July 10, 2004
Jimmy said this would be the last dance the band would dance, barroom
stuff just too strenuous for old men like us.
“I’m sick of drunks and cigarette smoke,” he told me yesterday when I
called to find out what time the band went on.
So, with Jimmy predicting the end of an era at a place so close to where
we all started, I called a tape recorder and camera to record the last vestige
of the band.
We came early – unused to the rock and roll life which started late and
dragged out into the early morning hours. It was one of those small details
that made me give it all up in the first place, unable to put up with the lack
of sleep and excess of alcohol.
Even 9 p.m. – which we thought the band started at – proved too early,
but we did not find that out until after we had arrived.
To waste time, I drove around the old stomping ground, the history of
the Garley Gang so imprinted on its face that everywhere I looked I saw
memories – even in the spaces so-called progress had neutered with new construction,
such as the wedding hall where the bad and bowling alley once stood, condos where
Garrick’s cottage once was, and sacrilege of sacrileges town houses on the
property once home to the Red Baron (later called Rose Buds.)
We stopped on Main Street for food – an unnecessary arrangement since
the Grasshopper (once known as The Locker Room) also served food we could have
partaken in had we known standing outside.
Traffic passed us along Main Street, thick with the same kinds of faces
I recalled from living and later reporting there, pale-faced Republicans who
had for the mot part fended off the assault of immigrants from Paterson by
keeping their taxes high and property values exorbitant.
This was the birthplace of the Garley Gang revolution, as suburban in its
entirety as any of the popular Sixties rebellions better remembered in history.
When we got back to the Grasshopper, Jimmy waited in the parking lot
(He always seemed to anticipate our arrival.) Nearly every parking slot was
filled. Jimmy jealously guarded a vacant spot near the door so that the band
could unload its equipment when they arrived.
“They’re still eating dinner in here,” Jimmy told us as we walked up
from the lower level where we had found a lucky spot at the end of an aisle.
Jimmy looked as he has always looked, wearing a blue baseball cap, a buttoned-down
shirt, jeans and sneakers – a uniform I would insist he get buried in since I
fully believe he came into this world wearing such an outfit.
But he did look grayer – not old. Jimmy never aged. He was born an
adult and looked now as he had when I first met him at the dry cleaner on East
Main Street all so many years ago.
Sharon was annoyed at the idea that the band would start even later
than we’d anticipated, rock and roll never started on time – especially with
this cast of characters.
While the Locker Room had no where near the same depth of history as
the now-demolished Red Barron, the band in its various incarnations had played
here from time to time.
For me, the most memorable occurred in the early 1980s (1983 or early
1984) when John, Jimmy, Rich Gordy and several others tried to start a rhythm
and blues band with me as sound man. That incarnation lasted only for one gig
of two nights in this establishment when the band members – many stoned-on heroin
– smashed up their own equipment at the end of the second night in a
heart-stopping sequence I will remember until my grave.
We were not standing there long when Garrick arrived up in his Ford
Bronco, larger than he had been, wearing a plaid shirt and a New York Yankees
hat – a lifelong commitment to the most capitalistic of American sports teams.
Garrick was apparently in a playful mood, ducking behind parked cars to
keep us from seeing him until he got right up on us.
We never stop being like kids whenever we get together, perpetual adolescents,
inspired no doubt this time by being so close to the place of our roots. We
fell back into the same mental state we had as teens, thinking and acting the same
way, unable to kick the habit we had developed over a life time from an era
when we saw each other four or even five times a week rather than five or six
times a year as we did now.
But such meetings made us aware that part of our crew, the fourth suit
in this historic deck of cards, was missing, gone back in 1995, leaving a
permanent gaping hole in each of us, and tainting these get-togethers with just
a touch of sadness.
Frank had spent so much time around the band that some considered him
an unofficial member. Even after his death, Frank’s spirit seemed to appear in
and around us each time the band got back together to play.
And here, we all felt it again. I looked at Jimmy, Jimmy looked at
Garrick, Garrick looked at me. And we knew.
By this time, other people started to arrive – including my former work
mates at the Bloomfield newspaper, O’Keefe and Kelly who I had invited to come
see the bad, both giving Jimmy a run for sarcasm, although Jimmy retained his
title because he was rarely bitter the way these two often were, though
listening to them together was like hearing the sound track to one of those spiffy
1930s movies such as His Girl Friday.
Kelly would have made Jonathan Swift sound positive and continued an
ongoing rant against Jersey City where he had also worked briefly with me and
against Caren, the editor, who had treated him like a rookie. He did not
understand why I needed to take as many pictures of the band as I did that night
and had done at a previous event at a picnic in Mouth Arlington. He seemed to
think I was working instead of getting drunk and having fun like the good
Irishman he was.
John Monett arrived a short time later with his new girlfriend – who turned
out to be Jimmy’s youngest sister, Patti, and Patti’s (therefore Jimmy’s)
mother, and had also brought a truck full of equipment we had previously presumed
Garrick had brought.
It was another flash back to that time when Garrick and I did most of the
hauling of such stuff for this band and for varieties of it that included John
Ritchie, and how weary we were after dropping the equipment off in Little Falls
before stumbling into the 24-hour 7-11 on Squirrelwood Road in West Paterson for
food before heading home to sleep.
We all stood in the parking lot waiting for people inside to finish
their meals, one crowd taking the place of the other, much like changing shifts
in the factories some of our fathers worked in when they were young.
I recognized many of the arriving faces, even though I could not put a
name to them, from those days when the band played regularly, coming on this night
with the same nostalgia I felt, and guaranteeing the band would have a good
crowd and keep bar management happy.
Once inside, I discovered the interior had changed greatly from that
previous time almost twenty years earlier when I was last here, the bits and
pieces of the interior shifted into a different format, so it was difficult to
envision how it had been. It was the crowd that kept the memory alive, pouring
in like a rising tide of memories.
One by one the most familiar people came up to say hello, Pam – the underage
girl the band used to sneak into the Red Baron with her even younger sister,
Arlene who Frank for a time had a crush on. Garrick’s cousin Stevie came, too –
but without the boa constrictor Jimmy once loved but stopped loving when it
shit on his feet in a softball field behind Ginger’s house in Towaco. Dawn and her
husband Frank came, too, people with whom we often shared Christmas Eve on our never-ending
search each year for Christmas.
When Jimmy got behind the microphone, it was not the aging Jimmy I had
talked to on the phone, a glint coming back into his eyes as he looked out at
the crowd. Perhaps he imagined he was back on that tiny stall of a stage in the
Red Baron all so many years ago, seeing the same faces now as he did not,
feeling the same energy course through his veins.
John Lennon once said in reference to The Beatles, that the story is
about the music.
The same could be said that night in regard to Jimmy Garland.
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