Going back May 8, 2024
It got warmer finally, yesterday and the day before.
I still overdressed, though less so yesterday since I had to
walk from 45 th Street to 30 th Street to catch the bus again to Journal Square.
This morning, we’re seeing a change of weather as thunderstorms
rip through our neck of the woods, driving our outside cats for cover and
causing our inside cats to quiver at the perpetual rumbling.
Scary or not, I love these, and would spend my time on the front
porch if I didn’t have to get ready to work, our lives caught up in the practicalities
when we really prefer dreams.
I keep going back to places where I wandered when I was
younger, not just those places that remind me of Pauly, but ones where life
changed dramatically for me.
I keep wanting to go back to WPC campus, though with the
world as it is today, going there on a weekend is a bad idea, and perhaps there
will be too much security on week days to make the venture.
I last went there in the 1990s, snapping off a few
photographs before the massive changes occurred.
They have built new buildings on parking lot 6, which we
used to call “the airport” or “the runway” because of the odd configuration.
I started college in the fall of 1979, developing a whole
new group of friends, a generation younger than the ones I grew up with.
My friends by that time had started to act too old when I
didn’t want to, even though my old friends still clung to their heritage of the
bar scene and still worked in bar bands.
Since I never looked my age, even back then, I fit in with
the new crowd, some even refusing to believe I was on the verge of 30 and
insisted I show them my driver’s license to prove I was.
Eventually, those people aged, too, and settled into their practical
lives, giving up their hope for art for jobs they could afford to pay mortgages
with.
Poets because social workers; musicians took up jobs in high
tech. while I clung to the hope I might survive as a writer and such, which I
sort of did, only not in the way I imagined.
Not everybody goes back to such places the way I do. Some go
to a particular place, one that defined an important moment in their lives. But
as our poet friend pointed out, we all have a number of lives we lead. In her
case as with others, once they leave those places, they never go back, while I
always do.
Some places no longer exist, such as the rooming house in
Montclair that finally burned down, or the Red Baron rock club demolished to
make way for condos.
I’ve been trying to get old photos of the place and its
people from when we hung out there in the 1970s, but Rick, who has many, said
he’s no longer interested in the past, and won’t root through the old archives
to find them.
I suspect he doesn’t want to look back because he may come
to realize there is more in the past than there is in the future.
He never did respond to my messages about Pauly’s death. But
Rick built a new life in Montclair after he and Pauly got thrown out of the house
by the lake, and their lives took divergent paths. I’m not even sure those two
ever saw each other again, despite having lived together for more than a
decade.
I went up to their old house last fall. It’s still there,
though its been spiffed up from the Hobbit house it once was.
There are places I haven’t yet returned to, such as the Dunkin
in Willowbrook where I worked for most of the 1980s. None of the Fotomats
exist, though I go passed the parking lot in Garfield often, and the parking
lot in Secaucus.
Some places I can only go back to remotely, such as Portland,
Oregon or Los Angeles, while the place in the East Village still exists, though
now turned into a haven for yuppies.
I guess I’ll make the trek to the college soon, before it
closes and the land is sold off to developers, hoping that I can even gain access
in this age of madness.
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