A taste of wine

August 24, 1969

I got the call last Friday before my duties were done.

The ward sergeant yelled for me to come to the phone. Since I never get calls on base, I thought it must be serious.

I thought it might be my mother or my girlfriend.

I envisioned that time I came home from school to find my uncle Pete on the front porch with news about my grandfather’s dying.

So all more was the surprise when the voice on the other end of the line was Pauly’s.

“Are you coming home this weekend?” he asked.

“Yes, I have a pass,” I said, wondering what this was all about.

My pass was suspended last weekend because some idiot got sick and I wound up on a helicopter flying over some large field in New York State where they had a concert going on. We didn’t land. But I saw the whole mess from the air while clinging to the strap, scared shitless about falling.

I heard a few days ago, Hank had been there and got flown out sick.

Perhaps he’d gotten ill from the trip to the shore two weeks ago Pauly had orchestrated, and from which I was still recovering. This made me wonder what he was up to.

“Perfect,” he said. “Wear your uniform.”

Then, he hung up.
Vince drove us north and left me off at the George Washington Bridge Port Authority building like he normal did when we went awol during the week. I took a train to the other Port Authority in Time Square because I didn’t know the buses out of Hackensack as well as I did the ones I took back and forth from New York to Paterson with Hank.

When I got home, my uncles told me I had a phone message and that my friend said it was urgent.

Pauly answered on the first ring.

“Are you home?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good, we’ll pick you up in the morning,” he said, and then after a slight delay. “You have your uniform?”

“Yes,” I said. “But why…”

But he was already off the line.

The next morning, someone rang the front bell.

I remembered two weeks ago when I warned Pauly not to come to the front door after he, Bill, and Bob had rousted me out for the trip to the shore.

Through the glass this time, I saw Bob instead of Bill, and down at the curb, Bob’s VW Beetle with Pauly in the passenger seat.

My uncles wanted to know where I was going wearing my uniform. Since I didn’t know myself I couldn’t tell them and hurried down the front stairs and somehow managed to cram myself into the Beetle’s back seat.

“Do you mind telling me why I’m dressed up to go trick or treating?” I asked Pauly when Bob pulled the car into traffic.

“We have a dinner engagement and the girls told me we have to bring wine,” he said.

“I don’t get what that has to do with me?”

Pauly turned and looked at me.

“None of us are old enough to buy booze, and all the people we rely on normally won’t buy us any,” he said.

“That’s because you still owe them money,” Bob pointed out/.

“A small matter,” Pauly said.

“Not to them. Especially because you also owe them money for pot.”

“So where do I fit into this?” I asked. “I’m 18. I’m not old enough to buy booze either.”

“Ah, but you’re wrong,” Pauly said. “What right minded patriotic store keeper would deny you, one of the boys destined to serve country over seas?”

“I’m not going over seas,” I said, although I knew I was still disputing the orders that had me slated for Vietnam.

“Ah, but the store keeper won’t know that.”

“So you want me to lie?”

“Lie? That’s such a harsh word. Fib is better.”

“So it’s still illegal for him to sell me booze, whether I’m a soldier or not.”

“True. But he’ll sell it to you anyway. He wouldn’t deny you with your short hair and your uniform.”

“Damn you, Pauly. Why are you always getting me wrapped up in your schemes?”

“Scheme? This is no scheme. We have several young ladies who are cooking their hearts out for us as we speak and all they ask of us is to bring them a few bottles of wine.”

“Now it’s a few bottles…”

“Hush, boy. Let’s not bicker over this. I’m not asking for you to pay for all the bottles yourself.”

“You want me to pay?”

“But not for all of it.”

“Why should I pay for any of it?”

“If you imbibe of the food, then you should share in the expense of the drink.”

“I don’t recall anyone inviting me to any dinner.”

“Another petty detail. How can anyone refuse you when you’re bringing the drink?” Pauly asked, displaying once more his usual circular logic.

“You might as well just do it,” Bob said. “He won’t let you out of the car until you agree.”

So I agreed.

Pauly had Bob pull up around the corner from the liquor store so that the store keeper wouldn’t see us together.

“No use tempting fate,” he explained, and then put some money in my hand.

“What kind of wine do you want?” I asked.

“Use your judgment,” he said.

“I don’t know anything about wine,” I said.

Beer, I knew. We could buy nearly all the watered down low alcohol beer we wanted on base. But wine was a mystery to me.

“You’ll figure it out,” Pauly assured me.

Less than confident, I went into the store. The store keeper was busy with another customer and so I wandered up and down the aisles staring at labels that were meaningless to me.

A moment later, the clerk – an elderly man with gray hair and classes – asked what I needed.

“I need some wine,” I said. “For a dinner.”

The man looked me over and my age easily registered in his eyes. But so did some deeper sadness I didn’t understand. He seemed full of pain, especially when he looked at my uniform.

I thought he was going to throw me out. But instead, he smiled.

“Where you stationed, boy?” he asked.

I told him.

“I just finished basic training,” I said. “I’m waiting to ship out for advanced infantry training.”

“My son trained there,” he said, sounding said. “They sent him out to Fort Sills. He was artillery.”

I thought he was going to ask me if I knew his son. But he went mum about it, and looked even sadder than he had.

“What kind of wine did you need?” he asked.

This was like asking me what lay on the dark side of the moon. I shrugged.

“Whose the dinner with?” he asked.

“Some girls I know,” I said, although in truth, I didn’t know them.

“Ah, a shipping out dinner,” he said. “Then you’re going to need something special.”

He brought me to the counter and then produced a wide green bottle with dust on it.

“I was hoping to buy two bottles if that’s possible,” I said.

“Not a problem,” he said, and found another bottle equally dusty. “My son had this kind of wine for the party when he shipped out. It’s fruitier than most wines, but I’m sure the girls will like it.”

I tried to pay, but he wouldn’t take the money.

“It’s my gift,” he said. “If you come back safe, then you can come tell me how you and the girls like it.”

I tried to thank him. He shook his head.

“Just enjoy,” he said.

I made my way out to the car.

Pauly was ecstatic.

“See!” he told Bob. “I told you it would work.”

Bob drove off grumbling.

I felt bad for the old man, but couldn’t say why. I also felt like I had misled him, though in truth, I did have orders for Vietnam, orders that I would not likely have to follow.

Bob drove to West Paterson and through the winding streets on the western slope of Garret Mountain. He pulled into a driveway that already had several cars parked in it.

“We’re here,” Pauly said. “Let me take one of those bottles.”

I suppose he wanted to get credit for bringing in the booze. So I handed him one.

Alf was there. So was Garrick. I didn’t know the women until Pauly introduced me: Jane, Ann, and Margaret.

Pauly was apparently dating Jane.

Ann was some kind of chiropractor, and Jane was in training to become one.

They had incense burning, and a buffet set up on the table with cheese, crackers and other stuff.

They told us to help ourselves.

“That’s caviar,” Ann told me, pointing to a plate with black stuff on it.

Following the example of others, I put some of a few crackers and some crackers on a plate and sat down in one of the chairs.

I was way out of my league here and I knew it.

I felt embarrassed without having done anything.

Then I bit into the cracker and nearly choked.

The caviar tasted awful, but I couldn’t just spit it out in public. I saw a similar reaction on Pauly’s face, and Garrick’s, and Bob’s. Pauly handed us each a glass of wine, and I gulped my down to wash the horrible taste away.

But the wine lingered on my tongue like an old memory, and for some reason, I kept thinking of the old man, and his son.

Somehow I got through the rest of the dinner without totally making a fool of myself, mostly by keeping quiet, drawing some notice from the three girls who commented that I didn’t talk a lot.

Later, Bob drove me home without Pauly, who went off with Jane.

I finished out my pass the next day in Washington Square Park, just taking in the sights and listening to David Peal sing.

But I could not get the old man out of my mind. I still can’t now that I’m back at the hospital. I keep looking at the wounded veterans who have come here from Vietnam and wonder if any of them was the old man’s son. But I know better. I know that while I’ll be going home soon, his son never will be.

And I keep tasting that wine.

A brave new world?

Friday, October 16, 2015

I heard on the news this morning about how rail road companies are guarding against people wandering onto tracks and how to detect objects on the tracks that might derail trains.

Maybe I’m a little too much like Mark Twain in that I am nostalgic for a simpler and more innocent past.

As a boy, the tracks were always my pathway to some other world, some better place, a connection that if I touched the metal I could feel in Chicago or San Francisco.

I wandered tracks every chance I got. In fact, the tracks came out on Crooks Avenue allowed me to go to downtown Paterson or downtown Passaic, depending on which way I turned. I often crossed them during my walk to junior high school. Later, when I cut high school, I often wandered down to the freight tracks, hopping on a train that took me north to places like Mahwah and Suffern.

People have always gotten hurt on rail road tracks, a fact of life that in the past did not matter nearly as much as it does today.

Sociologists note that as a society moves from working class to middle class, they become more protective of its kids – part of the social conflict underway currently in America.

I wrote about a playground this week that is not a playground, but a health center, a gated community with rubberized floor and a variety of devices kids have to be educated to use before they are allowed to play there.

In the past, playgrounds were risky places, where kids learned the most basic rule of life: how not to get hurt in a harsh world.

Our movement into middle class also brings up the battle of Planned Parenthood – and the massive amount of abortions it does yearly. In the past, families had lots of kids, and kids often did not survive out of childhood. Like most mammals, we managed to maintain society through breeding. A more protective childhood allows most if not all kids to survive, and so like Huxley’s Brave New World, we select sooner who will be allowed to live, doing away with the pain of losing a child after being born.

The video tapes that right to life activists doctored were far less offensive for the presumption of Planned Parenthood’s ghoulish selling of body parts as was the tone and attitude un-undoctored that showed just how uncaring these defenders of women’s rights were: they cold, calculating and unsympathetic to the idea that they wield the power of life and death. They have become the technicians in the Brave New World who do not see themselves as playing god, but merely stamping out defective parts on an assembly line. This is offensive.

This, of course, is mostly a middle class problem. Immigrants and poor still tend to overproduce babies, and thus continue to concept that more is better for the survival of the species.

The other reason for over protected middle class children has to do with the expense of raising kids these days. Medical and educational costs have been inflated by a greedy system and so each kids becomes nearly as precious as parents seem to see them, and to lose a child to some unfortunate accident on a playground or a rail road track is to lose an investment that cannot simply be made up by having another child.

Over protected kids, of course, produce spoiled, self-indulgent adults, who assume that because they were treated special in childhood that they must be special in the real world, and so we get this concept of entitlement: they can do what they want to do when they want to do it, regardless of the impact it has on others around them.

Some anthropologists have also noted that the safer a society feels the more stupid and reckless individuals become. Intelligence is a survival mechanism, something that is often produced in order to overcome danger.

Until 9/11 America has largely escaped many of the dangers faced in other parts of the world, a perfect breeding ground for an overly careless population. And because many grew up with the parents protecting them, they submit more easily to state mandated Homeland Security measures that turn America into one vast prison, subjecting us to searches we would not have tolerated a generation ago all in the assumption of keeping us safe.

I miss the rail road tracks. I miss the idea that I have to look out for myself and protect myself, and cannot rely on some parent or government to make the landscape so safe I never encounter danger.

But as train tracks get closed off, and cars are built so they can run themselves, we grow less intelligent and more reliant on social institutions or the computer apps to do our thinking for us.

It is very sad.

Lipstick on a pig

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

We live in a brave new world – and if I can mix my metaphors – one filled with doublespeak.

In particular the concept of sharing, which is not sharing at all, but taking, and where the concept of “greed is good” seems to continue to benefit the wealthy over everybody else.

We get a lot of talk about entitlements for the poor and working class, but hear very little about how entitled the most affluent feel when it comes to following rules.

In my city, we have abated projects that cater to the rich, while saddling the cost of schools and county on the backs of more traditional home owners. This appears to be a kind of urban renewal, in which traditional owners eventually get driven out by higher and higher taxes, which in turn allows their properties to be redeveloped – if not into insanely high residential towers, then instead into two family homes that are really three or more. Still worse is the fact that what replaces the idea of The American Dream of home ownership is a new wave of rentals. In truth, homeownership has been a dinosaur since the Reagan Era, when those who own homes became sitting ducks for local taxes.

Of course, new comers to the city have an argument that they are taxed at a significantly higher assessed value than residents who have lived in the city for decades. But this is something of a false argument since new residents knew what the cost of taxes would be coming in and over the long run have invested much less to the tax base than those living in the city for decades.

The latest schemes involve a pack of whacko drivers scooting around the city pretending to be taxi cabs, only they are not regulated by anybody, and so we live with a pointlessly ineffective government who cannot control anything that happens with these vehicles until they have done whatever evil they have done.

This is kind of underground economy, selling services the way drug dealers do, providing ways of getting around laws that have not yet caught up with technology. This greed is called sharing, when in fact drivers – who believe they are getting a good deal – are exploited in order to provide services to an elite too indignant to wait for traditional cab services. Instead of providing apps for cabs, the city throws up its hands and sighs, saying it can do nothing.

The latest scheme most benefits the wealthiest in our city. Properties with the most elite occupants are suddenly becoming hotels, sponsored by some national organization that does not honor zoning laws, and while fully taxed, benefits those who need the wealth the least, people who have already established themselves and seek to eek out a bit more capital on their residential investments. Many of these are real estate companies or developers, who are doing business in the pretense of offering underground service. This is not sharing in the way hippie communes meant it.

This concept of sharing is nearly atrocious as abatements in steering even more wealth to the rich, if not quite as unfair as the tax structure associated with capital gains – where people who actually do hard work to make their money must pay a higher rate than those who make their money by investment.

The concept for the city is that somehow some of this new found wealth will trickle down to other less fortunate people such as local business. Trickle down didn’t work under Ronald Reagan because wealth tends to horde wealth, and while tourists that use these facilities might spend locally, it won’t be in my hometown, it’ll be across the river in NYC. We of course are trying to mirror New York, but as President Obama once pointed out in another context, it’s like lipstick on a pig.

In the end, all we are really seeing in one more aspect of wealth distribution in which the wealthy benefit most.

This concept of sharing might be best compared to the Soviet model of socialism: those on top do best, the rest have to suffer whatever inconveniences the system imposes.

That wedding long ago

Monday, October 12, 2015

The boardwalk is a haven for weddings.

This day a few days after John Lennon’s 75th birthday is no different – although it took one complete stroll around Asbury Park and nearby Ocean Grove before I found it.

The weddings vary, from simple to ostentatious, sometimes with tiny tots in suits and ties as ring bearers, sometimes not.

The ring bearers when they do take part are usually dressed up, and uncomfortable, a fact that appears to make them misbehave. One kid last year -- part of a photo shoot on the beach -- shed his shoes and appeared to be heading towards the ocean tiny tuxedo and all when they corralled him.

These scenes and others remind me of the day when I was that small and my aunt, Alice, got married.

I was about seven at the time, and extremely jealous of Big Pete, who was to become my uncle.

Alice had filled in as my mother, when my mother was committed to Graystone – the now demolished mental institution in Morristown.

Alice took the job seriously, singing songs to me, reading stories to me, making me feel loved when I already felt abandoned.

Years later, after Alice’s untimely death at 41, Big Pete told the story of his first official date with Alice – how he first had to run the gauntlet of Alice’s very large brothers, only to discover that she was bringing me along on the date.

I didn’t serve as ring bearer the way these poor kids did in Asbury Park, but I was given the royal treatment at that wedding long ago, dressed up, and shown off, as if I really was Alice’s child.

For the family, this was one of the most significant events, the marriage of my grandfather’s youngest daughter, a woman that was his favorite, and perhaps the favorite of the entire family, all of whom seemed to love her as much as I did. I know her brother, Ritchie (who I later cared for when booze drove him over the edge – he never recovered from Alice’s death) celebrated her wedding as if it was his own. No two siblings were ever so close as those two were, and during her life, Alice managed to save Ritchie from himself, just as she saved me.

I guess it seems strange to think of ancient history while strolling Asbury Park, but I did, feeling the same sadness and joy as I did then, seeing something similar in the faces of the tiny tots who had been vested the duty to serve up the ring, symbol of future happiness for these couples.

Later, while seated on one of the benches on the boardwalk near the Stone Pony, I heard some of the sounds from another wedding (or perhaps it was the same) coming out from one of the seaside eateries, voices of hope, and joy, and though I could not see the bride and groom going through the rituals of a reception, I envisioned Alice, beautiful Alice, from that day when my whole world changed, and she went on to start a family of her own.

I cried that day as a young boy nearly as much as I did the day she died years later, sensing that things could not be the same.

And yet, hearing the joy in the voices of this Asbury Park wedding, somehow old wounds seemed to heal, and mingling in with the sound check from the Stone Pony’s outdoor act, the silly reception hall music, and the crash of waves on the beach, I was seven again, and no longer crying.

 

Alice & Big Pete

Lennon-aid

Sunday, October 11, 2015

I like routine.

It saves me from having to think about stupid stuff.

So I get Chinese food on Friday, do my shopping on Saturday, and take a trip to Bubbles on Kennedy Boulevard on Sunday to do laundry (which an occasional trip to Secaucus if the JKF store doesn’t have The Times).

I used to go to breakfast at the Coach House on Saturday where I could look over the published copy of my newspaper and ponder the universal meaning of life.

Now I just stop in there for a cup of coffee to go before crossing the street to the Salvation Army where I search for DVDs to replace the VHS tapes I watch while exercising.

This week, I had a bunch of stuff to donate, especially a bunch of books – many of which I have acquired for my Kindle. I also sorted through my summer clothing as I changed for winter wear, and found some things are too old or ragged, or even too large for me to wear.

They had a book table out on the sidewalk with piles of interesting volumes that drew my eye even as I was dumping books inside. Between trips, I noticed the pile at grown and was attracted to several volumes I had not seen during my previous trip, volumes that seem to broach subject areas – such as history of New Jersey and poetry – that I’m always looking for.

I stopped and perused several of these until I realized that they were some of the same books I had just dropped off. The guy inside was bringing them out as fast as I could bring them in.

At least, I know my own tastes.

From there, I normally journey to the Shop Rite in North Bergen – going to the Big Lots store first, the dollar store and then the food store.

But half way down Paterson Plank Road traffic came to a halt. The road was closed and I was directed back up onto Kennedy Boulevard where more streets were closed, and traffic looked like it does before a major holiday.

I decided it was easier to go home and wait out the quagmire in the comfort of my own home – I’ve decided to learn all the songs of The Beatles’ first album now that I have an electric guitar again.

I guess I’m caught up with John Lennon again. He would have been 75.

It’s called making lemonade when life gives you lemons. Or in my case, making “Lennon-aid.”

It’s inevitable.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

I knew with the threat of rain I was taking a chance walking into Hoboken yesterday.

But this had been a week from hell, where between finishing the debate video and getting my stories done, I had barely seen outdoors except driving from here to there.

I needed the air and to stretch my limbs and the walk from my house on the Western Slope of Jersey City to 14th Street in Hoboken did just that.

A few drops wet my brow during the walk in. But during the day, rain swept over Washington Street, making even my usual mid-day coffee ritual somewhat moist.

I lingered a little too long in the office, finishing up a few small items before the long weekend. This allowed seriously dark clouds to sweep over the city, and my journey up the viaduct from Hoboken, through Union City, proved more than a little challenging. The rain hit just as I got to the metal footbridge over the viaduct into the Union City portion of Washington Park.

So did the lightning, a terrifying matter since being in a metal cage (essentially) at an extremely high elevation seemed like a bad idea.

When I got to the other side, the deluge hit, and the best cover I could find for the moment was behind a large tree, whose trunk blocked out some of the torrential rain being blown towards me.

But I still got soaked, even putting my denim jacket over my head.

A woman jogger came passed me in a hurry. But until I saw her circle around again, I thought she was rushing for better cover. Soaked as she was in her green jogging suit, she seemed unabashed by the slash of rain and the claps of thunder.

Still I waited, rain dripping off the tip of my nose.

When the down pour slackened slightly, I decided to continue the walk, even though I was barely half way home.

As I exited the park, I saw the bus shelters, and realized I might have avoided some of the worst of the storm had I continued in the first place. The one on my side of Palisades Avenue was stuffed with two bicyclists and some young woman standing on the seat so as to not get dripped on. This left very little room for anyone else. But the shelter across the street only had one person in it. So I went and took cover there.

She was pleasant black woman from Hoboken, Born and raised there, she said, with a brief trip to Puerto Rico. She had been shopping on Bergen Line Avenue, got caught up in the storm when trying to change buses.

A number of buses passed but none were going to Hoboken.

She said her “sweetie” drove a tractor trailer truck up and down the east coast, getting paid well enough for them to continue to live in Hoboken. But she said she was being pushed out by the excessive rich people, the yuppies. Rents were going through the roof. Section 8 housing was being turned into market rate properties to accommodate. Businesses were no longer interested in selling to the poor when they had walking wallets stumbling around willing to pay high prices for everything.

She said she didn’t like the current mayor because the current mayor didn’t seem to represent anybody by the rich people, and could care less about people being forced out of town.

“We’ll hold on as long as we can,” she said. “But eventually we’ll move to Florida. I have family there.”

At this point, the rain has slackened enough for me to start walking again, and with my wet denim jacket over my head, I made my way towards the safety of the Western Slope, wondering if and when people like me will be forced out of Jersey City the way people like this person were from Hoboken.

It’s inevitable.

Pay your parking meters

Friday, October 09, 2015

Politics is described as “an organized” activity, a group of people gathering behind a common cause to achieve power.

This week proved the long-standing assumption that people seeking power often compromise their own beliefs, abandoning principle in order to advance their personal agenda.

On national level, political wizards operate behind the curtains to develop schemes that will lure naïve people into supporting questionable schemes, shaping myths out of papier-mâché so that masses of people will flock to the ballot box on their behalf.

This is no less true locally. Reformers wave flags that draw groups of well-meaning people to their cause, and then when achieving power, cease all pretense at being reformers.

They become the very thing they rallied against, often leaving the landscape littered with the remains of those who once championed their causes.

This is a lesson learned once more this week, leaving a host of disillusioned people to wonder whose cause to rally for, or to abandon the whole field – seeing politics as simply too ruthless and corrupt for ordinary people to engage in.

Wandering through this field of victims, I wonder how we ever get things done, and whether there are ever any good guys and gals when it comes to pursuit of power.

Or do people start out good, and then get perverted by the system they seek to reform?

Power is addictive and seductive. We get there and then we discovered the perks, and then we become the perpetrators of the political crimes we were so bent against when we started our reform movement.

Those who still retain faith or realize they’ve been duped, suddenly give up, abandoning the field of conflict so that no one stands in the way of the power grab.

Honest people feel the hurt deep in the bones, suddenly realizing that they have encountered a cancer for which they have no cure.

They become the walking dead, stumbling around leaderless, seeing everything as corrupt because they flags they followed proved to be the disguise for something they thought they fought again.

It is sad. It is reality. It is the reason why people do not believe in causes after the causes after proved false.

Bob Dylan put it best when he said we can’t trust leaders and must always pay parking meters.

A quarter for your thoughts?