Chasing the wild turkey

November 26, 1981

My uncle Frank was with me tonight as we looked for his brother along Route 37 in Toms River.

Ritchie was on the loose again, only this time roaming around barefoot and in short sleeves on a day when the temperature fell below freezing.

We shiver even in the car wearing down jackets.

I kept wondering how Ritchie felt.

Or did madness provide its own unique protection, insolating him against the elements after it robbed him of everything else?

“I used to hate going home for the holidays,” Frank said as he drove, twisting the steering wheel to avoid things we could only vaguely see through the misting glass, both of us trying to clear the windshield with our gloves. “There was always something going on. Fights and other shit.”

We both recognized how much the family had deteriorated over the last few years, brothers and sister scattered across the state and even beyond, as if they could not put enough distance between each other for comfort.

This wasn’t new, but none recognized the signs until after I was born and my mother went mad – a family illness that tends to come out in the weakest link, reflecting a struggle for power among the strongest, held in place by a most powerful grandfather – and later by his loving daughter, my mother’s sister. When passed away, so did the family for all intents and purposes – revealed most evidently in the family’s next weak link Ritchie.

This was his fourth attempt since my bringing him down from Passaic to Toms River for Thanksgiving.

I could not trust to leave him alone up north, and he resented my dragging him to meet a family he had no use for any more than they had for him.

Each member of the family had taken turns taking him in, mostly for a week or two. Frank gave up when Ritchie decided to sleep in the cab of his carpentry truck rather than on Frank’s fold out bed, drawing scorn from neighbors who complained about the drinking and the stench. Ted already had my mother and my grandmother to take care of did not need one more of the old family to interfere with the raising of his own family.

He didn’t mind us visiting, but could not handle a mentally ill drunk.

So Ritchie got dumped on me, with the suggestion that I might commit my wayward uncle into one of the less than fine institutions such as Greystone or Bergen Pines, or the terrifying Willowbrook on Staten Island.

They had asked me to do the same thing for my mother, saying that I was so poor that the state could not expect me to pay when each of the other family members had a house or savings the state might tap.

Having my mother in such a place for most my childhood, and her pleading for me to get her out, I could never sign anyone into one of those places – even Ritchie, who I had hated most of my life.

Ritchie terrorized me during those early years when I was still impressionable and my mother in the hospital. I would be sitting on the floor watching television or reading a book and he would come into the house in a drunken stupor and lecture me about everything I was doing wrong in my life. Later, when I started to get in trouble with the law, and got dragged home in the back of a police car, my punishment was to work for him – something each of his younger brothers also suffered until they grew big enough to tell him to fuck off.

I never got big enough and so I avoided him, hiding out in my room, or finding places out of the house to hide – and eventually, I fled the house entirely partly to get away from him.

So it is one of life’s ironies that I should get stuck taking care of him when he got too unstable to take care of himself.

Ritchie may be crazy, but he’s also crafty, playing an assortment of head games – whether to mess with me or get sympathy, I can’t tell

He used to limp around my cold water flat complaining that his leg hurt until I noticed it was never the same leg he complained about, and he stopped.

We found Ritchie finally stumbling towards the on ramp to the Parkway and put him in the back seat of Frank’s car for the drive back to Ted’s place for lack of any place else that would take him. We called the hospital down here and they said they didn’t have room. The police had stopped him on the side of the highway earlier – but did not pick him up even though he was clearly under dressed for the weather.

Ted and his family left for north to see his in-laws, leaving me to lock Ritchie in the spare room downstairs.

But I have to stand guard until it is time to drive back up north for fear that he will again climb out the window and take to the highway barefoot.

Happy Thanksgiving. I keep wondering which one of us is the turkey.

Turkey Day

November 24, 1981

Thanksgiving is one of those difficult holidays, a prelude to Christmas, but never really as important.

In 1969, I slept completely through the day, hiding from the police in an East LA apartment like one of those b-movie gangsters, thinking the FBI or the mob might kick down my door at any moment.

I never saw myself as an anti-hero, just a scared kid a few months out of the army, in love with some girl everybody warned me not to get involved with and yet I got involved with her anyway.

In love enough to throw away whatever life I had at home, steal some numbers money from a safe in my uncles’ house and head west to try to find her.
I went to LA first and stayed there for a few months, waiting for things to cool down and for my uncles, the law or the gangsters to bypass Boulder where she lived so I could go there.

I remembering eating bad Mexican food out of a can, and smoking a lot of dope, waiting for the holiday to come and then waking up nearly 24 hours later with the clock ticking down not onto a new year but the end of Thanksgiving.

I was so damned lonely, I went out to the public phone the next day in the back of the Chicano bodega and called her, telling her that I was coming to get her, and asked it that was all right.

I heard doubt in her voice, I didn’t realize until I got there was regret over another man, someone she was in love with the way I was in love with her, but she couldn’t have, and so she settled for me.

In doubt when I hung up the phone, I wondered if maybe I had made a mistake, and felt this strong longing for home, the missed Thanksgiving turkey I knew my family had devoured, and now doubt still picked the bones of even as I stood in that rainy LA air, 3000 miles west.

I wasn’t even sure what I really missed since I’d spent most of my younger days doing everything I could to escape them and the madness, and yet, I ached none the less, and didn’t try to cure the ache by smoking it away.

I just sat on the stoop of the apartment building, drawing dirty looks from the land lady, who said she hated hippies, Mexicans and bums – and though I didn’t look like a bum with my army crew cut still fresh, I acted like one.

And maybe I was a bum.

And maybe I was grateful for being anything at all.

The next day I went down to the Trailways station downtown, got on a bus with a newly purchased motorcycle jacket (against the expected cold) and headed off to Colorado, vowing not to miss Christmas the way I had Thanksgiving.

The small things that count

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The rain comes – along with wind.

I never heard of a Nor’easter until I moved to Hoboken in the early 1990s, and then I never stopped hearing about, especially when my condo roof leaked.

This was far worse than anything I experienced in Passaic, where life was relatively dry inside, if never quite warm enough.

We live in a changing world – not just because of global warming, but also because we can’t seem to find a place that feels warm and dry on days like this.

I remember jogging through all sorts of weather with the confidence that when I got back home I would not have to worry.

These days, life is full of worry and obligations, and assumptions – we either have to shed or get crushed under their weight.

Sometimes the real weight isn’t on the outside, but inside, and we carry it around like excess baggage – the way Louise used to pack our VW van with things we would never need on our road trip out in the west.

I’m in the process of shedding a lot of physical stuff with the hopes it translate into something inside that is always shed.

Of course, we should be wary about what we get rid of as much as what we keep. Sometimes, things that seem of little value are the most valuable things of all.

Wisdom is knowing which is which, and at what point a blessing becomes a burden, and should be shed.

But then, I’ve never be as wise as all that, and keep small treasures inside me forever, things that other people might think I should shed.

I just can’t – useful or not, some small things make life worth living, and though we might be able to live without them, life would be greatly diminished – perhaps even pointless to live.

So I stare out the front window of my office at the rain, and know I shall soon have to plunge out into it, to get to my car, to get to some pointless meeting, to get home hoping that the roof isn’t leaking and the heat still works, and perhaps to feel just a little of that tenderness I felt way back then when I shivered against the cold in Passaic.

This is life

Monday, November 25, 2013

This is the time of year when we heal our souls, the transition time when the seasons change and we come face to face with mortality.

The chill air came rushing in with a gush over the last few days, making me shudder even under the thick covers in bed.

This has always been the safe place for me, even as a kid growing up in a house of rage and madness.

I went to sleep by relaxing every muscle in my body one inch at a time, a technique I later discovered was a kind of meditation.

I still use it, trying to bypass the conscious barrier with its early morning panic to get to that stream of consciousness to which everybody contributes, drawing from it strength, knowledge and wisdom I do not possess for myself.

Sometimes, I curl up in a yoga stance, my face against the mattress, my arms down at my side, my belly bent over my knees as my back gradually gives up the weight of a week’s worth of worry – so when I straighten again, each muscle eases and I ease into sleep or some self-induced sense of peace.

This always worked best in colder months as a kid because with a quilt over me, I felt less vulnerable, my little tent against raging storms beyond.

This still works for me all these years later, as I resist the greater tensions of the world beyond the walls of my house, the darkness that does not come with changing seasons, but from some deep illness in our souls.

The leaves that had clung precariously to the trees behind the house – a gold and red wonderland – have fallen into heaps in my back yard, a patched quilt that snow shall soon cover over, but looking down on, has its own magical quality I treasure for those moments when it lasts.

These leaves crunch under my footsteps as I make my way to the shed for the seed to fill the bird feeder, a ritual that will become regular over the cold months, and then cease until this time next year.

As a city kid growing up in Paterson, I always longed for that middle class life that people always showed us on TV, where kids rushed through piles of leaves and teens took hayrides.

Having a yard like mine sort of gives me a little of that, and the sense of change that is often missed in places with few trees.

I suppose I need to have some visible indication of change externally, when dramatic changes occur in me.

My favorite English professor in college said I would change my mind about loving autumn when I got to be her age and had to stare down into the jaws of death and realize that’s what autumn is – dying.

She was wrong. I still love this moment in time, perhaps because I still believe that there is a spring that will follow it, and though I might be a totally different person when it comes, I believe wholeheartedly, it will come and I will be there to greet it and the green it brings, and I will remain to see those leaves change to gold and red, and to watch them flutter to the ground so that they may crunch under my footsteps when I go out to feed the birds.

This is life, and it is good – no matter what else happens.

The old house

 

Old house: 1946

December 3, 1986

  

I dreamed they tore my old house down

That constantly changing thing on the hill

Where I grew up, then again, just about,

But there is an empty lot of landfill

Covered with the dark, black of asphalt,

I was in tears even though I hated that place

Sitting on the corner to figure out whose fault

It was that caused me to want to erase

That bit of history contained in that old site

The house that sat there, so loud at times

Yet at other times so quiet and still despite

The rumbling of traffic rising with sunshine

To die later with the pink glow and rising dark

Maybe they just a space for those trucks to park

I always come back here to look at the old house on the hill because part of me still haunts it. Some places just don’t leave you even when you leave it, and this is one of them for me – as I’m sure the cold water flat I live in now will strike me the same way later.

Too many things happened here – the way huge historic events somehow stain the ground where they took place so that one cannot exist without the other in people’s minds.

I had a hard time here, moving in and out of this place as my mother’s mad fits dictated, sometimes returning here after terrible times elsewhere deeper in the ghetto.

I come back here because it is a lasting icon in my life that has yet to be bulldozed out of existence, even when nearly everything else has been.

The day I come back and find it gone, I’ll have lost part of myself.

I come back here when I feel lost and need to find my roots again, this generally after some bad bit of misfortune, a failed love or some other unnatural disaster I have brought down on myself.

Seeing it brings me home, even if strangers happen to be living in it now.

I remember when my uncle finally decided to sell the place and move to Toms River, and how lost I felt, not being able to return for visits, knowing that this place the family moved into after the great war would no longer get cared for by hands of the same blood line. Chuck, the guy who owns the gas station bought it and the boat store, and changed both while at the same time, kept up their surface appearance so that from the outside, I still get the same sense of foundation.

This time of year is even more important, because with the exception of the Christmas I spent in the projects in Paterson and the two I spent on the run from the police – most of my holidays were spent here.

All of these things are true this year, and I suppose the dream I had about its vanishing scared me so much I would have come here faster just to make sure it was only a dream.

Having seen it, I go on my way again, if not healed, then at least less wounded.

Firework

April 4, 1981

I used to watch the fireworks outside Clifton Stadium.

My mother used to drag me there and we would sit on the lawn by a large grassy knoll with an oak tree at its peak.

The fire works shot up out of the stadium like magic, bursting high in the sky with showers of color.

For some reason, it took me years to realize these bursts came with explosions, and then after a few years of going, I got scared, hands over my ears against the sound – each boom seeming to explode inside of me as well as out.

Still later, the noise didn’t bother me at all. In fact, when I went there as a teen, it was for the booms and not the bursts of color.

I could not get enough of the loudness, and I could not duplicate it, no matter how high I turned up the radio volume when I got home.

Sometimes, I just went out into the back yard and yelled as loud as I could, drawing the wrath of my uncles who hurried from every part of the house to find out what was wrong and grew enraged when I could not tell them.

I simply loved sound, the louder the better, and music like the Beatles and the Stones only scratched the surface of the itch I felt, fireworks of a sort that went off inside my head each time I dropped the needle onto the surface of the record.

I still don’t know what I expected, perhaps looking for a niche in this ever shrinking world where I needed to find voice I could not find any place else.

Or maybe something real, a bit of beauty that has to come with an explosion inside and out, a sense of pain and pleasure mingling.

I live in the very real world of Passaic, and pass all sorts of good and bad people in my walk down the block, hardly shocked, or even judgmental, always waiting for some light show and explosions to mark this life, illuminated.

Maybe I am the firework, waiting for someone to light my fuse.

I think that there’s a word for me

A gross thing in my mouth

I think that is it killing me

To ever let it out.

A new pen

April 3, 1981

I think I’ll buy myself a new pen

One with new words in it so I

Won’t have to see these words when

I’m crying on my pillow or cry-

ing when I’m down; I know it’s bad

when I can’t rise and face the day

that same old loneliness I had

when I was alone and used to pray

that someone somewhere would come

along and save this dying soul

of mine, no one came, no one

and I dug myself another hole

and lay there in my self seen shame

and moaned there in my peppered pain.

Things keep mounting: my ex girlfriend, my alcoholic uncle, my mad mother.

What’s the sense of going to school when there so sense of survival beyond it.

This hole I dug is filling with me on its bottom. There’s a gap in my chest and it feels empty. I feel it slowly opening like a bad tooth, ready to collapse in on itself until only the hole remains, with only the sharp, crusted edges left, like a stone henge to some mysterious past whose purpose has been forgotten.

Yeah, I think I’ll buy a new pen, one that inscribes a different life, one that inks this page with happy thoughts – that’s the difference between 8th Street in Passaic, and Oak Street in Paterson, except time, as if I have spent a decade presuming I made advances, when in truth I only marked time.

I can’t even blame my ex-girl friend this time. She’s 23, I’m 30. I ought to know better, have learned something, and have not.