Chapter ten

 

  

                Exhausted and depressed, Maxwell insisted upon his morning jog, penance for his idiocy the night before. Jack was right. Maxwell spent too much time going to bars, and not enough time making plans for going to Nashville or working on his music. He had seen other good men crumble, beginning their slide into obscurity with Monday Night Football at the bar, letting it expand into weekend drinking at the singles clubs, then six packs for lunch on the job, solid  men, who grew fat and dull-Whitted and arrogant with each ingestion of beer, trading their talents for fast cars and cheap women or wives that nagged them at home.

                Jogging up Main Street, Maxwell saw them, white men, ages 17 to 60, clinging to the backs of pickup trucks as they weaved through the narrow side streets of downtown Paterson, an occupying army who held the streets in daylight with their numbers and their hard-hat mentality, victimized later when they crawled drunk from the go go once in ones and twos, the darkness as heave as a shroud around them.

                This early in the morning, however, a truce existed as muggers and thieves changed shifts and the macho men returned. It was the quiet time when the police collected the pieces of the white men, and the junkies collect their fixes, junkies warning themselves by small fires in the historic district like twisted boy scouts at camp.

                How Maxwell survived his own nightly wanderings was a mystery he'd not yet solved. Only once or twice had the streets tested him the way prison had. Most nights, he seemed to pass through the shadows like a wraith, seen but untouchable, heard but ignored. Perhaps he had some sense of street wisdom Jack did not see or some immunity granted to children of any color or race who grew up here, the years of wandering giving him that automatic ability to react properly, an attachment that fancy clothed kids from Wayne lacked.

                Yet lately, Maxwell felt less protected as if that immunity was wearing off. Part of the feeling came as a result of the changing city, whole neighborhoods shifting, transforming into new places other than the ones he'd remembered them being when he was a kid. He blamed the malls in Wayne doing part of this, turning downtown into a ghost town of cheap shops in which no one but the most ignorant or newly immigrated shopped. Even the wise old Italians went to Wayne when they could, cluttering around the corners with shopping bags waiting for the bus, plastic umbrellas slung over their arms in anticipation or rain, returning with loads of goods they could not really afford.

                In daylight, the busy streets created the illusion of life, an artificial hustle and bustle given credence by the suit and tie office workers out of the legal district, or the tons of kids coming home from school in the afternoon. Trucks roared down from the highway and over the river bridges, busses squeaked and groaned at each stop, cars beeped, drivers cursed, policemen blew their whistles, workers skipped along, store keeper jingled their keys, social workers bought greasy egg sandwiches and dashed along with dripping brown bags. Hot dog vendors set up their umbrellas on the corners, bakeries flipped around their closed  signs to say open, gas station attendants clattered oil sticks and gas caps and the nozzles for their hoses, medical emergency vehicles screeched through the streets, clearing everyone from their paths, music blared, Jack hammers smacked, factory whistles hooted. But all was as dead as a morgue, these people just didn't know it until darkness fell again.

                As Maxwell ran, these imitations sprang up around him, inspired by delight, the facade of a new Paterson as strange and sterile as a reconstructed face. Only Maxwell seemed to be able to restore the original. Only Maxwell seemed to recall a time when a living breathing thing had existed here rather than stucco and plastic. And as he did on most of his morning's jogs, Maxwell began to patch back together a vision of the older Paterson, drawing the pieces of his memory, putting the columns of the former U.S. Theater back, and the marquee of the Majestic, reinstalling the glass of Grants, the holiday displays of Woolworths, the elevated, cold marble of Quackenbush-Sterns, the gnarled, interlocked doorways of the jewelers and the hock shops  and bicycle repairs, and then, as always, the vision ended with the prison walls.

                Maxwell shuddered as his pounding feet took him away from the high walls and dark windows of the jail, his jog drawing him into a more friendly section of town, yet a section no more full of cheer than downtown had been, tattered and decayed in its own fashion as the once mighty business district. Here, along this section of Main Street, the invasion was over with only a handful of old Italians still clinging to their third floor rooms, resisting the Spanish conquest with all the same success as the Aztecs.

                Yet life bubbled out of every doorway, unfamiliar foreign life, jabbering in an unfamiliar and foreign tongue, kids clinging to their mothers' skirts, boys watching their sweaty fathers hammer and chisel in their desperate attempt to repair buildings long beyond such efforts -- Latino faces so full of hope and joy and life that such expression had to have tortured to elderly Italians as reminders of their own childhoods here, when these same streets and these same buildings bubbled with their own relations, living and laughing, crying and shouting in much the same manner as the Latinos did now.

                And despite the dilapidation, despite the poverty of tattered clothing and the bent backs of American's latest cheap-labor force, this neighborhood always engendered hope in Maxwell, for it was out of this broth that better futures always emerged, this ethnic society involving into the social mandate that over ran City Hall. Someone from one of these doorways might be mayor someday and others would own a new Woolworths or build a new Majestic Theater. Some few of the survivors here would have the grit enough to build Paterson up again into something worth living in.

                Then, that neighborhood vanished as well and the four story walk up with associated store fronts evolved into two story houses with lawns, white picket fences bordering neatly trimmed front yards. While these houses lacked the small black-faced ceramic lantern boys Maxwell had seen in more openly racist neighborhoods in Wayne, Nutley or Bloomfield, the lawns did boast of numerous pink, plastic flamingos, bird bathes, and trees with tree houses. Bicycles with training wheels littered nearly every driveway. Underwear, bedsheets and towels flapped from long clothes drying lines in the back yards. A few corner stores filled in the mix, sweet shops and dry cleaners and several video stores. But for the most part, a quiet hung over this part of Maxwell's jog. A few of the students waiting for their bus giggled at him. Sometimes a truck brakes squealed. But these sounds were made louder by the lack of noise with even the distant sirens from downtown echoing here like spirits these people did not want to encounter, against which these people barred their doors.

                The place reminded Maxwell of the grave yard, the thud of his own sneakers echoing back at him from the faces of the houses as he passed. He could see movement inside each house, a shift of shade or twirl of curtain. But these things seemed ghostly, unreal, as if made by the wind, not people. This was the twilight world between downtown and the suburb, filled with the struggling -- mostly white -- blue collar workers building themselves an  imitation of the life style they could not afford to move away into, adopting Wayne's ranch style houses, and small versions of Wayne's wide lawns, mowing the grass of these four by four foot lots as if practicing for a time when they would indeed live in in Wayne.

                To supplement these small lawns and equally small backyards, local community groups committed the city to building neighborhood parks like those parks the city built downtown. Yet as Maxwell passed, he took note of the differences, too, the lack of graffiti, except for the initials of the love-sick, no wine bottles, no overflowing trash cans, no bums. All of these street lights remained whole, unmolested by kids taking them out in target practice with stones. Here, for the first time, Maxwell encountered other brave souls out for their morning bout of exercise, each wearing squeaky sneakers, each dressed in appropriate jogging wear, most color coordinated, many wearing complicated exercise watches that beat out the proper rhythm for their run, some carried a variety of Walkman tape and radio players, music or news oozing out around their headsets. Some nodded at Maxwell, as if his jogging suit and white face made him part of some exclusive South Paterson club. They saw him enough to think him part of their neighborhood. He saw them enough to wonder why he bothered to jog here, where he fit in too well and resented his own obscurity.

                And he did nothing to ruin their illusion, lifting his hand in the appropriate gesture, nodding with more than a slight enjoyment at the familiarity. And he resented this, too, and ran harder, moving deeper into their world, wishing he could live here again, as he had for a while as a kid, before Charlie died and the hatred of the rest of the family had driven Maxwell to the street. He wanted to live in a place where people didn't always need to lock their doors or seal their windows up with iron bars. He wanted a yard as a place to play, not a storage area for a guard dog. Where, kids played in the parks and school grounds, not in the street, and the sight of a police car meant more to them than a stab of fear or guilt.

                Maxwell turned left onto Crooks Avenue, the diving line between  Paterson and the much wealthier Clifton. The black and white police cars moved up and down this street like boarder guards, even eyeing Maxwell as he pounded along, dismissing him as another health nut office manager taking in a few miles before going off to work. Few black faces made the crossing unmolested, no matter how expensive the jogging suit.

                Now the street grew familiar, the aged face of his childhood peeking out from behind every yellow shade of every turn of the century house. He even recognized the store displays, each with the same seasonal decorations he'd remembered when he lived here as a  kid, changing only when the season changed, stored again for next year, sweet shop, cleaners, clothing store, jewelers. With each step, Maxwell felt reduced, shrinking back into the boy who used to live and play here, who used to run errands for Charlie or Grandpa, who used to sit on the porch with both sipping hot chocolate as they drank coffee.

                Grandpa's house sat a top the hill here like a Buddhist temple, one of the elder structure from years when this part of the state had been mansions and farms. At little of its history showed beneath the pealing paint and sealed windows, the way a hint of a man showed from the laid out figure of a wake -- its death long over due, after having raised generations of wild brats, who grew into the next generation's elders.

                Yet that family had failed with Maxwell. He was wild enough when he was very young. Far more wild than many of his uncles or aunts, but grew tamer far sooner, a mouse at ten, a lamb at fifteen, when he should have been a cat or wolf. Grandpa understood and accepted Maxwell, Charlie positively delighted in this odd creature that had fallen in with this pack of wolf hounds. But the others, they despised him. They saw in Maxwell the crumbling of the family, that final generation at which they old ways end.

                They scolded him regularly. They beat him from time to time. They threatened and cajoled him, saying he needed to "Fly Right" or "grow up," all in an effort to shape him back into a regular member of the family. But Maxwell grew less and less like them, and less and less likely to carry on their name and business. Indeed, as Maxwell slowed his pace, he could see the rusted supports and broken chains that had kept many of the boats in place, the whole asphalt yard beside the house as much a grave yard as the grave yard had been.

                He stopped at the bottom of the concrete stairs where they cut into the hillside forming two banks of overgrown slope -- at the bottom, near where where Maxwell stood, these slopes ended in a two foot high concrete wall. This marked the boundary of the property to which Maxwell was allowed to wander for the first six years of his life. He remembered rolling down each embankment in breathless anticipation of that fall. Grandfather, grandmother, uncles and aunts yelled at him for the activity, as if he was crazy, as if no normal boy would risk breaking and arm or back for the thrill of that two foot fall.

                Up the now-grass-grown steps and beyond the embankment, the front sport steps started, sagging wooden steps that years of rain and snow had splintered into ruin. Any footfall would punch holes through them and the wide expanse of porch. Maxwell could not have reached the front door safely even if he had been tempted to try. He had fled that house soon after news of Charlie's death had reached him, and he had not gone back. Whatever he had loved and cared for in that house, died with Charlie.

                Eventually, he stopped staring and shuffled up the road to the very crest of the hill, where the driveway met the street and the former boat store stood in ruins, black cinders and half devoured concrete walls, the inside long looted of anything of remote value. Wine bottle littered the empty space, left by the white high schoolers who hung out here at night. Here, slogans showed in spray painted graffiti, unchallenged declarations of turf, no black gang from Paterson could get near enough to read them with the boarder so vigilantly guarded by the police.

                When all this was behind him, Maxwell started to run again, north along Lakeview Avenue, slowing only when he came to the gate of the grave yard which was firmly closed and locked and posted with warnings for kids to keep out -- though even here, empty bottles of booze decorated the ground, along with the vials and plastic bags for dope, all like fast food wrappers in other neighborhoods.

                He ran on, abandoning the south side for the People's Park section, and then up along Park A venue into the deep East Side,  glimpsing the elegant faces of the surviving mansions that stood on the ridge line along East Side Park -- their walls and yards linking arms in a barrier against the tide of change which then washed towards them from downtown. Here was the last vestige of old Paterson, the silk barons' heritage chiseled out in stone, almost grim in their determination to remain unchanged, utterly tragic in their inability to notice that they changed despite themselves.

                At Broadway, Maxwell turned west again, away from the eloquent neighborhoods and back towards the desolation of downtown, and here, time began to reverse itself, as his sneakers pounded a dustier and more dismal pavement. Foot fall by foot fall, building by building, the decay grew around him with only the more official town and county structures surviving the onslaught, the public library, the unemployment office, the strange of state and religious homeless shelters standing as firm as temples, undesecrated by the spray painting madmen who claimed whole blocks as their turf. Faster and faster, Maxwell ran, as if seeking to pass through this war zone without getting wounded, avoiding not the violence of the gangs, but the touch of time which seemed to ruin everything.

                By the time he reached Main Street again, he could barely catch  his breath, a stitch in his side making him stop for air. He sagged against the light pole and sucked in the still-relatively unpolluted morning air, aware of the crowds of workers now making their appearance on the street around him, all dressed in similar kind of clothing in colors that varied from grey to blue with patches above the breast pocket on each shirt scripting out names like Joe, Juan, Jake or Jesus.

                His run had taken more time than he'd figured -- at least, a half hour longer than usual, his day dreaming by the old house throwing him off his time table. People gathered at the gates of the Greasy Spoon waiting for someone to open up.

                Of course Jack isn't here, Maxwell thought. How could I expect him to actually get up on his own, especially after he's been up so late.

                Maxwell could easily envision Jack snoring away as the mulcible electric alarm clocks buzzed and the numerous radio alarms broadcast conflicting rock and roll stations. Maxwell cursed himself for allowing himself to dawdle and paraded up to the door of the store, figuring to sooth the anger of some of the regulars before rushing home to strangle Jack.

                Yet, as he came closer, he noticed some of those nearly the door way weren't regular or paying customers at all.

                BUMS!

                Sprawled across the door in front of the gate as if they owned the place and not Mr. Harrison, lay bums, who refused to evaporate with the vanishing night -- their knapsacks and bed gear piled like so much trash. He could smell the stink of them a full dozen yards away, a smell that grew stronger and more repulsive as he advanced. He let out a howl so full of rage that each bum's head jerked up from where they slept. Some managed to scatter from the door before he got there, but a core of grey-headed figures remained, hovering  over torn plastic trash bags as if they had discovered gold.

                "Get away from here!" Maxwell yelled.

                Even then, they only reluctantly stepped back from their treasure of trash, tears like claw marks revealing slop of yesterday’s lunch.  "Didn't you hear me?" Maxwell yelled. "Go away!"

                Now, those nearest him froze, staring at him.

                "They're only looking for food," Jack once told Maxwell just after his first coming to work at the shop and this had occurred.

                "Food? In our trash?"

                "There are scraps of things in there and those people are hungry."

                "Hunger doesn't excuse the mess they make. God knows if we let it happen the health department will give us the summons."

                "Then maybe we can find a way to give them the scraps so they don't make such a big mess."

                "We sell food here, Jack. We don’t give it away."

                "But it's only scrap. We don't do anything with it but throw it away."

                "You're asking us to waste time separating it so we can feed bums. I'm sure Mr. Harrison -- who pays for our time -- would appreciate that."

                "Mr. Harrison wouldn't have to know."

                "You're setting us up to get fired," Maxwell said. "Mr. Harrison owns this place. He has a right to know what goes on here. The scraps go out with the trash, and the trash goes out in the morning when we get into work, which means one of us has to be here on time or the trash will sit in the store for two days."

                From the scattered remains of yesterday's refuge, Jack had obviously disregarded Maxwell's instruction, putting out the bags before he closed up, perhaps even knowing he would not be in early enough today to take it out.

                The bums backed away as Maxwell advanced, staring at him with their dead eyes asking: "Why are you doing this to us?"

                Though both they and he knew he could do no more to them than what had already been done by time and society. They might as well have been dead leaves, brown and withered, clinging desperately to these streets the way leaves clung to a tree, too stupid or weary to realize their time had passed.

                "If you don't leave, I'm going to call the police," Maxwell told them, the first few embers of alarm rising into their dead eyes.

                "Police" was a word they knew and from the endless repetition of hard knocks, had come to respect -- the way the respected drug dealers, pimps, prostituted and thugs. It was only the everyday people these wandering hobos seemed unfearful of, as if regarding pedestrians and business people as at least one full ring below theirs on the food chain, beings to feed off of, beings whose whole existence was to supply them with the bare necessities of life --and for free to boot!

                Back, they staggered, their shuffling feet scuffing at the junk they'd scattered, spreading the mess over an even wider section of side walk, grinding coffee grounds and egg shells into the cracks -- of which Maxwell would later have to spend an hour sweeping. Some clutched bags to their chests -- shopping bags, trash bags, old worn plastic gym bags, even turn of the century carpet bags, all full of holes from wear, each spilling out the valued collection of their lives, arms of sweaters or legs of pants, tarnished ends of photo frames. They staggered and stumbled, but did not run, leaving the air thick with that intolerable smell Maxwell had come to hate.

                This smell would stain him, and unless he hurried home and scrubbed it out, would haunt him for the rest of the day like a leprosy infecting him. It was a smell Maxwell always associated with the grave.

                But while these people may have wanted death, they expected it to seek them out, to sneak up on them, crawl over them at night, stabbing them while they slept. Meanwhile, these same fools put up with every other indignity, losing every other sense of self-respect.

                Maybe that was why Maxwell hated them most -- their filthy helplessness only symptoms of a much grater disease, a nameless, terrible disease that robbed them of hope and courage and humanity, stealing from them all that made them different from the wild dogs and cats of the street. Indeed, these pathetic creatures lacked even the dignity of dogs, unable to survive except as parasites, sucking blood from hard working people, helping Paterson itself bleed itself into the grave.

                Then, Maxwell saw HER.

                The jolt nearly knocked him down, and he staggered a step sideways as he tried to keep himself from falling against the store's metal gate, she sweeping away from him like one more brown leaf, her face as dirty and as grey as theirs, and her hair and eyes stained with the same smears of the street. She looked decades older than she was. Even then, Maxwell had to squint to bring her face into focus, as she was already half shadow.

                "Suzanne?" he whispered, the newspaper description of her attempted suicide at the Falls running through his head like instant replay, his voice as cracked and grotesque as her appearance.  She stared back at him, her grey eyes hard, though splintered with doubt and alarm. She seemed puzzled at hearing her own name. And like the others, she took yet another stumbling step in retreat. Maxwell grabbed for her wrist, missed once, but caught it the second time as she tried to shove him away. Her flesh had a gritty texture, partly from grime, partly from years of grime wearing at its surface, like sand grinding at an antique piece of wood. Yet instead of making her smoother, each stroke left a brutal landscape of ragged skin. It was for Maxwell like touching a grease-hardened rag. His hand fell away as quickly as if scalded by hot oil.

                But his touch did halt her backward movement, and she stood blinking at him, apparently waiting for another commanded, the ragged edge of her once lush eyelashes rising and falling with an expression of increasing bewilderment. Yet somewhere deep in those hazy pools, a spark showed, like one lone headlight coming out of a thick fog.

                She stared at his face for a very long time, studying the details of his craggy face, each detail bringing a bit more recognition into her eyes, each adding to an overall expression of utter horror.

                "NO!" she moaned, her voice nearly as raspy as her skin. She tried to push herself away from him, her small hands striking weakly at his chest. But he grabbed both wrists this time and held on. "No, No, No."

                Her need for escape pained him more than if she had slapped him. In fact, he would have preferred a slap, something to jog him out of this spell of seeing her again -- like this -- wrapped in rags. The pain, when it came, rose from his stomach with all the

respectability of a barf, burning its way up the back of his throat. He barely stopped himself from vomiting, yet clung to her filthy hands just as hard.

                "Do you remember me? He asked with a suddenly dark inspiration, hoping her horror was based on nothing more than the usual unhappy relationship between store keepers and bums, and that the look in her eyes was not one of Maxwell's recognition of her, but instead fear that this strange man in jogging apparel might call the police.

                Her answer was a sudden yank, her hands escaping his through not without tearing her weather worn shirt, one more tear among many. Her gaze blazed through the surface of ice, telling him she had on some level recognized him after all, not as store keeper, but as some twisted version of the man she had once loved. Step by step she baked away from him, her splayed fingers rising to shield her face from him, her arms outstretched before her.

                "NO!" she moaned again. "Go away!"

                Perhaps his own horrified expression betrayed some of what went on inside his head, thoughts tumbling around like so many trapped hornets. He could not explain her or how she looked.

                "Please!" he said. "Don't go."

                Yet still she backed away, one staggered step after the next, the last of her flock to retreat, her grey-looking blonde hair streaming around her face, the way it had years earlier when he had met her here, the dirt ascent then from the long golden strands, her sharp green eyes full of the vigor of a Midwest girl finding herself thrust into the activity of the city.

 

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