The Mega Foods in Glen Ridge is where I met Mimi, my wife-to-be. She was bookkeeper there. Mega stayed open until ten o’clock on Friday nights, and one Friday I offered her a ride home to Newark so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. My girlfriend at the time also worked at Mega, and I took her home every night. She came along on our trip to Newark, riding shotgun. She lived in Montclair, a lot closer to Mega, so for her the trip was wasted time.
As taking Mimi home on Friday night became a regular thing, my girlfriend continued to ride along, picking fights with me on the other nights. I guess she must have had some money saved up, because one morning she came to work driving a brand new Plymouth Fury and told me she wouldn’t need a ride home any more. After that, we only saw each other at work, and only by accident.
1957 Plymouth Fury
Store manager Carl always had an eye out for shoplifters. One day he saw a customer take two eggs out of the carton and slip them into his jacket pocket. He called me over and said “Watch this.” Pushing a shopping cart, he strolled over toward the customer, who was pretending to look at something in the dairy case. Carl let the cart run into the man’s right side, just slightly harder than a tap, and apologized. The customer said “That’s quite all right” and left the store immediately
For more serious shoplifting, the Mega Foods policy was that when a shoplifter was apprehended, they were invited to the back room for an interview with the manager, with an employee also present as a witness. They were encouraged to sign a “Confession” (actual word at the top of the form), and promise not to come back to the store. Interviewing a female shoplifter required a female witness. Mimi got pulled in to witness an interview once where the alleged shoplifter kept telling Carl “If you let me go, I’ll do anything you want. Do you understand? Anything.” Mimi said it was very uncomfortable. I asked if she thought Carl might have wanted her to go for a walk, but she said no.
One evening around 1960 I was headed for New York City, I don’t remember why, and as I walked through Newark Penn Station I heard “Paulie! Hey, Paulie!”. I looked around and saw my brilliant, crazy, crooked friend Pete, from Kingsway supermarket days.
His head and shoulders were visible over the top of one of those 4-poses-for-a-quarter photo booths. He was standing on its adjustable stool and the half-curtain was closed. I walked over, and, not wanting to pry, simply said “Pete! How ya doing?”
I don’t normally ask people questions about why they’re doing what they’re doing, but he explained anyway. He was going away on vacation with his parents, and was taking a picture of his penis so his girlfriend wouldn’t forget him.
Today, every cell phone is also a camera, and taking such photos is easy. But I like to believe my friend Pete was the first.
I was on vacation between first and second grade. We were living at Uncle Jim’s house. One day all the grownups started acting crazy and laughing and hugging and hollering and crying. I asked them what was going on, and they said the war was over. I asked them who won, but they just ignored me. I ran up and down the front steps for a while. I knew it was important. I had on my brown and orange striped shirt.
Before we lived there we had our own house. A few other things happened. I got hit on the head with a rock. I broke my brother’s radio and looked at a girl’s hiney hole. Italian kids moved in and came to my kindergarten. I asked my mother what two very bad curse words meant. My father stopped coming home. My teacher made me hide my face in her lap. I had to clean the school steps with a bucket and scrub brush because I wrote on them. While I was scrubbing my mother walked by on her way to the store but she didn’t look over at me. I cut off the tip of my finger slicing bread and got a red wagon for not crying too much on the way to the doctor’s.
At Uncle Jim’s house I jumped off his garage roof with an umbrella. I broke off enough roof shingles to build a fort but he made them not punish me. He had his grandfather’s Civil War rifle hanging on a rafter in the cellar.
When we got our own house again I used to play under our dining room table and make believe it was my fort. There was a metal lever there to pull the two halves of the table tight together and I would slide it back and forth and pretend it was the speed control on a trolley car. I wrote ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ in chalk on the underside of the table and the day the movers took the table apart to bring it to our next house they walked past my brother and me with the words facing out and he laughed but didn’t tell anyone.
“Atom Bomb devastating”– an ocean of contemporaneous news coverage, courtesy Jamie Bradburn’s Tales of Toronto
After the war was over, my brother Dick, Mom and I moved out of Aunt Elizabeth’s and Aunt Frances’s houses and into our own rented house on Linwood Place in East Orange. Grandma joined us there; I think she had been staying with Aunt Mabel.
With the troops coming home, there was a national housing shortage, and my mother decided to bring in some extra money by taking in roomers. They would have the large bedroom at the front of the house, and share the single bathroom with us.
Our first roomers were the Turners, a pleasant couple in their thirties. I was unaware of their nighttime activities because my room was at the far end of the house, but apparently their lovemaking was so loud and frequent that my mother and grandmother came to doubt that they were married. The Turners were asked to leave, whether because of the noise or the not-being-married I don’t know.
Our next roomers were two girls in their early twenties, blond Charlotte and exotic Betty K. They formed a close friendship with my brother, then about 17, which ended when the three were caught by my grandmother “rolling around” on the double bed. There were no further roomers.
As you might guess, the shared bathroom was often in use when I got up in the morning to get ready for school . An empty milk bottle was kept on the top cellar step for when I couldn’t wait. Someone, I assume my mom, emptied and rinsed it later.
I once read a science fiction story about a town where there was a mysterious death-by-poisoning almost every day. The police were unable to determine how the victims ingested the poison. A mad scientist had developed a poison so strong that it remained effective no matter how much it was diluted. Method of delivery? One drop in an empty milk bottle. After the bottle was picked up and returned to the dairy to be washed and refilled, enough poison remained to take another life. Do you see where I’m going with this? After reading that story, I imagined tiny amounts of my childhood pee distributed to milk drinkers across Essex County and beyond.
Some of the older guys in our group would make an occasional trip to one of the burlesque houses in Newark, either Minsky’s or the Empire. The minimum age for admission was 18, so that left me out.
Later I learned the dancers at Minsky’s would show their breasts sometimes, not so much at the Empire. At Minsky’s, a headliner like Lili St. Cyr might have hers out for most of her act. Wowzers.
And, oh yeah, there were some great comics, too.
Comics doing a bit, courtesy burlesquebabes.wordpress.com
At intermission, the house lights came up and the ushers walked the aisles, hawking overpriced candy and Crackerjack. Sometimes we’d spot one of our teachers in the audience – once Mr. Tischler, who taught social studies; on another occasion Professor Lewis, who taught biology.
I don’t know how Professor Lewis came to be called “Professor”, but that’s what they called him, even the other teachers. Maybe he lost a college position and the high school decided he could keep the title.
In class, the Professor was always dropping things and trying to look up the girls’ skirts – especially the skirt of Grace Scuderi, who sat in the front row and seemed cooperative and well aware of what the Professor was up to.
Sorry, I got ahead of myself there, let’s backtrack.
Being only 16, I worried that if I joined my friends on one of their expeditions, my age might be challenged, so I made a fake birth certificate. I already had an official one, so I knew how it should look. I sent to Newark for two fresh copies (one extra in case I made a mistake), and set to work.
The handwriting on the forms was just regular fountain pen ink. A quick dip in diluted laundry bleach made it disappear; the form’s printing and fancy embossed seal of the City of Newark remained. I rented a typewriter from the stationery store next to the library and filled in the now-empty form with my name and an improved birth date. The only thing still missing was the signature of the Newark city clerk. It’s tricky to imitate someone else’s signature, but after a lot of practice I was able to make a decent copy.
Until I got to be really 18, I carried that fake certificate in my back pocket each time we went to Newark. As it turned out, my worries were groundless – my age was never questioned, and I never needed to show it. But always, in the back of my mind, was the fear that I might need to show it one day, and I’d hear “Wait a minute, that’s not the signature of Harry S. Reichenstein!”
++++++++++There is no excellent beauty which hath not ++++++++++some strangeness in the proportion. +++++++++++++++++— Sir Francis Bacon
When I worked for Continental Insurance, a group of us went to Texas to visit a company that wanted to sell us computers. Our hosts took us out for drinks, and we sat quietly rating the entertainers as they took the stage. One girl had a face that was perfect – she was absolutely movie-star , Miss-America beautiful.
I hadn’t thought about it consciously before, but I said such perfection made me a little uncomfortable, and I would need at least one defect for such a girl to be “real.” One of our hosts said “So, for you, a 10 is a 9 with a broken nose?” I thought about that, and about Mary Ann, the first girl I ever asked out on a date, and told him he was correct.
As an example of “generous features”, the first time I saw newslady Maria Bartiromo on television was around 1995, before she ruined her beauty by getting her nose “fixed”, something done by insecure women who don’t appreciate what it means to be unique. Before that, she was a perfect example of a woman blessed with “generous features.”
Maria was doing the stock market reports on CNBC. She had everything right – the big eyes, the Mediterranean nose, the full lips. I watched her whenever I could, absorbing everything about her. I remember thinking “Man, if only she had been around when I was in high school.” Then I remembered – she had been around, in a sense, but she moved away. Her name was Mary Ann Potenza.
No, not Mary Ann, this is Sofia Coppola, but close. Courtesy Getty Images
She lived a half block from Vince’s but never came to the store; her aunt did all the shopping. Her house was behind the house of one of my friends from the corner, so we knew each other to see. We both went to Orange High; she was a sophomore and I was a junior. One day I saw her in the hall, got up my nerve and asked if she’d like to go to a movie with me sometime. She said yes.
I wasn’t old enough to drive, so everything happened on foot. The day of our date, I walked to her house the long way around, so I wouldn’t have to go past Vince’s and get quizzed about where I was going all dressed up.
When I got to the house, her younger sister opened the door, but the two girls looked so much alike that I didn’t realize for a moment that the sister was not Mary Ann, and wondered why she looked sort of unkempt and was wearing blue jeans. Then she said “I’ll tell her you’re here” and I said “Okay, thanks.” Her father was lying on the sofa reading and gave me a half-wave without sitting up.
We walked up High Street and then over Main to the Embassy. I suppose I should remember what movie was playing, but my mind was too busy. Did I buy popcorn? Yes, probably. After a while, I tried putting my arm around her shoulders like you’re supposed to in the movies, and it worked; plus she moved over even closer. Did we hold hands walking back? I want to say yes, but when I was older and tried holding hands walking with a different girl, it felt new and weird getting our fingers lined up right, so probably not.
When we got back to her house, we held each other for a minute and had a soft, sweet, slightly open-mouthed kiss. I walked home thinking about that.
The word of our date got out, and the next time I went to Vince’s I was greeted with “Hey! Secret lover!”, and serenaded with the first few bars of the syrupy “Once I had a secret love” song. They were just jealous.
A few weeks after our date, she came up to me in school and said she had to say goodbye, her family was moving to Sherwood Forest. I had no idea of where or even what that was, except for the place Robin Hood lives, and I was too flustered to suggest we stay in touch somehow. And that was the end of a good thing that never had a chance to grow.
Searching now with newspapers.com, I see that Sherwood Forest was a new single-family housing development in Mountainside. So her father moved his family out of Orange, a town already in decline, to a town that is still one of the 10 best in the state. Good for him.
I also ran across her mother’s obituary notice, from 1993, and in the list of survivors I saw that Mary Ann had married a nice Italian boy and was living in Poughkeepsie, New York. Good for them, too.
How can I still be embarrassed by something that happened when I was 15 years old? Recently the Italian word for laundry bleach, biancolino, literally “white linen”, appeared in the captions on a cooking show, where a pleasant old lady was reminiscing about growing up in Little Italy and how the biancolino (pronounced bee-yung-go-LEEN) man would come to your house with his gallon bottles.
I remembered being sent to Cucinotta’s grocery store by my German-English mother to get a bottle of “buy-anka-leena”, her pronunciation of the label pasted over her empty Coca-Cola Syrup makeshift bleach bottle, then eventually having to point to one, and Dolores laughing and laughing and showing her white teeth.
Everyone said Dolores looked like Pier Angeli, shown here. /courtesy livejournal.com
Writing a few days ago about Mary Ann, the first girl I ever asked out on a date, got me to thinking about Dolores, the second.
Dolores was Vince’s daughter, and ran the cash register in the family store on days she wasn’t in school. She was fun to talk to, but really out of my league. She was two years older, a lot when you’re 15 or 16. She lived all the way up in Livingston. She had a boyfriend with a car, a silly, absurd lilac-colored convertible.
She was beautiful, but unlike a lot of girls, she never acted like she knew it. An exception was made for a Fourth-of-July Festival beauty contest that her friends convinced her to enter. She won second place. First place went to the mayor’s daughter.
My crush only got worse the day she laughed at my comical mangling of the Italian word for laundry bleach.
A year later, we were in the store talking and I asked if she’d like to go bowling with me some time. She said yes, and next Saturday afternoon we met at her aunt’s house, a block from the store. We walked up High Street and then over Main to the Palladium.
She was wearing shorts, not short-shorts, just regular ones that come halfway down the thigh, all just normal clothes a girl would wear to go bowling. Still, she was hard not to stare at, and people did take notice. Each time she got up to bowl it was like everything slowed down around her. For me, anyway.
I still worked part-time setting up pins at the Palladium, so a few of my colleagues found a minute to come up out of the pits to say hello, but mainly to get a better look at Dolores.
When we got back to her aunt’s house, we had a sweet goodnight kiss, one I still remember.
A few weeks later, she invited me for dinner at her aunt’s. That was the first time I ever had a real Italian meal. I stuffed myself on the strange, never-before-seen appetizers and barely had room to sample the later courses. Through the meal, her aunt and the other female relatives kept encouraging me to eat, eat, eat. That meal was one of the life events that made me wish I’d been born Italian.
That dinner turned out to be the last time I ever saw Dolores. A few months later I had my first car, a clerk job in the next town, and a new circle of friends. Someone said she went off to college; I don’t know what happened in her life after that. I think of her and her family often. I tried looking for her name online, but no luck.
In his poem Woolworth’s, 1954 Raymond Carver recalls his youth as a stockboy, and lists the girls he went with then, “All those girls. Grownup now. Or worse.” Maybe I’m like him, and I don’t really want to know.
I bought a new used car, a 1951 Chevy, through my cousin Walter, who worked at a dealership in Nutley and kept an eye out for clean trade-ins. I wanted to give it a more thorough workout than my original test drive, in particular to see how far it could make it up a hill before it had to be shifted down to second. I called up my friend Bobby and we drove to West Orange, which is on a low mountain and has steep roads and even steeper side streets. We drove up a few hills and third gear was pretty strong, we tried a few other things and I was happy. Then we turned around to head home and there were these two girls.
We slowed down and drove along next to them, close to them. Bobby leaned out and asked where they were going, and if they’d like a ride. They answered “home!”, and “no!”, but in a not-unfriendly way. We stayed alongside them as they walked, asking where they went to school (one of the East Orange high schools, I forget which) and lots of other questions, as traffic swung out to pass us and our little group made its way down the mountain.
This probably sounds creepy to anyone who didn’t grow up in the 1950s, but that was one of the ways people met then, just boys cruising around, talking to and picking up unattached girls. By the time we got to the bottom of the mountain, everyone knew everyone else’s name, and the girls, let’s call them Carol and Becky, lowered their resistance and got in the back seat. Before we dropped them off at Becky’s house, we set up a double date to get better acquainted.
Carol and I hit it off on the double date, and we ended up dating for real. She was sweet and smart and nice to look at, but you probably guessed that already. Meanwhile, Bobby dated Becky, but not for long – he played in a band, and he had lots of other female friends.
The first time Carol and I had a real date, she told me in advance to expect to meet her mother, and made it clear that I should come to the side door of the house, not the front. By the time the day arrived I had forgotten, and I went to the front, where there was an enclosed porch with a “Nursery School” sign. I rang the bell, and in a minute an annoyed Carol opened the door, revealing two rows of child-sized porcelain toilets installed behind her. In a weary voice she said “My mom runs a nursery school,” and led me past the toilets into the house. I found out later they were a regular source of embarrassment for her, and this time it was worse because the inevitable reveal happened on a first date. I think I just said “Oh” in an understanding voice. I thought it was pretty funny, but I didn’t let on.
We developed a dating pattern, and didn’t go “out” on our dates every time. Sometimes we would go to the movies or such, but mostly we just parked and did deep kissing and what the French call frottage, that is, grinding ourselves against each other with our clothes on. It was good fun and nobody got pregnant.
We went to a house party, two paneled rooms in someone’s basement. One room was mostly high school kids like us; the other was college types. Everyone was behaving, just drinking beer and slow dancing to doo-wop music — Earth Angel and such. After a while, this big jock walked in from the other room. He wasn’t quite shouting, but his voice was angry as he asked, “FUUUCKKKK?? Did somebody say FUUUCKKKK?? In front of my GIRRRRL??” Back then nobody ever used that word in mixed company, certainly nobody had used it that night, and it was a shock to hear it loud and clear. We all froze as he glared at us, as though expecting a confession. After a moment he left. I think now that he was probably just doing a fraternity “bit”, a prank – funny in retrospect but scary for those on the receiving end. Maybe we’ll see it reenacted in a high school movie some day.
After a few months, things slowed down and we gradually stopped seeing each other. I don’t remember a reason, we didn’t have a fight or anything like that. Maybe it was just time.
The following year I joined the army, and I was feeling down. I wrote her a letter, just a kind of friendly “Hello, what’s up?” letter. I didn’t know her house number, so the envelope looked like:
Her name
Nursery school across from the Amoco station
South Harrison Street
East Orange, N.J.
I know the post office motto is “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night blah blah blah”, but they don’t seem to put much effort into the non-weather aspects of getting a piece of mail delivered – what was so hard about that address? How many nursery schools across from Amoco stations were there on South Harrison Street?
Yes, I do realize I was asking a lot. The letter came back marked “Insufficient Address”, and that was the end for Carol and me.
Newark trolley, courtesy Al Mankoff’s Trolley Treasures
A few things that happened before I owned a car.
Writing this makes me realize I must really, really hate throwing up; otherwise, why would I write about it so much? Do I remember every time I ever threw up? It might seem that way, but probably not. Anyway, here it comes…
Trolley car throw-up
Orange slices, courtesy Spangler Candy
My first memory of a public-transit event is toward the end of a trolley ride with my mother. I have eaten most, if not all, of a bag of candy orange slices, and I vomit them into the aisle, which fortunately is made of grooved wood to handle such events. I don’t feel sick beforehand, just surprised and embarrassed after. That orange mess sliding down into the wooden grooves is not a good memory, so for candy I stick to spearmint leaves now, they’re green.
Eastern Airlines throw-up
Before my second summer trip to Michigan, my mother asks if I’d like to fly there this time. You bet I would! At about 11 years old, I have never been on a plane, and will fly from Newark to Toledo, which is across the state line from Uncle Bert’s farm in Temperance.
The year before, I went by train, leaving from New York Penn Station, where my mother approached and drafted a pleasant Midwestern couple to more or less keep an eye on me during the trip. They were indeed pleasant, and in the dining car at mealtime the husband explained to me that the money my mother had given me to spend was New Jersey money, and only his Ohio money would be accepted on the train. I argued that he couldn’t possibly be correct, because it said “Federal Reserve” right on the alleged “New Jersey money” in my hand. He said there was more to it than that, and I finally gave in and let him pay for my meal. Thanks for the meal, Mr. Midwesterner, but I’m no rube.
Eastern Airlines junior pilot wings, courtesy bonanza.com
On the plane, the stewardesses are sweet; they know it’s my first time. They give me a set of Junior Pilot wings and tell me where the loo is, but perhaps to avoid the power of suggestion, they don’t mention anything about throw-up bags or the possible need for such a thing. Their mistake. About a half-hour into the flight I throw up, a lot, into the carpeted aisle as I run to the loo. By the time I get back, it’s all cleaned up and they are still smiling, bless them. When I get to Toledo, I make the mistake of mentioning what happened, and get a ribbing from my cousins.
Sweating with the dance instructors
This one has more to do with waiting for public transportation than using it, but here it is anyway. I was going to call it “Dance Instructors Move into the Bus Stop”, but I didn’t think anyone would get the Jackie Gleason/TV Guide reference anymore.
There’s an Arthur Murray dance studio at the bus stop near my job at Kingsway. On Friday nights, Kingsway doesn’t close until ten o’clock, and sometimes I’ll see two or three Arthur Murray ladies already there when I get to the bus stop. They work until ten o’clock on most nights, not just on Friday; I guess that’s the nature of the dance instruction business. They are nice to look at, but too grown-up and glamorous for 16-year-old me to even think about.
Paid actor, courtesy kinglawoffices.com
A comic whose name I can’t remember said “Minimum wage is what they pay you because they’re not allowed to pay you any less.” When I was at Kingsway, the minimum wage was 75 cents an hour, equivalent to $7.00 an hour now. In my youthful view of economic justice, I consider myself eligible for the employee five-finger discount, and have made use of it tonight. On top of the underwear I wore when I left the house this morning is still more underwear, six new crewneck T-shirts. It’s a cold night, maybe 20 degrees, but I am toasty warm. After a while, I start wiping sweat off my face and worry that the ladies will think there’s something wrong with me.
Girl on Greyhound
I am on leave and headed somewhere by Greyhound bus. There are other young guys in uniform aboard, one of them in the aisle seat ahead of mine, and at a rest stop I see him chatting up a girl. When we get back on the bus, I see he has persuaded the girl and his seatmate to switch seats, and she is now sitting next to him as they continue to chat.
Greyhound passengers, courtesy Pirelli .com
During the night something wakes me; I don’t know if it was a sound or her breath in my face. In the dim light I look directly into her eyes over the seatback in front. She straddles him, head over his shoulder, working her hips, and we stare into each other’s eyes as they screw.
Years later I wonder, what if I had brought my head forward and locked lips with her while the rest of this was going on? Would it even have been possible, given the geometry of a Greyhound seatback? But we shouldn’t fact-check our fantasies—it would be a sad thing to reject a fantasy just because it might be impractical.
You can’t stare into someone’s eyes that long without forming a bond. I think she would have been into it.
After I got the job at IBM Yorktown, I needed a place to stay during the week until we found a house in the area. Someone in the personnel department had the job of finding leads to short-term housing. There were always people living near the lab who were happy to rent rooms to IBMers, for if you can’t trust an IBMer, who can you trust? With my leads came a document that basically said “IBM takes no responsibility for whatever terrible things may happen to you there”.
One of the leads was to a room with private bath in Katonah, a quiet town on the commuter line to New York City and about ten miles from the lab. The room was expensive for the time, $300 a month. On my way over to check it out, I saw lots of roads that looked good for running. When I got there, I saw that the house was in a green, wooded area next to one of New York City’s beautiful reservoirs. The owner, Mrs. Fraser, showed me the room, which had an easy chair, a TV, a table and a bed — what more could I want? It was on the lower level of the house, with a private entry by sliding doors facing the woods. When I drove up from New Jersey the next Monday morning, I brought my suits and my running gear and moved in.
Mrs. Fraser’s husband owned a business in Europe and spent most of his time there, so I didn’t meet him for a few weeks. I don’t know how he felt about having a non-dweebish IBMer in the house with his wife, but I know my rent helped out with the bills.
On the day I have come to think of as BPD, Bachelor Panic Day, there was a surprise, late-season snowstorm, and at 10 o’clock in the morning IBM sent everyone home. Virtual bachelors like myself, who now had nowhere to get lunch, rushed the vending machines, emptying them completely of junk food and canned soup. When I got back to the house, Mrs. Fraser invited me to have lunch with her and her daughter, home from school on a snow day. It was the first I’d ever been upstairs.
Blue Dolphin diner, Katonah Avenue
Normally, there were plenty of small restaurants and diners where I could stop for a meal after work. I had a bottle of port wine I bought to keep me company in the evening, and on general principle I hid it so that Mrs. Fraser wouldn’t see it when she cleaned. I went for a morning run twice a week, saw lots of deer and once got lost in Pound Ridge Reservation – not Hansel-and-Gretel lost, but lost enough that I had to flag down a passing car and ask for directions.
Avery Cemetery in Pound Ridge Reservation. Photo by Howard Dale
For the Fourth of July, I was worried about traffic and decided not to drive home. I drove over the state line into Connecticut, where the town of Wilton was having an old-fashioned Fourth, with beer, fireworks and a parade. Norman Rockwell would have been completely at home in Wilton.
House hunting
The way it worked out, I drove home to the shore on Friday night and back to the lab on Monday morning. The trip took two hours each way and could be difficult, especially the trip home Friday evening. But, at only twice a week for a few months, it was tolerable. During the week, I’d look at houses with a realtor, Irene. She was really sharp, and after a while understood what I liked and what I didn’t, and we generally didn’t waste each other’s time. If she showed me a house I thought was a strong “maybe”, I’d bring Mimi up to Westchester on the weekend so we could look at it together.
One place I was shown was a townhouse in Bedford Hills. It was nice, but as we were about to leave, I realized the kitchen had a clear view of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, a maximum security prison surrounded by razor wire and only a quarter-mile away. When I said I wasn’t in love with the view, the seller’s agent reassured me by saying “Oh, they can’t get out.”
On one of our cross-Westchester drives to see a house, we passed a beat-up Volkswagen bus parked alongside the road, where a woman had set up a sort of flower stand. She may have had other flowers too, but there were roses, lots of them. Mimi said “Oooh, look at the roses!” I said “Yeah!” in agreement, and kept on driving.
Amelia’s not-beat-up flower truck, photo courtesy KT Sura
On the way back, she said “There’s that rose lady again!” and when I didn’t respond, she gave up and said “Can we get some?” Well, I can take a hint, and I pulled over. I bought a dozen roses from the lady, who was acting all goofy, as through love was in the air and I was buying flowers for her instead of from her. I got back in the car and handed the flowers over to Mimi, saying something like “Here ya go.” Yes, I am aware this all makes me sound like a jerk. Mimi didn’t say anything, and both she and the flower lady seemed disappointed in my presentation. For the rest of the day, Mimi called me “Mr. Romantic”.
Driving in New York
Seeing a car with Jersey plates driving around Westchester County was like a thumb in the eye to the locals there. Also annoyed sometimes were the State Police. One Saturday morning out house-shopping with Mimi, I was doing about 75 on one of the expressways, along with everyone else, when a cop pulled me over. Once it became clear he was going to write me a ticket no matter what, I said I couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t pulled over the black Jeep that just passed me doing about 90. He replied “I didn’t see him. I saw you.” After that, I decided it was time to become an official New York State resident, and switched my plates and driver’s license from New Jersey to New York.
Westchester signage. It’s actually pretty good
A lot of New Yorkers drive like idiots, and that includes both driving too fast and driving too slow. New York didn’t yet have the common-sense law that says “keep right except to pass”, so I’ll chalk up the slow-driving-in-the-left-lane idiocy as mostly the state’s fault.
After I switched over to New York plates, whenever I was back in Jersey on the Parkway, maintaining my speed in continuous traffic and passing in the left lane like I’ve been doing since I was seventeen, there was always some Jersey jerk coming up behind me and flashing his lights to get me to move over. By definition, if you have New York plates and are in the left lane, you are driving too slow. You just can’t win.
As I often say while recounting Everything That Happened, all good things must come to an end, and one day Mrs. Fraser knocked on my door and said their son would be coming home from school and they’d need the room by the end of the month.
I went back to the personnel department and told them I needed a new place to stay. They gave me the number of a woman in Peekskill who took in transient IBMers, Mrs. Garrison.
Mrs. Garrison
Peekskill is a working-class town on the Hudson River. Mrs. Garrison’s house looked old but was well maintained, with a long set of stairs leading up from the sidewalk. She appeared to be in her early 70s, and mentioned she was a widow. She began showing me around the first floor, starting with the front entryway. On the table there was a framed photograph of two men dressed to go fly fishing. She said the man on the left was her late husband Everett, and the other was Hoagy Carmichael. “Hoagy Carmichael?!” I said. Carmichael was one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters, hugely popular from the 1920s through the 1950s, and I reflexively crooned the opening of his theme song and greatest hit, Stardust:
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
the lonely night
Dreaming of a song…
Carmichael at work
Mrs. Garrison got all teary-eyed, and said “I never thought anyone as young as you would know that song.” I gave her my standard response to people that I somehow favorably surprise, a gentle “Well, I know some things.”
(FYI, Willie Nelson sings a lovely version of Stardust in his familiar, reedy voice.)
She showed me the room and I took it, even though I’d have to share the bathroom with two other IBMers who had rooms there, and pay a few dollars extra for electricity if I wanted the window air conditioner hooked up. Writing about charging for electricity makes her sound like a cheapskate, but she wasn’t; she was just trying to get by on her Social Security and some income from her roomers. She was a pleasure to chat with in the evenings, sitting in her ‘parlour’. The other IBM roomers were basically children, and had no interest in anything an old lady might have to say.
Classic parlour
Mimi and I eventually found a place we liked, an almost-new townhouse in the sleepy village of Croton-on-Hudson. The price was higher than we were comfortable with, and we tried to negotiate. The owner was an IBMer who was retiring, and he would not budge an inch. I think he expected the housing market would improve enough to meet his price if he just held out long enough. We hadn’t found anything else we liked, and now we had an offer to buy our house in New Jersey, so we bit the bullet and signed for the full price. The market was indeed improving, because when IBM cancelled my project eighteen months later and I transferred to Boca Raton, we priced the townhouse high, so high that Irene thought we were delusional, and made a profit.
Jumping back a bit, the day we moved into the townhouse I stopped by Mrs. Garrison’s to say goodbye, and I made sure to bring Mimi along to meet her. Mimi knew the words to Stardust too.
I haven’t been inside a brick-and-mortar library in years, but the one in my town kept the public computers out in the open so the librarians could keep an eye out to help anyone who got stuck. Here’s how that worked out one day for me.
While my wife wanders around picking out books, I grab a computer to kill some time catching up with the news. When I sit down, there’s a string of tiny windows across the bottom of the screen. As soon as I try to close one, a regular-sized window pops up, with a closeup of a couple in flagrante.
No matter what I try, I can’t get any window to close; new ones keep popping up, and soon I’m standing up to block the screen while I click away. So of course one of the librarians sees me having a problem of some sort and comes over to help. I have to give her credit – once she gets close enough to see what’s going on and I say something like “Um, I’m having a problem closing these windows that were up already when I got here, I swear”, she says “Damn those high-school kids”, grabs the mouse and starts closing windows herself.
This apparently is one of those sites that doesn’t want you to leave, so there’s fresh activity blooming all over the screen and we’re both embarrassed and trying to address the problem of closing the windows while making believe we don’t see what’s going on IN the windows. After another minute, a different librarian figures there’s a computer problem that can’t be resolved and SHE comes over to help, leading to a discussion of whether to restart the machine instead. So there I am with two librarians next to me, porn all over the screen, and down the aisle starts my puzzled-looking wife with her bag of books to tell me it’s time to go. All I can say as I turn her around and walk her toward the elevator is “I can explain everything.”
After I left my first after-school “real” job at Kingsway because they expected us to come in on Sundays to clean the store, I got a job at the Mega Foods in Glen Ridge, where I was again grocery clerk , shelf stocker and sometime cashier.
I eventually gravitated to a job I’ll call “cellar man”, for lack of a better name. I listed grocery items that needed restocking, pulled the corresponding boxes out of the stacks, price-stamped them, and put the box on the conveyor belt leading back upstairs. Simple-minded, predictable and repeatable. Working without any immediate supervision, uninterrupted and alone with my thoughts, that cellar job turned out to be good practice for my later career of programming computers.
Not that I was totally alone down there. The conveyor belt rose from a spot only a few feet from the ladies’ room, so I often got the chance to see and kid around with the cashiers. In particular I remember flirting with Myrtle
Hmm, did anybody else in the history of the world ever type in those exact three semi-rhyming words? Let’s ask Google… …dang, I am disappointed, someone has, “About 1,960 results (0.75 seconds)”. Tom, best friend of “The Great Gatsby”, has been “flirting with Myrtle”, the wife of the owner of the garage halfway between Gatsby’s place and New York City. It’s also something Harry Potter does in chapter 19 of the fanfiction “Harry Potter and the Daywalker”. It all goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun.
But I digress – back to the real Myrtle. She was 29, shy, petite and sexy in her coarse cotton wraparound company smock. She really knew how to hold a man’s attention. On the downside, she was married and about 10 years older than I, so nothing ever came of our talks except the pleasure of flirting.
There were other temptations associated with being cellar man. Who has not wanted to sample those fancy jarred pickles and olives on display? In the privacy of my cellar, I did just that, popping one or two vacuum seals every day, maybe unscrewing a maraschino-cherry lid as well. As far as I know, no customer ever complained. Kids, if you buy a jar of something and the lid doesn’t pop when you open it, take it back. It probably won’t kill you, but why find out?
Relatedly, on my earlier, Kingsway job, Tuesdays were a special day for us part-time clerks. It was the store manager’s day off, and assistant manager Freddy went to class in the afternoon. On a typical Tuesday afternoon, we’d destroy one or two sheet cakes and several large bottles of soda. It was like being invited to a birthday party every week.
JustRite self-inking price marker, amazon.com
There were no scan codes then, so every item had to be hand-stamped with the price. Like any job, no matter how menial, stamping prices on groceries can be interesting and fun if you make it a challenge. For example, a case of single rolls of toilet paper contains 100 rolls, in five tiers of 20 rolls, 5 by 4. Sounds like it would take a long time to stamp, right? Ha, not the way I did it!
Upstairs is the bottle-return station, where a cashier counts customers’ empty, usually dirty, glass bottles and refunds their deposit money, two cents for small bottles and five cents for large. (A Seinfeld episode touches on these values.) There’s a sort of vertical conveyor belt with buckets big enough to hold two or three bottles lying down. The cashier holds down a button and the buckets head for the cellar, where they invert and their contents clank into a sawdust-padded carousel. Not every bottle survives the trip in one piece.
Emptying the carousel involves picking through the sawdust and sorting the bottles into crates by brand and size. Nobody in their right mind wants to do that, not even wearing gloves, so management assigns each part-timer a turn at it. Part-timers are expendable and band-aids are available. Only rarely does anyone need to go get stitches.
Our sister store in East Orange had a fire, with much water damage. After the insurance adjusters left, one of the Mega Foods executives apparently decided that the damaged stock in the cellar was still saleable and could go back on the shelves, likely double-dipping the insurance settlement. The remains were trucked over to Glen Ridge and heaped up in my cellar. Although there are companies that do fire remediation for a living, yours truly was assigned the task of cleaning up those soggy piles and getting the goods back on the shelves.
The boxes were soaked and falling apart, the goods inside were wet, and everything stank of smoke. For two days, I made an honest job of cleaning up some of it, but it was hopeless. There was just too much; it was enormous and depressing. I called in sick for a few days, then quit. Hmm, I wonder if Mom could get me an introduction to one of the trade unions like she did for my brother?
Our first roomers were the Turners, a pleasant couple in their thirties. I was unaware of their nighttime activities because my room was at the far end of the house, but apparently their lovemaking was so loud and frequent that my mother and grandmother came to doubt that they were married. The Turners were asked to leave, whether because of the noise or the not-being-married I don’t know.
