My Friend Charlie (December 1990)

December 1990

December 1990

I think all this talk about the old days this year made me think of Charlie again, and that first time I was supposed to meet Ginger.

I guess the worst of it hit a few years ago when I heard about Charlie’s impending death. Over time you get used to the inevitable, if not quite able to accept it. Except for a few months in 1973, Charlie and I were never close. He was always the next layer out in my circle of friends, a friend of a friend-- of whom I heard regular news but rarely saw.

He, Bob, Alf, and Tom were regulars at a local bar once they came of legal drinking age. I knew I could find them any time I wanted by simply showing up there after work. In those days, we presumed people would always be where we expected, as if they were institutions like Ma Bell or IBM. And that part of the old Little Falls crowd was more predictable than most, making their daily ritual to the drinking fountain, telling the same tales day in and day out, of drug use, of auto repair, of new rock on the radio.

It was not my brand of life. But I liked to know they were there, echoes of an earlier stage of life when all of us had been closer. Somehow, we shared mutual myths. The trip north to Nova Scotia meant as much to me and Charlie as it did to the actual participants. We both had heard the details of that legend so often and for so long that we felt as if we had looked over the shoulders of those who had gone north.

Each of us, too, had our part in other tales which made us legends in the circuit of friends. I was still known for my military exploits on a trip to the shore in the summer of 1969. Charlie was well-known for his party Halloween night 1970.

My attending that party was as big a shock to Charlie as it was to me. I was hiding out from in New York City waiting for my child to be born when Jimmy told Frank to come tell us we should come to Charlie’s Halloween Party in West Paterson.

“He says you don’t have to dress up,” Frank told me after having driven all the way from New Jersey to our apartment on East 6th Street.

Jimmy had told him to collect us and not to take no for an answer. And while I was scared to go back to the scene of my crime, I was more terrified by Frank’s driving, fearing we might not survive the trip there or back.

Frank kept talking about Jimmy’s new girlfriend, Ginger, as if Frank adored her as much as Jimmy did.

Charlie’s house – or should I say his parents – was on one of those twisted hillside streets somewhere between Browertown Road and McBride Avenue. When we arrived, we found the whole gang including Jeff, John, Alf, Bob, Tom, both Carols, Judy and others who I did not know until later.

I don’t even remember if I actually met Ginger there or if we’d been introduced.

The whole party seemed to revolve around Jimmy, who hovered over the record player singing along with the newly released Neil Young solo album, his voice sounding as if he was Neil Young.

Just where Charlie’s parents were, I could not guess, no doubt away somewhere which explained why booze and drugs flowed so freely.

Charlie and I would get closer a few years later when he would wander across the street from the bar to my room in the rooming house in Montclair.

I guess that's why after not seeing Charlie for almost 20 years, his death hurt so much. Partly because I knew him briefly and felt for him the way I would a second cousin. Partly because his passing subtracts from this on-going myth, we call life, and what remains are the fixed details of an already well-known tale.