Chuck

(This is among many accounts I've written that should have but never made the pages of the paper. As many know, I write about everyone I meet and everything that happens to me)

December 3, 2008

Charles (his friends call him Chuck) says he doesn’t worry when his defibrillator goes off.

It does this about once a day at least sending 800 volts of electric into him to keep his heart beating.

“Only if it goes off twice in a row do I need to go to the hospital,” he says, but also says that the frequent jolts have him concerned.

At 69, this staunch Bayonne native has lived a charmed life, a sports coach for most of his long years whose body has betrayed him.

Two years ago, he suffered too deadly strokes in a week; either of one should have killed him.

The back that he survived brought him back to his Catholic faith where he recently became a Eucharistic minister.

“I haven’t been here in 30 years,” he says, believing that his surviving the near-death experience was an act of God he doesn’t question.

Although heart ailments struck when he was still a young man, he only learned after his stroke that his heart was a blood-clot making machine, firing deadly bullets at his brain – one of which may some day put him to rest.

Chuck, an Irish Catholic, if full o stories and recounted several sporting events in Paterson during the 1960s when he discovered I hailed from that neck of the woods as well. In one instance, he was a coach and recalled splitting his pants before half time and was forced to officiate that way for the rest of the came.

Another time – somewhere around 1967 – he made his way to the Thanksgiving Day game between rival Paterson football teams, Eastside and Kennedy, where he was scouting for talent.

“I was sitting high up in the stands around the 20 yard line,” he recalls. “I looked around me and saw nothing but black people. I guess that made me a little nervous.  But it wasn’t until I started to take notes that some guys to my right started to give me a hard time, demanding to know what I was doing. They had a real attitude. Then some guys on my left told them to shut up and explained how I was scouting. After that, we all got along just fine. They even passed me a bottle of wine so I could stay warm, and I drank. When I got back here, someone asked me if I minded drinking out of the same bottle as them and I said `No way.’”

Chuck thinks about death a lot because death is always with him.

“The other day in the Acme near City Line I was getting some ice. The staff had put up a sign saying to be careful about the wet floor and I was except when I turned around I fell over a cart someone had left behind me. I landed on the floor hard. I kept thinking that after all I’d been through, I was going to die because some jerk left a cart there.”

He thinks a lot about God, too, and has become more and more involved with his church. Last year, he asked the priest if he could become an alter boy knowing that the school from which the church recruited was closing.

The priest laughed and told him, “Sure, but I can’t promise you the other alter boys won’t beat you up.”

Yet the preset saw something in Chuck and a short time later asked him to administer communion.

“While I might not be a devil, I’m not saint,” Chuck tells me. “I didn’t know if I was worth and asked the priest if I was. He told me only I know if I was or not. I told him I would think about it – and did, and later, I said I would give it a try.”

Chuck trained for a few months, learning what he needed to do to perform one of the most sacred rituals in the Catholic faith.

“Then I got a note from the priest that I had to attend Mass on Dec. 24,” he says. “I asked him what this was about since I always attended that mass anyway. He said this time I would be helping him with communion. I felt so humble. I still feel it, humble and yet proud.”

The pieces left behind

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Bright sunlight flooded the road ahead on this post Christmas trip of Scranton – the mp3 player filling the car with memories from a time I didn’t intend to recall but could not help: Crosby, Stills, Nash; The Beatles; Elton John, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

Each of these things brings back images like the week of Top 40 hits CBS used to play every Saturday night – one week’s songs so vivid I stood on the railroad bridge again as I had at 16 with the plastic portable radio pressed against my ear.

This trip was like a trip I took nearly 40 years ago when I went to see my still-infant kid with Hank and Garrick – each song some song we would have sung along to during the two hour 100-mile trip between Montclair and Scranton.

But Scranton had grown with images more recent and so each mile is imbued with new, added meanings that tumble through my head as I drive, the music, the mood, the passing scenes like a flashback.

The leaves, just turning during my last trip, have been stripped from the trees so that on either side of the road the branches reach towards the sky like outstretched hands, the fingers pleading with the gods for some grace to be reborn when the cold eases and spring comes again.

Although the air had a chill, the temperature was above normal for the Jersey part of the trip, and only when the car got near water – Pine Brook and its always flooded woods (and Hank’s old warehouse), and snow showing nearer to the Delaware Water Gap.

As is the case these days after too much coffee at home, I needed the rest stop at the Gap, not just to use the port-a-johns, but also to gaze at the break in the mountains and feel as I always feel when I am there: humbled and insignificant amid the majesty of the natural world. Ice floated down the river, and snow showed here and there along the shore.

Someone’s German Shepherd ran up to me to sniff my heals before being healed by its master and before I went on, crossing the real and imaginary boundary between my life in Jersey and that other, dream-life on the other side – a life that is both past and future at the same time, filled with images of things accomplished and things yet to be done.

Traffic grew thick and finally to a standstill near The Crossing Mall reminding me of the holiday madness that grips people and stirs up their herding instincts.

The music got less distinct as the mountains filled my ears with that bubble it took miles to pop. So by the time the car rolled along the ridge of the Poconos on Route 380 I was almost deaf, and felt even more dream-like, except for the nagging gas gauge that told me in no uncertain terms that I would not reach Scranton if I failed to find gas – and eventually pulled off an exit early to satisfy that hunger.

But this road like the previous road carried a back-breaking load of memories, sad and happy, but mostly nostalgic – missing people in my life that had come connection to this part of the planet – this road and the next which is a ribbon road going down into the heart of the city – the path I had taken to Scranton since my first visit in 1971.

My newborn child, my then girlfriend and soon to be wife, and a large box-like vehicle filled with out possessions heading west like Okkies pilgrims fleeing not a farm dust bowl, but a dust bowl of post hippie Greenwich Village where junkies had replaced troubadours and despair had replaced great dreams.

In Scranton, this time, my daughter talked about the place of her birth in less than glowing terms, saying how the village was no longer the village, and that the era that have given rise to great inspiration had become a wasteland of wealth – rich people without manners or culture making the junkie era look attractive, even though the cold water flats we lived in back then, had heat and new paint today.

My daughter and ex-wife greeted me with presents I had not had time to buy for them, due to lack of time and several weeks of illness – the hectic pace of this life not at all what I had expected in anticipating closing in on retirement.

The scary part was that my daughter like my best friend years ago looked ahead towards retirement as if it was something other than what the British call “Waiting for God.”  People who put off their dreams to old age rarely live to see them realized, but I kept this last bit to myself, taking my daughter to the local mall to buy presents that would come wrapped in packing paper, not bows, and then to dinner at an over priced and over rated fish food place before making our way back to her house for good byes a few hours later.

The return from Scranton is always painful because each time I drive home I leave a piece of myself behind, and there will be a point – not far from now – when more of me remains there than what I carry away.

The trip home always comes with the added burden of traffic, and life that grows more and more hectic as the miles shrink, and this case, an accident near Route 3, forced me to divert from the usual pattern and take another route for the last lap, coming home exhausted and somewhat sad.

I guess the rain that we expect here in Jersey City today will fit my mood.

They said there’d be snow on Christmas

December 22, 1983

I guess this is the closest I’ll get to a white Christmas: snow at four o’clock in the morning that is scheduled to turn to rain.

So here I sit in the middle of Willowbrook Mall parking lot, my car slowly being devoured by snow; feeling lingering tenderness at having Anne to share this holiday with.

But I also feel a twinge of jealousy seeing my ex-girlfriend seeking to hook up with Pauly, my best friend, and wishing it was me she sought out with her return – when Pauly only feigns interest, and doesn’t want things to go as far as she does. She wants true love with a real artist, and she isn’t likely to get either with him, and he knows it, and goes along with it for the ride, just as he always does, in the end, ending up where he started while leaving women like her along the back tracks of his life.

He can’t afford to admit he is vulnerable to the same intense feelings I was when I was with her.

She wants to belong to some institution of higher knowledge, an academy of art and science, to which he would not accept membership even if it was offered – the old Groucho Marx idea that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

So he’ll let her tag along until she becomes a drag.

Perhaps he’s wiser than I was, seeing no more future there than with any of the other tag-alongs he let tag along over the years.

He knows when to keep his distance, especially when she is determined to conquer him.

Maybe she’ll succeed this time, able to play off his vanity so that even he – especially being as lonely as he clearly is – comes in out of the cold.

I think this while I sit out in the cold in the middle of Christmas madness, as I watch the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future float by along the walk, each carrying shopping bags from Bamberger’s. And I keep thinking that sometimes on nights like this, it’s better not to be alone, regardless of the debt in woe that must be paid when Christmas is over.

And I keep staring through the snow-covered windshield for some star of guidance that the heavy clouds won’t reveal, and wonder will the snow turn to rain after all, or keep on snowing.

A gift from beyond

Friday, December 20, 2013

This close to Christmas, I ought to be in the Christmas spirit, but I’m not.

I’m too ill, having caught a cold and forced to take drugs that numb my thinking.

I’ve done no shopping, although I somehow managed to get my Christmas cards sent – a feat I did not accomplish over the last two years, partly because each year I was saddled with the aftermath of eye surgery.

Christmas means more this year because I suddenly have family again.

Christmas became more and more diminished as members of my immediately family passed away. Each year saw a new loss and so by the time of my mother’s death just after Christmas in 2001, I seemed alone.

I had my daughter and my ex-wife, of course, but the core family I grew up with was gone.

This was made more painfully evident in 2010 with the death of Uncle Ted, the man closest to me, and then, in early 2012, Alice’s husband, Peter, who had become as close to us as anyone.

The discovery that I had sisters and brothers this year makes Christmas mean something again, although I’m too weary from the last few months of work and this week’s illness to fully appreciate it yet.

I need to take a walk in the woods alone to think – something I have always done in the past when change comes upon me – or even to wander around New York, although with Cooper Union stealing so much of the landscape I remember in the East Village, this is no longer as enjoyable as it once was.

New York is no longer a friendly place for people like me and so I must find that sense of spirit somewhere else.

Ultimately, of course, we are all alone – sometimes finding soul mates that help us travel through this and perhaps other lives.

We struggle to work out the difficult passages as best we can, forced to depend on our own resources.

Our soul mates, our friends, and those who know us best can at best provide some comfort, but rarely more. If we are very lucky, some few who know the deeper truths, can promise to keep faith with us – if not providing solutions, then at least, not blaming us for the solutions we find for ourselves.

People tell us that life is a gift; it maybe; but it is also a burden.

If we are lucky, we learn in this life that we live other lives beyond the boundaries of the one we wake up to each morning, and sometimes, we have others who keep us company there, and guard over us in this world and that.

These souls are always there for us, always holding our hands even when we seem most alone.

The great gift is finding that they exist in this world as well as that, and an even greater gift to have met them here, even if ever so briefly.

My destiny in life

Thursday, December 19, 2013

I have to stop wishing Happy Birthday to people for a while; with rare exceptions, this has mostly lead to bad news.

I guess this is because people I care for or cared for always remain fixed in my memory as they were when I last saw them, like snap shots.

They never change and generally neither do the feelings I felt about them.

So more is the surprise when time catches up with these images in my head.

This happened a few weeks ago when I heard about the death of my old friend, Ralph – who I last saw in the flesh just prior to my going into the Army in early 1969, but whose memory and friendship I carried around inside of me for all these years, undisturbed even by the photos of an older man I received a decade ago.

He remained the vibrant person I dragged into so much trouble when we were young, and who learned the real advantage of a movie usher’s uniform with the girls in the balcony.

Hearing of his death shocked me. He was only a few months older than I am, and I discovered his death only after I wished him a happy birthday on Facebook.

This happened again yesterday, not with as close a friend, but one of the more talented Hoboken musicians I had written about fairly often in the 1990s. Over the last decade, he had moved out to other parts of the world, but kept in touch via email and Facebook.

Earlier this year, he posted a message about waiting on a transplant – liver or kidney, I don’t recall.  But he sounded desperate. So when I wished him a happy birthday yesterday, I included a note saying I hope all had gone well.

It hadn’t. A message from his friend came back saying he had died.

All this comes at a difficult time of year since most of those closest to me were born near Christmas – including my one time, best friend, Hank, who always insisted on getting two presents, one for his birthday, and one for Christmas, refusing to get cheated out of one because he had the misfortune of being born on Christmas Eve.

He should have gotten a transplant, too, but had played games with his bad kidneys, finding a scoundrel of a doctor that allowed him to maintain his life style although he was falling apart inside.

Several years ago, we also lost one of the guitarists to our band, and shortly before that, the bass player – all in need of some repair to a major organ they could not get in time.

Ironically, the day of the guitarist wake I got an email from him – lost somewhere in the remote places of the cloud – suggesting we should work together on a video.

Such messages have been common with those lost who were close to me. Hank left several messages – appearing as a bat to Pauly, and a crimpled pigeon to me. The strangest came to Garrick a few days after Hank’s death in 1995.

A few months before Hank’s death, lightning struck Hank’s house and fried his phone and answering machine. This happened just prior to Christmas, and so we had a hard time getting a hold of him.

A few days after Hank’s death, lightning struck Garrick’s house, frying his phone and his answering machine – with one exception. The machine retained the last message Hank had left prior to his death.

Unfortunately, the last memory I have of Hank is not a good one. It came on Christmas Eve 1994, when we traditionally get together. This was a few months before his death, and he had grown old. He looked 80 or 90 when he was only 45, and acted it, forgetting things, and when we took off for our traditional Christmas Eve get-together; he drove like an old man.

I miss him, but I miss the vibrant younger Hank, and often go back to older photographs trying to restore his image in my mind.

Inside of me, each of these people, here or in the hereafter, remain alive in me, and always will – which is one reason I write about people I meet.

It’s my destiny in life.

Beating my head against the millstone

February 25, 1982

It doesn’t take a lot to realize how stupid I’ve been.

Fotomat?

This is absurd.

I can’t even consider taking a job like that.

So I think, maybe I should become a baker again – a nice, comfortable and messy job, one that can keep me in food, clothing and housing for the rest of school.

Why not?

If I have to work, why should I have to learn all the garbage these people in Fotomat want to teach me: become a computer overnight?

Love photographs, customers, and freezing in a tiny little booth at the remote end of some shopping mall parking lot?

Then this job is for you.

Sure, you get great services as an employee: half price on film processing, a third off the cost of film.

But you can’t eat film, and lately, the cost of food has taken on Grendel-like proportions.

It just won’t do.

So I air here (lay here actually under a ton of blankets) and ponder my options.

I could go back and beg entrance to the Willowbrook [Mall} prison I just escaped. But that seems drastic and degrading – especially to some of the staff who would like to see me humiliated. I had left with idea that I might make a living as a writer and so got a bit haughty. Lesson one: never get haughty when you’re always on the verge of starvation.

I could consider going back to the Paterson Dunkin (which has a new staff and less violent night time conditions since I last worked there – fleeing last when bullets decorated the front window along with the Christmas display).

Ah, such evil choices one must make when it comes to choosing work – personal freedom vs. being a wage slave.

Yes, I get more of my own stuff done when I’m not elbow deep in donut dough – more research, and writing, better engaged in my art. But how is art served if I starve?

Besides, the first draft of my current novel is done, and the second draft just begun – and I’m already stumped, seeking inspiration and originality in that block by block rewriting process that shapes into a world war inside my head. How long before I can sell anything, I can’t say, but I know I’ll need to eat before I can.

I need food, clothing, and housing – the three evils that haunt me always, as silly as that sounds.

These days, I envy Pauly even more and how he somehow manages to do what he wants when he wants, somehow working around these three ghosts when I cannot.

After three months of living the bohemian life: of writing and school, my vacation ends and I must once more play the game and rebuild the foundations of my life.

For all my isolation, I’m mostly depressed from such a slim existence.

I suppose I’ll organize the proper boxes and paste the proper addresses on the front.

Fotomat, ha!

There’s so much pointless stuff to learn and too many regulations.

Garbage.

So if they’ll take back this prodigal son, I’ll go back. I’ll feast on labor.

I suppose we all have to find importance in certain channels. Bohemianism is not for me (Not that I didn’t or wouldn’t enjoy more).

But reality steps in and I’m not the first victim.

So back to work, slave! Back to the flour and the world of imitation baking.

The times are hard enough without beating my head against the millstone.

So Dunkin Donuts here I come.

Not confusing what I do with what I do to survive

Saturday, December 14, 2013

The change is in the air – along with the threat of snow.

Few things last in this life time more than for a few years these days or maybe never lasted. I had pictures of the world in my head from the post World War II era growing up of great hope and promise. I have pictures of my family moving into the old house on the hill, all of them thinking that the world had become renewed and that the boundless future lay ahead.

Perhaps it did, for the brick layers, and those who build their future piece by piece – a conservative idea I didn’t always believe when I grew up in the 1960s and assumed that we could depend on Big Brother to protect us, to provide us with all those necessities the greedy of the Post Civil War denied – But godfathers and robber barons simply change their tactics and operate behind the scenes, pulling levers like The Wizard of Oz, and deluding the masses of people into believing that the future is bright when it is only bright for those who rise to the top of the froth.

But capitalism, criminal or legal, elevates very few, and as Thoreau pointed out, most of us live our lives in quiet desperation, either accepting our fate as cogs in the wheel of this machine or defying it, and becoming frustrated by it, and eventually crushed by it.

Some enjoy the benefits of power for a while, and then fall out of favor, or find their no longer needed, and get cast aside, desperate to find some new venue upon which to start their climb (or slide – depending on your point of view) into a new pyramid of power.

This isn’t just political or criminal, it is life.

I’ve been through so many changes of jobs in my life that I have seen the petty power structures rise and fall, mini-Roman Empires to which the small cling to for sense of worth.

Somehow in my life, I have been immune to these – either because I had positioned myself rightly as indispensable or because of sheer luck.

As a baker in the 1980s and early 1990, I saw my shop sold a dozen times – each time watching those who grooved closest to the new boss, building a relationship with the new boss, only to lose status as the next boss sought out his own cronies he or she could trust.

I was always above the fray, because people didn’t mess with quality bakers back then. these days, machines have made me history, and I am referred to as “a stick man” making me realize just how Mark Twain felt after training to become a river boat pilot only to have the end of the Civil War destroy that industry. Something similar is happening in the news industry in my time but it matters less to me because I am at the end of a career not at the beginning as Twain was back then.

But the concept remains the same.

Survival depends upon personal power, ability to transcend change – not just dependability. (The most essential cog can be replaced in any machine I learned long ago.) But somehow, you need to believe in yourself to such an extent that your power does not rely on some higher power (expect perhaps the highest power) and that what you do matters more than what recognition you get.

This is a long view because of the ups and downs that it entails and the eventual belief that in the end what you do will make a difference and bring about what you want.

The art world is littered with people who gave up their dreams, settling for less or moving onto something else because the road to what they was as success got too hard.

I remember a friend who came to visit me in the Garfield Dunkin donuts commenting that I was better that what she saw, that I ought to have another more respectable job.

I quoted Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty,” and said, “Try not to confuse what you do with what you do to survive.”

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, these are the same at the same time. Most often they aren’t. But at every moment of my life, what I do to survive matters as much as what I aspire to do. And although sometimes, this is a huge struggle, it is the only way I can survive the ups and downs and changes of power that go on around me. I work for a boss, but deep down inside me, I work hard at whatever I am doing because it is the only real way to survive.