marymount School of New York girl. Man, she came for money. You go to Marymount School, you got money. As far as I'm concerned? I don't know. I know as soon as I hear prep school kids, there's money. Because you have to have money in order to send your kids to these schools. Even if you're breaking your ass to do it, it still costs money because you're doing that on top of the rest of your life. So if ever yourselves or friends of yours who want to disparage your parents because you didn't know they broke their ass to send you to these schools and they wanted to make sure you were safe and you got a decent education, okay? Now, there wasn't for us that I could think of any sort of jealousy or hatred or anything like that. In fact, we like to hang out with anybody. You know, if you were cool, you wanted to hang out. Just back to the race thing. If you, you know, if you were cool, we hung out with you. Half of us were Puerto Rican kids, you know, my brother Henry, he's a Puerto Rican kid, you know, hang out with us. And we loved him as much as anybody else. I call him my brother because we lived together since we're 12 years old.

[22:34] Jessica: Tell us a little bit about that, about Henry and him being embraced by your family.

[22:38] Travis: All right, so me and Henry, we met in Robert F. Wagner Middle School in 7th grade. And, I don't know, he was probably 12/13 years old, something like that, you know. When do you start junior high school? 11, about that, you know, so we were probably about 12, maybe 13. He somehow thought it was a good idea to go and live in our clubhouse because he was having problems at home, you know, he didn't have the best home life. And was it that much better than mine? I couldn't tell you. But he wasn't happy. And so he was gonna stay at this clubhouse, right? And I said, no, man, you can't. You can't stay there. You know, there's rats there. You can know who's gonna be walking in and out of there in the middle of the night. You can't do that because it's not a group of us hanging out, drinking beer. You're by yourself sleeping. Can't do it, right? I said. I said, yeah, well, we didn't think. We thought we were men. In fact, that's an old thing, too. A Yorkville guy will tell you there are no, there are no boys in Yorkville, all right? Only men. And I know I'm getting waxing a little old fashioned there, but that was the kind of shit that we used to say. But anyway, what was I saying? So I said, no, you know what? Come spend the weekend with my house at my place until this all blows over and things get better for you, right? And long story short, he never left. He lived with us, you know, all through junior high school. I went to Julia Richman. He actually went to Chelsea Vocational school. Back then. We used to have vocational schools. Sadly, they don't have them anymore because it was a fantastic thing to have, especially for poor working class people. He went for electrical installation, so you could actually leave. If he had graduated the 12th grade, he could step in as an electrician's apprentice at 18 years old. I mean, by the time you're 24, 25, you're a journeyman. I mean, you're an electrician, you're making money, you're in the union. It was a great system. And to my knowledge, Chelsea is gone, and Samuel Gompers High School, which was in the Bronx, is also gone. I don't think there exists a vocational school anymore, which I think personally is tragic because there are so many young people. Well, first of all, we all need plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and there's nowhere to do it anymore. It's a terrible, terrible thing.

[24:26] Jessica: We can have a whole separate podcast about the degeneration of the educational system in New York, and we'll invite Burt for that one. Cause he's got a lot to say.

[24:35] Travis: Quite often make the joke that I am a victim of the New York City public school system. All right? I never had a good day at school in my life. It turns out, later on, well, not later on. Part of moving up to the East Side. We used to live down in the Village on 11th Street and Hudson. All right? And we left that area. I went to PS41 because my mother had found a better program for me up here because it turns out I was dyslexic. But in 1970, they really didn't get it. It took a little while to fix. I remember Miss Pondman, my third grade teacher in PS41, was the one, and she was a very nice lady, too, but she was the one that figured it out. And they would run me through tests. They would. On one hand, they would tell my mother, you know, we think your son is gifted. He's really intelligent, but he can't read. And it took them a while to put two and two together. But you don't have years to lose at that age. You know, you go to school for, what, nine months of the year, all right? And next thing you know, you've gone through three of those and you still can't read. You got a problem. And catching up was very difficult.

[25:30] Meg: And now you're a writer.

[25:32] Travis: How about that? How about that? Part of that is because I'm teamed up with my sister, who is the smart one, all right? My sister Natasha is a very smart woman. And so I'm the one who has the stories. And you get me going, and I can tell you a million stories, she puts them into book form.

[25:48] Meg: I just read your first book, Sister Margaret: A Tommy Keane Novel, and there was a 12 year old kid who's the runner for Terry Callahan at Rafes.

[25:57] Travis: It's on 92nd between First and Second.

[25:59] Meg: Was that based on a real person?

[26:01] Travis: Everybody in the books, okay, the stories themselves and all the characters are composites of real people. Okay? So I'll take several different crimes and mix them and wrap them around one detective. So it might be my story, might be your story, might be my brother's story, and I'll braid them together because, you know, otherwise nobody could have that many things happen to him personally, you know? So you have to make it more interesting and put it into a book. And when we first, my sister and I first decided to do this back in, I don't know, 2017, 2018, you know, were we gonna write a 600 page memoir of Travis and his life in the police department? And we kinda got the idea that if we make it fictional, it's much easier to tell the stories and make them more interesting. Make them. They're pretty grim, but more fun. Or as you say, a page turner. Okay. But also it keeps us out of court because I don't have to answer to anybody. Cause it's fiction and it says so right on the first page. But yes, they are all composites of different people. And I won't tell you here who any of these characters are, but once we turn the microphone off, I'll tell you all kinds of stories if you want to hear them.

[27:08] Meg: I was just interested, especially in this 12 year old kid who's basically an apprentice, to seem like a kind of mobbed up guy.

[27:17] Travis: Exactly. Yes, he exactly is. When I was a kid, I worked at a place called Willy's Saloon. All right. My first job ever, I worked in a candy store on Madison Avenue. Oh, it was a terrible job. Sounds like a great job for a kid. But all I did was package candy. It was a true candy store.

[27:31] Jessica: Was it Penny Candy on Madison. Like in the eighties, it was like.

[27:36] Travis: On between 80th and 81st on Madison Avenue.

[27:40] Jessica: Penny Candy. We would go and get. So this is so insane. Oh, yes. My friend Nina, who was also in, she's on East End Avenue, we would do the most pathetic ever magic show in front of The Met with a hat out. We get money and then spend it where you worked at Penny Candy.

[28:02] Travis: Very good. Very good. So. Yep. And what I would do all day is when I would work. I would go in there and you got paid nothing. It was like a $1.50 an hour back then. And I would just package things because they had their own stuff that they would package to put out. And so you want to see a gift wrapper come Christmas time?

[28:17] Jessica: You're the guy.

[28:18] Travis: This guy. Because I did it a thousand times a day when I worked there. But then I got this great job at Willy's Saloon, which was on 81st and 3rd, and I was the dishwasher on Sundays only, okay? But I'll tell you how I parlayed that into other things back then, people don't realize, okay, or remember. But I'll remind you, there were no Mexicans in New York at the time, okay? All the kitchen staff everywhere was Chinese, all right? So they had two Chinese fellas that worked the kitchen of Willy's Saloon every shift, you know, two shifts a day, all day, all night. They broke their ass because it was a late night kitchen. I went to like 2:00 or 03:00 in the morning, except for Sunday. That was their one day off. And on that day, they had me and this Irish kid that worked the grill, all right? Because I was, again, I was only 12, so I wasn't cooking. I just washed. But when we washed, it was actually in a sink with tide detergent and we would wash the dishes, all right? I learned more in that bar than I ever learned in school about people, about getting along people, about talking people about the neighborhood, about all kinds of things. Everything would come through there, okay? Because the beauty of a bar, especially in New York City, okay, is at one seat, okay? One stool, right there could be a million dollar stockbroker and he's having a conversation with a plumber. And next to him is a cop who's having a conversation with a gangster, all right? And they all live in a two or three block radius. And, you know, the stockbroker's kids might be prep school girls like yourselves, you know, but the plumber, his son is me.

[29:49] Meg and Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip. Field trip.

[29:56] Travis: Everybody can know everybody, you know? Unless you're the guy that locks himself up in your apartment and never leaves. We all know somebody. That whole six degree of separation thing is very, very true. Already we've got. We've only known each other for a couple hours before we started talking here. And we're already saying, I remember that. I remember that. I remember him. I remember her. And it happens. And the more we get to know each other, the more we will shock the shit out of each other about how close we actually are, besides, you know, the age group, but the neighborhood and being in New York City as a whole. And that's happened to me from people from the Bronx, from Brooklyn, whatever. Once we get chatting up, you really find interesting things about, about people. But I kind of go off track there. But working there at Willy's Saloon, to relate it to kind of to Shane's character from the book. There was a guy who's still around, he lives on 80th Street, John Pierce. And John Pierce was a bartender at Willy's saloon. He'll never know what a great person he was in my life. He's probably, you know, I don't know, between 10 and 15 years older than me. And he worked the day shift at Willy's saloon for many, many years. And Willy, by the way, Willy Morrison has passed, passed many years ago. He owned like six bars in New York City. You know, he owned the West 4th St. Saloon,the Good Old Days, Willys, which was named after him, and several other places that I can't remember. But anyway, John would do things like, he would give me a couple of bills and I would run up to King Karol records on 86th Street, and I would buy whatever he told me to buy for the jukebox. I would go back and he would let me keep anything that came out of the jukebox. So for me at that age, it was a really good introduction to music. Then sometimes he would give me a wad of bills because remember, there was no computers back then, all right, nothing could be done online. He'd give me a couple hundred dollars, all right, I would go down to Madison Square Garden and buy 20 tickets for, I don't know, Billy Joel, Rod Stewart, The Police, you name it, I would buy these tickets, and those were tickets for the bar. So the entire bar? Well, not the entire bar, but 10-20 people would go to these shows. And Travis always got to go because he went to get the tickets. So my tip, or my payment for the trip was to get to go. So here I am, 12,13,14,15 years old, going to see shows at Madison Square Garden with a whole bunch of cool ass bar people, guys and girls, you know, guys that you looked up to, girls that you just thought were fantastic because, you know, what do you know about girls when you're 13? I go back to junior high school in 7th, 8th grade. What did you do this weekend? Oh, I went and saw Rod Stewart. What did you do? You know why? Because I had a job. It was a great way to grow up. A bar like the one we're sitting in right now can be a hub of activity for the entire neighborhood. Willy sue, in that same place, we had an apartment across the street. That's why it was so perfect for me. So my sister would come home from school, and if there was a homeless guy or a junkie or just a creep sitting on the stoop or on the corner or followed her home because she was a cute little Catholic school girl, right? You know, my sister went to Catholic school, unlike me and my brother. What she would do is not go in. She'd go across and see John or Dominic or one of the other guys and say, guys, can you make sure I get in all right? And they would, because everybody knew everybody.

[32:54] Meg: I actually want to do a story about the guys who protected us. They're like the doormen and the cab drivers and

[33:01] Travis: Make my sister a guest for that one. Cause she's got all kinds of girly stories. I could tell you stories about me standing up for people, but I think maybe hearing them from a woman would be more interesting.

[33:10] Jessica: But that's the thing. New Yorkers, real New Yorkers, are actually polite, super friendly, and look out for each other. And I would love to hear from your perspective as the one who did the looking out, first as a kid and then as a cop. Like, what was that like for you?

[33:30] Travis: I'll answer the rude part, okay? And this is something that I've gotten from people from all over the country and all over the world who think New Yorkers are rude. I bullshit, all right? And I'll tell you what we are. We're direct, and that's a big difference, okay? Because I've brought people here. I was actually talking to a fellow, another podcast guy, The 500 Section Lounge. I've been on there a couple of times, really nice guys. And they tell me they're coming to New York stories. They said, no, Times Square is not New York.

[33:56] Jessica: Exactly.

[33:56] Travis: That's not New York, okay? Bailey's Corner is New York. Ryan's Daughter is New York, all right? And you can come in here and you can have a conversation with anybody. Strangers will buy you a beer. And it's, you know, you just start chatting each other up, and you can have a really interesting evening. And these people who, if something is obviously wrong, vile, dangerous, will stand up for you. Perfect strangers will. And we always grow up like that. Like, back to the whole 84th Street gang thing. Many times, these awful, heathen, low life 84th Street guys we've chased down numerous purse snatchers back in the day, grab bad guys. You know, not that my friends didn't also do bad things, but I could tell you stories. Absolutely. You know, where somebody be running down the begging, stop him, stop him. And we were the guys that caught him because it was the right thing to do. We were talking about poor old Annie up there. We saw her and poor old crippled up, bent over badly Annie, we always took her groceries in for her, always helped her with, how are you gonna let a poor old lady carry her stuff home?

[34:49] Meg and Jessica: Field trip. Field trip. Field trip. Field trip.

[34:56] Travis: When I was a kid, okay? And I don't care what block you lived on, there were 30 kids to play with, all right? And if you didn't like any of those kids, you go right around the corner and it was another 30 kids you could play with or more, all right, back to, like, hanging out at 84th Street as a teenager. That was a couple of blocks from my house, but I had found a home there with these guys, right? You know, like I said, you know, one guy hangs out, two, then five, then ten, on a nutty night, there could be 30 or 40 teenagers hanging out. We could go down to John Jay Park in the summertime where they had the pools, all right? Because guys would go with bolt cutters and cut holes in the fences. Fences. And we go swimming at midnight, you know, I'm not exaggerating. There could be like 150-200 kids hanging out in there because all the different groups would show up to go swimming. It was great. It was great. Well, we would all go to bars and clubs and stuff, but there was a particular club that somebody had done as like a teen club. It didn't last very long. It was called The Wave. Look it up when you're doing your research stuff. I don't think it was open for maybe a year, maybe two years at the most, all right? And we would go down there and it would be, you know, us, 84th Street guys, there'd be a thousand kids in a place would be packed. What street? In the Sixties down by where the movie, you know, where the movie theaters are? And I can't tell you. Is that 60th, like 66th, 62nd in that, in that area, okay? And it was a corner place called The Wave. And, you know, Italian connection guys would come down from Harlem, you know, 84th Street guys, Spanish guys like the Apaches or the Comanches, with all these different, you know, gang guys again. We never called ourselves to be gang. We were just guys that hung out, you know, but that's what you get tagged with. But it was really a great thing. And yes, sure, sometimes there were problems, there were fights, but if guys didn't have shirts and names, it would still happen, because there's always somebody going to try to bully somebody else. But it was a great thing. And it was a legit discotheque for kids. They didn't serve alcohol. And of course, people bring their own alcohol in and bring drugs in and whatever, but it was a good, good time. Those days are long gone.

[36:48] Meg and Jessica: Field trip. Field trip. Field trip. Field trip.

[36:55] Travis: The 84th Street gang. Yeah. As I think I told you, we never considered ourselves a gang, per se. And I was a little surprised how anybody in the world would be interested as far as the media turned out to be interested. And a bunch of nobodies, you know, poor kids hanging out on First Avenue. I wouldn't trade my time as a poor New York City street kid as my teenage years. Although I could tell you some awful stories for anything in the world. All right. We had a great time as kids. Most of my friends that I'm still in contact with looked back on it with fondness. You know, it's what we knew that was our life.

[37:30] Jessica: We haven't even gotten to the.

[37:33] Travis: We didn't talk about 84th Street at all. No, no. We've just been sitting here chatting about everything else.

[37:38] Meg: Well, I think we need to have you back on the podcast, if you'll have us.

[37:42] Travis: If I'll have. Nothing would make me happier. Ladies, I would love to come sit with you again.

[37:46] Jessica: Part two.

[37:47] Meg: Part two. In the winter, in the spring. We're gonna have more Travis. More Travis all the time.

[37:53] Jessica: So, yes, it's happening. I love that. More Travis all the time. How do you feel about that?

[37:58] Travis: I'm down.