A different man in 1980 Jan. 7, 1986
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 writer
someday.
My second life was rock and roll, working by night like a
vampire as a roadie and soundman, taking full advantage of the sexual
opportunities granted me. I recall one young girl from Rutherford who I had
picked up in a Mountainside bar, who later claimed I had gotten her pregnant –
which turned out to be a lie. I briefly dated a barmaid from that same bar, and
at Hank’s insistence, dated a girl named Kathy, who Hank loved, but who loved
my look alike character, who brutalized women, and Hank wanted me to save her
from. I had a brief fling with a groupie named Joy, which relieved the members
of the band who had wondered why I resisted groupies before that.
My third life was my real life, a man living in a cold water
flat in Passaic, lost in a sequence of temporary arrangements with the vain
hope I might find someone to share life with more permanently.
By May, the band life had ended; school had burned me out, leaving
the ruined wreck of that third person – that point when miraculously, Suzanne
came into my life, and faded just as quickly. By mid-summer our love affair was
already shaky although I didn’t know the worst of it until much later.
I spent the summer working at Two Guys in Garfield, while
Suzanne had taken a job in a cable tv company (the beginning of a whole new
reality neither of us realized at the time). My world was very working class,
full of working-class people struggling to survive, with me thrown into the mix,
where I came to face with the folly of my radical beliefs when it came down to the
bread-and-butter people I labored beside. I had this illusion about how capitalism
and foolish notions fed into my head by radical professors, none of whom ever
worked a real job in their lives or understand the struggle real people went
through every day.
I resisted the bosses at Two Guys, and then saw working
people following me as if I was a leader. I had nothing to lose; they had everything
to lose. This, I learned, was the way of the radical, always spouting out crap that
other people suffered for.
Suzanne and I had some good times that summer, but it was a
strained and strange relationship that got even stranger in September when I
quit my job to go back to school, and she got a job at a prominent insurance company
in Newark – she taking a very long step into middle class, and we had less in
common.
She grew more distant and colder, and by far less
sympathetic, something that became clearer in September when I got hit with a
series of disasters, my car breaking down, my license revoked (for failure to
pay a ticket, and my phone got shut off.
Eventually, I worked my way out of that insanity. So, by
Christmas, things seemed pleasant again with Suzanne as well as my finances.
For the holiday season, I took a seasonal job at Toys R Us
where Garrick’s cousin also worked – someone I had always been attracted to,
even when she was still married.
In September, I became editor of the school literary
magazine and would continue this for the next two semesters.
But I had become a different man at the end of 1980 than I
was at its beginning and could never go back again.
I mentioned the Dodd’s event because the band played New
Year’s in, and afterwards, we wrecked the place: band members, roadies, bartenders,
groupies, and others, in an insane emotion filled moment that left the place in
shambles – yet not bad enough for us to be banned from playing there later. It
was a strange way to start a new decade.
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