Rainy days and Mondays

Monday, December 30, 2019

It’s a rainy day, and Monday, and the last Monday of the last month of the last year of the decade, a scary concept since I once thought making it merely to the year 2000 would be an accomplishment. Now, we are edging into the twenties, marking the centennial of those members of my family that predated my uncles and aunts, yet whom I managed to meet before they passed off this mortal coil.

This idea that we have transitioned into another decade scares me a little, and adds to the blue mood I feel with the cold rain pelting at my window.

The outside cat we call “Tiger Kitty Brother” came into the mudroom to get out of the rain and I sat up with him for a while, feeling chilly, but in that sense I used to get sitting on the front porch of the old house in Clifton when I was out of the rain, but still being touched by it.

We made our way to Asbury Park again this weekend, wasted a lot of time between dinner and when we actually were to see the band, and though the band was good, we were too tired to stay for more than one set – a certain sign of our getting old, as was having to listen to the kids around us – me wondering if I sounded as stupid at that age as they do. One woman and three guys behind us was particularly silly, the three guys all trying to get her, only have her take off with a fourth man.

I guess the three guys were good enough to buy her drinks, but not good enough to go home with.

On Saturday, we had breakfast at Franks, read the story posted about Springsteen, then took our stroll down the board walk, where a footrace has just concluded, before we made our way back to the car. We drove south along Ocean Avenue until it stopped near Belmar, and then drove home.

Everywhere were signs of the old days, changing, rust settling on things that had seemed fresher when I made my way through these streets many years ago. I kept thinking of my family, and how this had been such a big part of their lives, and the century in which they came south when it was still just a location for summer resorts, crabbing in the bays, swimming in the ocean, buying fruit from highway stands that have since ceased to exist.

They are all gone, the family, and I carry these memories around with me as I drive, and memories that aren’t even my memories of a time when things seem much more simple, and how we could still get lost on these highways (lacking GPS to steer us home) and how we really didn’t mind, as long as we came in out of the rain at the end.

 

Recovering from Christmas

December 26, 1980

The hard part is over: the expression and glitter of Christmas, the opening of presents and the mad dash from my mother at my uncle’s place at the seashore to the arms of my girlfriend a stone’s throw away from Giant’s Stadium.

I fell asleep in her arms last night and woke this morning on her parents’ couch.

I’m still unsure whether or not her parents objected; but the sticky part of the holiday is over and all that’s left is recovery.

The whole affair started two days ago with me visiting my girlfriend at her parents’ house, and now I am home again, alone, filling my cold-water flat with steam in order to get warm.

My girlfriend came down with tocolytics and wanted nothing more than to stay in bed, where I found her when I showed up and should have left her, but I didn’t, choosing to help her mother wrap presents while letting my girlfriend rest, and my making a mess of the whole things since I’m no better at wrapping gifts than romance, my girlfriend’s mother eyeing me with some distain while asking just when it was I had to be at work – suggesting maybe I should try and go early and leave her with the chore she knew how to do and clearly I did not, with me glancing out the window as the snow and telling her I wouldn’t be going.

Later, their relations arrived and I went up to hide in my girlfriend’s room, waking her briefly, before she faded back into blissful sleep, with me waiting for her to wake so we could both take the trip up to Towaco to Pauly’s girlfriend’s mother’s house for the first part of our annual Christmas Eve tradition, and then later to make the trip south to my mother’s in Toms River on Christmas Day.

Traveling in the snow scared me; traveling south to meet my mother scared my girlfriend.

Garrick saved me from the trip in the snow by picking me up at my girlfriend’s house, waiving back at her as she waved from her door up the long set of stairs from the street with me merely having to pay the price of listening to Pauly in the front seat predicting ill tidings for the upcoming year.

My girlfriend’s sickness allowed her to escape the trip south to see my mother, leaving me to make the trip there and back along, returning to her late Christmas Day exhausted, falling asleep in her arms and waking on the couch under the scrutiny of her parents.

With my girlfriend still not recovered, I wanted to stay with her today – but had already told Uncle Harry that I would drive up to Greenwood Lake to visit him, knowing that he was ill as well.

“Someone has to visit him,” I told his brother Ed down in Toms River, “and since I’m the closest geographically that someone has to be me.”

Harry like many in our family has been ill for a long time and Christmas time did little to help him mend.

Harry and Christmas were old drinking buddies and I over the years was the hapless bartender condemned to listen to their tales of woe.

My girlfriend’s illness robbed us of what may be our last and only Christmas together since this time next year she will likely be off in some remote place at graduate school.

The whole two days made me realize that we are constantly saying goodbye to each other, each time feeling as if it will be the last time, and that we might never see each other again.

Now, I sit in my own place on my own bed aching for warmth that may never come, from a stove that is not adequate to heat this sieve of an apartment, and from a love I know already is only temporary.

A Christmas Tradition

December 26, 1985

We celebrated a traditional Christmas – traditional for us, if not the world, just like in the old days, a fellow might say, me, Hank, Pauly and Garrick, all in the same place at the same time, singing old dogs, drinking until we were drunk, smoking dope the way we did each Christmas Eve as long as we could remember, feeling the age old pain lonely men feel this time of year.

Only Hank seemed reasonably content, having met a new romantic interest last fall. The other three of the Four Musketeers ached with the same old pangs that drew us together in the past, bringing us to Frank and Dawn again for our reunion.

Although the location changed over the last decade, the mood never did, nor the atmosphere – and even when one or more could not stay the whole night, we all made our appearance if only as a gesture of the past, to maintain a tradition we are reluctant to surrender for fear we might not have it when we need it again in the future – when suddenly four years ago, it stopped.

One year, I recall, coming through a thick fog. One year I even deserted my girlfriend to be with this motley crew, deserting them a week later on New Years to be with her.

One year I met Frank’s mother, an elderly woman who startled the crap out of me when passing the joint, she asked for a hit.

This year felt as if nothing had changed, time preserving this night in eternity for us to linger in and recall, except that we all looked older if not acting it, and Frank’s daughter springing from childhood into young womanhood.

Thinking back over the last four years since our last gathering I realize how lost I felt, and hearing the old songs and feeling the old high dragged me back in time to a point where no matter how miserable I was on any other day of any other year, I found peace on Christmas Eve with these people.

Early on Christmas Eve Day I’d felt lost, without tradition after hearing other people talk about theirs, and then attending the event with the others and hearing Hank belt out songs we’d sung since 1971 or so, and having Pauly dominate the room with his satiric humor, I felt as if I’d come home again – We all go home for Christmas don’t we?

Hank had a more self-deprecating humor, mocking his past life and failed accomplishments, while Garrick still pined over that one lost romance from that one time when he lived inside a DH Laurence novel with a woman as acute as any of its characters.

Garrick makes up for his loneliness by going from place to place, seeing a host of people who populate the landscape of his life, but never really manages to escape the fundamental pain he feels – we all feel – this time of year, waiting as we all wait for some woman to jump into his life with both boots on.

I think I hurt him a little when I mumbled something about my interest Hank’s cousin, Mary Kay, a woman Garrick is apparently interested in as well. But waiting for Garrick to act is like waiting for the advance of a glazier. He flirts with commitment, but never commits.

I remember a string of Christmases past in which he occupied himself with a woman from Clifton, coming ever-so-close to getting her to bed, only to wait just long enough for her to eventually introduce him to her future husband. I remember when I was just like Garrick and so we can take comfort in each other’s misery, and the perverse contest of how long each of us could last without a woman’s attention.

Now as always, Garrick operates alone, and sometimes I feel sorry for him, when I am really feeling sorry for myself since – in breaking up with Anne – I’m right back to where he is, one more sad tradition that has nothing to do with Christmas.

Layoff from Toys R Us (1980)

December 23, 1980

With one day more to work before Christmas, Jim – one the assistant managers at the Totowa Toys R Us – came over to us as we cleaned up after our shift to tell us we all will soon be laid off.

No, it wasn’t quite as direct as that.  He didn’t even want to say it, his contorted face going red as he blushed.

“Please, don’t hold it against me,” he pleaded.

But we already knew that our days were numbered and did not blame the man.

This was one of the few jobs I’d worked in my life where I had not problem with the bosses. For the most part, they were all great people – this in contrast to the Garfield Two Guys where I worked last Summer where all the bosses were assholes.

When I said as much, Jim tried to laugh; John and I did.

“Don’t worry, Chief,” John told Jim. “I just got fired from my day job, too. So now I can definitely collect unemployment.”

Jim looked moderately grateful, then glanced uncertainly at me.

“Don’t worry about me. I have a job starting after the first of the year,” I said. “So, don’t bother begging me to stay because I can’t. I know how much you want me to, and how you’re willing to beg the big bosses on my behalf. Don’t bother. I can’t.”

Jim stared at me for a long moment, knowing how willing I was to make stuff up, a regular storyteller, but perhaps this time I might even have been telling the truth.

Then he shook his head.

“You’re just a sick individual, Sullivan,” he said. “You’re testimony to just how willing we are to hire anybody during the Christmas season.”

We laughed; he laughed; then he walked away.

Several people were already gone, taking off early to be with their families or doing last minute Christmas shopping or even down with the bug – we not knowing which was which or who was whom.

But there was a sense of loss, as if working with these people for such a short time had left us saddled with unexpected nostalgia, wishing they had said goodbye or given us a parting Christmas card.

The season is dying and soon John would vanish, as would Debby, and the last holdouts would hold on until Friday when we all would pick up our last checks and go our separate ways.

Marcie seemed particularly sad as she strolled up from the game wall towards the wall where we all hung our coats. She wanted to say something, but didn’t, as if she couldn’t find words to express something, I could only guess she meant to say.

Many of the people laughed sadly, saying, “See you next year,” although we all know most of those we worked with would be somewhere else entirely by next year, and I felt much the same way I felt graduating school, knowing that I would never see many of these faces again, although somewhere in the back of my head, I would wonder what happened to them, if I managed even to remember them at all.

Marcie is the only one I’m sure I’ll see again since she’s the cousin of one of my best friends. But I also have a bit of trouble there since I have a girlfriend who I know I will also be parting from soon, and I’m attracted to Marcie and scared to tell her as much.

I keep thinking of when my girlfriend will take off for graduate school and I will be by myself again, if not immediately, then definitely by next Christmas.

Christmas season is a hard time for the broken-hearted, as Chris – the former girlfriend of Bob, the band’s bass player showed when I met her hear last week. She stumbled through these aisles like a zombie, looking but not seeing, her vacant gaze searching for something she’d never find in a toy store or any store for that matter. We spoke for a time, her bitterness reminding me of how I felt when I broken up with my ex-wife years ago and reminding me of how much pain I can expect to feel when I lose my current girlfriend.

Chris holds a grudge against Bob similar to the one I held against my ex-wife, and I cringe hoping I won’t hold the same grudge against my girlfriend when my time comes again. I like to think I’ve grown up a bit but know pain does terrible things to people, twisting them up inside so we can’t think straight.

While some people do blame Jim for the layoffs, we all saw it coming and so we shouldn’t be as bitter as we would have if it had come as a surprise.

When all the warnings are there, it’s not the other person’s fault, it’s our own.

So here we are, something coming to an end in our lives, and we spend this last night desperate to squeeze out the last drops, clinging to a job we didn’t particularly like or a romance we suspected might be just an interlude between other acts – whether we are Toys R Us friends or lovers, all things must pass.

My future is one of doubt. Although I jokingly told Jim I have job offer, it was just another yarn, and I know after the holiday I will be scrambling to find a way to pay my rent.

Christmas is near. I’ll try not to think about the future until it comes.

A Christmas to remember?

December 22, 1980

The count down to Christmas continues, the final push in a long series of days that make up the Christmas season, three more precious days of madness before the whole thing concludes with the fat man sleigh bells.

Only I’m not as pressed as the world is, going from the madness of school to this semi-retired stage between semesters when I have time to clean and relax before the madness starts again.

There will be new obligations and new disasters to deal with come the New Year.

For some reason, I keep thinking back to the Christmas I spent in Portland back in 1971, that last gasp in a long criminal road trip before we made our way back to New Jersey to turn myself in and start my new life as a model citizen (ha!)

I guess this is relevant since that was the Christmas John Lennon released “Happy Christmas,” and I was caught up with his Imagine album ( I still can’t believe he’s dead, and still feel as if I lost a member of my family when he died.)

My daughter, Ruby, loved that album, even though she was not even a year old. She rolled around the big room in our apartment in her walker, rushing to the radio whenever one of Lennon’s songs came on – as she also did for Paul McCartney for songs from “Ram.”

It was a time when Louise and I had to make up our minds about the future. Portland had not been the nirvana we’d hoped. Mike and Marie – scared about the potential that the FBI might finally catch up with them – vanished around Halloween, leaving us with no natural allies.

The Lewis family with whom we’d developed some kind of unreasonable feud had moved out of our hair to a new apartment in a remote part of town.

I remember the huge Christmas tree we had acquired and how it barely fit in the main room despite the high ceiling. I remember Louise cooking a turkey for our dinner and inviting our few remaining friends to come share it with us on Christmas Day.

Louise even invited her secret lover – with whom she had cheated on me – who told her then that he was moving back to Idaho, although at the time I didn’t yet suspect anything between them and wondered why she was so upset when he told her he had to go. Being a blind as I was, I merely thought him as a good friend.

It was a mystery seeing her cry like she did under the glittering branches of that huge tree, and this man trying to give her comfort, and me being too stupid to understand what exactly transpired.

I remember feeling a strange sense of relief that Christmas, but we knew the quiet spell could not last, and were already discussing our return to the East. But later, I knew Louise had other plans other than just the trip, and what she wanted back east had nothing to do with me.

In 1971, I had nothing to hold me in Portland, not even a job – although I had worked a number of jobs our first time there, including temporary work through Manpower, and then several other jobs in New York while waiting for Ruby to be born.

Part of the reason for leaving New York was how dangerous it had become. Hank moved out before we left because he’d been mugged too many times and feared he might get killed if it continued. Louise feared for our safety, too.

But jobless in Portland was little better, and part of my longing to go back was to find a job, although I still hadn’t then made up my mind to settle my legal troubles.

It was also risky to remain because I had lost my wallet and my phony ID, and so risked getting stopped by the police and hauled back East to justice as a wanted felon.

By the time we did get back, everything fell apart, and by Christmas 1972, I was alone again.

I kept thinking of our previous trip through Portland in August 1970 when Louise was still pregnant and we hoped Hank – living in New York at the time – would help us, and how we made our way east, only to long for Portland again, and once in Portland, longed for New York again – an endless cycle of coming and going Louise continues since the last I heard of her she had taken Ruby for yet another trip to Portland.

Now, almost decade later, I still feel the loss, the lingering sense of the unresolved, of something should have done and did not, and may never get to do, thinking about that Christmas 1971 as if it had been my last chance

Four Days to Christmas (1980)

December 21, 1980

Four days before Christmas, the last Sunday before the main event.

Outside, the neighborhood roars with pre-holiday life, people stumbling down steps from the upstairs apartments, hollering at each other over forgotten car keys or presents or some other nonsense I can barely make out. Many need to reach the mall for last minute buys or risk finding empty shelves.

My pal Pauly says he’s yet to buy the hat he plans to give his mother, or so he told me last night when he hopped up on the barstool next to mine, exhausted from performing, caught up on the same Christmas disease he mocked me for earlier.

Garrick, more than a little inebriated, wandering around the bar alternately laughing and cursing, not quite sure whether he was angry or happy – which was perhaps his intent all along.

Although tired after a late night, I’m not hung over.

Outside, the traffic along 8th and Passaic streets has taken on a new tone, not quite like the hectic work-day stuff of the rest of year, yet in some ways more impatient, horns honking with an urgency only impending Christmas can cause.

And yet, behind the impatience is a quiet I can’t quite explain – as if a hope to achieve the peace on earth this time of year always promises.

Someone leans on the horn in the carport outside my door, trying to get passed some visitor who has parked in the driveway in from the street, making it impossible for anyone to get out – a ritual so frequent I would not take notice if not for the time of year and the need to find peace in my own life.

I hear Stella curse and realize she’s the one whose trying to get out, for more than fifteen minutes, needing to get to the store for milk and the newspaper, finally relenting when a young Cuban guy comes stumbling down from upstairs apartment next to Garrick’s and demands to know why Stella and apparently Garrick were trying to get into his car.

“To move it,” Garrick tells him.

Stella tells him she should have called a tow truck.

The boy climbs into the car, starts the engine and grins at Stella as he pulls away.

Four days to Christmas, I think.

I hear the howl of wind, too, stirring up a few brown leaves at the back of the carport and sending a chill through the thin walls of my cold water flat, a chill the stove can barely compensate for, and I shiver, huddled still under my blanket on the bed I moved out of the frigid back room to get closer to the stove – a Christmas present of warmth I will continue to enjoy until spring comes, and maybe even until summer.

My mother – living with my grandmother and my uncle’s family in Toms River – wonders if it will be a white Christmas this year. I peer around the window shade and see a bright blue sky and a brilliant yellow sun and think perhaps not.

I wonder if we will seek out Christmas on Christmas Eve as we used to. Two or three years ago – I forget which – Me, Pauly, Hank and Garrick found Christmas up in Towaco on a rainy Christmas Eve, rain everywhere except at the top of that mountain where Pauly’s girlfriend’s mom lived – there we encountered snow, and a scene straight out of Dickens’ Christmas Carroll – old Victorian structures lining each side of a snow-narrowed road as if waiting for horse and carriage to arrive, smoke rising from the chimney of the house we were to gather in, and the scent of pine and burning logs filling the air when we finally pulled up and got out of the car.

Inside, we gorged on cheese and soaked up the wine, sitting before a fireplace nearly as large as my car, laughing about the holiday and the future, and the dreams we all still had.

We were a small band of old friends sharing the moment.

Today, things would be different because my life is different, college collecting new friends and new rituals, though I suspect I will be returning to that house bringing my newfound girlfriend with me, having had no woman in my life back then.

She plans to join me when I go out with Hank and Pauly shopping for that hat for Pauly’s mother, and the host of other odd gifts Pauly routinely buys to fill in for those folks he hadn’t time to create a painting for.

Four days to Christmas, and really, life hasn’t changed as much as I think, only adding a few new stockings to the chimney, as we plan to throw another log on the fire and open another bottle of wine.

Will you still love me when I’m 74?

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

This would be Hank’s 70th birthday, had he managed to live this long.

Although he lived longer than the age of 25 Pauly predicted, Hank died in March 1995, far short of the year the rest of us have reached in our now-old age.

 I saw Hank last on his Christmas Eve birthday in 1994, when we made our way to his mother’s house in Haledon where we met Garrick and we all made a caravan to Sparta for our annual get-together with Frank and Dawn.

I recall how old Hank looked, more 90 than 45, balding and stooped, forgetful partly because of the toxins stirring in his blood from his bad kidneys.

He looked more like his mother’s husband, than her son, and acted that way even that night, struggling to get himself together for the trip, urged on by Garrick, who on-and-off lived in the spare room upstairs with Hank, best of friends, who spent nights watching TV together while consuming TV dinners or takeout pizza.

Hank always ate badly, smoked too much, drank too much, and refused to give up his nasty habits even when death loomed over him, a dark cloud he suffered under for years before he actually passed.

I met him at the Fabian Theater where we both worked as ushers in 1967, and this changed my life, stirring up in me a passion for art that Hank struggled to realize. He ached for the bohemian life and made me ache for it as well.

We plunged into the Village scene together, where for a time he found comfort in an East 5th Street apartment living with a woman named Laurie, with me still destined for a life of crime I could not completely avoid before winding up living around the block on East 6th Street, a hunted criminal connected to Abbie Hoffman and the Weather Underground.

Hank never got into the radical aspects of the 1960s, preferring the peace and love hippie life, something he could not sustain working as we both did for Mercury Messenger Service.

He eventually moved back to New Jersey and took up various warehouse jobs, while engaging in community theater on his free time, trying to convince me to write songs for him so he could become a new Elton John.

I struggled through similar jobs, scribbling out bad poetry, while learning how to write, not just poems or songs, but eventually real stories, and eventually newspaper stories as well.

At the time of Hank’s death, I was fully into a career as a journalist, something I think Hank admired in me since he saw me living up to my dreams when life kept him from realizing his.

For several years, Hank and I searched desperately for the New York City folk scene that had vanished a decade before our arrival, wandering into a strange new world that included places like The Electric Circus, the Filmore East and Max’s Kansas City.

Hank loved New York with such a passion that he could not leave it, and often drove there after work to hang out at several bars – I eventually wrote a song about him and a place called “Formerly Joes” in the West Village.

I try to think more about those days when he still was creative than the final days when he could not keep up on the treadmill of ill health and struggled just to wake up. He might have survived longer had he gone into more intensive therapy, doing the full-blown dialysis he needed rather than the half-hearted effort he engaged in so that he could continue to work and socialize.

I remember his fantasy when we were young, about he, me, Pauly and Garrick, all as old men, gray-haired, hanging out together on rocking chairs on some porch, viewing the world without usual cynical eye. Hank used to sing the Beatles song about being 64. Now, we have to update it. Yes, Hank, I will still love you when you’re 70 or even 74.