One of the fringe members of the Garley Gang caught up with me and
Frank at the Woodworth’s lunch counter in Paterson one day late in the year.
He mistakenly assumed that because we knew Jimmy and Frank made regular
visits to The Village that we were somehow hip.
He had long curly black hair and acted so peculiar he could have been a
character out of a Woody Allen movie.
We didn’t know much about him except that he hung out with the crowd in
Little Falls and we had heard him mentioned from time to time. Freaks were
still relatively rare in Passaic Valley so we all tended to clump together, and
was part of the crowd that hung out at the Agora coffee house in Montclair –
which had opened in 1966, drawing most of the valley’s youth especially from
Montclair College and other schools.
But since we came from the Paterson area, it was easier for us to seek
out Stop the World on Main Street or even better, make the trip by bus to New
York for the coffee houses there.
Bored and on his way to Manhattan himself, Chris decided he needed
someone to talk to and since we were available, he sat down on a stool next to
ours and started to chat – it was like listening to a Gatling gun – he talked
too fast for use to clearly understand what he said and the more he talked the
faster he went, and so we were relieved when he finally saw his bus pulling up
outside, and fled to catch up, Frank and I looking at each other and asking,
“What was that all about?”
The next time we saw Chris was up the street at Broadway and Main, at a
hamburger joint a few doors up from Stop the World.
He seemed more anxious than usual, glancing around at all the other
people, telling us in his usual rapid way that he was fine, and we shouldn’t
worry, though he seemed to think everybody was out to get him.
“But you two looks pretty run down,” he said. “But I have just the
thing to help pick you up.”
At this point, he handed each of us two tiny white pills and told us if
we took them, we would feel better right away.
Frank and I was not as naïve as we had been.
I was so horrified at Chris’ gift I thrust the pills into the palms of
the firm person to ask me for spare change outside.
Frank kept his. And to this day, I don’t know why. He didn’t like
speed.
Perhaps, he saw those two white pills as a ticket to being cool,
something to go back to New York City with where he could impress the
teenybopper hippie chicks in exchange for sex.
He folded the pills into foil of an empty cigarette pack and put the
foil into the breast pocket of his t-shirt, a place more secure than King Tutt’s
Tomb and equally as remote.
Frank dressed in layers even on the hottest of summer days, starting
with a t-shirt closest to his skin, over which he added a button-down shirt, a
pull-over sweater, a jacket and so on. The pocket to the t-shirt became a
secret vault even he sometimes forgot existed.
I don’t know why we decided to walk to Passaic at some point later or
why Frank let me talk him into walking along the railroad tracks to get there.
Although later I would live there with Garrick, Jimmy, Lewis and others, at
that time I only went there to see movies in one of the four theaters. At one
time, the tracks ran in the middle of Main Street connecting Hoboken with
Paterson and beyond. But the city had torn up the tracks in the center of the
street and we came out just short of downtown where the tracks ended behind the
Capital Theater and near the diner named after it.
Winter had come early, and we decided to go into the diner for something
warm to drink.
On most days, factory workers, truck drivers, store clerks and such
filled the stools and booths, along with the slightly less decrepit street
people and bag ladies trying to stay warm. So, we with our long hair should
have fit right in unnoticed.
Not so on this night. A cop watched us from the counter as we came in.
He had a big black mustache to go with his curly black hair and deep
black eyes and his stare made me extremely uncomfortable from the moment I
noticed him watching us.
I ordered coffee; Frank, hot chocolate. And though I wanted to leave,
making the hot chocolate took time and so we sat as the cop stared. Then it
took time for Frank to drink it, saying it was too hot for him to gulp down the
way I did coffee. Finally finished, we rose, but so did the cop, who followed
us out the door and once in the parking lot, he told us to halt.
“You two are absolutely disgusting,” the cop said. “What the hell are
you up to?”
We had no real explanation. The cop then told us to empty our pockets,
pointing at me first, and held his hand out for me to deposit the items. His
eyes glowed when the first knife appeared, a slick switch blade I had purchased
from a Times Square store. But his expression grew even more delighted when the
second knife fell into his hand, a longer, thinner gravity knife I had ordered
by mail. The third knife was my trusty boy scout pocketknife I had carried
since I was ten.
The cop then looked at Frank.
“Well?” he said.
It was at that moment I remembered the pills Chris had given us and
wondered if Frank had changed his t-shirt or at least had removed the pills
from a few days earlier.
Out of Frank’s pocket, however, came such an assortment of stuff even I
was amazed, started with ticket stubs from some movie he had seen earlier, a
bus receipt, a signed receipt for his latest payment on the guitar he was
buying on layaway from the store on Broadway in Paterson, slightly used cough
drops covered in lint, several pieces of potato chips, a detailed note from his
mother reminding him to pick up something a week ago had already forgotten to
pick up, a ticket for a cleaners for his tuxedo from the prom he had attended
the previous May, two crumpled packs of cigarettes, several packs of matches –
on which he had scrawled the number of girls he had met and planned to call –
and lastly, but not least, topping off the pile in the cop’s palm, two
handkerchiefs so filled with crude they might have gone through a coal mine,
which horrified the cop more than my knives did.
“Stop!” the cop said when Frank reached into his pocket to for the
loose change, we all could hear jangling at the bottom.
He made Frank take the stuff back, and then focused on me and my
knives.
“Do you mind explaining why you need three knives?” he asked.
“For protection,” I said, although that was not the reason. I just
liked knives.
“I ought to take both of you in,” he said. “But I’m feeling generous
tonight. Get out of here. Go back to wherever you came from. If I catch you
here again, I’ll haul you in.”
“I want one of my knives back,” I said.
The cop looked stunned. “What?”
“I paid good money for those knives.”
The startled look turned to anger on the cop’s face.
“All right,” he said, holding his palm towards me with the three knives
on it. “Take one. But if you pick the wrong you, I’ll take you in.”
Wisely, I knew which one to take and picked out the boy scout knife.
“Good choice,” the cop said. “Now get before I change my mind.”
We turned and headed back towards the tracks that led into Clifton – at
which point, Frank halted, clutching his belly.
“It’s out!” he said.
“What’s out?”
“My hernia. I got kicked by a police horse during the protest at
Columbia got a hernia. It pops out now and then.”
I glanced back at the diner and the cop still staring after us.
“Well, we can’t stop now. Just hold it in until we get out of sight.”
“I’ll try,” he said, and somehow, he managed to hobble far enough to
satisfy the cop, who was either too cold to worry about us or wanted another
cup of coffee. He vanished back into the diner.
I forgot about the pills in Frank’s pocket – and so apparently did
Frank because these played yet another part in a drama with Jimmy that I did
not witness, but later learned about from Jimmy and Frank – making me wonder if
Frank EVER changed his t-shirts.
The first snow had arrived by mid-December and the roads were slick.
But Jimmy, on a mission to get John Lennon’s book, talked Alf into driving from
bookstore to bookstore in order to find it.
This magical mystery tour (as Frank was later to call them) involved Alf,
Bob Warren, Frank, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s black girlfriend, Michele (a somewhat
scandalous relationship in the all-so racist Passaic Valley.)
Jimmy finally found the book at a store at the Garden State Plaza Mall
and was sitting in the back seat with Michele reading from it as Alf navigated
the slick and narrow lanes of Route 4, headed in the direction of Paterson.
Between passages, Jimmy abused Alf as usual, often prompting the
stuttering Alf into attempting words he could not normally say, and then just
as Alf was finally going to say the word, Jimmy would jump in and finish it
first.
Alf put up with being Jimmy’s abused driver mostly because of the
promise of drugs – which Bob Warren routine hid in his underwear, but did not
do so on this particular day, feeling some strange omen that fate was about to
drop its heavy hand on the back of their necks.
Once he had acquired the book he wanted, Jimmy was also pondering the
perpetual problem of where to get pot.
Alf wanted to go back to Little Falls and dig out the stash everybody
knew Bob had hidden somewhere in his father’s house. But Jimmy didn’t want to
have to wait that long and directed Alf to drive a different way, heading
towards downtown Paterson instead – a risky proposition for four white boys and
one black girl from the suburbs.
But the slick roads made traveling even more treacherous – especially
on the bald tires on Alf’s car. He bitched often, but Jimmy did not pay him any
attention, reading instead from John Lennon’s book and inserting his own subtle
jabs at Alf that made Frank, Bob and Michele giggle and only made Alf’s mood
worse.
Finally, Alf could take no more of it and pulled the car over onto the
shoulder of the narrow highway, ordering everybody out.
“Here? In the middle of nowhere?” Jimmy asked, thinking it was just
another one of Alf’s usual tirades.
It was. But Jimmy’s tone only infuriated Alf all the more.
Again, he ordered them out of his car.
“But it’s the dead of winter,” Jimmy protested.
“Out!” Alf yelled.
This time Jimmy believed him, sighed, and climbed out into the cold,
followed by Michele, Bob and Frank.
Alf sped off as soon as the door shut, bald wheels spraying slush back
at them.
They stared after the car as the rear lights vanished in the haze, and
then began the long trod along the shoulder, Jimmy in the led, cursing Alf – at
which point he noticed the police car parked on the shoulder just ahead.
Michele or Frank suggested he might ask the cop for help, an idea Jimmy
immediately vetoed, his arrest for possession of pot over the summer near the
Agora coffee shop in Montclair had left him more than a bit wary of the police.
Instead, they crept passed the parked cruise trying not to be noticed
which somehow managed to accomplish – that is until Frank, noticing he was out
of cigarettes began patting down his pockets and came up with a mysterious
packet in his t-shirt pocket. He unfolded it, gasped, then dropped it and the
pills on the ground.
Jimmy caught the whole thing as if in slow motion, including what was
in the packet Frank dropped, and for some reason insisted that they call
recover the pills, and so all of them, Frank, Michele, Jimmy, and Bob got down
on their hands and knees to search for the missing pills.
It was at this point that the officers in the patrol car looked out and
took notice of them, stepping out to ask just what they were doing.
“We’re looking for our car keys,” Jimmy explained, unable, however, to
explain why they had no car when one of the cops asked.
By this time, Alf – who had a change of heart – pulled up to retrieve
them, and after the cops asked him a few questions, reviewed the appropriate
documents, sent them on their way, not in the direction of Paterson, but to
Little Falls and Bob’s stash.
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