A D. Journal 1985

    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 behin...

   I keep thinking of the Paul McCartney lyric about nobody being left in 1985 as this year concludes even though the year did not open as ominously as 1984 did with the front-page article in The York Times talking about scary FBI surveillance – which only further reminded me of just how right George Orwell was about our society. But 1984 started in the aftermath of the death of U.S. Marines in Lebanon and the American invasion of Grenada. I just published my story “Joe’s Diner” to reflect that strange Christmas with Hank had hung out with a number of outcasts. Phil had already sold the Willowbrook Dunkin, sabotaging the new owners with rumors. My uncle was already back in Graystone after yet another series of attempts at suicide, and I was making plans to move back into his apartment, leaving Pauly to occupy the old apartment on his own, giving me desperately needed privacy I could have living with him. I was worried about my cat Dudley, who was jealous of my relation...

   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 – thoug...

   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 co...

   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 c...

   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,...

  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 to...

    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...

   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 wh...

   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...

    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 apocaly...

   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 a...

  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 Willowbro...

   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 illu...

   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 softb...

  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 o...