 |
| Tunnel to Cedar Grove |
December 29, 1981
The Garland family has moved so often I often forget where they live.
I keep thinking about the old house on Paterson Avenue where Jimmy
lived when I first met him, a place so historic that everybody I know remembers
it, too, but a place now long gone, and many moves ago.
And I’ve helped them move so often from there to up the hill (where we
used to play risk with the daughters), then to Pompton Lakes, only to return to
West Paterson – one side of Route 80 and then the other.
Jimmy briefly went back to live in one of these after he got evicted
from Passaic after not paying rent for a year only to last a week, fleeing back
to Passaic to hide in Garrick’s attic until it was safe again to come out.
I know the Garland’s possessions from all these moves nearly as well as
they do.
But I got chills when we moved them yesterday as if I won’t be moving
them again at least not in their current configuration, this move, not from one
part of West Paterson to another, but from West Paterson to Montclair near the
Verona border – a few short blocks from where I lived in the rooming house
until only a few years ago, a trip back in time which made me think of a lot of
things, including Jimmy and Ginger when they happily lived near there on Pine
Street, and the breakup, and the gloom that hung over Jimmy for months.
Oddly enough, it was me and Garrick – who was waiting at the edge of
the drive in Towacco instead of Jimmy when I arrived to pick him up.
Garrick was supposed to have picked up a truck from one of the
companies Jimmy’s father, Basil used to work for to help with the move.
“They wouldn’t give it to me,” Garrick told me as he sipped his coffee,
a regular Buddha of patience even in the midst of crisis.
But I felt the tension between him and Jimmy, which nobody explained.
I also learned the Bobby, Jimmy’s brother, who lived within spitting
distance of the new destination, wouldn’t let his father’s family use his truck
either.
“Bobby couldn’t be bothered,” Garrick said. “He says he has other
things to do.”
I suggested maybe Bobby wasn’t blood after all, but some bastard child
of some Irish housekeeper who Basil felt sorry for at some point in the distant
past.
Jimmy laughed, saying unfortunately not, understanding for the first
time that old Biblical tale of Caine and Abel.
Garrick managed to borrow the band’s fan, leaving all the equipment of
the floor of the Ethel Street garage in Little Falls, and as Jimmy took the
passenger seat and I sat in the back, I kept thinking about the days when this
was routine, when we had the band to move, not someone’s lives.
When we arrived at the West Paterson house there were no cars in the
street, drawing curses from Jimmy about where his sisters were.
But one of the girls, Patti, was there. She has just taken a shower and
was just then drying her hair while she watched the TV set we had come to move.
Most of the household stuff remained unpacked – even though none of us
wanted to be doing all this on New Years Eve just so we could be out of the
house by the first as promised.
“Doesn’t anyone do anything around here?” Jimmy grumbled.
Patti shrugged and flicked through the TV channels with the remote, sitting
on the couch where Jimmy had spent a week after his eviction from Passaic.
I couldn’t believe how she had grown, how all the girls had grown, and
I understood that this was the end of the road as we knew it, and that I could
no longer keep that image of the only family intact in my head.
We loaded the washer and dryer into the van along with some other minor
items and headed towards the other house in Montclair where we could expect
Maureen to be waiting to let us in.
This trip brought up other memories from the days when Garrick owned an
old purple plumbers van and the trip, we took to Boston to move Geri Gorley
there, or one to Manhattan to see Carol at one of her uptown parties near
Central Park.
“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” Garrick asked Jimmy, who was
the one who had taken the instructions over the phone from Basil earlier that
morning.
“Like the back of my hand,” Jimmy assured him. “Just pay attention to your
driving.”
He had to count the houses on Bloomfield Avenue when we got there since
he wasn’t precisely sure which one his father had meant, Garrick grumbling the
whole time as Jimmy pleaded with him to shut up, “I’m trying to think.”
Basil had left the girls money to buy us lunch. So, I waited on the
porch with the girls as Jimmy and Garrick went up to the White Castle to buy
sliders and fries.
But it was old there on the porch waiting, and then it occurred to me
that we were making this move on Jimmy’s birthday, the day after Garrick’s
birthday, and I struggled to figure out just how old each of them was, finally
concluding Jimmy had just turned 33, and Garrick, 31, thinking too how far we
had come in all those years since we were teens, and yet, not far at all, close
enough to walk to my old rooming house, and a bit further to Pine Street where Jimmy
and Ginger once lived.
And I kept thinking how much had changed, how this move might be Basil’s
last move, and soon the girls would be gone, married off and embracing some
career somewhere far away, no longer the giggling girls we all used to babysit.
And all this made me sad.
No comments:
Post a Comment