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.
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