“Was the life good? Was it bad? How should I know? It was life, the only life I ever knew, and it was alive. Intense, absorbing, filled with a kind of comradeship I never again expect to know. In those basement clubrooms in The Coops, talking late into the night, every night for years, we literally felt we were making history. Do you know what I mean when I say that? We felt that what we thought and spoke and decided upon in those basement rooms in the Bronx was going to have an important effect on the entire world out there. Now, a sensation like that is beyond good or bad. It’s sweeping, powerful. More important,” he smiles cynically, “than good or bad. And,” soberly, “infinitely more compelling than anything in that other, bourgeois world could ever be. The idea when I was twenty of having a profession? making money? becoming a middle-class American? I literally would rather have been dead than have ended up like that. I remember I sat through City College like a zombie, only waiting each day to get back to the neighborhood and the meetings and the important, righteous, just, real world.”