A D. Journal 1985

   I have almost no memory of coming to Bertrand’s Island with my family, although I’m sure I did. My visits here came later originally with Hank, who assumed that the aging amusement park in the middle of nowhere would be a great place for us to pick up girls. Hank did not fully comprehend how rural that backwater part of the planet was and how unreceptive locals might be to the arrival of two long-haired hippie types from the edge of Manhattan, Our brief sojourn to local pubs filled with rednecks soon apprised us of the circumstances but did not stop us from wandering into the amusement park itself where we might have had a beer and hot dog before moving on to better hunting grounds elsewhere. Although my family had talked about the place, the fact that it had survived as long as it had actually surprised me. All the other lakes in the area had been taken over by invaders from Mars – those yuppie types that spread out from New York City like locus, following newly constructed

   Woody Allen slept here. Well, at least a part of his movie, “A Rose for Cairo” was filmed here, the last great act for an amusement park that has existed here for more than 60 years. Bertrand’s Island has been abandoned, a ghost town full of memories and relics, partly covered over in snow. A handwritten note scrawled above the jungle boat ride says, “Condominiums,” more foul than any curse words anyone might have thought to write. A crude prediction for the old park’s fate. Sixty years ago, it had all the prestige of a Northern New Jersey Great Adventure with trolley tracks running all the way from here to Landing, Pennsylvania where crowds filled the cars and came here for amusement. Saturday nights, locals claim, were as thick and wonderful as any major sporting event, people dressing up as if for the Easter Parade. Swimming, boating, concession stand playing were merely excuses for people to gather here. Even in the mid-1970s, fifty years after the place’s constructi

   We celebrated a traditional Christmas – traditional for us, if not the world, just like in the old days, a fellow might say, me, Hank, Pauly and Garrick, all in the same place at the same time, singing old dogs, drinking until we were drunk, smoking dope the way we did each Christmas Eve as long as we could remember, feeling the age old pain lonely men feel this time of year. Only Hank seemed reasonably content, having met a new romantic interest last fall. The other three of the Four Musketeers ached with the same old pangs that drew us together in the past, bringing us to Frank and Dawn again for our reunion. Although the location changed over the last decade, the mood never did, nor the atmosphere – and even when one or more could not stay the whole night, we all made our appearance if only as a gesture of the past, to maintain a tradition we are reluctant to surrender for fear we might not have it when we need it again in the future – when suddenly four years ago, it stopp

  I saw Fran today – well, technically yesterday this being 6 a.m. on the 24th and since I have yet to slip into serious sleep. So, this is Monday even though it still feels like Sunday. But then, I’m caught up in self judgement and the action/reaction of having once again possibly done something stupid. Last week, I deliberately found her car, and from this, her mail box, into which I put in a copy of our latest zine, scrawling on it a simple cartoon and a balloon wishing her “Merry Christmas.” I suppose fate played a hand in all this, pushing and pulling at me all day, timing my actions to coincide with hers. My original plan was to buy her a plant and leave it on her doorstep. But lack of funds and time to cross seven towns to the plant store forced me to settle for buying a single pink rose and a box of butter cookies. It was even the wrong time of day, traffic thinning after the 3:30 rush. She should not have been there. Neither should have I. But it was all too fa

    Pauly asked about the tape project we did back in the 1970s called “Francis and The Wolf,” a project we had engaged upon as a spoof of Hank but had such a mean streak down its middle other people we played it for cringed asking why we hated Hank so much. We recorded it for the 1976 Christmas season in my room in the rooming house in Montclair, following up on a similar but less lethal project the previous year recorded at “my fancy apartment” on Paulson Avenue in Passaic which we had simply called “Francis.” Pauly and I overdubbing our voices to sound like choir singing “Francis, Francis, please put on your pantses.” Included in that recording in 1975, were snippets of a live recording Pauly, Hank and Rob had made during their trip to Nova Scotia in 1971, a tape that served as Pauly’s running documentary of their journey and a tape Hank ached to have a copy of. Giving him so little was a kind of tease. We ended up that recording with a speeded-up version of Bob Dylan’s Positi

   I can’t remember the last time I took two whole days off from work – illness or not. But the habit could spoil me, getting me to realize just how good it feels to be relaxed. Safire is here, all the way up from Maryland, part of this insanity we call “love.” Sick or not, making love is the order of the day. It even snowed (in time for Christmas), leaving a white layer of skimpy frost as our gift (not much but better than coal. If it doesn’t warm up over the next few days, we might legitimately claim we’ve had a White Christmas. Meanwhile, my illness takes it usual course, and I struggle with the idea that I’m wasting time in attempting to create under such inhospitable conditions – weary and sneezing, desperate to write but without energy to do so. I’m almost tempted to quit work entirely and regain my youthful vigor and then plunge into learning my craft. Only things do not work that way. Already my body has changed from the great driving days of 79 and 80 when I coul

   Friday the thirteenth and Christmas practically knocking on the door. I’m on Toms River starting a new tradition of bringing my mother north to see the graves. Last year we both shed tears as we passed the old places, landmarks my mother got used to seeing when she was still free. Down here there are very few buses and so almost no independence, yet also less of the danger that haunted her when living in the north, punk kids from Paterson throwing things at her out of spite. Freedom has its attractions and going home for Christmas means a lot. I’m down here with work at Willowbrook and a weekend schedule only hours away, which I know will have been dragging by Sunday night. Still, there was just too much “right” about last year, my mother getting to see her father’s and sister’s graves, and the inside of the church that protected her for so many years. I could not ignore the expectation I heard in her voice on the telephone as if over time we’ve reversed roles, w

    Ill again – although rare these days, lucky for me, when the world appears primed for international disaster, diseases rampant, partly due to poor nutrition. Much of this has to do with the way food is marketed full of sugar and stuff. Too many people are starving even though they eat too much, while others starve for lack of having enough. Mine condition is just a simple head cold; though fear grows with each degree drop in the temperature. The cold snap arrives at noon and at my worst physical condition and is expected to drop to zero by tomorrow. Makes me wonder how humanity survived the ice age, living in caves, huddled around fire, struggling to find food in the midst of storms and over frozen landscape – in an environment clearly far worse than what we suffer through today. History books rarely go into enough detail about that aspect of evolution, individual survival over the prospect of mass extinction – bodies buried hours apart after each new apocalypse, dise

   A whole decade has passed since what we call “the mid-1970s.” Hank had just gotten over – no was still getting over – his romance with Cynthia – that little rich kid from Lincoln Park that had raised such high hopes in him he could not later justify. He 25 or 26; she 17. He kept her secret or hidden from the rest of us for nearly a year, falling in love with her after his Columbus Day debacle at the Drawing Board. Too long without a serious relationship after his breakup with Laurie in 1971, Hank needed romance in his life again. Different men deal with heart break in different ways. Men like me isolate ourselves in an effort to keep from getting wounded again. Others, like Hank, go out into the world, challenging it to try and hurt him, embracing flirtations, resisting anything serious, keeping up his defenses, never letting anyone inside where he felt vulnerable – each one a substitute for the woman who got away. For four years, he managed to avoid serious attachment

  Phil’s shrill voice hinted of impending disaster. Two weeks before Christmas and Pepsi Cola sent notification terminating his contract. Phil acted like a young child who’d not received the toy he’d requested from Santa. The contract had sentimental value to Phil since he had used that end of the business as foundation for his small business empire. Cold blooded, Phil aches for importance, making up for his lack of smarts with extreme shrewdness and luck, always managing to locate himself in the right place at the right time. A few years ago, Phil’s boss in a soda distribution company screwed up in delaying his bid; Phil, second in command at the time, slipped in his own bid and stole the contract. Later, when Yacenda, owner of the Willowbrook Dunkin, ran afoul of federal monopoly laws, Phil brought the franchise at bargain basement price. Still later when Gene, the owner of a Dunkin out in far Rockaway came looking for a second franchise, Phil sold him the Willowbrook s

   It has been six years since my last Christmas with The Shayds, although briefly in 1982 around this time, some members tried to reform in what became an embarrassing disaster at the Locker Room in Cedar Grove. I met Fran at the Fotomat booth in Clifton; while the band practiced for their big event a few blocks away. This should have warned me, a premotion of doom, for that future time when my life would become completely entwined with Pauly’s in a way far more intrusive than before. Pauly, despites his chaotic history, wasn’t to blame for the demise the band. I would blame the place, only it was not the same place we played years prior to that, even though it bore the same name – spiffed up for the 1980s to attract a new and perhaps younger crowd. The old place attracted old desperate lost souls with vinegar instead of blood and piss for brains, constantly in search of pussy that didn’t want them. We all thought ourselves studs back then – a typical drunken illusion we m

   I used to run passed here in my more ambitious days, stopping sometimes on a warm spring morning to catch one of the local softball games, a good place to rest until the city cut off the water fountain as part of some confused scheme to draw more people or to force folks to buy from vendors who had paid good money to not so good political people for the right to sell wares here. Clifton is notorious for doing exactly opposite of what is best for the community, keeping its taxes low by discouraging poor people from living here, shutting off services they deem too expensive to provide. I came here as a small child in the company of my mother to the kids pool – a blue-bottomed concrete construction as the far south comer, whose paint peals now, and who cracks have been tarred over and repainted a hundred times since then. I haven’t actually seen the pool open since I was here at 16, when Dave and I used to sit at the bottom of the hill overlooking the park’s three softball field

  I’m tired again, existing coffee and too little sleep, and certainly not enough money -- nothing but bleary-eyed stumbling from this job to that. This I suppose is the dues one pays, working into greatest – or even mediocrity. Lenny Lopate on the radio last night spoke painfully of his bout with art, a serious student once, three credits away from his masters, over 40 now and disillusioned. He talked about making a mark on the world and bitterly said now he never would, even when others called up commenting on his remarkable observations on art, on must, and on most things. He often puts himself down, especially after he’s made some valid points. He often qualifies his statements with “I’m not sure what point I’m making here.” He seems to believe he will make no mark on the world and wonders if that’s a bad thing, if greatness seems to be the objective of everyone, or is it enough just to go on living. What struck a nerve in me was his description of those who seek to obtai

    I took a trip to Manhattan yesterday, ostensively to deliver my underground newspaper, although since I heard about the Rockefeller tree lighting, I figured to take a gander. What a huge part of Christmas lighting has become to me, having become a tradition simply by repetition from when my mother and her best friend, Selma, brought me there when I was very young – mostly still being carried rather than attempting the feat of walking along the crowed sidewalks. I remember confronting The Empire State Building on 34th Street on that trip, staring up at what seemed like an endless building which didn’t even stop at the sky, a brick edifice that rose higher and higher into the gray wintery gloom – not quite the Tower of Babble, but close. Not long after that in the midst of my mother’s madness we journeyed back to Manhattan to 42nd Street for the express purpose of seeing “West Side Story” on a special curved screen – an important element missing from the showing at The Fabi

  They are more similar than either would ever admit. Enemies generally are. The fact that they are father and son makes it all the worse. Enemies for some silly reason both long ago forgot. Too many reasons have popped up since to justify their hatred. Yet the more they hate each other the more they seem the same. They even resemble each other physically, a fact that must give Hank pause. Both suffered the same addictions, once Hank got that 60s silliness out of his blood - alcohol and tobacco, though Hank’s father, George, did eventually managed to quit smoking in the mid-1960s. Hank still smokes. Which begs the question as to whether Hank will follow in his father’s footsteps and get lung cancer, too. A lot of Hank’s hatred of George stems from George’s treatment of Hank’s mother, Ann – the moody bastard acting like a spoiled child, demanding things and affections that had long abandoned their relationship. Freud’s Oedipus complex plays havoc with their lives as the two

  I took off from work last night, a deliberate act of rage that had no justification. I simply needed to prove a point and chanced losing my job. I went in earlier to make sure the night manager had left my pay check. When he told me there were no checks to leave out, I left, telling him to get someone else to do the baking. This is just one more thing to add to my list of grievances. Despite the phone call I had with Rich last week, I’m still ticked about the lies and cowardice ongoing in the Willowbrook DD. But I’ve always been a bit obsessed about money, stealing it, spending it, etc. More than once I’ve had a fit when my check wasn’t there when I arrived at work. Bernard seems to admire me for this; he uses my rage to wiggle out own check when Phil plays games like this. Maybe it was to keep Bernard from getting off too much on all this that I stormed out. I’m working too much, which is part of the problem. I’m spending too much time trying to make money and not en