It was a very good year 1976 January 20, 1986
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
van. He loved his olive-green van like an off spring.
A lot of people came up to the Paulison Avenue apartment,
some just to hang around listening to me and Pauly’s play and record. I had
purchased a four-track reel to reel tape recorder, on which Pauly and I recorded
a lot of original music.
Life was good in 1975 except for the death of my aunt,
Alice, who had more or less raised me during those intervals when my mother was
in the mental hospital.
I was driving a 1960 Chevy Impala, which had so much wrong
with it I had to sell it off to a collector, and then put the money down on a
new Pinto, which got delivered in a snow storm in February 1976 – and I had to
stop at a tire store on the way back from the dealer to get snow tires put on
it – at which point I found I could not for some reason remove the key from the
ignition, drove back to the dealer, only to have him show me a button I needed
to push to accomplish it – a small, but memorable embarrassment.
By May, my finances went caput (elevated car insurance, rent
on the fancy apartment, paying child support) forcing me to move back to the
rooming house and the dirt-cheap rent for one very warm room on the top floor,
rejoining what was largely a dorm for the local college, very hippie-like. By
summer, I drove to Pennsylvania a number of times determined to see my kid,
which my ex-wife didn’t want. This came as a result of a brief visit a year
earlier when my kid cried as I left repeating over and over, “Daddy, don’t go,”
and my ex-wife believing I might try to take her away from her when I had no
such plans. Louise was living with a biker crowd, and eventually vanished west
when I won my case for visitation in court.
The summer of 1976 was special, too, because of the Yankees.
When I couldn’t afford to go to the games I listened to the games on the radio,
keeping me company in the suddenly shrunken space I lived in.
Pauly came to the rooming house to record as well, although
I had to sell the four track for the down payment on the car. We double tracked
using two cassette recorders, which almost worked, but not as well. And the
magic of the previous sessions was largely gone.
At the time, Pauly was still working at Outwater Plastics in
Garfield and living in a cold water flat owned by Garrick’s aunt in Passaic. He
had quit the band, although the band practiced down the street in an old Polish
hall with another singer.
At the time, I didn’t think I was happy, yet looking back, I
think I was, my uncles, my mother, my grandmother and my friends all within
easy reach, something that would change drastically a short time later.
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