Looking back at 1973 Jan. 31, 1986
I keep looking back at the 1970s with affection I didn’t
appreciate then, as if they were better in retrospect than they were in
reality.
The year 1973 was a miserable year for me and yet for
something reason, I suddenly feel nostalgic about it.
I just moved into rooming house in Montclair a month and a
half earlier.
Ed, who had been one of the early residents, had taken off
for the west coast with one of the women who lived across the hall from him,
beginning the shuffle of people that would not cease the whole time I lived
there, part of that shiftless post hippie population not yet aware that the
Summer of Love stuff had ceased.
Ed was a tall and thin character, smoked a lot of pot, got
drunk a lot, and yet had aspirations to be someone someday if only he could
figure out what and how to get there.
I don’t remember the woman’s name. She moved in after he
did, fell in love with him, and off they went.
Meatball, a broad-shouldered, bearded, pot-smoking hold over
from Woodstock, occupied the third floor, and saw his future as doing what he
had always done, making his living selling pot, which brought in just enough
bread for him to pay his rent, keep him fed and maintain his high.
He lived in one of the attic rooms, which I later inherited
when he moved out. He hooked up with Ellen, another Woodstock hold over, who
baked bread and made a particularly good batch of pot brownies. Theirs was a
relationship made in Nirvana.
Unfortunately, Meatball he could not resist Sue, who lived
in the room next to Ellen’s on the second floor, an 18-year-old bit of one-time
jail bait, who attracted all the wrong kind of men, often requiring the
landlord to call the cops to haul them out.
Sue supposedly attended the local college, but spent more
time in local pubs. Her life was one constant drama, even when she actually
wanted to be with the men who followed her home.
My second week in the rooming house, Sue showed up at my
door wearing only a bath towel, claiming she had locked herself out of her room
and wanted to know I could put her up until the landlord got up.
I did not let her in but went down and woke the landlord to
unlock her door.
I did once sleep off a drunk with her and Ellen in
Meatball’s room after I got smashed on St. Patrick’s Day with my friends in the
bar across the street.
Danny lived on the third floor on the other side of the
house – which was actually two attached houses the landlord had connected by
creating doorways from our side to the other, renting out an apartment on the
second floor of that side, while he lived on the first floor beneath it.
Danny was a frizzy haired lunatic, stoned on acid and other
such stuff most of the time, often telling outlandish tales that he came up
with during his deeply drugged moment and expected us to believe.
There were outlandish parties in the house, sometimes
bringing in people from outside, such as Karen, who was a wannabe Joni
Mitchell, who had long hair like Joni, and sang like Joni, and liked to fuck
men who came to the house to party.
It wasn’t quite Animal House, more like a commune, and we
all rode the wave of it until one night mid-1993 when we got a phone call in
the middle of it all, telling us that someone they all knew intimately had died
in a car crash in Pennsylvania.
It was a pin in a balloon. After that, the old crowd began
to move out, and a new, tamer crowd moved in, the house never the same after
that.
It was later in the year that I met up with Mary Ann again –
a woman I had known since Kindergarten.
I had not seen her since we graduated grammar school. She
had grown up to be gorgeous, a jetsetter and still better to my mind, a quality
poet.
She spent most of her life in the company of extremely
wealthy men, taking weekend trips to LA and week-long trips to exotic isles,
all of which intrigued me, as well as puzzled me because she really, really
liked me. She inspired me to writer “serious poetry,” which I continue to do.
Over the years, we’ve separated and came back together many times, sometimes
had our issues, but we still remain the best of friends, even today.
I was working in the greeting card company with Hank and
Rich McGuire, each of us at each other’s throats but because the boss was a
common enemy, we managed to keep from killing each other, mostly listening to
rock and roll on the radio while playing cards, knowing the whole thing
wouldn’t last because business was so bad.
Rich had worked the previous summer with several of his high
school classmates, all of whom went off to college in the fall, which is why
the boss hired me and Hank as replacements. Rich came back after a few weeks,
unable to hack college. He would take off finally the following September
I took a vacation to Seaside Heights the last week in August
and was so depressed I stood on the beach and prayed that the ocean would rise
up and swallow us all. Twice that night all the lights on the barrier reef went
out. At some point, I ran out of money, using up even my bus fair home and
slept under the pier and got sick.
Back at work, Rich’s leaving meant I had to work with Hank
by myself. It nearly came to blows.
Knowing what would happen, I called in sick on Columbus Day,
leaving Hank to work side by side with the boss, at which point the boss
discovered how horrible an experience that was and fired him.
Hank came knocking at my door to tell me the bad news.
During that time, Pauly was living in Montclair, too, just
down the street from where rooming house where I lived. We got together a few
times to smoke dope and watch baseball games.
Louise called late in the year after a year and half of not
speaking and not allowing me to see my kid. It made for a strange Christmas.
That was the last time I heard from Chris, Mike Day’s ex-wife. She had moved
from Detroit to San Francisco, after which we lost touch, the last vestige of
my three-year flight from the Police and my west coast adventures.
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