Ruth

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Ruth Weissman, mother of Barry, Donald and Bruce, was already deceased three years when I wandered back into neighborhood of Kearny where I had seen her often during the few years I drove picking up and delivering merchandise for Donald.

I had come to the area of Kearny Avenue and Belleville Pike on another matter, but nostalgia lured me to the place where Ruth had operated Donald’s Kearny Cosmetic Plus, one of a handful of retail stores he had launched after he started business in 1968 but had begun to close a short time prior to his hiring me.

Stanley, who had lived around 15 blocks away on the other side of Kearny had made frequent stops here and at the other stores – including the most recently closed in Rutherford – as had Stanley’s brother, Bruce, who I apparently had replaced when I came on.

The neighborhood over 40 years had changed, but not so much as to have lost its blue collar feel. There was still a beauty salon a door or two away from where Ruth had managed Cosmetic Plus, but some of the stores were the same stores I remembered. The men’s wear store across the street was gone, as was the housewares store, one of those was vacant, the other selling more upscale goods designed to ensnare the yuppie walking wallets as they made their way to and from Manhattan down the long hill of the Pike.

As it turned out, the owner of the string of buildings that included the former Cosmetics Plus was out of the sidewalk, surveying a world he’d owned for almost 50 years, and wondered at my interest in the place when he saw me there.

When I told him, he looked more than a little sad, having heart of Ruth’s passing, yet more importantly, he said he still missed her, and her assistant whose name he mentioned, but I didn’t catch, and could not remember even though I had liked her a lot when I made my stops here – perhaps her name was Cathy. I still remember her face and her remarkable manners, and I had clear memories of Ruth, who always treated me like a son.

Cosmetics Plus, the owner said, was one of his earliest tenants, and he was particularly fond of Ruth, who he called “a saint” even though she was Jewish.

He said he missed her, and the store even thought he had not seen them in almost as long as I had.

I took part in closing down the store around 1976 or 1977, and never saw Ruth or Cathy after that.

Yet for my first two years driving for Stanley, the Kearny store was a regular a beat as any, not just a source of goods being shipped there by the cosmetic manufacturers, but as a stopover to pick up and deliver paper work and sale items – and in high summer, I was assigned to take part in the sidewalk sale, where I rubbed shoulders with Ruth and get to listen to some of her stories growing up, most of which have been lost to the hazy of memory except those that I was fortunate enough to write down later as a journal in college.

I remember Ruth being small but sprite, and because I was still in my mid-20s, she seemed old to me at the time although he was only in her mid-50s. She would live to 93.

In a journal I wrote for college in 1982, I recalled a few of her stories about her husband Irving.

She was apparently more outgoing than Irving was – she called him reserved.

But she was very proud of his accomplishments and was proud when she got to accompany him to various functions such as the time, he was part of a grand opening of a hardware store in Teaneck he helped design, which featured a prescription counter.

“He was an expert on drug store design,” she said, though this sounded a little tongue in cheek as if she believed Irv sometimes leaped into ventures just for the challenge and was as surprised at the positive outcome as everybody else was.

Although Irving actually didn’t die until about two years before I recorded Ruth’s story in my journal, she claimed she nearly lost him in 1967 to what was then called “a cardiac ailment.”

“They even hospitalized him,” she said, blaming his condition in the fact that he tended to hold in his emotions.

“Then, when we were to bring him home, he started to hiccup,” she said. “And it wouldn’t stop. It went on and one. So, we took him back to get home. But the doctors didn’t know what to make of us. They didn’t have a cure. They recommended home remedies.”

These were the same ineffective things we all did as kids when we got such things – although he apparently didn’t try drinking out of water in which he’d doused a lighted match or tried drinking from a glass the wrong way.

“He put hot compresses on his stomach. He held his breath. He drank glass after glass of water, and it still didn’t stop,” Ruth said. “The spasms didn’t go on constantly. He might go on for an hour or so without one, but they’d come back, lasting from 15 minutes to a half an hour. He even hiccupped in his sleep and it was nerve-racking.”

Ruth claimed the hiccups had to so with Irv’s emotions, but she didn’t have a clear definition of what she meant by that.

Days passed and so one of Ruth’s brothers, Monroe or Leo – she mentioned both at various points in her stories – suggested a therapist, one specializing in hypnosis.

“After about a half an hour the hiccups stopped, and we thought it was all over,” Ruth said. “So, did Irv, so he didn’t bother listening to the therapist’s tape recordings left in order to continue the therapy after he was gone. Irv said he didn’t have time to sit down and listen to the recordings. He said if he sat down, he’d fall asleep.”

Unfortunately, in the middle of the night, the hiccups returned with a vengeance.

Later, the therapist blamed Irv for doing the exercises wrong that he’d provided. So, the hiccups continued for one week, then a second week.

“Then one day they just stopped and didn’t come back,” Ruth said.

Since Kearny at the time was still a foreign country to me, I had to rely on Stan’s directions to get there the first time, a route that took me down Route 46 to Route 3, then south on Route 21 headed in the direction of Newark.

“But if you end up in Newark, you’ve gone too far,” Stan warned me, clearly remembering my first day’s trip in which I mistook Harrison Street for Harrison Avenue and wound up in an accident.

Stan’s instructions had me turn off onto a narrow road called Mill Street and weave through equally narrow streets until I found the Pike and took this over the bridge – passed the Arlington Diner – and up the long hill to Kearny Avenue at the top.

Later, I would go down the other side of the hill, through the trash dumps of Kearny, across the stickle bridge into Jersey City and the Holland Tunnel and stops in lower Manhattan.

The Kearny store was a small shop tucked between several other stores including the beauty parlor, a clothing store and some other shop selling trinkets of some sort.

The whole neighborhood had a small town feel that I found attractive.

Irving was still alive at the time – passing away in 1980 – though if I ever met him it was in passing and most likely when a very proud Donald gave him a tour of the new warehouse on Kaplan Drive in 1997.

At the time of his death, he and Ruth had been married for nearly 40 years. Ruth would outlive him for nearly as long. But I’m sure, she never forgot him.

If she told me how they met, I can’t recall it, although it must have been in Newark where his parents operated a grocery store and her father did business as a junk dealer.

She grew up on 17th Avenue with her parents Jacob (commonly called Jack) and mother, Fannie Best (shortened from some more complicated eastern European name.)

She had two brothers, Monroe and Leo, and two sisters, Beatrice and Anna – all of whom apparently passed away before she did.

Ruth treated me like an adopted son, and I still have memories of her greeting me whenever I came around and sending me on my way with a wave, making me feel as much apart of the family business as Bruce or Barry were.

The closing of the Kearny store signaled a larger change that would alter my feelings toward my job, and eventually lead to a much more viable corporation, and lead eventually to my leaving, letting Donald realize his dream when he relaunched the retail aspect of his operation aimed at a more upscale cliental than the blue-collar types the original stores seemed to attract.

Standing there with the owner of the property I felt all that rush through me again, as if I had just missed the sailing of a ship but could still see the smoke rising from its smoke stack on the horizon.

Main Menu

email to Al Sullivan

The Importance of Being Irving

Donald’s self-made man image becomes a bit less genuine when you realize just who his father was and how successful and just how this family managed to step into the post-world war concept of the American dream.

At a time when Jews -- rich or poor -- were fleeing urban centers such as Newark, Paterson and Bayonne, Irv was far ahead of them -- a 1940's Madman success story as an economic executive for Vitamin Corp of America (VCA.)

The son of George and Fannie, Irv grew up in Newark. His parents who came from then Russia controlled area that would later become Poland. They ran in a grocery store in Newark.

Irv apparently learned the benefit of a good education and completed high school at a time when many of his contemporaries had not

VCA was already famous with roots out of both pharmaceutical and patent medicines slightly more legitimate then Humphries of Rutherford where I later work for a short time in 1990.

Although the company suffered a scathing attack by the mayor of New York City in 1945, it rapidly became one of the post war successes and this had a lot to do with Irv who served as the company's advertising strategist learning early to use media to get his message out.

Advertising, he claimed, was the secret to the success advertising carried through to the point of sale merchandising.

“The merchandising,” he claimed, “clinches the sale.”

VCA he said used radio and TV to educate the public about the need for vitamins.

One of its most popular products at the time was called Robutol, a vitamin product geared toward adults.

The company, in order to expand its advertising budget, borrowed heavily – but it paid off in big profits later.

The company sold every sort of drug from patent drugs and aspirin to things such as Cal-o-Metric for weight control, and a variety of skin creams and lotions.

One of its most significant accomplishments and what allowed the company to expand even more was when VCA got the contract to sell to Rexall Drug Company in 1952.

Irv’s advertising strategy for various consumer drug products had a number of factors: such as seeking mass appeal programs or agencies to sponsor on the air media in emotional and highly-charged commercials and special offers.

“But it is the druggist who actually puts Robutol in the customer's hands,” Irv told one consumer publication in the early 50s after he helped boost sales from two or three million in 1952 more than 10 million 3 years later.

“But it works both ways,” he added. “The druggist is more likely to push a product that is backed by national advertising.”

This relationship between producer and drugstore would not be lost on Donald, who would form close associations with drug stores throughout the area in a network of sources for cosmetics.

Donald briefly delved into and had a supply of vitamins when I worked with him, but his business model clearly wanted to serve as a middleman for cosmetics especially the high-end products corporations were reluctant to sell on the mass market.

Clearly, he learned relationships and business strategies from a father who helped develop them three decades earlier.

VCA through Irv’s help learned how to use Madison Avenue and increased its advertising budget in TV radio and newspapers.

“We spend for promotion when we feel their time is right,” Irv said. “Our campaign is geared for national market.”

VCA had a target audience mostly women in their mid-30s or older – mostly housewives although the drugs were not developed exclusively for them.

“Women are the main buyers of drug products,” Irv said.

For this reason, many of the ads appeared on shows that appeal to women or were then considered family-oriented.

The company also begin a new approach to spot TV buying, one that stressed identifying their product both with strong local personality and with a program.

One of the programs they bought spots in was Best Movie of the Week, a 90-minute feature film usually shown after 10 or 10:30 p.m.

Their ads appeared and markets that included New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland.

One of their favorite announcers was a guy named John Reed King who hosted the show live in New York or on WABC TV.

He was a hefty vigorous looking man in his forties and has convincing salesman for their products. Irv figured the audience would assume King benefited from VCA’s products.

Under Irv’s direction the company sponsored a number of other shows as well, which included game shows on ABCs such as “On Your Way” quiz show.

When the company came out with a juvenile product for kids it held a Junior Follies based out of WATV in Newark.

More importantly, Irv was instrumental in the development of one of the first shopping TV shows called Let's Go Shopping, decades ahead of those on cable in the 1970s and 1980s.

Under his watch, VCA became the principal sponsor of the long-established and extremely popular radio show The Goldbergs after one of the principal actors was blacklisted for being alleged communist the previous sponsor dumped the show – not much different from black lists today that targeted people like Roseanne.

His success allowed Irv to relocate the family from Newark to Livingston and West Orange where he apparently took an active role in the local Jewish Center. He even planned a forum for Beth Torah Hebrew School PTA and The Parents Council of the Jewish Education Association of Essex County where panelist disgusted the problem of Jewish Education in relationship to his non-Jewish environment.

I must have met at some point while I was working for Donald, but I don't remember it -- possibly at the point where Donald moved into the new warehouse in 1977 and brought his family on a tour of his new place.

Donald of course was trying to sell the same $400 myth he had sold to me this concept that he was enough of an entrepreneur to make a massive success of himself and possibly equal his father's accomplishments.

In some ways he did.

In the 1980s, Donald managed to relaunch a retail chain that had floundered when he first launched one in 1968.

But perhaps his greatest accomplishment was fostering his son Joshua who would go on to become Counsellor for President Bill Clinton and a presidential speech writer and later a congressman and maybe in the future the first Jewish president of the United States.

Main Menu

email to Al Sullivan

Carmella Revisited

(Uncertain when this was written)

Carmela wasn't as old as she appeared to us at the time.

She reminded me of some of the nuns who taught me at St. Brendan's, a woman who may have been born a spinster and whose life seem to revolve around spinster sister I never met or don't remember meeting if I had.

Carmela was the most dependable person in Donald’s operation, someone on whom Donald was able to count on for the letters we needed sent, the billing, the typing of labels, arranging of interviews and so much more.

Carmela was fiercely loyal and perhaps this is why she felt so put out later on after we moved to the new location and Donald brought on other people to help her with office chores.

The expanded business meant a lot more paperwork and such and he clearly did not think she could keep up.

This was particularly true later when Donald installed the computer in his office around 1977 or early 1978 and did not see her as having the ability to handle such a new innovation.

Although Carmella for the most part was soft-spoken her voice tended to grate when she got excited although to some degree, she was amazingly shy. She still managed to do all the jobs he was assigned to while we operated out of the warehouse in the Pia Costa warehouse Park on Bloomfield Avenue.

Hers was the first desk you came to after coming in through the tiny lobby from the front.

There were two doors: one that led straight ahead from the front door down a narrow passage to a door leading to the warehouse in the rear. This passage also had access to the restrooms which were doors on the right. Across from the bathrooms was the door to Donald office. He used this door to access the warehouse unseen by guests waiting to see him in the front or as a shortcut.

Most guests, when they came into the front lobby, turned immediately to the left into a tiny space Carmella occupied, her desk located to the left coming in with her back to a couple of small windows looking out onto the parking lot.

The whole front office section reminded me of a maze with another door to the left of Carmella's desk and across from the door from the lobby. This lid to a tiny meeting room with chairs and an overlarge table where Donald met with clients or salespeople. A door to the right off this room led back to his office.

Carmela served as gatekeeper and kept anyone from seeing Donald without seeing her first. She was better than a bulldog gentle but firm -- attributes guest came to respect.

Her desk represented most of the business issues with a typewriter, phone, and trays for in and out mail laid out before her while around her -- against the wall filing cabinets contained files on various businesses that Donald did routine business with.

On her desk was also a very large Rolodex from which she could draw the name address and phone number of all but the most secretive Donald contacts.

I remember her office as well as the outer lobby as being relatively dark, paneled with dark wood typical of that time, later redecorated to seem less oppressive yet the earlier version best represented Carmella's strange character.

Although a calming force in the office early on, Carmela struck me as a person with significant inner turmoil, filled with private issues we could only get clues of, family tragedies that helped cement her somber moods.

I got the sense that she was more outgoing of the two spinster sisters in that she could come and go and hold a regular job though she disliked driving after dark -- an issue that loomed over her during winter months and required her to leave early so she could get home.

She apparently did not live far from either of the two warehouses somewhere in West Caldwell or at least I believe that at the time.

She seemed to enjoy the fact that she could work in the real world without risk, protected by both environments. She seemed not to feel comfortable with the world and most likely would have felt more comfortable in her father's or grandfather's time a Victorian like existence denied people in the 1970s.

What struck us most was the car she drove, a 1960s Barracuda we all envied, something a family member had apparently purchased for her. This was ironic since this was considered a hot car on the street. But she drove it the way old ladies drive with ultimate caution.

How Donald stumbled on her I still do not know perhaps a friend of a friend or family. She was not Jewish and so in some ways seemed out of place with him.

She was small, dark and I guess an Italian woman, sturdy and slightly plump. She had dark eyes that seemed friendly yet seemed to vail personal secrets. Her dark hair framed and oval face with wide-set eyes thick eyebrows and a squat nose. She had a wide mouth and thin lips and sometimes the good cheer her mouth expressed was contradicted by her I thought I saw in her eyes.

She tended to walk the way an old woman might slowly with great care as if expecting a sudden fall. She dressed decades out of date with pin on earrings, the kind with the twist in back, and sometimes wore a necklace of pearls over which on cold days she wore scarf -- sometimes even inside the office.

In winter, she wore a cloth coat, scarf, a knit or old ladies’ hat. In summer she shed the hat gloves and coat, but generally wore dark ankle-length pattern dresses, practical low-heeled shoes and stockings all of which seemed appropriate to a World War II era or earlier.

If she ever talked about her parents or her upbringing, I don't recall hearing it. She spoke about her sister with whom she lived but only in passing and how she had to get back to her.

Neither she nor her sister ever married, and it is unclear if there was ever a love in either of their lives. Both were apparently well educated since Carmela had all the skills needed to run the office. This suggested her parents had provided for her and probably educated her sister. I vaguely recall her sister may have worked in a library.

Since Carmella did not talk politics the way most of us did, I don't know what she believed in. But since Donald was a liberal Democrat who voted for Jimmy Carter 1976, Carmella’s views must have fallen somewhat in line with those -- even if she seemed and looked like a Nixon conservative with the old-fashioned Republican cloth coat etc.

Carmella seemed not want anything more than the job she had and seemed to generate importance from it and so got put out later when Donald hired other people to help her when he expanded the business. He was right in believing the workload was too much for her, yet he was not sensitive enough to realize these hirings undermined her -- partly because the new women did not see her as important, but a relic and they did not treat her as a boss going to directly to Donald or Stanley if they needed something.

Carmella began to think of herself as useless piece of furniture in the expanding operation this included people hired to work in the outlet with whom she had running conflicts those were still unresolved when I left Donald's employment in the spring of 1978.

Main Menu

email to Al Sullivan

A bonus for Christmas

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

(College journal from 1981)

I stared down at the check Donald had handed me as if he or me or even Stanley had two heads, or that this was some artifact from some alien planet, an envelop with my name on it, resembling the envelops I’d received each Friday since I’d started six months earlier with my pay check in it – only this was a Monday, not a Friday, and I’d already been paid the Friday before.

“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” Stanley asked, looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes of his, the way he would likely look in two days when he watched his kids opening presents under the tree.

“What is it?” I asked, thinking the worst, recalling how I’d been fired from the theater with an envelop containing my last pay check and a pink slip.

“What do you think it is?” Donald asked, slightly back from where Donald stood, all of us crammed into the front where Carmella’s desk hogged up one side of the room, and a few chairs sat against the wall across from it.

“I’m scared to say,” I said.

“It’s a bonus,” Stanley blurted out, drawing a dark and disappointed look from Donald, who turned to me with something of a rare smile, the edges of his moustache rising that seemed unnatural to a man who perpetually seemed in a dour mood.

“A bonus?”

“For Christmas,” Stanley said.

This totally blew me away and for several reasons.

Until that moment, I’d seen Donald being as generous as a five-year-old with the last remaining gumdrop clutched in his sweaty hand.

He was also Jewish, and I wanted to say, “Jews don’t believe in Christmas,” but was savvy enough not to blurt this out.

Of course, a number of Jewish vendors I picked up goods from over the last few months had wished me well for the holiday and had their stores decked out with Christmas tinsel, I thought that was only good business, since most of those who shopped there were gentiles.

But this was different, striking me the way I might have been struck seeing Scrooge on Christmas morning after the three ghosts had paid him a visit, and I wondered just which ghosts had visited Donald to make him so generous.

I didn’t have to say any of this. I saw a kink of twisted humor in Donald’s eyes, bloated by his small glasses, as if he was enjoying my awkwardness more than he might have at me being appreciative over the Christmas gift.

His lips twitched under his moustache, again defying his basic nature with a strange smile.

Carmella sat behind her desk as non-committal as a Buddha.

I didn’t know how any of them expected me to react, so I just sputtered and tried to say something that remotely sounded sincere, and tried to make sense of Donald, who clearly contradicted himself, someone who crafted as public image as a tough business man and yet did stuff like this, who got his haircut twice a month so that he seemed as unchanging as a statue, and yet at this moment, two days before Christmas, seemed utterly different, if not in the way he looked, then in the way he seemed to look at the world.

Later, I would reflect on this moment and realize that this was my bar mitzvah, my first season’s rite of passage from gentile to the Jewish son.

I stuttered out a thank-you which was more a reflection of my confusion then my appreciation but Donald took it is one, picking up his pipe and sucking on it and for a few seconds he pretended to look out through the window behind Carmella’s desk at the busy world in the parking, then went back to the inner sanctum of his office as Stan and I made our way back to the warehouse, now quiet after a hefty six months of insanity, carts lined up around the packing table like elephants headed towards some mythical graveyard.

My head already spun with too many issues, public and private, the resignation of a president along with my resignation to give Louise – my estranged wife – the divorce she wanted, Donald giving me a check serving as a kind of salve to ease the pain of another Christmas without her or my daughter.

“So, what are you going to do with the money?” Stan asked.

I glanced down at the green slip as if it was counterfeit.

“Hire private eye,” I mumbled, as Stan’s dark eyebrows rose.

“What?” he asked, his large hands clutching a collection of Chanel Number Five bottles he intended to relocate to a shelf across the warehouse, near Donald’s cabinet where the special stash got locked away, but not quite deserving of the distinction of being guarded as well.

I faked a laugh and told Stan I intended to buy some presents, for Pauly, Garrick, Hank, my mother, my aunt, and the host of siblings I would see on Christmas, the bonus coming just in time for me to get to Willowbrook Mall for rushed shopping spree.

Of course, Stanley had received a bonus, too, I found out then, and I asked him what he would do with his.

He shrugged.

“It’s not enough to buy a house,” he said. “That’s what my wife really wanted for Christmas.”

He apparently had another kid on the way finances were getting hairy.

Donald, he said, kept telling him how Stanley had a future here and how things would get better, but all Stan saw as the dusty old warehouse, and the now-empty tray where the orders were kept, and seemed to envision this as another version of the sheet metal factory in Harrison where he had labored for ten years with the dream of putting on a white shirt some day and not needing to sweat out his shifts the way we all did now.

His bonus went towards survival it kept him from floundering totally alone in the water.

Donald had that unique way of shining a light now and then only the ship never came which it was supposed to be attached to.

There was always that feeling of drowning was just an inch or so away.

 Stanley said he had to see his mother on Christmas she was, according to his rather sketchy narration a determined woman who wouldn't leave her old neighborhood in Newark if it burned down around her,

His father had died there in 1962, a year or so after Stanley graduated high school and started to work full time at the sheet metal plant where his father had worked before him.

Stanley started down at the bottles he held, treating them as if they were rare piece of sculpture. While Donald saw these things as gold, sand treated them as if they were nitro his scarred fingers surrounding them as if sculpting them from steel.

He said his mother thinks that if she is leaves Newark, she would be leaving her husband.

“We’ve asked her to move in with us,” he said. “We only live a few miles from where she lives now. But she won’t do it.”

That's when the office door slammed, and the familiar heels clicked on concrete floor again.

“What? You’re not through putting that stuff away yet?” Donald said. “I give you two a bonus and this is what I get?”

I cringed, but Stanley smiled, his six years prior to my coming giving him a better read of Donald’s moods than I had, although there still seemed pain in Stanley’s eyes.

“We’re almost done,” Stanley said.

“Good,” he said. “Then we can all leave, maybe get a drink before we go.”

Even Stanley frowned, apparently struck by something odd in our boss’s behavior.

“A drink?”

“Yes, a fucking drink,” Donald said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Stanley said, “Although it seems strange that we’d be drinking on the clock.”

“Nobody said that,” Donald said. “You’ll punch out first.”

I didn’t go with them, so I never found out why Donald was in such a mood that day, and never saw him in that same mood again.

Main Menu

email to Al Sullivan

The best job I ever had -- Cosmetics Plus -- a novel

(from college journal 1980-81)

Eventually the best part of the job was out on the road.

There is freedom and driving about where there is none in the warehouse;

It got so bad at the warehouse I was constantly looking over my shoulder for Donald always wondering what kind of wisecrack he would come up with next.

For us the Christmas rush started in late August which meant I was on the road a lot starting then.

That first year it was rough because business picked up dramatically and Stanley and I had to bust to get stuff packed and sent.

Donald also had this nasty habit of not telling anyone till late that I had to go out to get something.

This left Stanley stranded in a sea of unpacked merchandise. This left me with something of a guilty feeling and caused me to learn to rush from stop to stop.

Then one day near enough Christmas for us for business to slacking Donald shouted at me telling me I have to go to New York.

It was 3 and I was supposed to meet Paulie and Hank

“I have to go New York?” I asked, as if half believing I had misheard him.

“Yeah,” Donald said, snapping open his private cabinet and unpacking several bottles of Joy perfume and Shalimar.

He told me to strip the tags off the goods he gave me, and seemed angry, making me a bit paranoid, since Donald got angry often, and sometimes over something insignificant.

I asked him if there was something wrong, taking the bottles from him. He paused seemed a little disoriented as if he couldn't figure out for himself whether he was angry or not. Then he looked at me his now gaze ran over, and he laughed harshly.

“I'm not mad at you if that's what you're worried about,” he said.

 I sputtered and then turned my attention towards the boxes.

“Why would I be worried?” I said and yet deep down I was relieved.

Stanley heard some of this and came up from the back pulling a pallet jack and a pallet. He addressed Donald asking why he was sending me out now.

Donald didn't answer he didn't even look up, but his neck stiffened, and I knew that it was Stanley who Donald was angry with.

“Don't worry,” he told Stanley, “you won't have to stay late and wait for him.”

Stanley slammed back the handle to the pallet jack and swore

“That's not what it's about and you know it, I don't mind working the hours,” he said and then stuttered to a stop.

“You just don't think you're making enough money,” Donald said easing closed the doors to his special stash, his stubby hands pressing against the flat metal like he was preventing the cabinet from falling.

“No, I don't think I'm making enough for the hours I work but it was my wife who complained not me,” Stanley said putting his clipboard down on the work table.

He gripped his pencil though like a knife

“So, go home nobody's stopping you if you're damned wife can't live without her husband then I'm sorry for her,” Donald said, his hand dropped from the cabinet and he handed me the packing list to check. I counted the bottles and the items and handed it back then he walked back up towards the office.

Stanley stared down at his clipboard. But he wasn't reading the items there he was just staring then he looked up at me his hound like eyes for the first time looked mean. Then he relaxed a little when he realized he was looking at me and not Donald.

“Don't you think you'd better get going,” he said. You don't want to get back at midnight.

 I nodded and sealed the box and then headed for the van

The van was a bright red Dodge with windows all around. Stanley had argued against the color when Donald first bought it, saying that it was all too obvious and that the police could pick up on it easier.

Stan was unusually aware of police speeding traps because of own experience with them he had 12 points on his license from speeding tickets and was on the verge of losing his license because of them.

And it wasn't that he was reckless. He told me stories about his younger days when he was, but he had calmed down since his marriage. He was simply the unfortunate schmuck in a line of cars doing 60 and he was the one to get caught.

I had yet to get caught speeding although I did a lot of it. My specialty was parking tickets over which Donald had a fit but then it wasn't an easy feat parking legally in New York City.

I climbed in the van and started the engine there was power under me a terrible frightening power that thrilled me in a special way.  I wasn't particularly excited about the speed just freedom. The job was perfect for being on my own, using my head.

Donald waved at me from the door and I stopped he ran out with a couple of memos and stuffed them through the window.

Two more stops, he said, and I nodded as I looked at them.

It was Friday and he had me going uptown and downtown and after 3.

I might just be back at midnight, I thought. But I wasn't about to argue not then.

Some other time I might have pointed out that it would take me forever with the New York weekend traffic, but his face was tight in the lines around his nose and mouth deep; he was in no mood for argument

“Okay,” I said and backed out watching him as he turned back to go inside.

 Donald was a short man, a Jewish Napoleon with blond hair and blue eyes, eyes when stern were often exaggerated by the glasses he wore.

But then everything about him was exaggerated, his clothing was rich, his haircut fine and carefully cut, and his manner was that of an executive.

He turned to watch me then vanished in the door as I drove around the end of the building heading for Bloomfield Avenue.

Once on the road again, I was gunning it.  I had little patience with traffic weaving in and out of lanes like I owned them. This was quite different from my first day when I crashed into the back of a Mercedes.

 I was going to New York then to and that made me laugh.

I slowed on the highway by the light only because the police had a nasty habit of hiding behind the hedges in front of the restaurant.  I had seen enough other suckers fall into that. But then by Willowbrook I was gunning it again.

The secret was to sneak through the tunnel before heavy traffic started and rush up the West Side Up 11th or 10^th.

I had a trick for cutting through the park too, but I wouldn't try that now. Fridays were miserable that way, so I would put up with 57th Street across town somehow traveling up and down the East Side involved extreme hardship

I sailed on to Route 3.

This wasn't the way I normally went to New York unless I was headed to see Donald’s mother, Ruth at the Kearny store -- so there was something adventurous about it.

There were still a few fluffs of dirty plowed snow along the side of the road and the air was cold and crisp and smelled of Christmas.

But pain went through me with that this Christmas, creating a kind of bittersweet spice over the fact that I would be spending another Christmas without my wife or seeing my kid.

Louise had called, but after meeting her near Scranton, I discovered that she only really wanted me to agree to a divorce.

The van rolled pass the Nevins print factory on Route 3 where Louise and I had met five years earlier. It only made the feelings more intense.

Traffic thickened and so it put Louise out of my mind for a time, but it came back, and I had to struggle with it and the bumper to bumper insanity of the helix winding down towards the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel.

I was annoyed, yet knew that traffic might lighten up once through the tunnel, after which different feelings emerged, nostalgic feelings of those days when I worked at a messenger in New York, and did largely what I did not, and returning here like this before the holiday, felt a little like me being a prodigal son returning finally to a place I felt most comfortable at.

Once the city gets into your blood, you can’t get rid of it.

The truck vibrated over the potholes and bumps and I laughed the sidewalk Santa's with their tinkling bills, the red suits wrinkled, the belts holding up padding showing through the fabric.

Yes, it was a flavor here that that I savored, a fine wine that seemed to bubble out of the air with the clouds of subway steam.

I turned uptown half humming some old Christmas carol.

Main Menu

email to Al Sullivan

19 - Aftermath

Based on journals from 1/15/2002 to 1/28/2002

In January, 2002, I mailed a Christmas card to John Telson in just after New Years Day, on a whim.
I used an internet search to find an old address for him in a nearby town and hoped I could reconnect with him.
Perhaps 9/11 had hit me harder than I even thought, and the death of George Harrison, after which came my mother’s death. I felt nostalgic for that relatively innocent time during the mid-1970s when hope still bloomed in me, if not in the country.
After working with him for almost five years, I last saw him in the Spring of 1980 after his return from California.
I knew nothing of his pending divorce.
I recognized his olive-colored van that had been his pride since its purchase some years before.
I paused in my jog along River Drive in Garfield, and he pulled over. But he seemed remote
We had gone through some pretty steep emotional moments since starting to work together in 1975 and he seemed a little shy about risking yet one more such encounter and merely told me he was doing well – when he was not.
No such shyness affected his voice 20 years later when he called me after receiving my card, though I struggled to hear his weak voice over the phone with the busy news room going on around me.
I was pressed for time or I might have asked more about his activities over the long years since we had last met.
I did learn that he now lived with his parents again after a series of very serious illnesses. He had even suffered through a triple-bypass heart surgery, testimony to his bad died, action to cigarettes and constant drinking.
In 1976, his claim to have quit smoking caused me to quit as well, and only a blurt from his sister at the supper table one night disclosed his deception. He told me over the phone that he had only returned to work a few weeks earlier, employed by Burns as a security guard – a role he seemed destined to play from the moment I met him. He loved war games and military models, and fit the stereotype of a macho American male, except that he really wasn’t macho at all.
His frail shape always denied him credibility and he seem more suited to becoming an artist than a cop or a truck driver.
John once confided in me of his desire to be a history teacher, but his upbringing in a working class family seemed to keep him from boasting about his dreams to anyone but me.
His voice on the telephone had the same dull toned I heard in the voices of men who had failed to live up to their dreams. Yet he seemed thrilled to have heard from me and had tried to reach me at my work number on Saturday in his rush to contact me.
I suggested we meet for lunch so as to better rehash the past.

***********
Except for the goatee, John looked almost exactly like another friend who I had seen near death’s door: the same frail frame, the same bald head, the same intense look of suffering paintings of midlevel monks often portray.
If I had expected comfort after losing my mother two weeks earlier, I got none from his look of despair, and seeing him like this, only added to my sense of loss and my inability to make sense of this idiocy we called life.
Seeing John did nothing to dispel this mood except to recall times when we were still young enough to dream.
Outside of nagging problems with my teeth and a troublesome back, my life had largely been something akin to Dorian Gray with me holding onto portraits of people I knew from when I knew them, none of them ever aging, growing sick or unhappy beyond when I last saw them.
And if I saw them as the same, then I did not see myself as aging, looking out from the inside without an honest mirror to suggest that I was anything other than the person I was when I was 24 or 25.
But as of late, and with the events that had taken place over the previous few months, the horror of my growing old hit me – with John as one more blow to my illusion.
We met at a restaurant in East Rutherford that locals called “The Wick,” The Candlewick Dinner on Paterson Plank Road which had been John’s hangout growing up, and a place I had frequented for a time when I had dated a woman from Rutherford. For a time I had lived only two blocks from the place after marrying for the second time, passing it daily without going in. But John had lived his whole life within sight of the place and had continued to haunt it. From its side door he could have tossed a stone and hit the church where he’d married in the late 1970s.
As with most meetings I covered as a reporter, I showed up early and sat in my car listening to old Beatles songs in the restaurant parking lot, challenging myself to recognize him if and when he appeared.
I guessed wrong a dozen times before I saw the 1994 Chevy pull into the lot. Once seeing him, I realized I could not have mistaken him for anybody else. All his features were essentially unchanged from the last time I’d seen him on River Drive in Garfield, except he looked older and sickly, as if he had managed to cram additional decades into those between when we last saw each other. He was already dying as he walked towards me across the lot.
************
Born on Nov. 24, 1953, John was close to me in age, but seemed a lot younger and less experienced that these of us.
He was part of that mass movement of Blue Collar Americans that the Right Wing would later call “the silent majority,” of a kind who were old enough to have lived through the 1960s, but never evolved out of their 1950s mentality and thus reverted to that 1950s mentality once the 1960s faded, and became Reagan Democrats when the time came for the back lash against social reform.
Although the baby boom didn’t officially end until about 1963, the most radical of our generation were born between the end of World War II and 1950, since this was the age group that was most likely to face being drafted into the most violent part of the Vietnam War.
By the time John reached draft age, the war was winding down, and a lottery system had replaced wholesale kidnapping of kids for the war.
John’s father and grandfather both worked largely for themselves, self made men who set a pattern of expectation that John apparently couldn’t live up to – even to the point where he could not or would lot get into the military.
When he came into the warehouse in 1975, he seemed very young to me, even though he tried to pretend he was tougher than he was.
Seeing him again in early 2002, he struck me with the same sense of inexperience combined with missed opportunities. John seemed to have gone through the motions of living, but had failed to derive from them any sense of experience most other people would have obtained. Despite disease, divorce and personal misfortunes, John seemed as naïve in 2002 as he had been in 1975, as if he had spent the additional years living in a bubble.
While he was no longer protect as he once was, he failed to comprehend the significant to early events he’d experience or learned much from the pain he had suffered.
He was the same confused man sitting across the table from me as he was when I first saw him, just as puzzled over life as he had been, and again looking to me to supply him with answers only he could supply
This unchanging innocence was the thing that first drew me to him, and eventually made his company unbearable, when as a younger man; I failed to understand how some people grew from their troubles while others like John slowly wilted under them without every comprehending as to why.

************
In one of those twisted coincidences life seems to dump on people from time to time, my card to John arrived at his house in the same week that he learned that his wife intended to move back to New Jersey.
Both events surprised John, even though he claimed to have a “good and open relationship” with his ex-wife, Eva – proving that to the end when it came to women, John remained an absolute sucker.
I couldn’t recall when he met Eva, only that she had latched onto him as some point following his graduation from high school, and that he was as shocked as anyone to learn that he had suddenly been caught up in a relationship.
At one point, when we worked at Cosmetics Plus, John me another woman to whom he was extremely attractive, and who treated him with the respect he deserved. Torn between the woman who manipulated him and the one he was extremely attract to, John actually asked my advice, and I told him to dump Eva.
A week later, John informed me of his engagement to Eva and even invited me to the wedding held in Hasbrouck Heights at a Church about a mile north of The Wick.
Unkind fellow workers claimed Eva looked like a fish – which as I recall was a pretty accurate description of her. Worse, she had a personality to match her looks.
Unfortunately, when John pulled out a photograph of his daughter, I mistook her for his ex-wife.
At the time, his daughter was attending graduate school in Boston, and he said he was to see her shortly.
This may have explained Eva’s return to East Rutherford.
She had given him little warning, he said, and suggested that she feared he might run away before she arrived.
All I could think of as I sat with him in the diner was the memory of how confused he looked on the alter that day nearly 25 years earlier when he got married and how she had to nudge him with her elbow to say “I do.”

*****************

In mid-to-late 1977, John and I had something of a falling out, when I accused him to selling out to management.
He was kissing Donald’s ass in order to hop over me and take my place as assistant manager for the warehouse – a position I clung to even as I felt the urgency to leave the company before I became trapped there like Stanley.
But even at the time, I sensed that John’s actions were something born out of desperation.
Faced with the prospect of an unhappy married and no real career, he sought to follow in Stanley’s footsteps and find a permanent position, even if it meant that he would be packing boxes the rest of his life.
Part of what Donald wanted was for John to point out and report on all the trouble makers in the warehouse, the biggest of which was me.
After nearly four years working in the warehouse, I had reached the limit of the job, and unlike John, I did not wish to get trapped in it the way Stanley was.
I was unhappy and saw no easy way to escape. I lacked courage to simply walk away from the job. In the past, jobs had mostly abandoned me, either by dumping me out or collapsing around me the way the card company had.
But Donald was too shrewd a business man for the business to fail. Even when parts of it faltered, he found a way to make money. Things were going good, and worse, Donald seemed determined to keep me, the way he kept Stanley.
Capitalism feeds on workers’ desperation to keep their jobs, using them until their either grow accustomed to their misery or walk away.
I became a morale problem, which not only affected my work, but the work of those around me. I nearly constantly badmouthed management in a nearly constant personal revolution that could have no positive outcome.
I kept trying to turn other people against Donald and management, and eventually I committed an utter act of betrayal in an attempt to bring down the company on the feeble excuse that Donald had abused a fellow worker—which I still believe he had, but my actions were out of proportion to his sin.
Years later I realized just how mistaken I was.
John did not understand it at all – although strangely, he later praised me for it, mistaking me for some kind of hero.

************
Just when John started reporting to Donald about my activities, I’m still not certain, and I did not bring it up at our lunch meeting.
But I caught on to John’s activity by accident on day when I was putting away some boxes in the warehouse ladies room we used for storage because no women worked in that part of the building.
I heard voices through the wall – on the other side of which was Donald’s inner sanctum, and one of those voices was John’s.
I didn’t hear precisely what he said, but the fact that he was there at all startled me, and from that point on, every time he vanished from the warehouse, I headed to the storage room, eventually configuring a way to hear a mumbled version of what transpired – John testifying to mine and other workers’ transgressions.
Why Donald didn’t use this information to fire me I may never know.
As much as I came to fear and distrust him, Donald appeared to genuinely like me.
He seemed to like the company of men – perhaps because he struggled so much to overcome the dominating women in his life: mother and wife, as well as other female family members.
I suspected that half the reason Donald seemed so furious was a direct reaction to how helpless he felt in the rest of his life – and perhaps why he so abused Michele, the woman from the outlet, which led eventually to the final rebellion that forced him to fire me.
Years later, I realized that we were all damaged people working in that warehouse from Donald all the way down to the newest employee, many of us struggling to somehow come to grips with our private lives, some of which had to do with women and sex. And I was the most damaged of them all, full of rage I had no way to express -- so I took it out on John.

*************
During those years working together at Cosmetics Plus, John and I lived strange double lives, enemies sometimes by day, and remarkably close friends after work.
It was during this private association that I got glimpses of the more vulnerable John, and on occasion, came into contact with other people in his life, friends that had helped him survive high school, his family, and some of his other off hour recreation activities, and how I met his future wife, Eva.
Although not particularly gifted in handling electronic devices, John spent much of his high school time in the audio-visual department. Here he developed some friendships that last until his death, and gave him a position of authority that raised his status above other people the cool kids called geeks. It also gave him a place to hide away from the worst abuse the jocks and cool kids handed out, since no jock or cool kid would be caught dead in with the projectors and other such equipment.
Unlike most of his friends, who attended trade school or college, John kicked around at his father’s trucking firm until he found it intolerable and eventually applied to Cosmetic Plus when Donald advertised for a drive.
He kept in touch with his old friends, some of whom became members of his bowling team that jockeyed from Wallington Lanes to lanes as far away as Springfield. John tried to get me involved in this, but I had nothing in common with his friends and discovered that the competition was largely an excuse to drink beer and ogle the pretty girls playing in the other lanes, girls they all knew they could never have.
Before the hostilities escalated at work, I was a welcome guest as John’s family’s house, where I got to meet his brother and sisters. During our lunch twenty five years later, John gave me a quick update on these family members, whose faces were vague at best.
I remember John’s brother as being a moody soul, one of those frustrated men of talent who found no support for his frivolous exploits in a very practical-minded family – who eventually broke contact with that family over some joke they made at his wife’s expense.
I remember one sister being a home body and another a flirt, the first working on a second marriage now with the second set of kids, while the second sister suffered through a string of unsatisfactory lovers, the latest of which John said she would soon dump in favor of some new man.
I remembered her flirting with me over the supper table and how she accidentally uncovered John’s secret when he pretended to have quit smoking (telling us all this at work) when he really had not – although this motivated me to quit – a gift from John I will always remember.

*************

Seeing John 25 years or so after my first meeting him, I was struck by how trapped he had become in his own life and how dissatisfied the world was with him, despite his attempts to make everyone around him happy: his father, his mother, wife, boss, even me. We all pressed him to do things and he did them, and no one, lease of all John, was happy.
When his father demanded John get a real job, John gave up his dream of becoming a teacher to buckle down and work with his father, when that didn’t work out, John went to a series of other jobs that included warehouses, bartending, short order cook, even security guard. When his girlfriend, Eva, demanded that he make love to her somewhere other than the back of his van, he begged for use of my bedroom in Passaic, then suffered criticism from her for making her look like a whore in front of his friends.
If John ever stood up to anyone, I heard nothing about it – except in one particular moment when he wanted to prove to me that he could be a rebel, too, somehow turning revolution into a kind of conformity.
Considering all the abuse I heaped on him, John should never have gotten me a job at his new place, Wine Imports of America after I got fired from Cosmetics Plus, but he did.
Although as much as a trap as the previous job, the new place introduced me to a remarkable group of characters, all of whom were losers like me and John, coming to this place because this was the last place on the planet that would have them.
For the most part I hardly saw John except during change of shifts or during breaks. But even then, he tended to blend into the background other people, characters such as Cowboy or Cosmov or Ronnie or Roger, men whose pasts warranted arrest, who worked like horses and drank enough to drown one, yet who crumbled when the owner and the union rep conspired to violate their union contract, at which point I picked up my pen again and wrote to the head of the union, only to later get fired.
John caught up with me in the parking lot, and pulled me aside.
“When I worked with you at the other place, I thought you were a trouble maker,” he said. “But now I know better. Now I realize you are all that’s left of the 1960s.”
It was a remarkable moment for the both of us, and one both of us would carry to the grave, even though we met only twice, once a short time after this, and then more than 20 years later at The Wick.

**************

If John thought Wine Imports would provide him with the long-sought-after career, he was soon disappointed. The company closed not long later at which point his wife Eva decided they had to move to California
But before they could go, John came down with hotchkins disease.
While the treatments were successful, they led to later heath problems, and in the subsequent decade, he would suffer through surgery for other intestinal ailments as well, leading up to the final and more terrifying procedure, a triple bypass on his heart in August, 2001.
Over the last two decades of his life, John worked a variety of jobs, some of which lasted long than Cosmetics Plus or Wine Imports of American, but none which supplied the same sense of hope he had during those job. It was as if he knew no job would fill the empty space inside of him, a space that seemed to expand over time as his family scattered and his wife divorced him.
In 1985, John moved back to New Jersey from California.
But Eva refused to come back, remaining on the West Coast with their new born daughter.
In John’s life, the one constant had always been his family home in Moonachie, while full of conservative principles and stern scolding, he was always welcome there.
This was true this time, too, as his parents found a place for him.
There he picked up his life as he had left it, falling into the old routines even though his brother and sisters had long gone.
He felt like an only child.
In 2000, he went back to Cosmetics Plus asking for a job.
But if he had hoped to pick up where he had left off in the 1970s or find the people there the same, John was again disappointed.
He said Stan – the warehouse manager we both admired – had fallen onto hard times.
The growing use of alcohol Stan had started to help ease the tension of a tough job had become an debilitating habit – and according to John during our lunch at The Wick, Stan had suffered some serious trouble during the 1990s, which apparently got significantly worse with the death of his wife, Diana, at their home in Lake Hopatcong in 1999,
“Stan had just come back to the warehouse after some treatment,” John said. “But Donald didn’t give him back his job as warehouse manager – He gave him your job.”
This meaning the assistant manager job Donald had dangled in front of me, John and Cliff, how ironic.
For John, life just got steadily tougher. Without a steady job, insurance was hard to come buy, and though he still had a job to go back to at Burns Security after his by pass surgery, he found himself deep in debt.
“I look at the bills and laugh,” he said. “I’ll never be able to pay them, not in a million years.”
John said even his parents were on the verge of abandoning him.
“They’re getting ready to retire to south Jersey,” he said.
This would leave him homeless and he had vague plans to move north to Boston where he daughter attended school. But he didn’t know what he would do for a living when he got there. He had no way of knowing that by the end of the year, a few days before John’s 49th birthday, his father would pass away.
After our lunch, we shook hands and made our way out to our cars. He sat in his for a while without started it, and waved as I pulled out of the parking lot, -- me just one more ghost from the past moving through his life again, a ghost who had at some point contributed to his doom.
What if I had left him in peace back at Cosmetics Plus? Would his life have turned out any better?
Who can say?

Main Menu

email to Al Sullivan