THE LAST time I went to New York City, I became a communist. That was five years ago when Rocky, Ron and I- fresh from our Southern California ranch homes- decided to interrupt our first trip to Harvard with five days of skyscrapers, fashions, and museums. Those were the days before youth fare, so we travelled by train- three days of sleeping in our chairs by day and trying to sleep in them by night. As we got off the train in Grand Central Station, our arms were still tired from doing push-ups for exercise in the standing room between cars.

The first night in New York, I couldn't sleep in the creaky beds at the YMCA, so I woke up at six in the morning. I put on my yellow shirt, sport coat and tie, and walked down 42nd Street. Times Square was the only part of New York I had heard about. My father was born in Brooklyn, near Myrtle Avenue, and from him my brother and I learned about the push carts, the subways, and the City: "As you walk up Broadway, it's Washington Square, Union Square, Herald Square, then Times Square, boys."

I had dreamed of both New York and Cambridge. I was certain that in both places I could walk down broad, tree- lined avenues, watch elegant nineteenth-century women in long white dresses and parasols walk into carefully constructed three-story brick apartment houses, and see presidents and artists shake hands on the sidewalks.

But in New York, I was also ready to be on my guard against any suspicious underworld person who might try to steal my wallet, which had fallen out of my pocket by accident the night before- a little too easily for me to trust the city. And above all, I would become literally catatonic at the sight of anyone or anything black, from a janitor to a cat. After all, didn't they have good reason for keeping all of the black people in San Diego away from the highways and south of Division Street?

But the New York I walked into that morning, down 42nd Street from 9th Avenue, choked me with the smell of garbage and smoke. There was dog shit, even a little horse shit, all over the sidewalk, and there were kids- at six in the morning- there were kids huddling in doorways, watching me as I passed.

Mostly, I think, I was afraid of losing my wallet. A black man passed me in the early morning, and I decided that New York was certainly too dangerous a city to live in, what with black people and ragged kids on the streets and all. I stood on a street corner thinking that I had better go back to the Y and wait for Rocky and Ron.

But my father had also told me about the lights that circled the Times Building, spelling out the news, and the giant ball that dropped on New Year's Eve. No sixteen-year-old worth this three-day trip across the country would ever give up a chance to see the news blink around the Times Building and be able to describe it to two unworldly friends before breakfast.

I turned up the collar on my sports jacket and dug my hands into my pockets as far as they would go to look as tough as I could possibly look, and marched, head down, three blocks, almost to Times Square. I was watching the cracks in the sidewalk and swinging quick glances from side to side to make sure that I wasn't about to be knocked off, when suddenly I stopped and shook my head to clear it. Two feet away I saw a grown man, maybe as old as my father and the other members of the Lion's Club. He was sleeping in the gutter. A little water passed under his body to the drain at his feet. He didn't so much have a beard as straight white course hairs growing all over his face and head. He was wrapped in a super-large suit coat that didn't match his tattered pants. His stomach was enormous and there were red sores on his ankles. And two kids were sitting in a doorway with a blanket, looking at me.

I remembered that I had read in school that communism is where everyone has to wear the same thing and everyone has to eat the same thing. All that I knew about revolution was from the two pictures in my eleventh grade history textbook: the first of a vicious, almost horned Robespierre squeezing the blood from a human heart into a cup, and the second of an elegant, repentant, white-haired Louis XVI, praying before the guillotine. I also remembered the "World" section of the Sun Diego Union-Evening Tribune from one Sunday in 1957, when I was eight. On the front page was a color map of the world and a banner headline in big red letters that read "We Will Bury You!" I was so frightened that I hid the paper under the sofa and ran into my little brother's room with the comics.

But on this morning, one block from Times Square, I was looking at the first man I had ever seen who didn't have a place to sleep. I had never even imagined before that people like that existed. Maybe I was afraid that someday I might be in the same situation- and from my present possibilities- for employment that was extremely perceptive- or maybe I had always thought that everyone lived in a house pretty much like the one I lived in. In any case, I could see no reason why I should sleep in a bed while he was sleeping in the gutter. I decided that I would be a communist. I turned around and hurried back to the Y, completely forgetting the news and the lights and the Times Building. I would go to school, I thought, and read Karl Marx and no one would have to sleep in the street ever again.

AS I WALKED down the streets of New York last week, I decided that

I had changed a little, since I now felt safer in Roxbury than in New York. But I wasn't any happier about seeing drunks sleeping in the streets. And maybe my memory isn't as vivid as I had always thought it was, but this time New York seemed like rivers of filth flowing down one way streets between canyons of concrete buildings.

About thirty T-shirted freight men carried heavy packages from the side door of Saks Fifth Avenue into delivery trucks. I watched for a while as they sweated and swore, and finally I walked inside with a friend. My eyes went blurry for a second as my body had to change from a wet 85 degrees outside to an air-conditioned 70 degrees inside. "It's not so bad once you get used to it." my friend said. She explained that she used to work there ("That's the stock room we used to call the refuge from the glue factory") and showed me the multi-colored ??? and the eighty-dollar boots. I began to realize why, in Cub?, they hand you clothes as you need them, cut pretty much like everyone else's. No one in any sane country would spill quarts of sweat on the sidewalk to load delivery trucks with the stuff they sell in Saks.

The pomp and baroque decoration of the jewelry, guise and clothing stores in downtown New York may in fact be one of the images of paradise for those who shop there. All of the air-conditioned interiors seem to be consciously designed as the escape from the horrors of the facades of the buildings. Or could there be some unconscious desire to make the outside so inhuman that the insides, the real heart of middle-class life, the dressing room and the cash register, will look all the more comfortable? Maybe our real rituals are the ones between customer and sales person in Saks, the trips to the dressing room, the little dance in front of the mirror, the inquiries about price, the should-l-or-shouldn't I with the spouse, and the final "Well, we might as well because you can't take it with you."

Ritual usually develops out of unsatisfied material needs, and the subsequent desire to transcend want. Tribal rain dances were a plea to whatever controlled the material welfare of the people. The Mass represents a similar dissatisfaction with mundane needs, if only because they have been left unsatisfied, and the desire to build a larger world where such want is insignificant.