Grover
Cleveland High School had seen better days.
It looked like I felt. It was a built a long time ago, maybe in the twenties
or thirties back in the day when the cities were inhabited by
teenagers and the like. In the community
center across the street it was People’s out reach night, where official type
spokes people talked about all the progress coming to
Queens country and pretty early on they handed out free coffee and pastries- which tended to be the main attraction.
There’s a whole circuit of places you can
go. Tuesday night was people’s Out
reach, sponsored by the Feds, then Wednesdays after
afternoon a sandwich and dessert at the Salvation Army ( along with a talk about Jesus) Thursday the food bank special day and
Friday the Methodists give out a full lunch from 12 to two.
As it happen I was at
the People’s Outreach Meeting because
it’s in sort of a small shopping center, most of which is empty but one of the adjoining
storefronts is now a second hand book
store where the dope is second rate but
the conversation is first class. Paul Purcell, the proprietor has a degree
in International relations and he was
good at it except his father was a big influence and that made him too left
wing and unmanageable for the give and
take of day to day affairs.
The store wasn’t really a store. It didn’t have electricity for
instance and basically Paul would take
out a coupla shopping bags of paperbacks and put them on tables and call that a
store. Actually, back in the day I had a personal library that had actual real
books – hardcovers in sets, numbering a few thousand at the least, but then I had
to throw them all away when the hard times come
Paul was hard to
fool, but he was the only one.
One night come
aro9und ten o’clock it was time for the coffee boy, that was me, to clean the coffee makers,the filters and
cans and I was running a little late and
behind the big coffee percolators there was a few bags of weed. People had be supposed to pick them up
but for some reason the talker was a cop
and that spooked everybody I walk over,
causal like and I’m thinking “Oh , shit,”
and the cop, a middle aged fella looks right at me. I tried to look as stupid as I could.
Francis
Labriola, the organizer of sorts walks
over to the cop and starts talking to him. He was running cover for me.
I sensed it. I wished I could put words into Franks mind – about how my father
was dead, about how my mother worked
hard, about how I was a little dim witted
- but not from drugs – I was just born slow and people tried to help me
out when they could.
As the room
begins to empty I discover to my horror that I have my work pants on – the
one’s that never get washed, and my wallet and keys and money are in my good
pants which are in the coat room. The
co0ps walking around handing out cards to people and I notice he’s making his
way over to me.
I look at the weed and see that cop come
over an I say, “Er Hi Frank, whyduyathink I should do now?”
He didn’t
look at me but said one word under his breath like, “Run”
At this point the parameters have changed. The cop sees the
pot, knows what it is and knows I have got most of it im my pocket. The
question is now, is he going to bust me
at this meeting dedicated to imporviong community/police relations.
I get to the coat room and slide the work
pants down but I can’t find my regular pants, just a ot od coats and
stuff. I look up at the window where
thecy check the coats and theres the cop with Frank talking at him all the
time, something about pathetic, and brain dead.
Finally way in the
back corner on the floor I see my belt buckle
and I’m reaching and reaching and my ass is shaking and the cop is
wondering what’s going on and I finally
grab them pants and put ‘em on tright there.
God, that’s
a good feeling. I can tell you. To be
walking around in your underwear in front of people and then to wear your regular
clothes is a damn good feelin. As luck
would have it the coat room had a back entrance the use of which I availed
myself.
My second story, which is parto f the first
also concerns Cleveland – the city though, not the high school.
I t
was a long time ago and I was just over being a boy but not yet a man. Igot the periodic itchies that tended to
strike me I the spring time to see the world.
I carried round a guitar too, although I wasn’t any good at it, because
next to a friend a guitar is the best thing I know to keep you company – and I
am speaking from the vantage of one who’s seen many a man go down the dark
roads
It’s funny you
know. When I think back on those days I remember the rides but I rarely remember the connections and
what is more sometimes I don’t even remember where I was headed to ro coming
from. I just knowt the direction, usually.
This time
I was going west across Pennsylvania, which sound like
nothing special, one state, no turns.
But Ill never forget it because we start of in like Wilkes borough or Philly
even and we drove for hours in one direction, though forests and up and down
hills. On a twelve wheeler you know when
you’re going up hil and when you’re
going down I don’t recall
exactly but we might have been stopped by the
ITC, the Interstate Trucking commission.
If so then his weight woulda been alright and I would have hid in the back of the
cabin, under the rank blankets that he’d get his shut eye in. I do believe this fellow was not a devotee of
Ladies home Journal.
He asked
me if I knew any tunes I replied I knew
two by Johnny Cash, “Jackson” and “Folsom Prison Blues” Jackson goes:
“We
got married in a fever hotter then a
pepper sprout
We
been taking bout Jackson, ever since the fire went out.”
I was the last days of sixteen. I
didn’t know nothing about love. If I had I’d have realized tha the song told me everything I could ever need to know about love. Love is
a flame. Love consumes al things, even
mighty time itself. And importantly
them that talk about going to Jackson are practicall never the ones that
actually go.
( For all you non southerners that’s
Jackson Mississippi - long noted for the
beauty of it’s women folk of all different colorations)
That Johnny Cash was
something. You take a dirt farmer, a
poor man and you may wonder what keeps him going? It’s pride. I can’t explain it but you don’t
have to scratch Cash too deep to see and hear it.
“We I get into that city all the
men gonna stoop and bow
And all them
pretty women gonna make me
show em what
they don’t know how”
At the time I was convinced that June Carter Cash was the moist beautiful
woman I had ever seen and I was going to marry me one some day. Actually I got
pretty close, several times, but never
close enough.
We pull into Cleveland at four thirty in the morning. Everything’s dead. The sunsc coming up and
the trucker drops me off at a diner on the last hill before the plains upon which
the city set. Cleveland at the time was
at the end of it’s era. All the majestic stuff that was to be built had been built and whn I come by there was
just the slightest whiff of change in the air.
It
had, once upon a time, been the promised land.The funny thing is who among us,
setting our eyes upon the promised land are able to recognize it for what it is
instead of just seeing an empty, barren wasteland?
I guess I
beat Moses to he punch. He gazed at the promised to be land and died I saw the promised land that once had been
and lived.
Having to be frugal I had a cup
of coffee and a free refill. The waitress, an elderly lady was very friendly and treated me like a
man. Without undue hubris I suppose that
she had not seen many of my kind. For I
was being handed from person to person, truck to truck and city to city and I
felt that no harm was to come to me for
these were my people and it was important to them that I be delivered to my
appointed destination.
Th ealf
