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.
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