Somewhere on The Falls Road

Conor is lonely and confused, and he’s forgotten his hat. His hair is wet, and the water coursing on his cheek reassures him that Belfast is the most miserable place in all of the world, and now with the rain makes it worse. Ten Major cigarettes and a box of matches are growing damp in the pocket of his oilskin. Plodding uphill now his heart aches with things he cannot name. Such things as fear and excitation.

They say it is a circle and the excitation comes first.

Conor fears that his mates will catch sight of him on the Falls Road. “Conor, where are ye off to? Going to see Madame George?”

 His fear is that someday they will tell, and everyone will know.

At the crest of  the Falls Road he reaches for the fags, then he taps one out and it takes several tries before he can fire it up. Leaves a bad taste in the mouth in the rain like this. Gummy-like. Smoldering ash stinking just under the nose, and the smoky nimbus of it sticking to his damp hair.

*

Tires hiss on the roadway, splash the foot path. The RUC patrol the Falls Road, weapons at the ready, turning circles, eyes alert. Conor slowing his pace, staring ahead. They’ll pass the flat before he gets there if he walks a slow pace. Excitation as he reaches Madame George's brightly painted red door

God forgive us. Why are we here?

He cannot find the will to look at the door, the glossy old door, but stands before it wrapping his arms around himself to fight the damp and chill. The door opens and suddenly and Madame George is standing in  the threshold.

Well isn’t it Conor himself. Come here to me now, I saw ye  escaping the guards like a hero,” she teases.

Madame George. Queenly George. Resplendent in her violet dress and lacey purple scarves, wearing her embroidered red hat with the spangles that shimmer when she turns her head, and the blue powder and paint surrounding  her eyes. Madame George leads Conor upstairs, a quiet ascent of Persian carpeted treads, lit by sconces and a grand overhead lamp.

Madame George invites him onto the sofa, and he tries to remember the second part, the part that comes after the excitation. George comes to him, tall and mountainous George, leans over him and pats his head in her motherly way.

“Good evening love.”

“You look grand, Madame George.”

She sits at his side. Her fingers are callused but made soft with a lotion. Conor breathes the scent of cologne on her fingers, and on her wrist, and George says, “You look lovely as well,.”.

*

Her hand on his lap, light as a feather it feels; and she leans closer to put a soft peck on his cheek. The yearning in him drives the shame away; first theexcitation, then this. It will chase the shame. He finds his warm soft hand on her thigh.

“Madame George likes that,” she says; and her voice grows huskier now.  “Love me, Conor,” she pleads.

Conor leans into the arms of Madame George.

“Now there’s a good lad.”

*

She leads him to the door and sees him away.

The rain  is colder now and she is wearing boots, unlaced, like something a tradesman would wear. The rain is washing the paint off of her face as she peers around the neighborhood, and she touches him on the shoulder one last time. Her made-up blue and violet eyes running like the Prod in the rain. She quickly scans the Falls road, and furtively closes the door behind

“Safe home now, love. Slan go foill”

“Slan’,” he replies   

Conor waits until George is settled, until she is safe from the Peelers or the gooks. He hears the brogues drop, the signal; and the window is lit.

He scurries away gripping himself, shaking from the cold and the shame. When the shame is gone, the excitation arrives again. Then the time in-between. He knows this now. Conor hunches, hides his face within his Mac, then moves quickly along the Falls Road. It is dark now. If anyone speaks to him now, or catches his eyes, Conor will crumble and die.

6/31/03

The Cherry Blossom Incident.... 1954

My bedroom was in the rear of the house. It would eventually become everyone’s bedroom, because we shuffled our accommodations several times to make room for  new additions to the family. There was a Japanese cherry blossom tree outside the window that was so close to the house that the branches scraped against the asbestos shingles on rainy days. In the early spring I would watch closely for the first hard and tiny buds to appear. They had an outer shell the color of a Rome apple. Even before the first blooms appeared I would shimmy up the tree and sway  on the branches, climbing so high I could see the gutter, which was usually clogged. The trunk of the cherry blossom tree had the girth of  a beer keg. It was a shiny plum color, and  it’s leathery skin was nearly impossible to peel.

 It was also a home run.  My father threw a wicked whiffle ball, but like my hero, Ted Williams, I could pull dad’s knuckleball into the short porch in right field. Knock a few twigs off now and then., too. 

*

Fall was a bittersweet time. It was my favorite season, with the World Series and my birthday falling in mid-October. But it also meant the falling of the cherry blossoms, which was a week-long festival. I would rake those soft pink petals into a pile two feet high, climb to highest limb I could reach, and belly-flop into the mound. 

When it came time to clean the gutter, my old man cussed and turned blue in the face, while my mother shouted out the window to watch his language around me. Of course there wasn’t a foul phrase or a dirty word I hadn’t heard before.

Hell, I was six years old, for chrissakes. I’d been there when we were cleaning  out the garage and a cinderblock fell on his foot. He poured a stream of obscenity the neighborhood will never forget. And I was at his side in Seaside Heights when a rusty nail punctured his foot. He set a new record that time, bitching not only about the foot, but the money he’d lost renting a bungalow for a $%^&***# week while all he could do was skip around on one foot. Set a record for vodka tonics as well.  

My mother wasn’t that happy with the bungalow, either. She had to cook,  vacuum, and scrub pots and pans, just like at home. Heard some new words between her and my father that time, and I ran to my room to jot them down.

 * 

I took the jitney to the boardwalk every afternoon, even though it was only three blocks. I lugged my inner tube along and floated in the waves. Camped in front of Kohrs and made myself sick on ice cream cones. 

* 

In the evenings my father taught me to play solitaire.  He got pissed off when I lost.  

 *     *     *   

Alabama Burning, 1966

When we landed at the Birmingham airport, the wreckage of a small private plane sat in a heap at the end of the runway. Rust and weeds poked through the fuselage. It must be an omen, I laughed. I snubbed my cigarette and closed the ashtray until the smoke stopped, and then I inched into the aisle, and pulled my ratty backpack out of the overhead bin.

 The terminal was no larger than a hockey rink. I quickly found the van that had been sent to meet the students arriving on the Delta flight from Newark. It was parked alone alongside the curb, with the words Saint Bernard College lettered in blue on the side.

We had barely left the airport grounds before I spotted some wooden shacks on the side of a muddy hill. Water trickling down the hill had etched tiny veins in the mud. A group of skinny boys sat on a flattened cardboard crate and slid downhill. At the top, girls skipped rope and women in sundresses hung clothes to dry on a line that sagged between two straining poles. The sun gleamed off their dark shoulders as they worked.

In the van, the radio was playing Buffalo Springfield’s new hit; “…It’s time we stop children, what’s that sound, everyone look what’s goin’ down.” Alabama, just like I thought it would be.

* 

It was 1966, and parts of downtown Cullman, Alabama still had the raised sidewalks you’d see in old westerns. The Dollar General Store sat at the eastern end, and sold everything from Dickies coveralls to posthole diggers. Grizzled old men sat on benches outside, rolling Bugler cigarettes, and spitting pecan juice on the sidewalk. I was barely seventeen, and had found myself on the set of friggin' Gunsmoke. 

 * 

The Saint Bernard College faculty was mostly a handful of Benedictine monks, a few locals fresh out of junior college, and a pair of English teachers from Philadelphia, one of whom bore a resemblance to TV host Dick Cavett.

The campus encircled a shallow bowl of well-trimmed grass, crossed by gravel paths. I was assigned to a room in Maurus Hall, which sat at the edge of the campus, tilting into a swamp of weeds and cypress trees.
The asphalt shingles were stained a coppery green at the high water line.

I tossed my back pack onto the empty bed. My new roommate, known only as ‘Snyder,’ was busy lying on the other cot ignoring me. He rolled himself on one elbow, examined me from head to toe, and mutteres something under his breath as he turned away faced the wall again. He was a moody megalomaniac, but I was badly in need of a friend, so I watched him closely and soon developed an adequate sneer of my own.

*

In my sophomore year I became the features editor of the Saint Bernard College Guardian. It certainly wasn’t the big time, but I liked the way my name looked in print. I wrote book and film reviews, and an occasional editorial, usually some radical, leftist rant that had the dean’s office on my ass full time.

I received word one afternoon that somehow we’d managed to book Julian Bond to speak at our yearly address.  Julian Bond was the first black man to win a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives. He had come to Alabama to address colleges across the state. When I first heard the news, a shudder rose up my spine. The Civil Rights Act had been law for less than two years, and in a few hours I would meet one of the men who had fought so hard to turn the bill into law. 

 I nervously intercepted Bond at the foot of the stage after his address. He was thin and patrician, with a pair of narrow eyes that seemed to bore into mine. He was a man on a quest. I felt intimidated, and my interview was shorter than I had hoped for.

Nancy Parsons, the reporter from our ‘sister school,’ Sacred Heart Academy, seemed more at ease with Bond. She was a tall, intelligent young woman, feisty in a southern belle way. Her mother, Alma Parsons, was a professor at St. Bernard, and as frail as a butterfly wing. She smiled widely as she watched her daughter Nancy interview Bond, whose eyes were smiling even before the interview was over. The two of them joined hands, and posed for a group of local photographers.  

* 

Hours later I was at my desk with a tee-shirt draped over the lampshade, afraid to awaken the beast--my snarling roommate, Snyder. It was very late, and the dorm was quiet. I was doing my best to describe Bond’s stirring address earlier in the night, when I was suddenly jarred by the loud ring of the telephone in the hallway. It was obvious that no one was going to get it, so I went out in the hall. I lifted the receiver and heard a woman’s panicky voice. I asked what was wrong.

She he said to come to her house as quickly as possible, and to bring help. Suddenly, I recognized her voice. It was Alma Parsons. I got my notebook and she gave me directions to her house. She was sobbing hysterically, imploring me to hurry. I assured her that I would, and I was about to hang up the phone, when she said “Bring a camera. Please.” 

*

 

There were nothing but scrub pines and palmettos along the unpaved road. There was no moon. The sky behind us was as black as coal, but above the palmettos and scrub pines, the glow of flames licked at the sky.

 

*

  

Burning flakes of newsprint peeled free from the charred coals of a burning wooden cross. Two more crosses were staked into the front yard, which was littered with newspaper photos of Julian Bond and Nancy Parsons hand in hand. Some of the photos that had been nailed to the crosses were still aflame as they peeled away.

 I could not make sense of what was happening. There was no compartment in my mind for this kind of thing. I’d seen such stories on the small black-and-white TV we watched at dinner time. But my friends and I could only stare at the scene. 

*

It was raining fire as we held bed sheets behind the smoldering crosses while we took photographs. One by one we smashed the burning stumps with a shovel and rake. As we pushed the dying embers into small piles on the lawn, the silhouette of a pickup truck crept past the house with its headlights turned off. Shadowy profiles stood on the bed with their rifles pointed at the sky. They made two more passes, but no shots were fired.

As dawn peeked over the palmettos, I turned to survey the carnage again. The charred newspapers still smoldered in piles, and an occasional ember flared free and burned out.  Alma Parsons was shaking in her doorway, a pistol still in her hand. She thanked us profusely, and promised she would be all right.

“You boys can go now,” she said.  

Malachy and I sat on a bench outside of the Grotto gift shop. I swore to Father Malachy that I would write an article about the account, complete with photos of the carnage. He was a large, rotund man in his Benedictine robe. He was my mentor, and I told him I would spread the news of what had happened across Cullman County with my own hands if I had to.

Father Malachy said, “No.”

I stared at him, dazed. "What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean just that. No.” He turned away from me with a distant, mournful look.“Do you think that nothing like this has ever happened before last night?” he asked in a sad Irish brogue.

I waited before answering. Something was happening here that I did not grasp yet. I chose my words carefully. “I suppose it’s been happening for decades.”

“No, I mean here.” He waved his huge hands in an arc, from the Grotto to the campus and back.

I wondered what was happening here, and I looked in the large man’s eyes. He was quiet.

“Tell me. What are you trying to say?”

“All right, so,” he said and drew a deep breath. “It’s been ten years. Mind you it was a terrible sin. Someone much like yourself saw a... thing happen, and just like you, he wanted justice done.  He wanted to spread the news. And he did.” Malachy shut his eyes.

I spoke quietly, “What did he see?” I asked.

“Can’t say, son. It isn’t spoken of anymore. Lips are sealed.”

One student stood up and exposed the story, he told me.

“He wrote about it in your paper, so.”

“And?”

“The locals did not take to that, especially the youth. In their thirst for retribution they entered the campus one night while the campus police were away. They burned every automobile on campus.”

“Was anyone…hurt?”

“As I said, it isn’t spoken of anymore.”

“So what are you saying?” I said angrily. ”That I give up on the story? That we'll be attacked or something? That was ten years ago. This is 1966.”

He rose from the bench and stood before me, his hands hidden in his long black robes.

“I’m saying nothing.”

*

 I stormed to my room and threw myself face down on the bed. I saw crosses burning on a woman’s front lawn, and the shadows of men with weapons pointing at the sky. I pictured dozens of cars in a holocaust of of gasoline and burning tires. I could only imagine what horrible “sin” they had committed.  If I had the facts, maybe I could write the whole damned thing… 

* 

I did not write that story, or any others. I had to live with that in 1966, and I live with it now. Whenever I repeat it a different emotion arises.

At times I think I was a coward, but usually I am only confused. Maybe on that particular day I did the right thing, maybe not. But I was young, and the stories were so much older than I.  

*          *          *        

Reclamation

Long after my parents were gone, my sister and I were sitting at her kitchen table poring through a shoe box of old family photographs. Most were faded four-by-fives, some with scalloped edges and creased corners, and others were faded beyond recognition. I brushed some aside, removed two photos and placed them on the table. They were ancient photos of my mother and father taken from the distant past. A date hastily scribbled on the back of one photo was unreadable. But the writing on the other photo was clear: Union Beach, 1946.

They are sitting in the sand. My father is bare-chested and lean, and his face deeply tanned. My mother is in a risqué two-piece bathing suit that’s a bit scandalous for it’s time. She is gazing at him adoringly, a rich smile on her lips. Beyond them a pier juts into the water, the waves splitting against the long thin stilts. I can almost taste the crisp Atlantic salt in the air, and hear the raucous laugh of the gulls.

In the second photograph, they sit on a bench on the boardwalk. A simple woolen coat is drawn over her shoulders, the sleeves of it knotted loosely around her neck. My father wears a loose-fitting, waist-length jacket reminiscent of James Dean. Its lapels as wide as the wings of a gull. His other arm is hung jauntily upon his left knee. The camera caught him tossing his head in the middle of a smile.

*

While those smiling pictures faded in a shoebox somewhere, my father took to alcohol. His rage and anger were too often aimed at me. He was taken by cancer at the age of forty-eight, a hollow man, a dead drunk in a hospital bed that I’d never seen. He had never allowed me into the room.

*

My own path along the alcoholic trail was worse  than his. My track had been peppered with drugs and other addictions, a few bouts of homelessness, and cold nights living in the back seat of my car. I became a blackout drinker, and never knew where I’d wake up, nor with home.

One morning I felt myself dying inside, and knew I would not last another day. I made a phone call, hoping it would not be my last. The call was answered, and I stopped. I was one of the lucky ones.

*

In the therapist’s office, and in workshops and retreats, I looked deeply into the bottomless pit that we call the past. I found his face down there. I howled at him, pounded at him with rubber bats and shouted at the ways I’d been scarred. When I knew it was safe, when I knew I had survived, I crawled out of the box I’d been in forty-five years. It should never have happened to us. Neither of us. It took years to put the pieces together, and sometimes I found that there were good times as well as the bad.

*

I forgave, and a great weight was lifted. Tears were shed, but they were no longer tears of pain. It took a few more years before I was well enough to forgive.

And longer still before I asked forgiveness.

*

I’ve never hung a family picture on a wall. When I found the two small photos  in the shoebox in my sister’s kitchen years ago, I tucked them into an envelope, and put them into a drawer somewhere. Years later I came across them, and scanned them into my new computer for the hell of it. I stared at them on the screen. I took out a dust mark here and there. Erased a scratch. I spent hours retouching them.

They are in frames now on a shelf. For days I was drawn to them. Each night before I turned out the light, I took the photos down and studied them. Even after a year or two I still pick them up. I guess that’s what pictures are for.

As I stare at their images, I feel them smiling at me—no, not at me, but at the idea of  me. When I see them on my shelf now I know that they never left. It was I who’d returned.

*

A House Divided | WritersCafe.org

A House Divided WritersCafe.org

The Day I Met Tom Waits

These buildings had survived two World Wars and the Great Depression. They had been bought and sold many times, and had been passed from fathers to sons. Slumlords had partitioned each floor into eight apartments, with one common bathroom per floor. When the newly-established Board of Health condemned these hovels, the landlords simply kicked them out. The properties were sold for pocket change or burned. Others were simply abandoned when the shipyards shut down. 

In the early 1980s, the speculators arrived. Dilapidated row houses were bought and sold like playing cards. Scores of buildings were gutted and fitted with new walls and fresh paint, and electricity. Local tradesmen, who had barely eked out a living for years, were suddenly in great demand. Small businesses thrived again

The final sign that gentrification had arrived was the invasion of the yuppies, or the fucking yuppies, as they soon became known. The native existing tenants resented the fucking yuppies’ affluence, and their ability to pay the jacked-up rents, which sent rental prices soaring. The more stately buildings, such as the brownstones on Bloomfield or Garden Street, were pampered and restored, and given a new lease on life.

*

My crew and I had had restored a large brownstone on Garden Street. We had discovered marble hearths underneath thick coats of paint, and solid mahogany wainscoting covered by embossed cardboard. The original wide-plank flooring was hidden beneath several sheets of linoleum. This would be no cookie-cutter overhaul, but a renaissance.

*

The owners, Sandy and David were thrilled by the work we had done.  But we still had a basement apartment to build. While the couple was still admiring their new home, I proposed an idea. I suggested that if they paid for the materials, I would build the basement apartment for free, in exchange for free rent.

Sandy and David, still gazing at their home, agreed immediately.

Shortly afterward, they bought another house, and put the Garden Street property on the market. I should have amended the contract. After some cajoling, they agreed to give me a commission if I found a buyer.

*

I stuck some bedroom furniture into a corner, and built an apartment around it.

*

Martha was a bartender at Maxwell’s Tavern, which had been a workingman’s joint until Maxwell House coffee had moved away, screwing hundreds of workers out of their pensions.

I stopped in early one afternoon for a drink, although I’d have never had a drink in my life.

The place was basically a dump, sawdust and cigarette butts on the floor, and a men’s room plastered with for a good time call… graffiti. Martha she pulled a pint of Guinness for me, and I put a ten dollar bill on the bar. She let it sit there as she read a book, and I worked Will Shortz crossword.  A crooked, bent-over man in a ratty sport jacket and a brown fedora quietly opened the door. She poured the old man a pilsner of Bud, and returned with another pint for me. This time I nodded toward the back bar and she poured a shot of Jameson’s for me.

The ten spot still had not moved.  The bartenders at Maxwell’s served me on the house all night, and inherited the cash I’d left on the bar as a tip. In the evenings I put down a twenty, and at closing time Tom, Declan or Martha palmed it into their tip jar. For an early afternoon drink like this, I usually dropped a ten.

I told Martha about the ongoing saga at Garden Street. We talked about the rising rents. “Fucking yuppies,” She said

I left the ten bucks, and walked carefully back to my half-finished apartment.

*

Martha sometimes worked as a secretary for John Sayles, a few years before the actor and director became well known. He lived up on Thirteenth Street in a renovated, brick row house. I once repaired Sayles’ window sill, after a carpenter whom I’d recommended had botched up the job. Martha told me that a friend of Sayles was looking to buy an apartment. She promised that she would get more information for me.

Martha gave me the phone number, told me it was Tom Waits, who was even less well-known than John Sayles at the time. He was a cult favorite, with a deep, raspy voice, and a melancholy repertoire. His first album, Closing Time, became an underground hit. I was a huge fan.

I swallowed my timidity and dialed the number. A woman’s voice answered. I asked if I could speak to Tom, and she told me that he was out, and would be home late. She asked if she could take a message, and I gave her my name, explaining why I’d called. She asked if I was a realtor, and I told her in, I’m a close friend of his secretary, Martha. John told Martha that you were looking for an apartment, and she gave the number to me

I described the apartment in detail. I could already the sound hear his piano coming through my ceiling.

Would Saturday be convenient for you?

That would be fine, I said. I gave her the address and directions from the PATH train, wished her a good night and hung up the phone.

*

Sharon sold antiques. She had a good eye for what people liked and how much they would pay for it. She had no storefront at that time, so I let her hold gate sales in the small courtyard in front of the house. She and her friend James had set up their space by nine A.M. I was at the kitchen counter, smoking a cigarette while I watched the coffee brew.

Outside the Garden Street house. For those readers who have never been East of Newark, a gate sale is the Hoboken equivalent of a garage sale, or a lawn sale. We have yards, but shoppers would have to trample through your entire apartment to get back there. And garages? No way. You have to park in the street with the other 20,000 cars. They parade around the block at night, lurking at corners, looking to be the first one to spot someone unlocking their door, or hear the jingle of keys.

So we have gate sales in the small courtyard in front of the building. The court yard is enclosed by a cast iron fence, and a gate. Hence we have gate sales.

*

It was a cheery summer afternoon. I pulled a small table and chair from under the stairs, and set it under my sun umbrella. I didn’t want to block the gate or be in Sharon’s way, so I set everything in the far corner of the courtyard, near the three steps down to my apartment. I went to the kitchen to get my crossword puzzle book. I made a marguerita, I put on my straw hat on and tucked the magazine into the band of my shorts. I snatched the marguerita from the counter and went back to my table and chair.

*

 Sharon was exhausted. She and James were ready to box up the unsold items, as soon as the last few idlers left. I was still relaxing when I saw the image of a man appear further up on Garden Street. He drew closer, pausing in front  of a building.

He looked like he had not cleaned his hair in ages. He wore a white, button-down shirt and had a wooly brown cardigan tied around his waist. Oh god, I thought. What if he stops here?

I hid my face behind my crossword book, pretending to read. He was passing the building next door. I peeked over the top of my magazine. He had stopped at the gate. He leaned toward James.

Are you Bob Skye? He said in a harsh, raspy voice.

I put my magazine down.

You must be Tom, I said.

*

I went through my apartment and opened the door from the inside, and invited him in.

He said that the apartment was very nice.

He was really much cleaner than I thought he was earlier. He was tired and overheated by his walk from the PATH station. I have certainly looked worse, and it had nothing to do with the PATH train.

Tom could not have been a humbler, nor a shier man. He spoke softly, as if trying to hide his growly, trademark voice. Maybe he thought his voice was too harsh.

He, and James and I sat on the steps and had a beer. We spoke awhile of Ireland, James was from Ireland, near where Tom met his wife. We spoke of West Clare, a place I could live in for year and years. I might not even miss Hoboken. Theere would be plenty of car parking there.

*

 Tom Waits did not take the apartment, because he and his wife were planning a child, and the apartment was too small. But he said it was nice.

*

I wish Tom Waits and his family all the best.

I’m sorry that I thought he was a hobo.