Looking back on 1985 Dec. 30. 1985

  

It’s nearly year’s end and everybody is doing their reviews: music stations and magazines talking about the latest hot songs, newspapers and television going on all the sad events of the last year.

For me, the year began on a prophetic note with Fran and I breaking up just ahead of Christmas, then briefly reuniting, only to have it fall apart permanently. I saw her only a few days ago on the street, a bitter sweet moment that made it clear we would never get together again.

We put out our Sixties issue of our zine, a marked improvement on almost every level, better writing, and editing, and this sense of hope for our literary future.

Early in the year, I quit Dunkin, enraged at the new manager, Jerry and partly as a compromise with Fran, who hated my working the overnight shift (even though it paid twice as much as I could make in the Fotomat.) But I went back to Fotomat at the end of January anyway, and found my predictions for financial ruin coming to pass – though the move introduced me to Safire and a romance I never expected.

Broke, I went back to baking, not in Willowbrook, but in Bloomfield. This lasted only a short time before Phil lured me back to Willowbrook again, and since then have been working as baker by night and Fotomate day.

Mary Ann fled New Jersey for the west mid-year. She had originally planned to go to California but wound up in one of those dusty southwest states instead. She got angry at me over a story I wrote based on an incident between us in 1981.

But it was more than just my opinion about her running away. She has always been deeply entrenched in liberal politics, guilt-ridden over being white while black people suffered.

Even though I have known her since Kindergarten, I never fully understood this illusion of guilt. We both grew up in Paterson where we came face to face with racial reality, where it is a dog-eat-dog world regardless of color, and there is no reason to feel guilty for managing to squeeze something good out of life.

This year saw Louise come back into my life in a big carry, carrying the baggage of welfare, leaving me with the decision to shut up and pay up or reveal to the welfare agencies that I had been giving her money on the sly for years (and she never reporting it). I shut up and paid.

My relationship with Safire bloomed into full scale romance over the summer, complicated by whether or not she would move south to Maryland with her husband or remain north with me. By October, she had settled in Baltimore.

This is the year Pauly fell in love, head over heals in love with a young girl. I’d never seen Pauly like that before, full of the ridiculous antics we might expect of a 17-year-old, not someone on the verge of 37. By August, it was all over and he moved out of Passaic. I moved back into the apartment he abandoned, a fortress of my own against the world.

With the New Year looming over me, I know I will have to make more fundamental changes in my life. I just don’t know what they are at the moment.

 

  1985 Menu


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