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.

Brainwashed by The New York Times

Thursday, August 15, 2019

After having not talked to what I once considered one of my closest friends, I was horrified to find that he had turned from a working stiff to a pseudo metro-sexual, a wanna-be upper west or east side (I forget which is worse) liberal intellectuals determined to shed any semblance to his blue collar background.

This is a man who spent his entire adult life relying on The New York Times to provide him with information, and so overtime as paper of record turned into a liberal rag, he turned into a pretentious jelly fish, so filled with misinformation about the real world that it’s no longer possible to even talk to him, let alone try to apply reason.

He still believes states outside New York and California have a poll tax (something outlawed in voting legislation in the 1960s), believes that the electoral college should be abandoned (not realizing that it affects only one elected office of president, and not caring a bit about the protections it provides other states smaller than New York or California since the point is to have his liberal views imposed on people elsewhere, so that the people he votes for automatically become president.)

He refuses to believe that members of MeToo are vigilantes, and that Antifa is not a terrorist group (akin to the KKK only wearing black hoods and masks rather than white.)

My friend no longer believes in the concept of citizenship – since he would give the vote to anybody citizen or not who pays taxes – regardless of how these people came to the country – thus feeding the Democratic party with future generations of voters.

While my friend and I would likely agree that ICE is out of control, and that immigrants should not be rounded up like cattle, we disagree on the future.

He claims that at one time voting rights applied only to white males who owned property (an inaccurate statement likely gleaned from The Times as well since voting is regulated by states and various states offered more liberal voting than others). So, to his logic, allowing non-citizens to vote is just another change similar to those of allowing ordinary men and women, black or white to vote. He, of course, would have this applied nationally so stripping the fundamental issue of states to regulate their own voting – currently protected under the constitution.

This idea that my friend would use the federal government to impose its will on people who may have a differing point of view is at the core of the current constitutional crisis. New York and California with their huge populations want to control how people live and think in other parts of the nation. This is why they tear down statutes and flags they find offensive, and why they block highways often far from the part of the country where they actually live – an illusion of New Freedom Riders which is a bogus argument pumped out by left wing publications like The New York Times.

Since so many of our forefathers are being discredited by liberal media, we can’t even draw on their wisdom to show how they intended to protect minority states (which are largely smaller, less populated and conservative) from the mob rule of urban elite. The electoral college keeps Iowa from being overrun by a pack of liberal radicals who have managed in their own states to register massive amounts of voters, some of which many suspect are not citizens or even legal residents, but lack of proof at the polls allows them to vote anyway.

My friend is very concerned about voter suppression in places like the south where proof at the polls is seen as unfair to people of color as if poor whites wouldn’t be equally inconvenienced by needing to get proper identification (as required by most states as a result of 9/11 and the passing of the Patriot Act.)

Since my friend reads only The New York Times, he is not exposed to alternative views on many issues such as Climate Change, foreign policy – and he even believes the Russians interfered with the 2016 election, and would still vote for Hillary Clinton if she ran in 2020, despite her taking over the Democratic Party and cheating her way to the nomination.

Since The New York Times’ role appears to be designed to protect Democrats – regardless of how outlandish their behavior or their opinions, my friend protects them, too.

My friend is not stupid. But he is ignorant, and stubborn, and once he makes up his mind on an issue, facts would move him – unless, of course, he reads them in The New York Times, and then it’s gospel.

NJ’s Pathetically Correct Attorney General

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Grewal just issued a report on biased incidents in the state of New Jersey.

More than half the reported cases came from colleges and universities, a scary concept since colleges these days have become incubators of misinformation where students are expected to find racism under ever rock.

One university even required white students to write an essay on why they should be ashamed to be white.

Pathetically correct in schools are constantly trying to rewrite history to reflect their somewhat twisted vision of reality, such as the Elizabeth activist who want to remove the name of Ronald Reagan because he once said something questionable.

We already know activists hated Lincoln during his own lifetime because he preserved law over mob rule when it came to outlawing slavery.

In San Francisco, fanatic radicals want to destroy a mural of George Washington because it also depicted Native Americans (a term many Indians hate) and slaves.

All of this comes at a time when Toni Morrison died, a good writer, but someone who fed into this anti-white crusade, a black woman who preferred propaganda like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to real literature such as Huck Finn (both books written by white people.) Of course, being a white male who once served briefly in the Confederate Army, Mark Twain has been called a racist, too – clearly showing how little of his work critics have actually read (he openly condemned slavery in several of his travelogues but since these radicals are better at banning books than reading them, they would not know this. You would expect Morrison, an author, to be better, but she was not.

We can’t expect better from Grewal because we all know that attorney generals on a state or federal level are required to be political stooges – and so like Holder – Grewal does not disappoint us. But the fact that he is feeding into this anti-white racist frenzy is actually dangerous – giving creditability to this illusion that there are white supremacists under every stone just as there were communists in the 1950s.  This gives license to monstrous terrorist groups like Antifa or productions by NBC depicting violence against those media and schools claim as evil – in these cases, anyone who ever even thought about voting for Trump.

 No doubt racism exists and incidents happened. But how many are provoked by overzealous zealots and something criminals like Antifa?

The most visible of this hatred came out after the 2016 election as fanatic liberals became shrill when they could not lie or cheat to get their candidate elected.

The establishment of a Joint Bias Task Force will only exasperate this anti-white prejudice es, adding more questionable allegations by already questionably reliable people, who imagine racism under every bed and homophobia in every closet

Grewal and his side kick, Oliver, should show convictions, not accusations, and detail the circumstance behind each of these reports. Otherwise, all they are doing is feeding this hate.

Popcorn people call Trump a racist.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Democrat think tanks are spewing out a lot of crap these days.

This is not unusual for think tanks for the right or the left. What makes this dangerous is the fact that there is a built-in audience of true believers – I call them the pathetically correct (PC), who eat it up – the way movie-goers eat up popcorn.

To be in the in-crowd these days, you have to proscribe to a certain PC ideology, largely made up in these think tanks, and spread through media.

I call them big and little lies.

The Russian conspiracy to influence the 2016 election was a big lie – which taxpayers spent tens of millions to disprove.

Small lies are much more effective because no Mueller investigation is ever going to uncover them as lies, and popcorn-eating liberals gobble them up as fact.

One such lie is the idea that Trump is a racist. Another is that he supports white supremacists’ groups. Others paint him as misogynistic. While still others paint him as homophobic.

There is very little to collaborate any of these small lies except for a more than willing and dishonest liberal-controlled media that spreads them and distorts coverage to support these lies.

Day in and day out we hear how Trump’s rhetoric leads to gun violence by white supremacists, while media plays down those cases in which the culprit is actually a supporter of people like Warren and misguided and dangerous causes like Antifa (anyone who wears a mask is a criminal, white or black.)

If there is a terrorist connection, liberal media plays it down, but harps on any case that involves right wing killers, crediting Trump as the cause.

This comes even when the Trump Administration issues statements to the contrary. Braindead PC people still believe his rhetoric led to the violence, when they cannot actually support this with anything he said, just as they can’t support the claims that he is a racist.

This is fantasy that borders on psychosis, a liberal public unable to get over the shock that other people elsewhere in the country could win an election despite the massive voter fraud Democrats appeared to have used in 2016 to have the outcome come out differently.

We have transcended the concept of a fair media, and have evolved into a movement in which mainstream media has become an organ for spreading misinformation, pretending it is all the news fit to print, creating myths that popcorn people accept as fact because it fits in with their existing prejudices.

The truth appears to be exactly opposite of what these popcorn people believe, and when you have a sitting US congresswoman calling for the assassination of a sitting president and Hollywood spewing out movies that call for hunting down of Trump supporters, you have to wonder just who is actually inciting violence, and why mainstream media isn’t calling them to task.

But the answer is clear. Media has taken a side and is too busy screaming fire inside a crowded theater to actually report facts.