A triumphant return?

February 6, 1986

So who should show up last night at work?

Joanne again, dismal, curious Joanne looking for comfort in that wondrous way of hers.

She returned like a stranger, someone once utterly in love with the mall, but now divorced from it and aching for the old feelings she used to have for it, calling from the bagel shop for permission to see me, so she can slip passed guards whom she believed wanted to keep her out.

“That’s silly,” I told her over the phone. We could almost see each other across the dark hall.

Not so silly, she told me, since management has warned all the night guards against her, making her one of the most disliked people in the mall.

She is a liar. She even lied to me last night about Phil and her other job, still trying to sound more important than she really is. It is hugely important for her to be someone.

She is a thief, too, though not nearly as bad as many of the others who used to work here. She steals little things, like people’s souls, attaching herself like a leech to men like Danny, filled with an intense need to have him hold her, something that did not sit well with Danny’s wife.

But deep down inside of Joanne there is another person, a gentle caring child who trusts too much, presuming that others – especially men – won’t hurt her, therefore allowing them to hurt her even more.

She is not a pretty woman by many standards, but she is cute in her own fashion – a cuteness that draws men’s attention no other more eloquent women are around.

She has dark hair and dark eyes that remind me of one of those puppy pictures they sell in the center of the mall, and often acts the part of a puppy when she’s attracted, bobbing up and down at someone’s side.

A closer look, however, shows her hunger. She licks her lips when she is horny, and pressed her chest into the person she’s attracted to. She has a crooked smile that flashes on and off like an advertisement.

But she is slovenly, too, and slumps, and on bad days she smells for lack of a shower.

When she isn’t putting on a front, when she’s just herself, she had something of a bland look, lost and lonely, hunted and mistrusting.

Last night, she was ON, wearing a wrinkled silk shirt with an uneven collar, and jeans patched in stylistic copy of poverty. When she crossed the hall, she staggered a little as if drunk, glancing this way and that at the old sights, and saying when I let her into our store that she didn’t miss the place at all. Not long later, she moved around the store again as if she owned it, using the toilet (where she once made love to Danny during the busy shift), making herself coffee, pausing from time to time to stare through the gate into the hall, shaking her head, saying how everything had changed, looking every bit like the lost soul again, only to snap back into character.

She was one of the original mall rats, having come here when the mall opened in 1970, a mall rat who must have wrenched something inside her when forced to leave 15 years later. The last time I saw her here, she had men lined up waiting to take her out to their cars, with me aching to be one of them, and never was. Now the men here are all strangers, and she talked of other men, other places, other times, before fading away back into the night, leaving the place that much more devoid than it was before.

Night in the Blue Motel

 

Monday, December 24, 2012

I must of passed this motel hundreds of times since my first coming up this highway in the Chevy pickup truck we had converted to use as a camper for the long trip from New York City to Portland, me, my girlfriend, my daughter, Michael, the man who’d made the FBI’s most wanted list for a week earlier that year, and his girlfriend – packing our entire lives in the back of the wooden box we have built so that we looked very much like Okies from The Grapes of Wrath.

Each time I returned to visit Scranton in the subsequent years, I always took this highway, first because it reminded me of who would become my ex-wife, in whose footsteps I walked dozens of years – never ceasing to love anyone I once loved. I’d even traveled this road that time when she wanted to see me and I drove west with my two best friends, who hoped they could help convince her to take me back and allow me to feel like a father again, a romantic’s notion that never transpired, then later, I took this route because the road was one of the blue highways, an up and down ribbon through time and space that brought me back to an era before the super highways and modern concepts of speed. I always drove slow here and looked to the trees and ponds, yet oddly, have over looked this particular rundown motel, something straight out of post World War II with few modern conveniences except a pub that had beer signs posted over its front windows and two handwritten signs on the door: bikers welcome and closed until further notice.

I had called well enough in advance to make reservations and when I pulled the car up in front of the place, I celebrated my foresight, seeing pickups and other trucks sprawled on both sides of the highway in front of it – perhaps hunters coming in for their Christmas kill.

“No it’s an auction,” the woman proprietor told me when I finally tracked her down, trying all the doors to the office and then the closed pub, only to find them locked and their interiors dark.

I saw the door bell on the office door only after I saw the woman coming to open the door, and when I told her my name, she nodded, took my credit card and ran this through a swipe that did not take.

“It doesn’t work,” she said.

I was certain I had enough credit left to pay the $50 fee. But I gave her another card. This didn’t work either. Then I gave her a debit, and when that failed, I gave her the cash.

“We had a power outage last week,” the woman said. “Maybe the machine is broken. I’ll have to get someone out here to check it.”

But from the look of it all, the machine was not the only thing broken. The three building complex tended to sag in places it out not, and the driveway between these buildings can strong evidence to the heavy weather the snow-laden sides of the highway had only hinted at on our way there, ice covering the asphalt (and fortunately filling the holes that might have swallowed my small car).

She handed me a key to room #6.

“Check out is at 11,” she said. “Just leave the key in the room when you leave.”

Since I was on my way into Scranton to see my daughter, I only dropped off a bag with a change of clothing. But this gave enough of a glimpse of the interior – or rather, a sniff. Decades of cigarette smoke lingered inside, part of the charm of a room that barely had space for bed, table and chair. A TV set blocked most the way on one side of the bed. A small refrigerator sat in the bottom of a closet which had no bar or hooks to hang clothing. The bathroom had a window that looked out onto the pub’s back porch, which looked like something out of The Hobbit, only far more deteriorated, with old bar signs used to patch the broken spaces on the roof.

The toilet had another handwritten sign like those on the door of the pub saying “hold the handle down to flush,” only there was no handle, just a kind of button.

While the room had towels, it had two pathetic pillows and a very thin blanket. The heater, although claimed to have grades of heat, in truth presented only two options, scalding and frost bite. I chose frostbite and put on most of my clothing. The bed sagged in the middle and groaned like a wicker chair if you moved – or breathed too deeply. Needless to say, the night was one of waking and trying to sleep again.

And strangely, I loved it, reminding me of those days living in cold water flat in Passaic when I first re-hooked up with my ex-wife and daughter again, when I still believed that I would become a great novelist and was suffering for my art, when I placed myself not in some fancy hotel or celebrated venue, but in the down-and-out world of poor painters and suffering writers.

The night in the motel reminded me of what the artist life is supposed to be about, and how in the end, the work is what matters, not the accolades, and each time I work up and I thought again – to chattering teeth – of how special a place in the world artists hold because we do indeed owe a debt of gratitude to moments like this when we are reminded that the real satisfaction comes from what we do – even it if took the better part of the next day to work out the kinks in my back the lack of eat and bad bed causes.

Thin-skinned

10/29/81

I thought I left girls like her behind when I quit the band, the early morning 19 year old telling me she planned to jump off a bridge – not because the lead guitarist didn’t take her home after the last set ended, but because some professor said she couldn’t act when she’d had her heart set on stage and movies since she was five.

 A shy girl, often mocked at school before floating across the campus in a haze of hope, she often talked to me in the student center lounge about small things that bothered her – just the way the groupies often did – shy down deep myself, I guess none of them see me as a threat, or maybe when it comes down to getting what I want, I simply see too far ahead and know I’m going to hurt someone pursuing it, so stop myself, and eat the ache rather than force it onto them.

These episodes happen a lot. Girls like these litter the landscape, unnoticed mostly, disconnected from the hard news and war of wars we hear in on TV or from the spew we get from the mouths of elected officials.

These girls and me are part of some disconnected social thread, full of unrealized passion and pain, I feel but media doesn’t, and I ache over and don’t know why. It’s almost as if we all have radar, me feeling the warning signals as these women gravitate towards me, and we both collide in places like this, a student center lounge or the back of some bar with a bottle of pills or some intention to go somewhere and do something we all will be sorry for later, and the only person between them and doom is me, when all I want down deep is what every man wants, only I have this lousy conscience that won’t let me simply take and often won’t take at all because it never feels right.

This is true of this girl, who is about as fragile as a feather, her self-pride always hinging on the good opinion of some egotistic maniac like an acting professor, instead of some inner gyroscope she can use to gauge her own worth.

“He told me my acting stinks,” she says “But it’s a small thing. You shouldn’t have to hear about it.”

It all starts out small, I think but stay silent, fearful that one of the usual slick crew will overhear us and start to escalate things with their mockery. Someone always snickers at the wrong time. Some people think she’s stupid, and call her retarded behind her back. I see her as unbearably innocent, let loose to wander here without protection, like many of the groupies I knew who thrust themselves at musicians thinking somehow they can get love in the cheap dives we play in, somehow putting together the ingredients the way the bartender does drinks.

Sometimes, I hate humanity and all that status crap that marks one group of people as superior to others.

No one has mocked me since high school, and even then, they only mocked me because I chose to hang out with the losers and geeks, not out of sympathy, but feeling less phony when I did.

But we all have our egos and we all get them bruised. Some people like me can get kicked in the head over and over and not have it affect them, too stubborn to let any asshole tell me what I am or who I can be. But girls like this fold up and die.

This girl isn’t stupid or retarded, just innocent – and maybe not even that inside.

I listened to her fiction in our writing class, her wry intelligence peeking out from behind her shyness like a forest nymph, making me ache, making me want to make love to her poems and her stories, even though she has nothing overtly sexual in any of them, just natural talent I don’t have and ache to get.

“My father is going to be angry,” she tells me, looking around at the passing people – I suppose for signs of the same snickering fools who don’t understand her and would never get the inner meaning of her writing if they had a billboard to tell them. “He’s always angry at me about something, telling me I should just get a husband and forget all this artist stuff. But I won’t. I’ll die first. Maybe I should. Everybody seems to think I’m funny around here.”

“Don’t let them get you down,” I tell her, but I know how easy it is to say, when no one is mocking me. “You’re bright and talented it, and if you’re not around, we’ll all miss you.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” I say, but I know she can’t survive with skin so thin as hers, but if she gets tough, she won’t be the same.

They never are.

Think Big

October 20, 1980

Susan is ill; the Yankees have lost; and I am not the writer I thought I might be.

Although the sun shines, it is cold out, and day wears depression on its sleeve in my name.

I spent yesterday working out a draft of a story I’m not at all happy with.

What depresses me is the fact that it represents the best I can do at this point in my life.

I’m reading Lawrence and wondering how he ever managed to finish his first novel when he wasn’t satisfied with it, and his material was great.

I stumble over words and phrases as if real objects. I pace around my cold water flat like a madman, aching to somehow transpose that madness from my mind and onto paper.

Genius, I’m told, is work, work and more work, and even after all that work, something may not be finished. Some writers aren’t finished until the work is published and still hate later what they’ve done.

I slip another piece of paper into my typewriter and begin again, trying another idea, then another.

Susan is home with a cold and an empty house, and wonders why I’m not there.

I have to write, I tell her. But she doesn’t really understand or maybe doesn’t believe I really have what it takes to make it.

I have doubts when I’ve written a story like this last one and not liking the outcome, thinking that all the work may come to naught.

I am not a man of many talents and so if this doesn’t work, I have to find something more trivial to make my living at, back to truck driving or worse – though I stunk at porno movies in LA, too, getting excited at the wrong time or not at all when I was supposed to.

How many guys can brag about being fired from blue movies?

I ache to write, and thinking – we all have to start somewhere, and that not everybody can be great from the start.

“Think big,” someone once told me, but never prepared me for how big the bad feelings felt at being rejected – or worse, seeing the flaws before I get a chance to show them to anybody else.

Fortunately, I don’t take rejection seriously. I’m a stubborn bastard.

Some people never recover, crawling back into their shells because nobody could see the merit of their work. I keep thinking of Dickenson and her amazing poetry, and how I would kill to have an ounce of her talent.

Other poets thrill me when they’re great, and make me want to live up to what they do.

This place is cold, yet somehow I manage to stay warm, somehow manage to survive each winter and pay each bill, although I’m always on edge of disaster.

I live with hope that someday I won’t look at what I do and see all the flaws, not just in the work, but in me. All I really want from life is to making my living writing, not doing other things so I can write – even rock and roll distracted me, emotionally and physically, so it became more and more difficult to come home and write.

My theory has always been that if I wrote and wrote and wrote I would eventually get better, so that I write about everything I see or hear or anything that happens to me, so that I have history of people I care about already down on paper. So that if and when I do get better and learn how to control this monster I ache to ride, I can bring them all to life.

But I really would like to know if I have what it takes now, so as to avoid wasting my life pursuing some dream that I may not be able to realize.

Maybe I’m deluding myself.

Closing in on Christmas

 December 19, 1980

Well, Christmas is another day closer and the year’s end after that.

The semester ends today and like a messenger traveling across some dreaded war zone, I deliver all my final papers – allowing me to proceed onto my next level of learning.

Semesters seem too short to get all the work I need get done, yet long enough to wear me out, and make me ache for their conclusion.

On top of all that, I’m ill again – with some cold.

But then everybody I know is ill. Susan has a touch of it. And Marcy.

I ran into Garrick, Pauly and Ricky yesterday and they looked like zombies, just waking from the deepest bout with death and took deep breathes as if their last.

We met at Sterns in Willowbrook Mall, and for a time, drowned our misery with bad food at a mall snack bar.

Garrick claimed he could not taste and drowned his cheese steak with hot sauce, and act that I knew he would regret later just as he did when I lived with him in the Passaic apartment and he took me out drinking, bragging that he could eat more jalapeño peppers than I could. I refused to take the bait and refrained, which did not stop him from demonstrating just how many he could eat, and his moans from the bathroom later kept me up all night.

Pauly, in his usual egocentric piety, moaned a lot and said he was bored with our company and should have stayed home where he could suffer in peace.

Ricky stared through the glass barrier at a waitress with a low neck blouse who had bent down to retrieve a coin from the floor, a pleasant vision to men contemplating the end of existence.

It felt good to be around them again, as miserable as they claimed to be.

Outside, the sky had turned gray and a wind rattled the skylights that illuminated part of the upper floor of the mall – while the chill of the season  piled up ice on my car so that I spent a good half our chiseling my door to get it open, feeling all the worse for the exercise.

Back home, on Passaic Street, the wind made beggars of us all, as men and women huddled against it as they walked from the Polish market to the Polish church, stopping off at the Polish bar to get something to warm them. Many dive into doorways till the gusts calm.

I feel something like a lost leaf, being blown from one place to another without any clear indication of where I might land or what forces are the cause, or even if my life has any real purpose despite my pursuit of dreams that may not materialize, regardless of what my professors claim.

My art professor has joined the short line of confidence-building educators who think I’ll amount to something, which is more confidence than I have in that regard. After a decade working as a truck driver, warehouse man and rock & roll roadie, I’ve seen too many people with talent wasting away – more talent than I’ll ever have, more ambition, too, growing old without cashing in. I’m not in this game to cash in on anything, nor do I have any natural talent. I’m obsessed and driven, determined to make something happen that I have no right to expect.

So I park my car and sit to watch the world blow by, the last of autumn’s leaves, evading the ice to cling to my windshield. The wind knocks over a metal trash can and sends it rumbling down the sidewalk, a stream of food wrappers like a tail behind it.

Trucks roar down 8th Street headed towards the bridge into Wallington, each rumble shaking me and my world, as if more than just the semester is ending, as if I have turned some corner into some new life, facing new obstacles I may or may not be prepared to handle, a slippery and illusive as the icy sidewalk outside, the icy street over which trucks and cars travel.

I already miss my old life, secure with a steady paycheck and the indignity of unimportance, always looked down on as someone who works to hard and grinds my nose against the millstone for nothing.

College is suppose to elevate me somehow, make me more important, allow me to hobnob with better crowds, get up front in the line – the way Joey Ramone once got us all into Club 54 when other people had to wait.

I hated that idea. I still do. But I understand why John and the others got off on it, just as they got off on being in Hendrix studio to record the demo a few months ago. They like feeling like stars, being fussed over, being made to feel important, even when it is all an illusion and that any real importance has to be self-generated.

From where I sit the world looks like some impressionistic painting my art professor says I should study more closely, but with the paint still fresh, dripping more like a Jason Pollack painting than anything from Monet, everything weaving into everything else, tree limbs into the backdrop of sagging wooden porches.

Somewhere in this mix, I smell the scent of fire, a wood stove stirred up by poor relations on this block, who have collected fallen limbs near the rail road track and river to cheat PSE&G out of its daily blood money.

For some reason, this puts me in the Christmas spirit, despite Pauly’s vulgar comments about the holiday when we jaunted through the mall, especially when some poor fool tried to beg spare change from him.

“I gave up painting for this?” he said, referring to the numerous watercolors he created each Christmas as gifts.  “I’ll give him money only if he promises to do sit on Santa’s lap”

I felt sorry for the bum and gave him all the coins I had in my pocket, and got a giggle thinking he might spend them trying to get a picture of himself on the mall Santa’s lap, and wondered more soberly, what he would ask for: a roof over his head, a job, or maybe if he was as foolish as I was, a future.”

It’s hard to think that we’re all turning 30 this year (Pauly already has as has Hank) and still pondering the future when most of those are age are settled down with families.

Back home, alone, I felt the ache, not of cold or illness, but of uncertainty, wondering what it all means, and where it will all lead, and if it doesn’t work out, how I’ll ever get back.

Can’t save anybody, you have to save yourself

Dec. 6. 1981

I’m afraid: of guns, women, cars, taxes, police, drugs, booze, bikers, trucks and me.

Most of all me.

I’m my own worst enemy – partly because I care too much about those other people call the wrong people.

Now, I’m sitting with a frightened 17-year-old named Joanne, who tells me again and again how not scared she is.

We’re sitting in a completely American diner in a completely American town, and she tells me about her father and his rage, and the exploding fist on the dinner table that always shakes her world apart.

I’m not complete sure why I’m with her, except for the lure of a free breakfast after a hard night’s work working up a huge hunger in me, a hunger that three eggs, toasts and hash browns won’t cure.

She scares me more than her father scares her – or my reaction does anyway.

I’ve heard all the rumors and gossip about her, and they make me ache, and feel guilty, because she’s looking for salvation and I’m looking for…

Yet her terrified eyes hurt me.

She asks, “how to do I tell him?”

I break the yolk of one egg with the tip of my folk, watching the yellow ooze out. I’m scared to look up. She wants to know how to tell her father about Chuck, the 47-year-old married mall guard who professes to love her.

There are always a lot of Chucks in the lives of women like Joanne.

I tell her, I don’t know, still staring down at the spilled yolk, cringing at the still two unbroken eggs that stare back at me like eyes.

I’m no longer hungry although the hunger still rages inside of me.

I’m thinking of that time in Portland with Louise when we lent our spare bedroom to two 17-year olds so that they wouldn’t have to “do it” in the cold back seat in some remote parking lot where the cops might catch them, only to find out later, the girl’s uncle was a police captain, and he wasn’t happy with me for acting as her pimp.

I can’t give love advice to someone who makes me ache to look at, even when she gets angry at me for staying silent and tells me to stop staring at my eggs and tell her what to do.

I ask what she thinks her father would do if she told him straight out.

“He’d call me a whore,” she says, loudly enough to turn the heads of some of the patrons, and raise the curiosity of some Chuck-like men near by. “He always calls me a whore.”

“Always?”

“You know what I mean,” she says, her voice lowered as if she realized her mistake. “I can trust you, can’t I? You won’t turn on me.”

“Yeah,” I say, knowing that I’m always the trusting type, but don’t look up from my eggs, “you can trust me.”

“I thought about getting my father drunk first,” she says. “But then he might beat me.”

Her hand moved to cover the bruises on her right wrist, bruises that look suspiciously like large fingers. “He always gets violent when he’s drunk. But I have to tell him something. He saw me kissing Chuck in the mall, and now he thinks the worst.”

“The worst?” I ask, looking up finally.

Joanne takes on a coy look, somehow managing to blush when she isn’t the type to blush.

“I hate when my father calls me a whore,” she says, voice still lowered, her gaze sweeping the interior of the diner as if she expects to see her enraged father making his way towards us. I look, too, scared he might think I’m doing Joanne to, when I only want to.

All I see are the other patrons, their gazes returning to their own lives, their talk is of weather, of Sunday’s sermon, of football teams waiting at home on the TV, but not of angry father’s beating hapless daughters.

I hear someone laugh and I’m ashamed, as I break the yolk of the second egg and stare down at the contents I can no longer devour. I sip the milk I ordered instead of coffee because I soon have to go home to sleep and do not want more coffee keeping me up. I imagine all this will do that already, the talk and the hunger, and the desperate need I have to win her trust, when the last thing I want is to be trusted.

“Truth is the best thing I can think of,” I say, my words sounding hollow, like a lie. “Was it Chuck’s birthday or something? You might tell your dad that’s why you kissed him.”

Joanne’s eyes brighten, and she reaches across the table to squeeze my hand. Her fingers are warm, but it is my blood that boils. She rushes out. I wait until she’s gone, push back my plate, pick up the bill Joanne was supposed to pick up, leave a tip and head to the register, wondering the whole time if truth is anything more than a convenient trap, playing into the hands of an enemy who would use it like a knife and twist it deeper.

I keep thinking of the poor girl back in Portland who gave us up because her father, the police captain, made her swear to her lie on with her hand on The Bible, and she couldn’t do it. I keep hoping Joanne’s white lie won’t bring her more black and blue. I keep thinking how much trust is a two-edged sword, with me aching in everyway possible over a girl who loves someone else.

But I know I’ll do it again. When she comes back crying, I’ll sit with her, breaking yolks as my own heart breaks, trying to find a way to help her when I know I can’t save anybody, least of all myself.

I pay the check, and head to my car, and hope I can get some sleep.

Pursuit of greatness

  

Dec. 14, 1985

I’m tired again, existing coffee and too little sleep, and certainly not enough money -- nothing but bleary-eyed stumbling from this job to that.

This I suppose is the dues one pays, working into greatest – or even mediocrity.

Lenny Lopate on the radio last night spoke painfully of his bout with art, a serious student once, three credits away from his masters, over 40 now and disillusioned. He talked about making a mark on the world and bitterly said now he never would, even when others called up commenting on his remarkable observations on art, on must, and on most things.

He often puts himself down, especially after he’s made some valid points. He often qualifies his statements with “I’m not sure what point I’m making here.”

He seems to believe he will make no mark on the world and wonders if that’s a bad thing, if greatness seems to be the objective of everyone, or is it enough just to go on living.

What struck a nerve in me was his description of those who seek to obtain greatness (and of those who try and fail, but keep on trying). Obsession, a sense of self importance, a need to find immortality and have an effect on the world.

I’m not sure which one of these I am – the future success or future failure.

But I have all the ingredients to go on. I go through depressions and never have enough time to finish what needs to be done. Not enough craft to make things work the way I want.

It takes time and energy to learn the craft, to put one words after another in a logical and pre-planned progression. And for some, it never comes, for some; there is self delusion about effect their work will have.

With work, I feel good and feel real progression, always making progression, always learning enough to take the next step, as of what I am currently working on is merely an exercise, even though I might not be aware of it at the time. Some times, the work is completely inspired.

Shakespeare, I suppose, had these moment, too, when he felt right putting brilliant speech in the mouth of an idiot.

“Some aspire to greatness; others have greatness thrust upon them.

But I suspect truth is more devious and that one works and works, hoping for greatness, hoping that the magic spark touching the work as you move along, making the parts come together, beyond craft, beyond inspiration, when body and soul touches you for the briefest moment to give your work real life.

Joyce described this as radiance.

But to strive for magic is folly. One simply builds the house in the most appropriate manner possible, using all the most solid materials with the hope the spirit might move in, that the house weathers, serving generation after generation as Shakespeare’ houses have, finally realizing greatness. If you’re lucky, you might realize that greatness in your life. Most don’t.