Monsters from the ID in Eastside Park (from Villains from the Gallows Tree)

I don't know who thought this game up; but I'll kill him when I catch him

at least that's what I'm supposed to do.

We don't have a name for it. Dave calls it “Night of the Living Dead” after the movie with the zombies

That's a good name as any and the others don't mind. 

We only play it when we come here to Eastside Park, down near the bottom around the old stone building with the bathrooms in it, and a kind of porch that runs all around it -- so you can run in a circle in it and never stop.

One of the other kids thinks it's more like the movie with the pod people, where if you fall asleep you become one of them.

We sometimes start out with a dozen or more kids who come here by bicycle – me, Dave, Dennis sometimes even Little Dave -- making  our way through the Eastside of Paterson from the foot of Lakeview Avenue by the projects, through the streets with used car dealers and small warehouses to the rich neighborhood in the big houses which the Jews used to live, only the Jews don't live there anymore -- they have fled out to other places along Route 80 leaving the old house is full of people who are rich but who are not Jews.

The park sits on the corner of the city where Broadway meets Route 21 and where the river bends towards the West and Broadway changes its name to Route 4 as it goes over the bridge into Fair Lawn.

Eastside Park is a layered park, layered like a cake, starting on one level and then with a series of wide steps to connect has levels that eventually reach the low point at the highway.

We ride down the grass hills not the stairs, whooping it up as our bikes ride over the rough turf then level off before the next decline.

Our building -- yes, we call it that -- is down near the highway with a small gravel parking lot to one side.

There are never the cars in it, and very few kids hang around except over by the baseball diamond on the corner near Broadway.

Those kids don't bother us; we don't bother them -- even after we've turned ourselves into monsters.

The game is a little like the kind of tag we used to play in the St. Brendan’s school yard where when you get tagged you stay it and so as many more people get tagged you have more people to worry about, chasing you.

Unlike the game in schoolyard, the monster game has no safe place. You have to outrun or hide from the monsters somewhere in or around the building.

The game starts with only one monster. We usually pick the smallest or slowest kid.

Dave is too quick and big, so we never pick him and usually by the time he gets caught the game is over. 

I'm not fast; but I'm clever and usually last a long time before getting caught -- which means I have to escape a whole bunch of monsters, some of whom pretend not to be monsters in order to lure the rest of us in.

Dennis always gets caught early and -- knowing this -- we avoid him even when he protests and claims he's not a monster, yet he cries when we run away and chases us the way a lost puppy does when seeing someone he mistakes as master and is upset at the master not recognizing or wanting him

I don't know why we like this game so much. But we only play it here this remote corner of the universe where we come for no other purpose except to roll down the grassy hills and to play this game.

I don't even know how it came about, who first thought to assign someone to be the monster, or how it transpired he would win over other monsters. I just know that once we started it, we can’t stop, and somehow must continue as we run from danger to avoid becoming the thing we most fear -- and the more monsters the one monster converts,  the more intense the feelings, my heart pounding in a way it rarely pounds except when in the deepest of trouble with my uncles or the police, and somehow in the midst of it all, it releases something pent up inside of me, a monster I do not know existed until it is gone.

To be the last one standing, still unaffected, the last real human, scared yet pure, fleeing with every sense elevated, listening when sight is not enough, smelling even when all else fails, then enlisting some other faculty you can’t explain, telling you where the trap will spring and how to avoid it, knowing the whole thing is this game no one really wins, this game ending only when all are transformed into monsters, so, that no one goes home gloating or alone, a proud pack of defeated wolves, yapping only about how we avoided this trap or that, or about the moment when we could no longer hold out, defeated yet at that moment also undefeated, each of us returning to home where winning is never an option, and the traps set find no easy release.

That last Halloween (from Villains from the Gallows Tree)

 

We have no business dressing up like we do or going around fully armed for a war that should not happen on a day like this, when historically all the neighborhood gangs call a truce.

We just don’t trust it.

Even if Dave wasn’t as tall as he is, he’d stand out, and me, a year older, though a half foot shorter, I do, too.

Dennis comes as a ghost; Dave as a vampire; I dress up like a mummy, though Dennis says I mostly look like a zombie and holds both his hands over his sheet-covered head so, I don’t eat his brains.

Dave says I’ll need all the brains I can get; but he thinks eating Dennis’ brains won’t help me.

Coming to First Street, I say, is a mistake.
This is Dave’s idea.

First Street has all the best stuff and he wants to stay on the Clifton side of our street this year since last year when we went to the Paterson side we nearly got shot – not by some out of control street gang; a hot head older guy with a biker costume who called us hippies and told us to get the fuck out and we left.

The next day we read about him in the Morning Call after someone reported him to the cops, blaming his bad moon on his year in Korea where he nearly got killed.

Clifton has his kind, too. But I haven’t heard about them killing anyone, so I figure we’re safe in that quarter.

Sometimes you can’t read people just by how they decorate for Halloween.

My uncles don’t decorate at all, and they own carbines from the war. The only people they want to shoot are black people, convinced they will sweep over the border from Paterson the way the communists did from China in Korea.

Thank God it hasn’t happened yet, or we’d have no Halloween.

It’s First Street Gang I’m scared of. They never keep their word about anything, and they hate us more than they hate any of the other gangs, even those near Curry Park, who everybody hates.

Maybe the First Street Gang has good reason to hate us, we living so close to them, rubbing them the wrong way too often – sometimes even by accident. Neighbors always hate each other, as least that’s what my uncles say.

We try to steer clear of those houses in which we know members of the gang live, knowing if we don’t, word will get back about us being out, and someone will think we’re up to something, and this being that will lead us to a fight somewhere later in the night.

The woman who hands out candy at this house looks at Dave and me – not so much at Dennis – and asks us if we aren’t a little too old to be trick or treating, when nearly everybody else in the crowd barely comes up to my chest, and barely up to Dave’s belt.

I get it into my head that maybe we would to send Dennis up to collect for the three of us. We try this at the next house. Dennis comes back saying the lady there would only give him enough for one. Dave suggests we split what Dennis gets causing Dennis to howl, “No Way!”

He stomps off to go trick or treating with other kids where he won’t stand out like we do.

We’re still standing on the sidewalk with a dirt bomb hits Dave. He being so big he’s the easiest target to hit.

When we go to retaliate, the kids who attacked us vanish in a pack of trick or treaters and we know better than to try and sort them out.

The Morning Call report about gangs of kids on the Paterson side ripping off treats from smaller kids, and the last thing Dave and I need are cops thinking we’re doing that, so we wait, walking up the street to see if we can catch up with Dennis before he vanishes completely, and we won’t be able to talk him out of the few bars of candy he collects.

He’s not interested in candy anyway; all he wants are the coins some people hand out instead, people who’ve collected pennies in change and are too cheap to go to the store and buy candy to give. Some years, we’d wait until the trick are treating is over to egg those houses. Dennis knows which is which, but goes to all of them, thinking he can trade the candy he goes in some houses for the coins most kids don’t want. He figures he can get rich.

When we get to Lakeview Avenue, we run into the parade, a stumbling and bumbling collection of mostly tots making the long march from the Catholic school playground to Nash Park, dressed up as everything from Zorro to Mickey Mouse, and are all hoping to get one of the prizes the organizers hand out when the parade ends. Most of them – especially the very small ones – never make it to the end of the parade, and many win prizes not for the costumes they wear, but for endurance.

We follow the parade for a block, thinking Dennis might hook up with it, then change our minds knowing Dennis would never settle for the cheesy prizes they offer when he can con some kid out of cold hard cash.

We wander down to 2nd Street and begin to get nervous -- not about the wimpy gang that claims everything from Weiss’ Foodtown to the 2nd Street Deli as their turn. They don’t count for much and most us do whatever we want here.

No, I’m nervous because the old lady in the first house is right. We are too old to trick or treat. This is the last year we can get away with one of the most sacred traditions of our live, and we’re missing it just because we’re missing Dennis, and I want to kill the kid, I want to leave him to his own fate, whatever fate that might be. I want to get back to what we do best and hope we get as much as we got all the other years.

Dave looks scared about his brother, so I keep my big trap shut, as we make our way to Vernon and the deli, then town to Trenton where Dave stops and asks me which way I think we should go.

I want to tell him of a very, very warm place he can go.

But I keep my big trap shut about that, too, and shrug.

This is a pilgrimage. If he wants to get us lost, beat up or busted, let him. I’m only out here for the candy.

He turns right onto Trenton Avenue, convinced that Dennis has gone home.

I know better; I know Dennis.

Still, I follow behind Dave, eyeing the Halloween displays on all the porches, and all the doorbells we should be ringing, other kids are ringing, and all the candy they’re getting and we’re not.

When we get to the drug store on Crooks, we stop.

A large crowd of kids over flows the corner into both streets, shouting loud with all the typical signs that in the midst of them, framed and encircled by them, a fight transpires.

This is no gang fight.

Whoever it is, fights one on one like a Caseous Clay boxing match, except with us in this neighborhood, we have no rules or referees, and kids often get hurt.

Dave know something right away, and charged into the crowd, using his long arms to peal away the people blocking his way. He is taller than the crowd and can see the core of the storm. And when he gets near the center, he yanks his brother, Dennis out.

“Let me go! Let me go!” Dennis yelps, taking swings at Dave, his arms too short to reach anything except the arm that hold him. He strikes and strikes, Dave retains his grip until we are across Tr4enton in front of the large gray Victorian house where Dave dumps him on the lawn.

Dennis’ nose is bleeding and his eye already looks dark like the man Caseous Clay beat, sagging a little, the shards of his ghostly sheets shred around him, bleeding, too.

Dave scolds him, as he always scolds him when Dennis does things like this, Dennis interrupting to say they tried to take his money and he couldn’t let him, he saying how he earned it, how he traded for it, and how they had no right to take it.

Across the street, the mob moves on, trolls and goblins, ghosts and witches, slipping back into the dark the way all mobs do, without shame or repentance, cling to some shred of self-righteousness none of them have earned. 

They vanish b ack into the night to ring bells and beg treats, smearing chocolate over their mouths while ignoring the blood on their hands, one or some or many maybe even luck enough to ring the one bell behind which the man with the carbine waits, the man with a memory of war, in which no side won.

Dave helps Dennis to his feet, and the three of us head up the street to home, already too old, already ware of the vast void next year’s Halloween will leave in our lives.

Nash Park (from Villains of the Gallows Tree)

Even in daylight, this place ain’t save.

When I tell Dave that, he tells me if I stop pissing off kids bigger than me, it would be.

I tell him I can’t be anybody but me.

So, we ride slow, and watchful, to keep anybody from sneaking up on us.

Most of the kids that hang out here have cars, parking them across Lexington Avenue at the Hot Grill, showing off for the high school girls who go there for gravy fries and to let the bigger boys see them.

Dave comes to this place more than I do and tells me it’s his favorite park, which explains why he drags me here as much as he does when we have other parks, I find more interesting.

This used to be my favorite park, too, when I was very young, before I met Dave or had many friends, my mother bringing me here to dip my toes in the wading pool and run through its fountain on very hot days.

I could barely walk then but I ran fine. I guess I needed the practice for when I grew up.

These days, the pool is grungy, the fountain barely trickles, and the pain peals. A few kids play in it, but most mons won’t let their kids anywhere near where the water looks green.

Dave likes the chili dogs the Hot Grill serves. He’s just too shy to go over and order any. The older boys pick on him and the girls who like the older boys always laugh.

Since I’m sort of hungry and like Chili dogs, too, we head over there on our bikes, even though it’s dangerous. I don’t mind the girls laughing. They’re too silly for me to care about. There are better and prettier girls up at the Clifton pool.

We both order chili dogs and eat them too quick. Dave hates the girls who giggle at him and I'm a bit nervous with the looks some of the boys give us as they try to figure out who I am and remember what exactly I did to them to make them mad last time they saw me.

I tried to ignore them and the girls, staring out the window at the street and the park beyond, and at the playground with its squat brick building with rusted men's and women's bathroom signs, and the rusted slide, Merry-Go-Round, and swings, and the large space like a missing tooth, I  can still imagine from when I was a young kid, the main attraction of the park for years, and one that made me beg my mother to bring me here, boarding the Number 3 bus at Crooks Avenue, and exiting at Piaget Avenue for the three block walk to the park. 

Kids used to line up along the sidewalk for what seemed like a mile, waiting not just for the waiting pool. The slide or swings, or even the Merry-Go-Round not rusted then, but for the massive full size -- because it was real -- World War II Mustang fighter, an attraction better than any found in any other parks, even the ones with cannons and tanks, only you couldn’t climb in the tanks the way you could climb in the plane or move the cannons’ barrel the way you could the Mustang joystick. You could flip switches, tap dials, open and close the hood, and for a moment, erase the vision of the park for the sky over Great Britain where this plane once fought -- until someone tapped on the glass to indicate you've had your turn and for you to move on.

After a while, so many kids flicked so many switches, the switches stopped being switches and holes appeared instead of gauges, and the plane -- which had not succumbed to the Nazis -- slowly surrendered to time and the youthful attack until the city hold the carcass away as junk.

Dave doesn't remember the plane; he does not believe it existed. Maybe this is a bit of envy for me having seen it when he could not, when we share all other sights equally, when we remember everything else together.

Then one of the high school kids named Bill or Bob or Buddy remembers who I am and what I said to him  near the stadium a week or so ago and decides this might be a time to get even, and rises along with six or seven or eight of his buddies, and I decide I'm not as hungry as I thought and leave half my chili dog unfinished, and decide this is a very good time to ride my bike.

Dave at first doesn't get it and wants to finish his meal first, then he gets it, and gives up on his meal too and follows me out.

We cut through the park to keep the kids with the cars from catching us, crossing through the stitched together ball fields that come to an end with a small stadium, where semi-professional ball players play baseball, though nobody playing there as we pass, our wheels leaving scars across the manicured grass of the infield, raising protests from the fields keeper picking up trash in the stands.

We reach the river before the cars do, and steer down one of the narrow dirt paths the cars won't come on because of the guardrail blocks it from the street, and  we take refuge at the river just as we always do, sitting on stones overlooking the flat surface and the rippling reeds, the curve of the Dundee Falls visible from the stream that just rises above it, and while we’re not completely sure for what we lost in the mists of the memories we share, we do not regret things we have seen or not seen, nor do we ache over things we lost or may have never had.

But Dave mumbles something about wanting to go back and finish his Chili dog.

I tell him it's already gone.

  

Men from UNCLE (from Villains of the Gallows Tree)

I’m Napoleon Solo; Dave is Ilya Kuryakin, a compromise we make when both of us can’t be James Bond, or when we’re arguing over which one of us wants to be the Green Lantern rather than the Green Lantern’s side kick. When we do play Green Lantern, we fix green lamps on the handle bars of our bicycles and barge out the bottom door of Dave’s apartment building, riding hard into the night to avenge wrong-doing, armed with ash cans, cherry bombs and an assortment of fire crackers Dave’s mom bought in Pennsylvania to be saved for the Fourth, snuck out in the middle of her after work nap and hidden in the cellar where she never goes, we aching to blow something up, we just don’t know what, each night taking us deeply into part of the city we rarely rode in, to the ugly parts of Paterson near the railroad where the farmer’s market unloaded produce at sunrise and where my father once worked for a while, my mother says, a mystery man I never met, not even to get his veteran’s check like Dave’s mom does, our green lights cast out across the rough cobble stone streets our bicycle wheels struggles to navigate, this bump leading to that bump until we come close to denting the wheels, yet no closer to finding bad guys for us to blow up.

Dave’s younger brother, Dennis, bugs us to come along. We never let him, knowing if we find what we want we won’t have time to drag him away when we flee, running through unfamiliar landscape towards and unfamiliar destination we think as home, my uncles always enraged when I roll my bike back up the driveway, green glow glinting off the dusty windshields of the boats they want me to clean, arriving so long after curfew they need the adding machine they use for billing to calculate all the punishment I deserve, how many more chores they might make me do, how many more days should I be grounded in my third floor bedroom, Green Lantern, Napoleon Solo, caught in the bad guy’s trap, with no easy escape – Dave’s voice whispering over our cheap walkie-talkies about his mother blaming me for his being late, telling Dave I’m the one who stole her fireworks, so they won’t have a Fourth of July this year, both of us sneaking out the next night after dark, seeking bad guys we both know we only find when we get back home.

Bubbles on the roof

04-30-80

The morning sky bleeds rain, a Chinese water torture of a billion drips, day in and day out, leaving lines of bubbles along our back porch roof, with me, framed by my bedroom window staring out, safe, dry, but stranded, clutching this poor entertainment in exchange for wilder adventures I might have if set free – this memory of me at nine in the old house at the top of the hill my grandfather ached to own but could not afford until his mother died.

The roof is a war zone, and the bubbles the helmets of soldier desperate to survive the onslaught as they rush from the drain pipe from the roof above to the small dark hole leading to the pipe down to the ground near my grandmother’s rose bush at the foot of the porch.

I watch as they flee, drops of rain like bullets with too many near misses and many more direct hits, like the Normandy Beach my uncle’s old friends used talk about at night just before my grandfather’s boat store closed next door, fate deciding which of them survive, erasing all those who don’t.

Now, I see those bubbles in the eyes of this woman, eyes wide, open, vulnerable and waiting, as one-word responses emerge from bruised lips in response to questions people ask her.

She is a bubble merely trying to cross this roof unscathed, a target, the girl with HIM. The GIRL with him. The GIRL with HIM.

I watch her bubbles burst whenever she is near the others, and tries to speak, only to have others ignore her. She bursts with ideas like flowers growing out of her ears or eyes or lips, withering for lack of attention.

I keep thinking that if the only reason for life is death, why do we bother, one of the tons of grim thoughts popping into my head these days.

When I talk with her, ask her advice, her eyes widen, and I think I see a bloom in them, ideas spouting up inside her I am too unworthy to comprehend, and sudden, drops of words turn into a torrent I can barely catch half of them, she casting them all in my direction as if I am the last hope she has that anyone will listen.

We sit in a cold apartment.

She talks of men, and I think of myself, and how cruel I had been when I was younger, much worse in some ways than the men she knows. I have hidden my flaws behind a wall of concern, acting out the part of a kind and gentle person, when great rages roar in me, not against people so much as society, and my family, and the unfairness of life.

If we're only going to die, what is the point? If no one will pay attention to us, why should we talk?

Are we all just bubbles rushing from one gutter to another hoping the heavy rain won’t erase us from existence? And what fate decides us before we take the next plunge down to the rose garden? And what will we find when we get there?

She looks at me now, wondering where my attention has wandered to, and why I cannot grasp all that she is saying, she still believing herself inferior because of the way men have treated her, me knowing her better than that.

I'm the one that should be in awe; I'm the one who should fear crushing this very pickable flower, as if she was a weed.

The rain falls, staining each brick outside, staining each inch of the walkway up to the door.

I am wet on the inside, dripping from my own painful thoughts.

No Santa or Free Press

Saturday, December 15, 2018

When a newspaper tells you, it's giving you all the news that's fit to print it, shouldn't give you fits to actually read it.

While I love purple prose – or any other color -- the fact is it has no business being in a black-and-white publication that is supposed to be fair and objective.

Media objectivity has always been a myth.

But until recently with added ability to access information on our own without the benefit of media spin, we can better gauge what is fact and what is fiction.

The sad part, however, is that many who accept news as objective do not want to grow up, and believe they are getting free and unbiased reports in much the same way they believed a very fat Santa Claus was able to squeeze down a very skinny chimney with a bag full of uncrushed presents.

Media manages it somehow, only the presents they leave under your Christmas tree are more like time bombs than gifts from a well-meaning Santa, intended to – at best – cloud your judgment and at worst, brainwashing you into believing something that is largely myth.

Many people prefer the myth, and media such as The Washington Post sell news like Macy’s sells holiday shirts, giving these people what they want to hear, rather than what is real.

When the New York Times tells you, it’s giving you all the news that fits, it means fits its agenda and the target audience’s, which is usually very liberal, allowing people to be comforted what they already believe.

The fastest news is really a commodity like ketchup and you tend to look for the flavor you like best. It is also like a Christmas present in that you've already sat on Santa's lap and get what you ask unless you happen to be a Trump supporter and then you get cold usually well-ignited in advance so that you burn your fingers when you reach into the stocking to find out just what you already knew you would get from a questionable media.

Unfortunately, there are people especially young people who still believe in the myth of media as an objective source of information, something by which they can evaluate public policy and make clear unbiased decisions about who should serve in office and who should not.

It is a sad day when these people especially if they're relatively bright wake up and mommy tells them just like then she did when she had to tell him there was no Santa Claus media is corrupt.

I mean you have to look at all those tearful faces and understand they are now looking at themselves and wondering what could be next maybe there is no tooth fairy and maybe even no Easter rabbit.

 While some parents will warn kids against myths such as Santa Claus to spare them at a young age against the pain of discovery later, nobody warns them about newspapers and other media and the myth of an objective press.

So most of us have to live with the shock of waking up one day and as with discovering that Santa Claus is really Dad dressed up in a Santa Claus suit, we wake up and find that media like the Washington Post is really some Democratic clown dressed up as a legitimate news organization.

This is the kind of shocked that even years of therapy can't make you recover from because once this myth has curled its hooks into your consciousness you can't get it out of your head again and will always keep assuming that the myth is real.

We really clearly need to redesign our journalism schools to dispel the myth of a free and objective press so as to prevent people from being duped into this psychological trauma when they find out the truth later.

But this of course presents us with a massive problem since journalism schools and journalism professors and journalism courses are designed to spread the myth not dispel it and so it keeps becoming it's self-perpetuating Santa Claus syndrome.

It might be more effective to establish anti media courses that every student must be required to take in order to be aware of how they will be manipulated when they go out into the real world and find out that there is no Santa Claus after all only dirty old men and women dressed up in journalist’s clothing who are trying not to deliver presents but to steal your soul.

email to Al Sullivan

First Day on a new job – June 4, 1974

(from a journal written in 1979 -- part of a novel "Cosmetics Plus)


I was scared that day.

I didn’t want to drive. I hadn’t driven in over two years, and even that time was little more than a trip from Paterson to Fairfield.

My uncle had lent me his ratty old station wagon for a week or so in order for me to drive my mother and grandmother to his wedding and reception, and I had it until he got back from his honeymoon a week later.

This was different. This was a job that required me to drive in and out of New York nearly daily, and I wasn’t up to it.

I had agonized about taking the job over the long weekend. I had just bought a new tape deck and stayed up late recording albums on cassettes, only I also had to deal with the fact that someone who had crashed in my room Friday into Saturday was dead when I woke up.

My landlord stood up for me and the cops didn’t arrest me. But I was not in the best of moods when I came to the Fairfield warehouse on Monday (June 3, 1974) to start my new job at Cosmetics Plus.

Stanley instructed me to get used to the new routines that morning, showing me how this shipping department differed from the Drawing Board next door where I had worked for two years before the main office in Dallas decided to close this warehouse down.

But I dreaded the words I knew I would hear at some point during the day since part of the job Donald had hired me to do involved driving around.

Just after lunch, the words I feared most came, “I want you to make a pick up in New York,” Donald said, slapping down a clipboard on the work bench,

Donald was a small man with dirty blonde hair, a large nose and a blonde caterpillar for a moustache. He blinked at me through round designer glasses that he seemed in pain to wear.

“Did you hear me?” he asked when I made no initial response.

I heard him and didn’t want to respond.

Danny’s death still tingled in my head – one of those moments in time I’d never forget yet still too fresh and bizarre for me to fully believe.

Change for me always came with a bang and took time for me go recover from. I was still bleeding a little from Louise’s leaving me just over two years before this. I thought at the time that was the biggest bang of my life, but this week, this job change and the death of a friend, rivaled it in ways I was still too stunned to accept.

“Get him the keys to the van,” Donald told Stanley. “Then give him directions.”

Although still early in June, we suffered summer heat, and this stirred up the scents of perfume and powder in a warehouse stuffed with every conceivable brand of perfume, oils, aftershave and such. Each breath was a struggle against gaging.

And still, I preferred it to the scent of fear rising in me as I followed Stanley, my hands shaking so much the keys rattled when he gave them to me, falling to the floor where Stanley retrieved them and again put them firmly in my palm, frowning slightly when he did so.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” the apparently always-calm Stanley told me.

He had large black eyes better suited for a St. Bernard. So, it was difficult to refuse him.

I preferred he be a monster I could hate and fume over, or at least someone who seemed remote and uncaring the way Donald seemed.

Even as I made my way behind Stanley towards the van near the rear loading dock, I continued to think of Danny, my hands shaking as I tried to remember with which hand, I had tried to shake him awake, Donald shouting from the front about getting back here before six.

The keys felt cold in my fingers. I glanced up at the clock on the rear wall which said it was two.

I climbed down to where the red van waited, and then up into it, behind the wheel, feeling the way I did as a kid in Nash Park when they still had the World War II Mustang fighter there. I was an ace pilot heading off to combat in the air above England or France, an imaginary enemy clinging to my heals.

I turned the key, the engine rumbled to life, rough enough so that the whole van shook rather than just my hands.

The gears shifted with difficulty but engaged and I rolled away over the potholes of the parking lot, the metal hand truck rattling in the van’s vast emptiness behind me, an annoyance that forced me to stop so I could security, before starting again, gravel from the road peppering either fender with the sound of heavy rain.

Danny was one of the regulars who hung out but did not live in the rooming house in Montclair where I lived. I saw him earlier on Friday when I took a hike up the hill to the White Castle on the border of Montclair and Verona, near the Claremont Diner, where Route 23 met Bloomfield Avenue.

White Castle was a haven for every derelict on the planet, a junkie haven where people could get cheap food quick and often a quick fix, too.

Danny was there, not quite sober, buying sliders just as I was, and seemed pleased to see me because he seemed so otherwise alone.

I told him I would be up late recording, and so, I was not too surprised when he came knocking on my door later, saying he was too drunk to make it home and wanted to know if he could crash in the corner of my room.

I heard him hacking in the middle of the night even after I bedded down in another corner. I didn’t think he was dying. And that’s what I told the police when the investigated the next day before hauling Danny’s body out.

There was vomit under where his head had been on the bed.

I spent the whole next day shaking and was still shaking as I drove following the directions Stanley had given me to get to New York.

Dying scared me, somebody else’s like Danny’s, especially my own.

The police called Danny’s death an overdose, but didn’t say of what, and I was in no position to ask, since I was on probation and wasn’t supposed to associated with anyone involved with any kind of drugs, least of all dead people.

All the police would say is that Danny got ahold of something bad.

Stanley’s instructions were anything but straight forward – and certainly not the route I used to take on the bus from Paterson to Manhattan when I was a kid. He took me through twists and turns of West Caldwell until I found the entrance to Route 280 East.

This was alien landscape for a boy who grew up in and near Paterson, though not for anyone who lived along the corridor coming west out of Newark the way Stanley and Donald had.

Route 280 was this part of the state’s equivalent to Route 80, and east/west corridor of four lanes each way that helped open up the center of the state to suburban development, less a trail of tears than white flight from the core of urban New Jersey where many people – particular Polish, Jewish and Italians had lived, with a smattering of Irish in Kearny and Jersey City, and Germans elsewhere along that long route.

But because I was too ignorant of that landscape to know the difference, I turned off at an exit marked “Harrison Avenue,” when Stanley meant for me to steer in the direction of Harrison when the high way split.

By the time I realized that this was not what Stanley meant I was lost in a maze of West Orange suburban streets, desperate to find my way back. I found a phone book instead and called Stanley for an update.

“Where are you?” Stanley asked.

“I wish I knew,” I said.

“You mean you’re lost?”

I heard the laughter in his voice but did not particularly see any humor in my situation.

I told him where I had turned off, and he scolded me – still laughing – and suggested I consult the map that he had given me.

Once he figured out where I was, he gave me directions back to Route 280.

“You mean you still want me to go?” I asked, shocked, thinking this was the grounds upon which they would terminate my employment.

“Of course, we want you to go.”

“But it’s so late and Donald said he wanted me back by six,” I said.

“Just go, and get back when you can,” Stanley said, then was gone with the click as the coins rattled down into the change box inside the telephone.

I hopped back up into the big red van, and after puffing a moment on a cigarette, I started off again.

All this helped me forget Danny for a time, though after I calmed down a little, the memory of his body in my room flooded back, and stared at my hands on the steering wheel, again wondering which one of them I used when trying to shake him awake.

The palms of my hands started to sweat. I wiped them on my jeans but could not get them dry. The heat was getting to me. I rolled down the van windows letting in the air as well as the sound of traffic – the grunt and groan of other vehicles just line mine all going in the same direction I was going, making me feel less alone, making me feel just a little better about the trip and even Danny, or my sweaty palms.

But then everything got too claustrophobic as traffic narrowed into lines of bumper to bumper cars with my big red van stuck in the middle of it, the tall towers of Newark looming ahead of me, and suddenly I was on Harrison Avenue in the town of Harrison being carried along on a stream of overheated metal, horns ahead of me and behind me beeping in a desperate attempt to get someone somewhere to make room where there was no way anyone could.

Then I again thought of Danny’s hacking, and how I knew he was sick, and how maybe if I had thought of it at the time, I might have called someone to help save him.

I didn’t notice the Mercedes stopping until the van slammed into it, leaving a deep dent in its rear trunk.

The shock of it stunned me; I stared out at the scene and did not connect it with me at all, or realize I was the cause until the man jumped out of the car and started to yell at me.

I eased out of the van, traffic snarled behind us, more car horns blaring not at some invisible force far ahead, but at me.

The man kept yelling about what I had done to his car, his wide tie flapping as he waved his arms. He was fat with a flat nose and roared at me to produce a driver’s license and insurance card. I knew I had the license; I wasn’t sure about the card and rooted through the glover compartment until I came up with one and pushed it into the fat man’s greedy, sweaty hands.

I felt the way I felt when I first realized Danny was dead and not asleep, and how I would have to tell someone about it, and how the police would suspect me, an already convicted criminal, and how I would not get to start a new job on Monday, a job which I knew I would now lose because there was no way I could explain this to Stanley over the telephone.

Somehow, I bumbled through the process of exchanging needed information and saw the dented Mercedes roar off in puff of smoke, parking the big red van in a prohibited parking zone marked by a yellow painted curb. Then with a flutter in my stomach, I found a phone and made the necessary call back to the warehouse to give Stanley the bad news.

I found a phone booth in the back of a soda shop, and closed myself in, the air stinking of cigar smoke and chewing gum. I took dialed the number from the top of one memo head.

Stanley answered.

“What?” he said, no laughter in his voice this time. “You’re not in New York yet?”

I admitted that I wasn’t in something of a despairing mumble.

Stanley picked up on this and asked what was wrong.

I told him.

“AN ACCIDENT? How bad? Are you al right? How is the truck?”

“The truck’s not touched, but the Mercedes has a dented trunk latch,” I said.

“Oh, a bumper crunch,” Stanley said, the humor returning to his voice as I heard him relay the information back to Donald in the background.

I heard Donald yell, telling Stanley to tell me in no uncertain terms that I should get my butt to New York.

I hung up with his words still buzzing in my head, along with Stanley’s mysterious laughter.

I wasn’t any less scared when I climbed back into the van, but I was surprised at their not being angry.

And somehow in all this, I thought of Danny again, and started laughing as I dipped back into the traffic flow towards New York and wondered if maybe somewhere in some more distant world, Danny was laughing, too.


Link to "Cosmetics Plus" the book

Gwenn (from the novel "Cosmetics Plus"

Dec. 12, 2018


I always hear about these things late.


So, I did not hear about Gwenn’s passing until just recently, too far after the fact to adequately mourn her loss, yet not distant enough to feel without pain – this despite the fact that I have not seen her in 40 years.

While others who knew her better saw her in a different light, for me, Gwenn was like a movie star. When ever she swept into the office of the Bloomfield Avenue warehouse in those early days of my employment there, she lit it up and left behind lingering good feelings that overrode any disasters that might have befallen us prior to her arrival.

She was always amazingly dressed, far beyond the blue-collar sensibility of a warehouse worker like me, or even Stanley – who did not particularly like her, though knew better than to show his distaste.

Stan saw Gwenn as flamboyant where I saw her as classy – though in many ways she was just like her husband, Donald, a product of the Newark Jewish community and the white flight that sent many Jews to more remote parts of the state – and in her case, to the shore area where she apparently returned later in life when she remarried.

Her obituary in the Asbury Park Press said it best when it claimed she “lit up the room with her vivaciousness, her sense of humor and spunk” or should I say she wandered in and out of my working world, always ware of me because I was always are of her, and Donald being Donald claimed I hate the hots for his wife, when it was something far more serious than even he could have imagined.

A graduate of Asbury Park High School in 1965, she lived through the heyday of the music scene there and her young life may well be reflected in the autobiographical elements of early Bruce Springsteen albums, about the boardwalk, fast cars and an energy long gone from that world by the time I discovered it a decade later.

She apparently lived in nearby Deal with her sister, Leslie, brother Louis, and perhaps another sister none of whom I never met.

I never learned how she met Donald, though both his and her families had roots in Newark – her parents were Emanuel (called Manny) Kuskin and Ida Byhoff.

Manny and Ida lived in Elizabeth in the 1940s and 1950s. Manny made a living in lumber and apparently owned the Amboy Builder Supply company in Perth Amboy.

Her father died about a year after Donald moved into the new warehouse on Kaplan Drive, during a disastrous spring and summer that included a massive power outage, Elvis’s death and a tornado strike that ripped up a corner of the warehouse roof while we were in the buildings. I heard briefly about the death in passing from Donald and remember how shake she seemed a few times I saw her afterwards. Those were my last few memories of her before I left Donald’s employ in mid-1978. Her mother died 33 years later in Neptune.

Gwenn and Donald divorced at some point in the mid-1990s, after which she married Harry Feldman, by which time I was long out of touch with any of them, but at a point when their son Josh had already made inroads as a speech writer and legal counsel for then President Bill Clinton, a platform off which he would eventually make a successful big for political office as a congressman.

I don’t know what Gwenn did for a living when I knew her. She later taught pre-school at a local Jewish facility in South Orange. But when I knew her, she always looked like and acted like a fashion model or at lease dressed up in fashions that cost more than a month of my salary. I don’t recall seeing her pregnant, but I do remember going to Donald’s house in North Caldwell to share a Seder just after their son Josh was born.

At the time, I was puzzled by the invitation, knowing too little of Jewish tradition except those I occasionally encouraged while wandering the Eastside of Paterson as a kid.

Their home was as stylish as they were, yet not overdone. Both Donald and Gwenn seemed to have a sense of eloquence not typical of the nouveau riche. Both seemed determined to defy the label of “rich Jews” that might otherwise have been applied to them after coming up out of roots that started in the heart of Newark.

I remember feeling inadequately dressed for the Seder, even though I had put on what I considered at the time my best clothing.

I remember how tasteful their private world was, the clean lines of functional yet attractive furniture, a few house plants (I believe) and my seat at the table with them – their infant son nearby (I don’t recall the daughter) and the plates placed before me in a ritual I would later recall when attending other more orthodox Jewish ceremonies such as the first hair cut as a journalist.

I did not understand then why I deserved this, how as an employee I should get to share was what clearly a private moment. I was stunned (but not put off) when they read from some Jewish text. I was not asked to read as I later learned was also part of the ritual otherwise, I might have made more of a fool of myself than I thought I already had.

It was a moment I would later recall often especially in relations to my betrayal of their trust, feeling in retrospect how Judas must have felt at The Last Supper.

Although Gwenn was a small woman, I never thought of her that way, partly because Donald was not tall, and the two of them seemed to fit together. Both of them dressed impeccably all of the time, but Gwenn seemed more flamboyant, yet still within the boundaries of good taste.

So, each time she swept into the old warehouse office, I found an excuse to come up from my duties packing in the back – though for the most part I was dumbstruck when I actually had to be in the same room with her, a fact lost on neither Donald nor Stanley, or worse – her.

She being a playful person, she some how found humor in exasperating my discomfort with a smile or a nod, and even all these years later, I still blush at the memory of these ostentatious displays, a well-meaning teasing that I late realized was a sign of affection as well.

Yet I also think of Gwenn from the Seder when I saw a whole different side of her, as if she was far deeper a person than she let most other people know about, her chatter, her laughter, and her flamboyancy serving as a barrier against the world’s intrusion on that part of her that went far beyond the slick surface most people saw.

Born in 1948, Gwenn was younger than Donald by five years, and had much more in common with my generation than she did Donald’s or even Stan’s, still in high school when The Beatles exploded on the scene and changed pop culture forever.

Yet three years older than I was, she seemed light years ahead of me in world experience, something that often showed in her eyes and manner. Sometimes, she titled head in a curious way, as if looking for a new angle to see what went on around her or to shrug off everything the rest of the world worried about – and sometimes, even her own worries.

Petite did not describe her, even though she was small. She carried herself with bearing that disguised her side. She filled a room with her personality and it lingered behind her like a familiar scent long after she’d gone.

She reminded me of my Aunt Alice, although not at all as serious.

Gwenn could be serious, no doubt, but I mostly saw the playful aspect, a smile that suggested she knew something nobody else knew, and whatever that was, it made her laugh – not mockingly, but more like she knew the punch line to this joke we call life and she wasn’t going to spoil it by telling anybody what it was.

She was unbelievably erotic – at least to me, carrying around with her a femininity I found extremely attractive, and this she knew and also found amusing, not in a mean or arrogant way, yet she could not resist teasing me, flirting just enough to cross-circuit my hormones and leave me speechless.

I remember her having nearly constant laughing eyes, yet could sense something deeper behind them, an emotion that I might have even thought of as joy.

She seemed thrilled to be alive, and though I’m sure she had her moments of pain and doubt, I never saw them, and Donald seemed to be proud at the fact that she was his wife.

I would have been, too, if I’d been him.



Link to other chapters of Cosmetic Plus

Good Timing

04-21-80

 Her timing was incredible.

 Just when I hovered over the ivory flesh of her vulnerable neck like a vampire ready to suck the life out of her, she tells me she's still a virgin.

 My vampire jaws snapped shut on empty air.

 A virgin? What the hell is a virgin?

 I sat at the edge of her dorm room bed with everyman's dream curled at the other end, both of us lost in a maze of confusion, her innocent eyes blinking so rapidly I could not tell if she was telling me the truth.

 A virgin?

 I had only heard rumor of such beasts, but had never met one before, something so mythical I could barely breathe.

 And then, she hit me with the zinger and said: "I knew I could trust you."

 Then she told me she would do anything I wanted.

 The room was suddenly cold. A red stop light flashed again and again in my head, telling me that if I made the next move I might be sorry for the rest of my life.

 I kept thinking of what other men had told me about making love to a woman for the first time, now they never truly let go, and this one, a Jewish Princess from Fairlawn, looking at me already as if she was attached. I tried to tell myself that I didn't want to spoil such a perfect flower, but in truth I was scared.

 I was no collector. I did not want to mount her as a trophy.

 I got up and walked to the window. From her window I could see a distant New York City, and remembered my own loss of virginity there so many years earlier, a different kind of redlight flashing outside the window of a cheap East 11th Street hotel, bedbugs keeping the two of us company.

 "Look," I told her, "I really can't stay late tonight. Why don't I call you in the morning, eh? Then we'll both have clear heads."

 I knew she knew I would never call, and I felt the pain of her stair the whole way out of the building and down the hill to where I had parked in the valley.

 Her timing was so right. It was mine that seemed all wrong.

Dairy Farm on Route 15

04-19-98

 The patio is crowded with people and chairs, while around us, over the crown of the house, a miracle occurs: the bare brown limbs of the trees begin to show green.

I alone seem to take notice.

Everybody else shifts their chairs and stare at each other, displaying all the symptoms of boredom I never feel.

We all wait on a host we dread may actually come, though nobody can say when they might occur – since unlike the change of seasons, nobody can predict him.

This only irritates the guest all the more, a crowd of friends who would serve equally as enemies and at times may have, caught in that swing of pendulum between celebrating or lynching him.

This is a hip crowd, never showing exactly how they feel, scared such displays might get used against them, if not now then later, and if not by him, then by each other.

When they can, they slip off to some private nook where they can sniff white powder from silver spoons, boosting their egos if not their temperament. Some suck on joints in the open, sending up smoke signals into the budding leaves of the trees I can’t read – messages nobody else bothers to.

Each holds a private court in this strange place far from home, playing out some self-anointed role they must maintain even if it makes them miserable, needing to score some social point before they all flock back to their cars for the long drive home.

Those of us with far less clout float like shredded clouds from potent to potent, allowing them to grace us with a nod or wink, rarely a smile. We need to let them see us, so we can still exist – though in truth, we seeing them is what is really important, all of us asking each other where we’ve been and what we’ve been doing, and what we intend to do when we get through honoring our noble host.

We are too old to still be doing this after so many years and so many miles since those days in the rock clubs when we assumed such things were important. I guess, we never got over the loneliness we felt then, carrying it on our backs the whole time, locked into this trek through a wilderness we hoped we might lose it in, glancing over our shoulders and again and again to see if its shadow still clings to our heals when we fail to see it clinging to our backs, missing the scenery the whole way just as they miss it today, the miracle that comes to life above and around us, that embraces us, that invites us to take part, while we play parts nobody actually believes.

Doing as directed

04-14-80

 So, I play this role: director, finding myself caught between the actor and the real director, scurrying like a go-for to tell this person to move here and that person, there, and one actor I have to deal with in particular.

 "You have to tell her she's wrong for the part," I'm told, then sent off to deliver the sad news, sitting in her home in Fairlawn, her Jewish features and parents and life like a rare jewel I am ashamed to help destroy.

 She tells me about her life instead of me telling her straight out that the real director, the director with power, wants to dump her from the show.

 "I'm not really so protected as you might think," she tells me, referring to how her parents -- her doctor father in particular -- keeps her from harm, little knowing that I have come to hurt her.

 And suddenly, I'm making out with her in her parents’ house, with her parents in the other room, we coming as close to making love as the circumstance will permit, each of us fearful that if we removed too many articles of clothing we might not be able to replace them in a moment's notice when her parents coming knocking and asking what we are up to, each of us doing what we can by unzipping zippers or undoing a blouse, each of us giving each other pleasure in anticipation of oncoming pain.

 Then, two days later, she stands beside me, holding my hand, as someone else takes her place on the stage, someone else playing the part exactly as he had played it, like a mirror image of herself.

 Causing pain!

 And I'm the one alone with her, the real director nowhere to be found.