Nothing but change July 30, 1985

 

Life goes on; Cycle end and begin anew.

What a load of crap, change rarely comes without resentment.

Two more years of Pauly under my best and what happens now? This kind of emptiness at his going and knowing he won’t return; everything in my life turning out to be temporary.

Even Safire, whose life still revolves around her moving to Baltimore back in with her husband.

The only permanence in my life is my family, my uncle, my grandmother and my mother down in Toms River, and my mad uncle who lives with me when he’s not institutionalized.

Maybe I exaggerate. My friendship with Michael seems long term, even if at times it also seems bitter sweet, a brilliant if something overbearing friend, whose poetry might someday really bring him to the greatness he craves.

Though all these things, family and friends, seem perpetually at risk, as if they might be taken away at any moment.

Even Passaic, which has become a haven for me, is changing, different already from when I first moved in with Pauly and Garrick back in 1975, and later moved to the uptown apartment on Paulison Avenue, only to return after Pauly got evicted.

The most serious change came when Stella and Chet sold the apartment complex in 1979 and my friends began to move out, our little great social experiment coming to a close. Chet was no longer up to working a full-time job doing maintenance at the college and a full-time job doing maintenance here, struggling to keep these aged buildings from collapsing

A small, wiry man, Chet was as tough a man as I ever met, and yet kind, too, determined to hold up the world on his shoulders and tried more than once, small like a gnome, his smile more powerful than his muscles, suggesting just how big a heart he had.

Once he asked me and Garrick to help him move a refrigerator from the third floor, we holding the bulk of it with ropes as he guided it from the bottom down each flight of stairs, and to our horror, the ropes slipped and we watched him and the refrigerator bouncing down the stairs to the next landing, we thinking he’d been crushed, only to have him leap up when we reached, laughing.

But illness plagued him even then, as he and Stella spent years trying to find a buyer who would take the buildings off their hands, the sale of which allowed them to buy land elsewhere where they could live life without such strain.

In the summer of 79, they hired Pauly’s brother to do the roofs, a foreshadowing of things to come. By year’s end, they’d found a buyer and were gone by the first of the year. Louis and Jewell left immediately after, followed by Garrick and Pauly, leaving me as the last survivor, Pauly returning in 83 for a brief two years, and now he’s gone as well, seeking relief from the hot and dusty streets of Passaic, and leaving me with the fear of what possible disaster to expect next, one more chapter in the story of Passaic, one more vacancy in a year when everybody is leaving here for some place else, none destined to return.

I am here alone in Passaic in a year of massive change I can’t put a stop to.

Then, last night Garrick told me Chet died two weeks ago after a long bout with illness.

  

 1985 Menu


email to Al Sullivan

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An old nemesis December 11, 1985

Image
    Surisky hated me from early on in grammar school, although “hate” may be too strong a word to describe his reaction to me. I was simply available to him for abuse, Third grade was pivotal for both of us. Prior to that, we were simply feeling our way through Catholic School routine, emerging eventually as whole personalities from the muck of early childhood. He came across as a thug, trying to convey the image of a tough guy. He wore a leather jacket and spiked boots, and snuck into see James Dean movies. Third grade was tough on everybody, including the teachers, who considered us the worst class in the history of the school – even in the safe grades of Kindergarten, First and Second. Two of the three nuns retired after passing us on. But it was in the third grade that we began to work our magic, driving even the stout-hearted nuns crazy. Later, the nuns tried to break our spirit. But we fully represented our age and had the full impact of the 1960s behind us. So,
Read more

Pauly leaves Passaic for the final time July 24, 1985

Image
    Pauly is leaving Passaic again. This comes after two years of us rubbing shoulders after he had been cast out of paradise in Towaco, after his goddess, Jane, went and married that man Pauly calls “a bum.” This has been a tough two years, filled with Pauly’s typical manipulation, his usual shaping of reality to his own needs often at other people’s (mine) expense. When Pauly first came I had Fran’s cultist brother as a temporary guest and Pauly spent most of his time trying to push me into getting that guest out. A few months later – in November – Fran got the ax from her ex and changed her mind about moving in with me after I had committed the spare room to Pauly. He assumed she meant more to me than he did and was already packing when I told Fran no. She had no place to go except for her father’s house, a father she had a love/hate relationship with, and she held it against me, even though we continued to see each other romantically. Pauly being Pauly drove me out of
Read more

The clock is ticking July 18, 1985

Image
  We’re talking love here – silly fictional love with all the connotations of disaster. I seem to be on the meat chopping block with Safire looking for qualities in me that are lacking in her husband. The fact that there is a husband in the first place greatly disturbs me. All this said, I’m uncertain as to why I haven’t ended this already, except to know she is too much like my ex-wife to pass up without a closer examination. Even the way she thinks: slow, methodical, going from point A to point B. It has only been a week since she blurted out drunk that she wanted me in bed. It seems like much longer. And she hints of something more permanent, suggesting that I might fill in for her husband for a much longer duration. The night before last she suggested I come see her in her trailer, as if she is legally separated from her husband, when in fact she is supposed to be biding time until he finds them both a place to live in Baltimore. This is the same kind of smoke and mir
Read more