A D Journal 1986

  The year 1974 started off on a sad note when Dallas notified that they were closing the New Jersey warehouse down. Carlson cried. Nancy, Teri, me and the new kid were simply numb. This was my first taste of troubles that would soon plague the rest of the country, and which had already been infecting other parts of America without our knowing. I kept feeling like it was the beginning of the end, since the rooming house I’d lived in since late 1972 was also undergoing significant changes. Ed, my first friend at the house, was long gone. Sue Roe, a girl who came to my door naked my first week in the house, was just on her way out. Meatball and Ellen, who had moved in together for a short time, had found bigger digs elsewhere. Only me, Danny, Doug, Wanda and Vern remained of the original cast. And some of them were making noises like they wanted to leave. New people had moved into rooms across the hall from mine. When Sue Roe finally left, Dave, the landlord turned her ro...

   What an idiot I was, forgetting the year in which my Aunt Alice died. Several times in these pages, I claimed her death as being in 1974. But yesterday, I saw her grave stone and it said 1975. Her death should have been branded in my brain, since it was clearly one of the most emotional moments of my life. Even though the event occurred more than a decade ago, I should not have forgotten – especially because her death was significant in a number of other events that followed, a shattering of our family in a way that had not happened before. Not even my grandfather’s death a decade before that had such an impact on the family. Harold hid himself in a hill top house overlooking Greenwood Lake. Teddy fled to the Jersey Shore.   Albie moved his family to South Carolina.   Ritchie with no one to check on him lost himself deep into a bottle and eventually to the edge of suicide. While Alice was a significant figure in all our lives, she was closest to Ritchie....

  I was unclear yesterday about when John Telson arrived at the Cosmetics Plus. I know he was with the company while I was still living on Paulison Avenue in Passaic, where I lived from July 1975 into May 1976 after which I returned to the Montclair rooming house. So, I guess I started 1976 working with him. He tended to dolt on me, a happy-go-lucky guy who would later get weary of me and my moods. He probably arrived at the cosmetic warehouse in August 1975 just in time for the Christmas season, a scruffy guy with a beard and thick, black-rimmed glasses, and a knit hat set on his head, regardless of the temperature. He was pure working class, having been raised by a working-class trucker’s family in Moonachie, a pleasant chance from the middle-class kids that had come and gone from Donald’s place after he expanded into the new warehouse. John occasionally brought his girlfriend up to my apartment to make love, when the weather was too hot or too cold for them to do it in his...

    Oddly enough, I can’t recall anything major happening to me during the year of 1977, something distinct, which stands out, bring neither joy nor misery. Yet, the year was filled with smaller, less significant memories, some less cheerful than others. I remember being ill for most of the year, spending a good deal of time getting treatment from a doctor in Caldwell, thinking it was hypochondria, when more likely my lung issues came as a result of breathing in cosmetic fumes and warehouse dust. I spent a great deal of time contemplating how I might make my escape from Donald’s warehouse, seeing it as a trap, and kicking myself for making the wrong decision when I chose to work as a warehouse worker and driver for Donald after leasing the Drawing Board, when I could have been the manager of an electronics communications company, or even taking a yearlong vacation collecting unemployment. I had already gotten weary working hard labor in one dead end job after another...

 Looking back, I realize now the year 1977 began for me with a kiss. And that edgy, debauched behavior that Rock & Roll always generates, even on the level of bar bands in the 1970s, more than a little depraved, and more than a little attractive. The kiss came at the moment when one year ended and another began, when a dark-haired lady I had never met before picked me out of the crowd of partiers to celebrate the change of time. She must have watched me for hours, and like a fool, I never picked up on it, sitting on the coach like a wall flower, paying more attention to a scandalous conversation taking place in another corner of the room, where two of the girlfriends of the band members, were instructing a naïve young girl how seduce yet another member of the band, a conversation broadcast over and open microphone the band had let remain live after playing a set of music earlier. I heard it all because I still had the headphones on after doing the sound. The whole event...

    The last time I saw John Mark was after the Great Dundee Fire last Labor Day. Hearing from him again this week should have warned me, especially when he suggested I come over to his place to talk about some money-making scheme he’s come up with. He said it would be good for me. I’ve had my fill of people trying to sell me on schemes that will make me vast fortunes. A few years ago, I wrote to one company about taking up work at home stuffing envelopes, boring but honest labor, only to wind up on a mailing list of would-be fortune-makers, each promising me great wealth for doing almost nothing. Since then, any hint of such schemes sets me on edge in much the way cult worship does, or any of the extremely fundamental religions. I’ve been attuned to the warning signs, as any intelligent being might. And yet, John Mark truly believes he’s somehow above being fooled, while trying to ensnare me into what is clearly a pyramid scheme. In order for him to get rich, ...

  What was I thinking when I decided to go back to college again? I forgot all about the bureaucracy and how nasty the machine can be. I should have known how screwed up things would get when I tried to get readmitted last July and was told by the admissions office there would be no problem for my getting placement in September. They informed me that the deadline had been extended which of course it hadn’t been, or they forgot that’s what they told me. The $50 readmission bill I got in the mail should have at least guaranteed I was in route for September placement, even if I wasn’t supposed to have been charged. I should have known things were screwed up because when September came, no dice fellah, no paperwork, no word from the college at all. So, being the reasonable person I sometimes am, I called the college and asked about Spring. I even paid the college a visit and picked up the booklet listing all of the spring classes, twice, reminding them that I had not yet re...

   Here again. William Paterson College. Only it’s different this time, listening to Ripmaster’s tirades, seeing photos on the walls of the admissions office that mean nothing to others, but whose images bring back whole truckloads of memories – each frame a familiar face, each scene exactly how I picture it in my mind. I am history here, part of the pre-Reagan revolution of Michael Alexander and Michael Reardon, Suzanne, Mary Kay, Roland and others, all gone. The fact is I feel closer to the professors than I do to any of the new students, having been here so long they almost see me as one of the faculty. When I first came here in the fall of 1979, I had great hopes for change. So much had happened in the year leading up to that moment, change seemed inevitable, and school the vehicle I needed to help me meet new people, to move out of my dead-end blue-collar world, the rags of that life no longer able to keep me covered or make me feel secure. I spent many hours ...

    I spoke about my second Michele yesterday neglecting to mention that the boss was not the only person at the cosmetic warehouse to abuse her. Michele, who had come to work in the outlet section sometime in 1977, was born and raised in primarily white neighborhood in Caldwell, spoiled a bit by successful white parents. If she actually knew a black person personally, it was someone from one of the more successful Essex County families who were a white and white people. Like many suburban girls, Michele had an imaginary perception of other black people, either as villains or victims of society. This did not alter much when she finally met “real” black people when she attended William Paterson College – a school that had a significant population of underprivileged students from places like Paterson. Even then, the blacks she met were not the hard-core street people, but those struggling to make their way up in the system, aided by Affirmative Action, Pell and other g...

   Two women named Michele had a huge influence on me in the early days of 1978. One was a regular patron of the band, Sleeper, and the Red Baron club in Cedar Grove where the band played regularly. Pauly had ill things to day about her, I was acutely attracted, and could have gotten involved with her if she’d not scared the crap out of me, especially during that party on New Year’s Eve when she came onto me like a storm. She had blond hair and always wore provocative clothing, on that night, a silk blouse unbuttoned enough to show her cleavage, and thin enough to show how little if anything she wore beneath it. She usually had her pick of any of the musicians, but for some reason, she picked me to seduce and I – in a fit of stupidity and panic – rejected her and did so in a way that burned all future bridges between us, slipping a somewhat judgmental poem into her purse as I fled the party. A year and half later during the luxury of my unemployment, a girl in a ye...

  I don’t remember precisely where I was on New Year’s Eve 1978 into 1979, only that I was unemployed, and for the first time in years, I felt content. I jogged each morning along the river, careless of time, knowing I had no place I needed to get to except to get home. A relaxed state so intense I thought only of being free. Chet and Stella still owned the apartment complex where I lived. Louis, Jewely, Pauly and Garrick all lived in some of the other apartments, a kind of extended family or impromptu arts community that would vanish a year later when the buildings got sold. The only obligation I had during the first part of 1979 was to show up at the unemployment office in downtown Passaic to tell them I’d not found a job, collect my check, then head to New Jersey Bank up the street to cash it. Sometimes I went to the library after that. Other days, when I didn’t have to report, I went with Pauly and Garrick to a small diner on Passaic Street, Garfield, called “Pure Foo...

  1980 began at Dodd’s Orange – a rock club managed by Pauly’s ex-music partner from the Stolen Rolls. This was a New Year’s event I will never forget and painted a very uncomfortable portrait of my life at the time. It was a moment when the curtain got pulled back, not just on my life, but on everybody’s life around me, a veil of illusion that had kept me from seeing who I was and who they were. And it scared the crap out of me. I had just started coming out of an emotional shell my breakup with my ex-wife years earlier had left me in. From September 1979 onward, I lived a double life, maybe even a triple life, living on one level an almost perfect student’s life, being part of a group of people I could envision myself graduating with (of course, it didn’t happen, but that’s another story). I hung out with people from The Morgue (one of the dorm rooms) and talked with people who loved writing as much as I did, leading me to believe I might actually live my life as a wr...

   I go through this every holiday, looking back at what I did around this time at another time, a backwards time machine. Now I’m looking back at 1981 and realized that it was another one of those bad dreams that eventually led me into real trouble. I was with Suzanne then, and jobless, having just finished a seasonal stink with Toys R Us during its Christmas rush. I understood even then that whatever Suzanne and I had had no longer existed. Suzanne was never attracted to any individual person, but always to a group, a dynamic, to me because of my association with Pauly, Garrick, Hank and Rick, to her previous boyfriend because of that group he hung out with during college, most of whom were part of the college’s theater department. Me and my friends apparently were to serve as the replacements after her graduation. I resented it; so, on New Year’s Eve I refused to take her to the navy base in South Jersey where Pauly’s band was playing. This was not at all fa...

   Looking back, I realize 1982 began with a dream coming out of the wreckage of school and a job.   I had the foolish notion I could make a living as a writer rather than a baker, truck driver, Fotomate or warehouse worker. It was the same dream I had back in November 1978 after I got fired from the wine import company (a whole story in itself) and looked ahead to a life as an artist. But in 1982, things were even more miserable. I had just come off a horrible Christmas season. My always suicidal uncle, Rich, had disappeared – something possibly predictable after his antics on Thanksgiving when I forced him to come south with me to Toms River because I didn’t trust to leave him alone and he tried to run away – leaving his brother’s house without shoes or jacket, cops catching him walking along the highway perhaps for home. When I finally brought him home, he ran away again, and I couldn’t find him. I thought he was dead, although I searched and searched the riv...