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11 In the Wilderness What did you do after you closed down ESP in 1974 and moved with your wife to Woodstock? The area, like much of upstate New York, was eco nomically depressed, and local lawyers were not responsive to my overtures to join them. We struggled for five years to make ends meet, un til my wife suggested I take the state and federal civil service exams. My grades were acceptable, so I visited various state agencies in Albany. In 1979 I was hired to an entry-level position as a staff lawyer at the New York State Department of Transportation for seventeen thousand dollars per year. It required a daily round-trip commute of three hours, and I was fifty years old. After a y ear, we rented an apartment in t he Albany area. In the course of my work, I would speak from time to time with members of the staff of the attorney general in New York City, and I eventually decided to visit New York and look for a position in the Law Department. I found one in the Mental Hygiene Bureau, which served the needs of the psychiatric hospitals and facilities for the developmentally disabled. My impressive sounding job title was Assistant Attorney General. Our oἀ ces were on the forty-sixth floor of 2 World Trade Center. We remained there for seven years, until the New York State Department of Law moved to 120 Broadway, a stately old building nearby. During my eleven years in state government, I avoided contact with friends and ESP artists, as I felt responsible for the failure of the label. On my sixty-second birthday in July 1991, I retired from government service with a small state pension and Social Security. My wife and I left New York City and returned to Acorn Hill House. In D ecember of t hat y ear, w e entered into t he licen sing agreement with ZYX to reissue the entire ESP catalog on CD. A year later, my wife and I separated. The Catskill farm we both loved was sold. I withdrew to a mountain cabin near Woodstock, living alone for a year and a half with a black Persian cat and pondering my next direction. 72 In the Wilderness 73 What happened after that, in the decade before relaunching ESP in 2005? Lost years. I returned to Manhattan. I floundered—I guess that’s the word for it. I hadn’t seen my parents for several years. So, I f elt I was f ree to go down to Florida and spend some time wi th them; it was nice . During that period my father had been placed in an assisted-living facility, which angered him, but my mother had no c hoice, as he was no w a hundred years old and susceptible to falling when he wandered about at night in the apartment. When did your parents pass away? Within that period, my father died, my mother died, my brother Norman died [December 1996], and his son. Four deaths within one year. I have a sister living in Hollywood [Florida], so I stayed with her. After my brother’s son died, his family wanted me to help a little bit. I got his affairs together, some paperwork, and I took over his little room back in New York at the Hotel New Yorker. I lived there about a year. On that floor of the hotel there was a record label, some artists living there; it was like a bohemian place. Tesla the scientist had lived on the same floor for ten years. So I stayed there, and time went by. Where did you go from there? After that, I stayed for a couple of years in my brother Steve’s building on Houston Street, which he sold recently. I have no clear recollection of what exactly I was doing. In the back of Steve’s building—he didn’t live there—he had a mezzanine , and that’s where I was staying. Then he had a party, and a friend of his, a brilliant woman who was in t he computer software business, had an apartment in Stuyvesant Town that she wasn’t using. She rented her one-bedroom apartment to me for nine hundred dollars a month. I was there for seven years. It was very comfortable; the area was nice. What animated you to start thinking about the label again? I never wanted...

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