Chapter 31
Monday, September 24th.
It was eight in the morning, and I awoke to the comforting, greasy smell of eggs, bacon, and warm butter-soaked toast. I wondered if I was home again. At the small apartment kitchen table, we huddled around large glasses of orange juice and full plates of food. The dreams of the night before dissipated with the folding of the convertible couch and packing of our few things once again for the road ahead. After breakfast, Laird’s mom gave us directions to the aching Jersey Shore that we wanted to visit before heading north.
After a short ride eastward, we pulled over in a roadside neighborhood whose streets were lined with small summer cottages. We had found the shore! This was the other end of the continent that we had just come so eagerly across, the right coast of America. It had only taken twenty-four days to get this far! My first glimpses of the roaring ocean were incredible, just as I had wanted it to be. We walked over a rickety wooden walkway between two beachfront houses to access the beach. Sand dunes and tall outcroppings of weed grasses greeted us everywhere. I quietly looked out at the angry, turbulent Atlantic that was now in front of us. The wind was blowing wildly as we began to run barefoot on the soft and weary sand northward with the waves crashing a few yards from our feet in their choppy defiance. We first ran on the steep slope that abruptly dropped to the water, but quickly decided it was too difficult a grade, for it was high tide now and the wind was mad in our faces. It was too much work for the effort. I wondered if this feeling was somewhat akin to what little Roxy felt as she grabbled with the challenges of cerebral palsy. The visit to Sandy of the day before came back to me. We moved closer into the crashing water washes; the wet ground was harder than the sloped sand, and even though we had to withstand moments of knee-deep surges that halted our progress, we decided to battle and tough it out down there. The cold, engulfing, crashing white capped water made it more of a game for us.
Even the sandpipers were scarce on this abandoned autumn shoreline, although some of these friends still appeared, almost haphazardly, during our jagged run, as if they were lost from the rest of their species and perhaps still searching for another summer. Had they flown in with the errant gusts of a Northeastern wind coming down from Nantucket? I didn’t know if the species was even migratory, but just like all of the beaches that I had lived on in my life, such as Huntington, Newport, and Paradise, I was always fascinated by these little creatures just the same. They were my peaceful friends. Winter was eminent. The gradual grade of the tidelands was disappearing for the little birds, and with it, all of the sustenance beneath it. All of the tourists were gone from the cold, abandoned beach; all of them were off somewhere else following their own migratory patterns. Perhaps some were still chasing the sun somewhere.
With the wind hitting us now with biting blasts, we decided to only go a little farther, as far as the pier, which was now about 100 yards away. Once there, we tried for the jetty which was about 100 yards beyond the pier, and it was there that we stopped. We then set out to run back at a much-easier pace, with the wind at our backs now. At the rickety wood path entrance we had started from, we found our shoes again atop the high sand. They were slowly becoming buried in the angry wind, getting heavier and heavier with the passing time.
The sands of the hourglass
Where already this sentence is old
Only to be retold
In their memories of gold
As they think about the past
Tina had run out and bought a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts. Back at her tiny apartment, we were greeted at the door by the smell of freshly brewed hot coffee. There were jelly donuts, glazed ones, cinnamon, chocolate, plain, and bear claws with that crazy frosted crust that you could gnaw off in little pieces. I filled a large mug with steaming coffee and poured in a lot of real cream and loaded it with three spoons of sugar, stirring it all up and dunking the bear claw into it until it became so soggy that it almost broke off in the cup. The sweet coffee dribbled out of it and rolled down my chin as I put the whole piece in my mouth, barely able to chew. The sugary syrup coffee at the bottom of the mug was like dessert. Why did things so bad for you have to taste so good?
We said good-bye and headed north on the Garden State Freeway, the New Jersey Turnpike, where the crazy booming skyline and the Lincoln Tunnel finally appeared out of nowhere and shot us into New York City. We parked on Fifty-fourth and Eighth in a twenty-four-hour parking garage. Ammonia-like smells lingered in the side stairwells; the urine-stained concrete walls called out a certain form of urban expression. This was the life-scrawling graffiti of the poor homeless. We boarded the E train southbound. It was ninety cents to ride. We ended up at the World Trade Center with her beautiful twin towers looking straight down on us when we climbed the stairs out of the underground tunnel to street level. From below, the towers appeared to shoot up to heaven.
Atop the observation deck, I panned the great island that was spread out below me now, this grand island of Manhattan, with the Hudson River on the left and the East River on the right. I thought about how all of it had been traded for goods worth twenty-four dollars back when the Lenape lived here some 350 years before us. I looked to the distant purple hazy horizon; I knew it was a vantage point that the Lenape never had, lest they never would have let their island go. We looked out and tried to determine which states and how far we could see, Connecticut to the northeast, New Jersey to the south and west, and all of New York State to the northwest.
“I wonder if that is Massachusetts up there on the horizon,” I said.
“Can the naked eye see for more than fifty miles?” Decky asked. “Isn’t Massachusetts more than fifty miles away?”
The Statue of Liberty sat out on tiny Ellis Island to the south of us all on her own; Lady Liberty looked so small now below us. I remembered that climb years before into her windowed crown. I looked out to the north again all the way out to Central Park, the green rectangular beauty of it all, surrounded by such a vast city. I embraced all of the architecture below us, the Empire State Building, The Chrysler Building, tons and tons of concrete and steel all filled with moving people, beings, everyone thinking something different, individual cells making up one beautiful earth organism. We were atop the largest city of our kingdom in an amazing double-helix structure 100 stories high that had been built by mere men. I remembered seeing all of the old pictures of the construction of the thing, with the workers sitting on beams of iron and eating their lunches, welding without a net, never afraid of falling, like ancient cliff walkers, absolute masters of their domain. Our vantage point was like having a hawk’s-eye view, the same as the view of Boston from the top of the Prudential Building or Chicago from the top of the Sears Tower or precious Earth from the heavens above.
At street level again we walked up toward Greenwich Village. On the street outside one of the taverns was an Australian photographer taking pictures of “Series S” fire hydrants. Everyone was an artist here, everyone had a script, everyone sang on Broadway. The streets teamed with thought. The next big thing hung there right under everybody’s nose, although I wondered what artistic value a “Series S” fire hydrant might have. It could make a good coffee table book someday perhaps.
“Hope you win the big one!” Decky said to the photographer.
We went into the tavern that the photographer stood in front of, but we found it almost empty, because for everybody else, even in Manhattan, it was still a working Monday afternoon. I remembered a Greenwich Village bar much like this one that I had been to in 1979 on one of our UMass weekend road trips where we walked in on none other than David Peel performing his infamous song, “The Pope Smokes Dope.”
Now in 1984, this tavern that Luke, Decky, and I stumbled into had the same peanut shells all over the bar floor that David Peel’s bar had. There were buckets of peanuts on the tables too. You could shell them and throw the shells all over the place if you wanted to. We began shelling and eating the peanuts, for this would be our lunch. Peel’s song came in . . .
The pope smokes dope, God gave him the grass
The pope smokes dope, he likes to smoke in mass
The pope smokes dope, he’s a groovy head
The pope smokes dope, the pope smokes dope
Maybe it was the same bar, I couldn’t tell for sure, but it kind of felt like it. What had ever happened to this guy, David Peel? Wasn’t he a friend of John Lennon? That would be really cool if we could meet up with him again, I thought.
Back in 1979, after me and my UMass friends left the bar that day, my friend Jake jumped down on the subway tracks in a drunken stupor to retrieve a bouncing token for his fare. It was the simple cost of life itself back then.
“Jake!” We screamed for him to scramble to the side of the tracks and jumped to pull him up and out, as the light on the front of the fast car quickly approached from the other end of the tunnel.
“What were you thinking?”
“It was the only token I had,” Jake said. “The pope smokes dope.”
Now here we were in 1984. Behind the long oak bar again, a beautiful bartender tended our large, thirsty-size drafts. As she poured them from the tap in front of us, she talked to a thirty-something-year-old man sitting down at the end stool with a briefcase beside him. She talked to him about Broadway; the man blew smoke from his cigarette toward us all. He wiped his runny nose with the side of his hand. She was a therapist, I thought, stroking his ego all the while. I watched her craftsmanship. She quietly listened to his dreams. How many stories had she already heard today? Was he a Wall Street guy? He wore a shirt and a loud tie, with a coat overhanging the neighboring stool, as if to piss out his own territory. He rolled his beady eyes at us while he talked to her; perhaps we were cramping his style.
“When I make it to the big time, come see me,” he said to the bartender as he threw down a five-dollar bill and left. She only smiled and then turned to smile at us. No words needed to be said; she was good at her job.
After drinking our beer and filling up on hundreds of peanuts, we exited the little tavern and descended to the train. People on the bouncing car studied us as we studied them. A man walked through the length of the car, handing out worn and printed cards that told us he was deaf and dumb and that he was looking for a donation, any donation that we could spare. When the train stopped, we saw him again. He reappeared magically, coming through quickly, picking up the cards that had been left on the silent seats, left there by the dumbfounded passengers. He got off at this stop and jumped into the car behind us. As the train started again, I watched him repeat his routine in the next car; he would ride all day, I thought, collecting donations. This was a hard job in and of itself, working the masses, a sort of survival of the fittest. It was a manifestation of his entrepreneurial spirit in the big city.
“It must be really hard keeping your mouth shut for an entire day,” Decky whispered to me.
I remembered this one guy in Hollywood who used to walk with a limp and one crutch all the way up Sunset Boulevard, hobbling up the busy side of the street like a robot, asking everyone methodically at the outdoor restaurants and shops for money. You’d see him later walking down the other side of the street, the crutch gone, with a perfect stride, counting his dollars and coins. It always seemed like such hard work to me.
“He must have gotten better!” we used to say jokingly to each other every time we saw the guy in the late afternoon counting his money.
“I wonder if we are going to end up that way,” I said to Decky.
“I got it! You can be deaf, I’ll be dumb, and Luke will be blind!” Decky turned to me shaking his head. “We’ll just have to find Luke a pair of dark glasses, and we can lead him around, and he can ask everyone for money and explain our situation to them!”
From the train, we walked fourteen blocks all of the way to Times Square, looking everywhere for a Woolworth’s, for at some point, we had to have ten-minute head shots done for our international student ID cards. We eventually settled on having them done in a quick stop photo booth. I looked so frightened in the photo that was taken of me. Did I always look this way?
In Times Square, we approached a crowd that surrounded a team of break dancers who moved rhythmically on the street corner. It was the last few minutes of the dancers’ performance. A shoe box came through the crowd for donations, and we carefully passed it along. A jazz band played on the next block with another open trombone case for tips. There were clenched hands everywhere in the crowd, sudden movements and empty faces. Luke and Decky threw all of their loose change into the case. All I had were dollar bills and travelers checks. I couldn’t part with those dollar bills, I thought. I was a gypsy myself, just roaming the diverse streets of this grand civilization.
“God bless you!” the trumpet player said to Luke.
In the late afternoon, we sought the refuge of another movie theatre, paying three dollars apiece to see the newly released Ghostbusters. The film was set in New York City, a paranormal city terrorized by a host of ghosts and the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Professor Blakely back at Orange Coast College had taught us that everything in a screenplay was a formula, so just as I had attempted to take notes in Gremlins, sitting there in the midtown darkness, I studied the probable setup and the hook with my open notepad. The movie started out where Dan Aykroyd and his associates lose their jobs and open up a ghost hunting office in an old fire station. This was followed by twists and turns that uncover demons and a gateway into a whole other dimension. The whole thing culminates in scenes where the ghostbusters are finally let out of jail to battle Gozer, the evil god from another world. In the end, the ghostbusters cross their zapping proton beam weapons and seal the open portal forever, annihilating the Marshmallow Man. Good wins over evil, and the ghostbusters are redeemed as true heroes. Casey Kasem even made a cameo in the movie. I would have to make a cameo appearance in my own movies someday too, I decided. I had read that my hero, John Belushi, was supposed to be in the movie, but he died while Dan Aykroyd was still writing the screenplay. I wished that Belushi was still here. He made us all laugh; he was always larger than life, even larger than the Marshmallow Man, I thought, but just like that—he was gone.
From the theatre, we spilled along the midcity sidewalk, just like we had back in Chicago, but people were everywhere here, moving busily around us; the bloody workday was over. We ducked into a nearby bookstore to get out of the bustling crowd. Inside, I leafed through a “Best of Photojournalism” picture book and marveled at the dimension of time that stood still in these old photographs, these ghostly images of light on paper. Ever notice how glassy-eyed everyone looks in these old pictures? Kind of like my Europe Student ID photo. I focused on the pocket watch chain coming from an old conductor’s pocket. I tried to picture myself in his skin. I tried to be him in my crazy mind. I stood there on that train platform back in 1891, watching the funny photographer fiddle under a big black bedsheet as he held up a giant flashbulb in the air and cracked it in my face. Flash!
Born into a time
Born into a place
Given a face
On the pavement
Just outside the doors of the bookstore, a crew taped a commercial starring a chubby blond actress from the TV Show Dallas as we tried to integrate back into the moving masses of the passersby. We lingered there for a moment, huddled behind a group of curious onlookers, just to see who exactly this actress was, but she was unrecognizable to me. Despite its huge popularity, I never really watched the show Dallas and neither did my friends, so we quietly broke away from the crowd after a few minutes. We headed to Fifty-fourth and Eighth to pick up the old urine scent that we had so fondly left behind hours before . . . Those familiar stairwells of the parking garage that led to the resting Fairlane. The Fairlane still sat quietly in the garage. The surfboard was perfectly intact on top, for there was no real reason for anyone to steal a surfboard in Manhattan. You couldn’t even pawn the thing, I imagined. It was my turn to drive, so I started her up and exited the garage now and headed northbound out of the city. Central Park quickly came up on our right as nighttime swiftly approached.
We first cruised through the low light of Harlem with some of the black people that hung out on the street corners looking back at our strange vessel in reckless wonderment. As the blocks went by, on the lonely streets outside of our bubble windows, I noticed now how the city had changed from the largely lit storefronts of lower Manhattan to this heavy look of quiet desolation. We all had abandoned them here.
In 1980, a group of my friends from Lowell took a road trip to New York City with our friend Dukie who had played football for Columbia. You see, Columbia University is situated just on the outskirts of Harlem. Dukie had just graduated that year and had this new Volvo station wagon that he wanted to show to all of his underclassmen friends who were still back at school. When we got to the university, we parked on the outside of the enclosed campus and went upstairs to Dukie’s old dorm room to grab his friend Grinder. Of course, Dukie had to show Grinder his new car.
In that few minutes that we had gone upstairs back in 1980, all of our things were stolen from the stupid Volvo, right there on the streets of Harlem. The thieves had quickly pulled up the knob on the driver’s side door with a screwdriver and a bent coat hanger, probably the same way I had seen Ray Champeaux do it so many times back when we were both fourteen. With all of our things stolen now, we had to wear the same clothes for three friggin’ days. The thieves had even taken our toothbrushes. The funny thing as I think back to that time is that we really didn’t give a damn. We still had a blast despite it all. It was such a simple beautiful time, I thought.
In 1984, as Luke, Decky, and I sat there stopped at the traffic signal now, I suddenly felt afraid. On either side of the street, curious eyes looked out from the small groups they were in; some of the people pointed to the surfboard, some of them laughed, some of them figured we surely must be lost.
“Mike, just avoid any eye contact,” Decky said to me. “Pray for green, and if that green light doesn’t come, just floor it!”
“Come on, green!” I muttered under my breath.
But the stupid light wouldn’t change. The green wouldn’t come. So I anxiously floored it at once through the red and drove as quickly as I could through blocks and blocks of empty streets. I soon found the FDR Freeway, but even so, realized I was desperately lost and quickly exited a tunnel to the 289, somehow going back all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge. I wondered if we could ever find our way out, caught in the same vortex that the ghostbusters had been caught in. New York City would not allow us to leave. But then a sign for the 95 North appeared, and soon, we were on the 91 and were able to cruise through Hartford. We finally made it to Springfield by three in the morning. We neared Amherst around four o’clock and there, in the predawn darkness, I witnessed, once again, the sweet rolling beauty of the early-morning Berkshire foothills. They were awakened in my memory. Blue light appeared over their ridges from the east; it was a brand-new morning. Childhood dreams came back to me. We were in Massachusetts again! Spanky and Our Gang sang “Lazy Day” on our radio. Then James Taylor sang about the dreamy Berkshires. I was exhausted.
I had traveled this road, the windy Route 9, so many times before. I had often hitchhiked the edges of North Hampton and Hadley to UMass as an undergrad. We were soon on the UMass campus where the fog’s dreamlike arms in the morning darkness hung over the campus pond in a pastel watercolor that reminded me of a distant painting by Ingrid. We passed wearily by. The Fairlane climbed the hills of Central, a dorm community, and quietly pulled over behind Baker House. A campus cop passed by us on the hill, but unlike the butte roads of Utah or the billowing fields of the Midwest, there was no cause for alert; we seemed to blend right in, even with the crazy board atop our car.
Our morning was finally sound. We slept for about an hour and a half until five thirty a.m. I slept in the front seat, Luke was in the back. Decky had rolled himself up in an old plastic sheet (with his sleeping bag inside of it) that he had pulled from a Dumpster that was outside of Baker House. Decky positioned his plastic cocoon in the front of the car, all wrapped up beneath the grill and the warm radiator.
When I awoke a few hours later, I saw Decky bouncing outside of our windows. “That was the greatest sleep I have ever had!” He jumped at us. “I put the piece of plastic sideways against the blowing wind and rain, and I was so warm!”
In the daylight, I rubbed my eyes and saw that this college community that I had once lived in so comfortably was completely foreign to me now. We tried to find my past, but on this barren Tuesday morning, just like in Kansas and Ohio, just like the schools of Luke and of Decky, there was nothing for me here anymore. Where had they all gone? Buddy Love had disappeared. I hadn’t been good at all about keeping in touch with the rest of them.
From the hill outside of Baker House, I pointed out the landmark red brick library to Luke and Decky, all twenty-six floors of it. It could be seen from everywhere on campus, shooting up high in the middle of rural New England, a pinnacle of our educational aspirations. I told them about one terrible suicide off of the top when I was a freshman, and how everybody yelled at the poor soul from the ground to jump. From the edge so far above, the guy vanished for a few moments. Little did we all know that he had disappeared only to get a last good-bye running leap. Seconds later, here he came catapulting off of the top in slow motion, waving his arms frantically like a stuntman in the movies. He came down fast at all of us in the dispersing crowd, crashing terribly in a life-ending halt at the base of the building on the smack-hard pavement. Sad silence rippled through the crowd around me as his clump of lifeless, broken bones rested there. Everyone backed away. Everyone was aghast.
“Even the suicides off of the Golden Gate Bridge break hard on the cold water, as if the water itself is cement,” Luke told us.
I wondered that day as I looked on the poor soul’s lifeless body if he was still there with us somehow, watching us all as he ascended to the heavens.
“It’s a sin to commit suicide,” my father Frank used to say.
“You can’t fly with just one wing!” Decky exclaimed, quoting his alcoholic friend Max from Ohio.
“Do you think Max’s pot pipe has made it back to Ohio from Indiana?” Luke laughed.
I had walked the UMass library’s twenty-six-floor stairwells once, reading all of the graffiti on the walls all of the way up, the musings of higher learning. I remembered Nietzsche’s famous quote, “God is dead—Nietzsche,” just pen scratched there on the wall in the high floors of the tower. And below it, someone else had written, “Nietzsche is dead—God.”
It was still way too early for students to be making their way to their morning classes. We drove by the athletic fields on the western edges of the campus. Beyond these fields the farmlands of rural Amherst reached out all the way to the Connecticut River and out toward Smith College, an all-girls school. My college friend Jake stole a bus on the way back from Smith College one wild night in 1978. The driver stopped the bus in a maddening snowstorm because six of us were hanging from the floor poles and ringing the buzzer cords, screaming and crazy drunk.
“If you don’t settle down, I refuse to drive any farther,” the driver protested. He opened the bus front door and walked out to stand in the blowing snow on the side of the lonely road with his arms folded in disgust. The bus was in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing but farm fields and whiteout snow in those miles between the two college towns.
With the bus driver now out in the cold, Jake suddenly ran to the front of the bus, hopped in the driver’s seat, shut the door, pushed the start button, and abandoned the defiant driver right there on the side of the road. The other passengers on the bus immediately freaked out at what was happening, themselves now subjects of the takeover, screaming, “What are you doing! Are you crazy! Let us off! Let us off!”
Two hundred yards up the road, Jake opened the door again and let about twenty people out in the middle of nowhere, the rest of the innocents, and closed the doors with just the six of us inside now. We were all mad, laughing and drunk on the ride of our life in the middle of a blizzard. What has he just done? We are so screwed! I thought.
We rode right into the center of Amherst that night where Jake grounded the bus in a snowbank close to the police station and city hall. The six of us piled out of the bus and scattered in six different directions, mad directions—run for your life places, trying to find a way back to sanity and reason, like rats out of Buddy Love’s cage running for the cracks in the walls, trying to get out of the light of night.
There I ran in 1978, on my own, cutting into the turns and backyards of the Amherst neighborhoods, a few miles of them, remembering Coach Malloy, running hard, swinging arms, breathing from my mouth like a blowfish with every arm thrust . . . whoosh, who, whoosh, who, whoosh . . . with The Rolling Stones all the while singing in my head . . . “Gimme Shelter” . . . I was running the race of my life and had to find a way back home.
Pushing, pushing, seeing blurry, edging closer, I was closing in on our warm dorm in the northeast quadrant of the campus. I played that song over and over again in my mind. I heard the haunting ghostly guitar play of Keith Richards; I heard his heroin addiction coming through it all. I heard the harmonica and those piercing background vocals, the crazy high notes of the irreplaceable Merry Clayton, her screaming voice reminded me how I so needed the shelter of the dorm, the shelter and comfort of finishing the race.
I loved that song more than no other. If the age of rock and roll had to be defined by just one song, this was surely that song. But now, everything was gone. We were crazed youth back then trying to find ourselves. We’d go to the football games where we would purposely sit in the section behind the marching band and snap beer caps into the moving tubas every time they turned our way. There were Thursday nights at the pub, or pickled eggs and whiskey shooters at Barselotti’s, or heated basketball games in the Boyden Field House, with yells and chants whenever we played the University of Rhode Island, “U-R-I, U-R-I, U-R-I-N-E!” There was UMass lacrosse, the game of the Native Americans, or the infamous UMass spring concerts, with the likes of The Allman Brothers, The Grateful Dead, Procol Harum, The Kinks, and The J. Geils Band. It was at UMass that Buddy Love sprang Barney the beagle from the dog pound down the road, that crazy full-moon howling night where Buddy broke into the building and opened all of the dogs’ cages. I’ll never forget that beautiful sight of Buddy Love running up that long driveway holding Barney in his arms with 100 dogs running up the driveway right behind him, all of them barking with craziness and freedom. It was right out of one of those Disney movies. And all of the parties at Smith College we had gone to in those four years . . . There was the time my Lowell friend Richie Clark hung crazily from the outdoor Christmas tree lights in the snowy Smith Quad while coeds screamed from windows at him or the time he hung across the outside of a Volvo screaming for his dear life with his crutches in the air as four pretty girls kidnapped him and sped away. There were the early days at Kappa Sig when I got caught after storming the house as a pledge. They placed me on the front porch facing the campus on a picnic table turned on its end. I was bound to it, on display—naked in another deafening snow morning while students walked to their classes. But here in 1984, as we cruised by in the Fairlane,