A D. Journal 1985

    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...