10 – Gail and Vern

downtown Paterson

Just like that, everywhere Frank and I turned, we ran into people associated with Jimmy Garland.

In the case of Gail and Vern, we didn’t know until later just how close we skirted to real danger since Gail was at the time the girl friend of perhaps one of the most notorious characters in the Garley Gang, Richard Gordy – who had he known might have torn us apart.

Well known for his fist fights with his own father, Gordy loved weapons and bombs, and martial arts, and scared the hell out of me later when I met him, although I also liked him.

He and Charlie were also phone freaks, early hackers who had discovered the internet long before most of us knew it even existing, building their own personal computers from Heath Kits they ordered via mail.

Of course, one of the best kept secrets of the Garley Gang for years was Gordy’s unintended blowing up of a phone booth in some sort of protest I still do not understand, perhaps in imitation of the Weather Underground.

Frank and I met Gail and Vern at the Stop the World headshop in Paterson.

We were constantly on the hunt for women and almost never successful in actually picking up any in those early years.

We kept hearing about how easy hippie women were and so were stunned when our inept flirtations seemed to appeal to these two girls, who had made the usual pilgrimage to Stop the World from West Paterson as many of the Garley Gang did in those early years.

Gail was taller than Vern, and willowy, with lighter hair, and bright eyes that always seem to be laughing – although I learned later although she loved Gordy, he made her miserable.

I was particularly attracted to Vern, partly because I thought she had big tits, and great lips, and I loved the way she laughed – although she might have giggled a lot, too.

They invited us to their family home in West Paterson – in one of the handful of streets across from Garret Mountain Park we’d often passed without thinking. They drove since neither Frank nor I had a car at the time – which made our later escape extremely difficult.

Like many of the kids that lives “up the hill” in West Paterson, these girls lived in houses that were somewhat above the middle class standard in which Jimmy or John Monnett lived in, or even those houses along Paterson Avenue where Gordy and others from Passaic Valley lived. I remember admiring the built in pool as we made our way into the garage where as good red blooded boys we did our best to make out with those girls, Frank making it with Gail, while I did my best to get to second or even third base with Vern.

Frank had already gone “all the way” with girlfriends; I had not, but not for lack of trying, and this was the ultimate aim when we were suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Gail’s parents.

We panicked and fled out to Mountain Road, following it down to Valley Road and eventually back down to Main Street near St. Joe’s Hospital, looking back over our shoulders the whole time, fearing the wrath of Gail’s parents. Had we known at the time; we would have kept our eye out for Gordy instead. He found out about this little affair years later when he was playing bass with the band, and still fumed at the idea that Frank had once made out with the woman he assumed would someday become his wife.

Jimmy, who was lead singer of the band at the time, talked him out of killing us.

But we did not know that hanging out of Stop the World would soon introduce us to an even more notorious and perhaps even more dangerous fringe member of the Garley Gang, Chris Andres – who served as the primary source of drugs for many of the kids in Passaic Valley.

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