When he comes home

Nov. 10, 1981

The spouting water burns as I splash it on, trying not to look too closely in the mirror at my morning face, cycle of life gripping me in their jaws as I hope for a change of luck. The mirror has a tiny crack in it from when Garrick painted over it because he didn’t’ want to look at his face either when he lived in this apartment, or maybe when Pauly scrapped off a tiny circle just big enough for him to shave when he lived here, or when I finally moved in and couldn’t stand such a limited view – so that seven years of ill-luck turns out to be my misfortune, and I wonder, just when the ill-luck started so I can calculate as to when it might end, if ever.

I have a line of useless bottles along the ledge between the mirror and the corroded faucets of the sink, all rattling with the pipes whenever I turned the hot water on, my morning music that wakes me up better than the clock radio and the annoying newscaster telling me about the list of disasters I ought to know about from the night before.

Sometimes the bottles rattle from traffic outside, as trucks make their way down Passaic Street, turning the wrong way at the train tracks and confused as to why they can’t find the bridge across the river into Garfield. Their horns honk like frustrated geese, nature never intended to produce.

The apartment is always cold, but I’m reluctant to turn on the heat until a real frost comes, the energy man sucking the life out of me, and then like the drug pusher he is, threatens to cut me off when I can’t pay. So I take comfort from the hot water when it finally rattles out of the spout, and scrape my whiskers off so I look more respectable than I am.

Dust falls from the tin ceiling Garrick also painted over while living here. He was good for painting over anything that didn’t move, and always in that suck ass tan paint he got cheap from some warehouse on River Drive, maybe the same warehouse where Pauly worked, and who sold it to him on the sly, pocketing the cash so he could buy pot later.

The dust catches in the light through the shade, and looks strangely pretty, like a shower of diamonds or snow, although snow it a four-letter word I have no use for, and already dread.

This early, I already hear the raised voices of my neighbors, the bastard who beats his wife before he goes off to work, and beats her when he comes home, calling her all sorts of names for all the things he imagined her doing while he was away. And I always think of how she won’t be there when he gets back someday, and imagine his howl and outrage, and how somewhere some place safe she is laughing – even though I know she wouldn’t laugh, and that she would likely come back even if she left, and take the beating “like a man,” when she isn’t.

I can’t wait for the shouting to stop and the door to slam, and the thud of his footsteps on the stairs as he makes his way out, and I always imagine being outside when he got there, revving my engine for the moment when he steps off curb. But I never do. I just listen to the rattle of the pipes, the honking of the trucks, and to her sad whimpering in her anticipation of when he comes home.

Alter ego

March 30, 1980

(I don’t often write when I’m drunk or high. This was written after a visit to one of the strip clubs on Main Avenue in Passaic)

We’ve made it, sitting here on this park bench in the middle of the Passaic Avenue parking lot, more than a little stoned, watching the flicker of light in the night, darkness flashing with cigarette lighters and then, the pale glow of cigarette tips growing brighter and then pale with each puff.

We laugh; we giggle.

I need coffee or some other legal drug to keep us going. So I rise – we rise – me on the outside, you inside.

Rain trickles into drizzle, filling the air, giving new things for the distant light to play with, streaks like fireflies before our eyes, the broad-faced moon peeking out from time to time behind heavy puffs of cloud, a shy but devious nymph peeking in through gray curtains to catch lovers engaged.

He sees only us, walking along this wet street, sees the sparking of the headlights as cars swish by – lights like diamonds glittering off this wet word, making us ache inside and out.

Our breath leaves trails of steam before us, the huff and puff of some imaginary dragon whose fire has yet to be quenched, unaffected by the chill air, we needing some other thing to cure this ach, some spear thrust to kill the dragon that roars inside us.

But there are no heroes left to cast a spear into that fiery gap, no one brave enough to venture into those deep dark places and pluck the prize that waits there – only us, walking survivors, staggering stoned along these moist streets, huffing and puffing and aching inside, weary winter expiring around us, stains of white lingering near where our feet fall.

We struggle to survive this change of season, this ache, this lioness, always mistaking the journey for the destination, sticking speaks into jaws that always break us and leave us in pieces.

I walk and think of you, deep inside of me, the soul I can never let out, the alter ego I dare not reveal for fear the spear might stab too deeply and leave both of us dead

But we’ve made it. We’ve survived. We walk on with the light of the night glittering over us, in front of us, inside of us, tempting us and making us ache for release.

We’ve survived.

The rules of the game

Oct. 10, 1979

“I don’t go anywhere I’m not invited,” Hank told me over beers one night at the old Red Baron pub in Cedar Grove, explaining why he refused to go to the party with the members of the band, despite the fact that the girl he loved had gone. “If she wanted me to be there, she would have invited me, otherwise it hurts too much when I get there.”

At our age, I wanted to tell him, we couldn’t afford to be picky. But Hank was a social butterfly with clipped wings who would not willingly go back to the cocoon he had lived in early in life, but feared to walk into a spider web, he said, at least not without someone inviting him.

But knowing Hank as I did, and seeing him walk out the pub door that night, I knew he would go anywhere and do anything if he thought there was a chance for love at the end of it, and as it turned out, he did go, and he did get hurt, and even then, when he said he wouldn’t, I knew he would still do it again.

Art for art’s sake?

Sunday, April 07, 2013

            I didn’t know last night was to be the last performance of Love Assassin or I might not have gone – I’ve seen too many great people giving up on their art, and remember the time when my then best friend, Frank, gave up his craft as a singer/actor for a “practical” job when they changed him to the second shift.

            He didn’t have a family to raise, or even rent to pay (he lived in his family’s house), but something compelled him to give up, and it pissed me off.

            Maybe I would have gone to Maxwell’s anyway, even if it was to witness the death of a great band. I was that hungry for down and dirty rock and roll.

            I always ache for it until I get there, and even then, among the clamor of cymbals and the wail of guitar, I wonder why I gave it up.

            It’s not age – at least not in the county of years, but rather the wear and tear, rock and roll being an endurance test to sort out the wheat from the chaff: those who fall into excess or do not have “the stuff” it takes to make it.

            I keep thinking back all the years to that parish hall in Paterson when I first saw a group with the silly name of Eric Lemon’s Milk Band and realize talent doesn’t always count, or ambition or dedication to craft or even luck.

            Some rockers never stop even when fortune has abandoned them, love of “the life” or habit of craft moving them ahead when all else has faded from them – men and women who believe in something more than just success or failure, fortune or poverty. This thing lacking in all the bands I was associated with over the year, who despite great talent and massive ambition, eventually quit.

            Two years ago, I mourned more than the death of a talented guitarist when one of the lead guitarists passed away, but the passing of a dream – my memory of his performance still vivid when in reality he hadn’t touched the guitar in years.

            I felt wounded from his giving up.

            A twinge of this touched me, too, last night, when the lead singer for Love Assassin announced that this was their last performance, bringing out all the old feelings in every way, the triumph of being great and the pain of not making it in the commercial world, the plague all great performers suffer even sometimes after the world has acknowledged them.

            “This is not a bad thing; it’s a good thing,” he said, trying to convey to the disappointed fans that there would be life beyond the band, something I have heard so many times over the long years, I almost laughed, a shadow in the shadowy otherwise unchanging world of a club I had frequented often as poet, writer, even singer since the 1980s – and once, in another incarnation, made a delivery here as a truck driver, more than a disappointed fan, mourning not the loss of a band, but of an idea that art may not after all be immortal, when deep in my heart I always believed it could be nothing else.

Drums along the Passaic

May 31, 1980

The drum beat rises with the heat like crickets.

But even on days like this with a gentle rain, I hear them rising from the tracks up Passaic Street, a sound track to life here on this boundary between ghetto and the Old Polish world.

The birds chime in, caught up in their own endless conversation that seems made louder by the lack of screaming kids, too typical for other days when the sun shines.

This place would shake the faith of any middle class housewife: shouting and stomping, and the beat of the drums.

The kids dance to the back beat though the older Poles call it noise and call the police, who can do nothing, or won’t, figuring it is better that the black kids beat drums than the staggering Polish drunks who make their way out of eye-opener bars even this early in the day.

The sound of the drums reverberates off the sides of the rusting box cars and unused chemical tankers that are as much icons of this world as the strip club and the Polish bakery.

Our mayor talks about keeping the peace in this part of the city, while someone told me yesterday a cop got stabbed down here, and some has been setting fires, and black kids have been fighting white kids up on Main Avenue, the boundary between rich Passaic and poor.

Wiser people do not go up there after dark, but I’m not wise, doing my tour of the go go scene in search of authentic characters I might write about some day, finding that world all too authentic for comfort, many of the inhabitants looking at me and wondering what it is I put down in the pages of the notebooks I carry – their lives part of this amazing tapestry I can never get enough of, all too authentic even for me to handle sober – except on mornings like this when the drizzle greets me and so do the drums.

Other journal entries from 1980 -- including Rock & Roll Weary

What’s a woman like you doing in a…

April 24, 1982

Her name is Liz and she’s 34 and she works in a bar in Passaic called the Coo Coo’s Nest, which is probably the most appropriate name ever given to anything.

            It is a go go bar and I go there because the place has tables where I can drink and write without anyone bothering me, too much.

            Liz, the hostess, delivers drinks to the tables and she sees me writing and bends over me with more than just a literary interest.

            It’s a strange place for a woman like her and her sweet smile. She doesn’t fit here. She doesn’t look older than 18 either. This makes her seem even more innocent. I ask how she stands the place. She smiles and tells me she’d tell me later, and later, she hands me here number, saying we should have coffee together.

            Yet, she’s here, surviving this world and its hard faces, surviving me and the strange man beside me, and the man beyond that.

            Why?

            She mentions vaguely that her husband left her and her seven year old child.

            I want to ask why a man would leave a woman like her?

            But I don’t.

            Those words won’t come out of me, and shouldn’t.

            You just don’t make those connections in this world. You sit; you listen; you take what you can get.

            And she likes me. You can’t ask questions like that when someone leans over you with that bit of sexuality in her eyes.

            A week ago, I told her this was a rotten place to pick people up in, too much raw energy, too mush lust.

            She only smiled with that compact smile of her sand touched my hand, and all I kept thinking of was of weeds and flowers, a whole lot of weeds and this one tender flower growing in the least likely place of all.

            So now I have her number and a piece of her heart, not a lot, but something, and it strikes me strange how a human can make contact with another human even in a hell-bent place like the Coo Coo’s Nest.

            So maybe I’ll called her, maybe3 I’ll reach out this time and make contact with the single lovely flower and maybe I’ll find out why such souls spend their lives alone. Why their husbands leave, how they survive in bars like this.

Some other journal entries from 1982 (added from time to time)