Dancer 7
Creeley had a local reputation as “a character.”
Born just prior to the Wall Street crash that led to the Great Depression in what was then called Paterson General hospital, Creeley attended local public schools, including the local community college, but never got the necessary degrees to qualify him for any legitimate position.
He loved to scrounge around, always searching for the roots of things. He spent a great deal of time among the dusty volumes at William Paterson College’s historic archive, and even more time among old timers, from which he learned more about Paterson’s rich history than any other living being.
He was possessed with knowing everything there was to know about every part of Paterson's history, going back as far as written records went, and when he expired those, he sought out whatever folk tales he could get from the Native American tribes, often traveling to the archives in Newark.
Hutchenson claimed Jackson had everything necessary for a first class historian except the degrees and the social skills.
Creeley was blunt to a fault and offended most people who came into contact with him, making more than a few enemies as a result.
He was also well-known as a child molester, although in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was most active, locals feared scandal and kept the matter hushed up.
His brief flirtation with the opposite sex led to marriage, and later, divorce, but not before the birth of a son, Puck. The mother, a promisqious barfly changed the boy’s last name back to her maiden name in the vain hope that the boy might forget the association.
Puck never did, and soon found himself abandoned by both parents once his mother latched onto another man. Creeley tried to lure the boy back, even tried to make up for his previous sexaual advances. But the memory was so tattooed onto Puck’s consciousness, that Pubk refuwed, learning he could find more safety on the street than he could in a so-called traditional family setting.
Guilt-ridden, Creely took me in with the same promise he made to Puck – though in truth, the fire behind his previous desire for boys seemed to have smoldered out, replaced for his increasing desire to learn about Paterson.
Hutchenson – who I later learned used some of Creeley research to benefit himself and his own position as the city’s historian – got Creeley a job as a tour guide for the Great Falls Park, a duty Creeley took as seriously as a soldier might guarding the borders of America. It gave his life structure he had lacked before.
His knowledge of local history made him a perfect fix for one of the states most historical – yet largely neglected – sites. And for a time, people came to the falls to listen to his lectures, though he frequently angered the more official historians over his radical views on history, and his non-Christian habits drew the wrath of local churches, who claimed he practiced witch craft.
He pretty admitted he did, but his definition differed from theirs. He claimed he performance wicca and native American rituals, often claiming it was research when the college administration told him to stop.
The college also told him to cease the use of drugs such as camabas and pioti, which he maintained was essential for performing his rituals.
These so-called flaws made him seem all the more admirable in my eyes, defying society just as my uncle, Charlie had done – if only in a totally opposite way.
We also worked well together, co-existing in his Main Street loft without friction.
I took up odd jobs, attended college part time, and eventually learned how to play guitar, getting the idea that I might some how make a living as a song writer.
Each of us plodding along in our own world for years and might have continued that way if the outside world had allowed us to.
The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 ruined his world by drying up SETA funds, through which Creeley’s meager salary was paid.
My world fell apart when I fell in love.
**************
Despite what many people think, art in Paterson was not a contradiction in terms, although it struggled to survive the harsher realities around it.
Creeley’s knowledge of history taught me to appreciate the rich traditions modern Paterson needed to live up to, from the early days of Vaudeville, Abbott and Costello to the higher poetic arts of William Carlos Williams and Jazz.
In some ways, Paterson was a miniature version of 19th Century New York where high and low art duked it out, though as timed proved, both faded leaving more of a legacy than a living tradition.
Vaudeville gave way to movie theaters, and these to porno palace. Jazz clubs turned into strip clubs, and the besieged poetry scene took refuge at the local community college.
While a few solitary artists fought the good fight, living their lives Greenwich Village-style in lofts along Main Street, most fled to the more lucrative haunts of Manhattan.
Artist life might have deteriorated further had not a liberal Republican taken office in the mid-1970s, a feat so rare among eastern cities that national Republicans steered massive federal funds towards his administration as a model for how they might transform the east just as they had the west – provided a usually Democratic population would only vote them into office.
But it was like pouring money into a black hole.
Paterson got no better as a result, except around the edges where a few like Creeley managed to receive paltry salaries while corrupt local officials skimmed off most of the rest for personal profit, or steered funds to gangsters operating trash and construction companies as legitimate fronts for drug and illegal gambling operations.
Art funding become one of the decorations for the operations, and a decade after the rest of the country saw a flowering of culture, Paterson had a brief artistic spring, drawing in suckers who believed the movement would spout into the next Greenwich Village.
The highlight of this movement came in the guise of The Great Falls Festival as local artists took advantage of Paterson’s Great Falls as the symbol of a regenerated Paterson, perhaps only partially aware of Alexander Hamilton who had done the same thing just after the Revolutionary War.
Perhaps I fell for the con game as well, fooled by the city’s passing of legislation that set up artists’ housing and sought to get historic designation for the blighted and long-deteriorated mills just south east of the falls.
The city, of course, hoped to duplicated efforts other towns had achieved elsewhere in the country, using history to renew interest in an area that had become symbolic of urban blight and spur investment that had ceased when most of the white population had fled to the suburbs.
For a time, this seemed to work. Plush little shops popped up, the kind more typically found in places like San Francisco or Greenwich Village, not in urban cores like Paterson. Jazz clubs that had become strip clubs eased back into their former use, bring a new population of hopeful musicians, joined by a flood of artists, actors, and crafts people. Lower Market Street began to glow again in a way it had not glowed since before the great strikes of 1913 had destroyed the mills.
Suzanne Martin arrived with the tide of incoming artists, still naïve enough to believe any place other than the tundra of her father’s Midwest farm was “a big city.” She had attended a two-year community college back home designed more to find her a good husband than a career.
An untenured English professor at the college found some real talent in her and tried to cultivate it – perhaps attempting to make up for his own frustrated artistic career.
This professor seemed unaware of the realities of life there, how fathers like Suzane’s scraped the frozen earth to send their girls to college so as to find a better breed of husband material than the local landscape sprouted. Fathers worked hard to keep hteir daughters out of the hands of the bar room cowboys who married only at the end of a shotgun when a pregnancy could not get aborted.
The outraged fathers forced the college to terminate the professor, but not before the professor had raised a crop of hopeful artists, among whom Suzanne was one.
Most of the other girls eventually fell back into line, giving up their artistic ambitions for good husbands; not Suzanne.
She actually went on to graduate, avoiding the pregnancy that drove many of her female classmates into the arms of marriage prior to getting their diplomas. She even refused to take one of the menial jobs offered to girl students who managed to get their degrees such as waitressing or secretarial (disguised under the dubious term: administrative assistant). This drove her father even crazier and frustrated the hopes of her younger sisters who had to wait longer for their turn at college and husbands, since their father refused to pay for more than one daughter at a time.
Family arguments ripped through holiday gatherings like a re-fought Civil War, leaving father enraged at the whole concept of her becoming “an artist.”
“I suppose this means I shouldn’t expect any grand kids from you either?” he asked, to which Suzanne routinely replied, “Never.”
The father blamed her attitude on some bad blood that flowed through some remote portion of the family, most evident in a second cousin he refused to allow into his house, but with whom Suzanne met often to plot out their lives as artists.
This cousin recognized Suzanne’s talent and picked up where the professor had left off in promoting the arts.
He convinced her she needed to go east to New York where arts were still appreciated and college was not used as an elaborate mating service.
She resisted only because she feared to make the move and permementally sever ties with her family which she still loved.
But as the feud with her father got worse, she began to make plans to do as her cousin suggested, by which time reports of the Paterson revival reached her and she headed there instead.
She traveled east by train, registering each stop as another gateway out of her Midwest hell with the misery of the farm life fading away by the time she reached Chicago.
She had visited Minneapolis-St. Paul numerous times previously. But it never struck her as “The Big City” the way Chicago did. Penn Station New York so stunned her that she wondered if she had wandered into the middle of a dream.
Her arrival by train out of Manhattan to Paterson was among the greatest disappointments of her life.
Even by standards of the Midwest where Minneapolis seemed petty, Paterson was nowhere. While it lacked the turbulent winters and drudgery of farm life, Paterson had a misery that showed as clearly on its decaying face: three-storied buildings falling to dust while its downtown had taken on the vestige of a ghost town or abandoned shopping mall, cheap stores filling in the empty spaces like false teeth.
Although Paterson had one 15-story building (a bank upon which the city fathers’ hoped to build a bright new future) most of the tall buildings were brick-faced housing projects and encircled downtown like prison bars.
She scolded her cousin for the deception, though he pleaded his case that Paterson would change, grow into become the art capital of the East if people like Suzanne gave it a chance.
Suzanne needed all of her creative vision to see the ruined historic mills as anything more than dilapidated buildings.
Her cousin, a pleasantly plump little man with slicked down black hair and an annoying mostashe that wiggled when he spoke, tried his best to make her see Paterson as a future investment, a place what would eventually grow into the place of her dreams. He claimed the fortune of federal money being poured into the city would yield a community of wealth and art.
So she stayed and waited, and watched, taking ballet classes at two local colleges, then later in New York, where teachers, awed by her raw talent and enthusiasm – fawned over her, giving her extra tips she would need to evolve into a professional.
It was at this point, she met me.
********************
The newspapers puffed up The Great Falls Festival that year with reports of a prodical son story: the return of the city’s most famous poet, Arthur Guttenberg.
The infamous poet had refrained from returning to the city that raised him because equally famous Mayor Frank X. Graves, Jr. had filed drug charges against him.
Guttenberg had mistakenly allowed a newspaper to quote him boasting about having smoked a joint on the banks of the Passaic River.
Allegedly homesick (although more likely hungry for the generous grant the college offered him to read), Guttenberg agreed to return – despite the outstanding warrant for hi arrest.
This was a monumental event for the still hopeful artist community, which saw this as the inpetus that would push Paterson over the edge to become the new Greenwich Village.
I attended the festival expecting very little and got even less than I expected – except in one regard.
A three-ring circus might have seemed less hectic than the parade of harried academics scrambling to make Guttenberg feel welcome.
I read briefly at one of the open poetry readings and sang a song at one of the side shows, where I caught Suzanne’s eye in the crowd.
She smiled.
I smiled back, then followed her into the main tend where hundreds gathered to hear the all-mighty Guttenberg read.
I elbowed my way through the crowd to get next to her as people around us chirped in anticipation of the poet’s taking the stage.
“Who are you?” I asked. “And what are you?”
She frowned, a deep ridged marring her pale mid-west face around which blonde hair cascaded.
“What do you mean: what am I?” she asked, looking even more beautiful in her puzzled state than she had smiled.
“I mean everybody who is here thinks they are something, poet, writer, actor. So which one of them are you?”
Her green eyes sparkled.
“Why do I need to be anybody at all?” she asked.
“I suppose you don’t,” I said. “But I’ve noticed very few people here who are not artists of some sort.”
“Is that bad?”
“It is if you want all this to amount to something,” I said with a shrug. “Otherwise, it’s too much like we’re talking to ourselves.
Suzanne’s eyebrows rose.
“You mean to tell me you’re something, too?” she asked, mockingly.
“Yes,” I said so softly, I could hardly hear myself speak.
“And you’re here, too?” she went on.
“For now.”
“And what does that mean?”
“I’m on my way to Nashville,” I said.
“Don’t tell me you’re a country and western singer?” she said, her expression turning sour.
“What’s wrong with that?”
She glanced away, staring around at the crowd as if she didn’t want to look me in the eye.
“My mother loves country and western music,” she finally said.
“And you don’t?”
“I hate it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s always about heart ache.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s true about any country song I’ve ever heard.”
“You never heard any of my songs.”
Suzanne glanced back at me. Her smile had returned, but it had something of an unnerving twist.
“I suppose that means I have to come up to your place to hear them?” she asked.
“We could go to the park.”
Her smile wavered and she stared harder at me.
“You’re serious?” she said.
“Of course, I am.”
“All right, I’ll listen to your music,” she said. “But not today. Today I want to hear poetry.”
“You mean Guttenberg?”
“Who else? After all, he is the main attraction.”
“I suppose he is,” I mumbled.
“Don’t tell me you don’t like poetry?”
“I love poetry,” I said. “Too bad Guttenberg doesn’t write poetry.”
“Paterson’s most famous poet and you claim he doesn’t write poetry,” Suzanne mocked. “If it isn’t poetry, what is it?”
“He rants and raves, curses up and down, and other people pay for him to do it,” I said. “Every wannabe poet applauds him, feeding his ego, then goes home and writes just like him. As for being this city’s most famous poet, he’s only that to the unwashed masses. Real poets know William Carlos Williams is more important.”
“My, but you do have some very strong opinions,” Suzanne said. “What do other people here say when you start spouting?”
“They think I’m a heretic and tell me I should get out of town if I don’t like it here.”
“Has Guttenberg heard your opinions about him?”
“Oh, I told him all right.”
“And?”
“He asked me to have sex with him.”
“What?”
“You mean you don’t know? Guttenberg is gay.”
“Well, no…” Suzanne said, her face flushing a deep red. “I suppose I knew. Is he always so forward?”
“Stick around after the reading and find out.”
“What happens after the reading?”
“We all go to a bar and get drunk. There’s a jazz club around the corner. I’m told some of the poets are throwing him a big birthday bash there.”
“Won’t it be private?”
“Nothing Guttenberg does is private.”
But surviving the reading and the open, filled with Guttenberg imitators, was a chore even an ever-patient Gandhi might have despaired over.
Bad poets polished up their most tedious works with which to impress Guttenberg, hoping he might “discover” them the way Williams had discovered him.
Any other time I would have abandoned the excruciating performance. But I was intrigued by Susanne and entertained by the fact that Guttenberg – caught up in his own loud and often explosive conversation at the rear of the hall – seemed unaware of the poetic community’s efforts to impress him. Someone, in fact, had to tug his sleeve to even inform him that the affair had come to a conclusion.
At this point, everybody rose up and in a clatter of metal chairs that made even the bad poetry sound good, made their way through the doors in a rush, each poet and art lover crowding behind the vanishing Guttenberg in some kind of pecking order I did not fully comprehend, trailing his shrinking laughter that drifted back in derision they failed to understand. Most were too busy scratching and clawing at each other to get closer to him.
I held Suzanne back until the worst of the madness passed. Then, taking her arm, we leasurly strolled out into the parking lot well behind the chattering parade.
This parade, filled with people dressed up in their Sunday best, spilled onto the dismal streets like an oil spill, glistening against the gray world of Paterson’s ghetto and the dull red brick of abandoned mills. They were a shock wave over a neighborhood unaccustomed to such activities, except perhaps for the sporatic night time gun fire or the street corner social gatherings outside some of the taverns. Their voices rattled windows and doors, stirring up some of the more desperate characters, and chasing these into deeper recesses the way an army of cats might have stirred up dens filled with rats. I caught some of the faces peering out at us from the dark recesses of the deep doorways of long abandoned stores.
We caught up with the crowd of poets again in front of the Jazz Café as they attempted to squeeze through the narrow front doors all at once, expressing as savage an attitude towards each other as the most vicious street thugs.
The most important dignitaries insisted on going first, though some found difficulty in determining rank. Each acted as self-righteous as any of the fundamental Christians they often abused in their poetry, noses elevated, gazes fixed.
As was typical for the local jazz scene, the band hired for the event stunk. It’s sound was so sour I hesitated at the door.
“What’s the matter?” Suzanne asked.
“Leave it to bad poets not to know enough to hire a respectable band,” I mumbled. “They probably don’t even know what good jazz sounds like.”
Guttenberg, however, noticed. His scrubby graying beard could not hide his expression of annoyance, not just at the bad jazz, but also at the yammering of the social elite who sat around him. Their voices added disharmony to an already dischordiant music. The great poet looked around the room, his gaze clearly showing an internal conflict as to how long all of this would take and could he possibly get through it all if he had enough to drink.
Then, he saw me.
A vague remembrance stirred in his stare. He grabbed Annette Sardi, the woman who single-handedly reinvented the organized poetry scene in Paterson, and who was head ring master in the current circus.
He pointed me out to her.
At first, Sardi frowned, then a combined look of recognition and harrow came over her face, his dark brows rising high above the black rims of her thick-glasses.
She shook her head forcefully, clearly agitated when she spoke to him. But the crowd noise kept me from hearing exactly what; I didn’t need to hear it. I had heard it all before.
When Guttenberg spoke again, however, Sardi’s shoulders sagged. She gave one brief and resigned nod, then rose from the table where she’d sat with him, and made her way through the crowd towards me.
Sardi was a small woman, but stereotypically middle class Italian, dark hair, dark eyes, and always bearing an expression as if her shoes hurt. Normally, she wore very conventional flower patterned dresses, but on this occasion had dressed up with a black dress. A string of pearls decorated her neck, with matching ear rings.
She looked in even greater pain as she approached where Suzanne and I stood near the door.
“Mr. Guttenberg wants to speak with you,” she said in a whisper that sounded more like a hiss.
“Did he say why?” I asked.
“For Christ’s sake, be civil for a change. It’s his birthday. He’s important. God only knows why he wants to talk to you, but he does. Please don’t snub him the way you usually do with important people.”
“I snub people?” I said.
“Constantly. And when you’re not snubbing them, you’re offending them in some way.”
“How?”
“Stop with the inquisition. Are you coming over or not?”
“All right, I’ll talk to him. Lead on, Virgil.”
Sardi gave me a side glance, looking slightly puzzled, as if only partly getting the poetic reference. But she was much too agitated to waste time determining if I had insulted her or not.
She turned abruptly and started back through the crowd, on the assumption I would follow, and I did. So did Suzanne.
Guttenberg had grown in size as well as stature since his bohemian days in the 1940s New York City. The small forest of beer bottles others had paid for on the table in front of him partially explained the change from a skinny Jewish kid to a bloated, and sickly overweight middle-aged academic. The gray peppered his beard making him look older than he really was. But the eyes showed the struggle to maintain his health, deep, penetrating, and yet also filled with doubt.
This changed the moment I appeared, as if he’d pulled down a shade to keep anyone from seeing the real man inside.
He also looked extremely lonely, even though he sat amidst a host of admirers.
They were too much in awe of him to say anything of substance when they could speak at all. Many just gushed. Some offered gifts, which Guttenberg accepted the way a god might sacrificial offerings.
Indeed, as much as I hated the idea, he had become a god of the poetic world, one of the survivors of a Beat Generation to which middle class whites looked back at with great fondness, which disparaging the Beat decendants that carried on those traditions. Somehow, the excesses of the past seemed less offensive to middle class values than those of the current day.
Guttenberg spoke briefly to each of those who came up to his table, although his gaze became vacant the moment they vanished from sight, as if he was eracing them from existence in his head.
“I’m brought him, Mr. Guttenberg,” Sardi announced when we, too, arrived at the temple like table. She presented me with a much dignity as she could muster, her lips pale even under the bright shade of red lipstick she wore.
The great Guttenberg didn’t even look at her, dismissing her with a flick of his fingers as if might a fly.
He stared at me instead, then motioned for me, and with less enthuisam Suzanne, to sit.
We sat.
Then, he studied me some more, even as his admirers continued to bring him offerings – chapbooks and copies of poems as well as additional drinks. The table between us was littered with the remains of both, booze dripped over unopened poems like drops of blood.
I expected him to look angry or annoyed, but he only looked confused, his booze –reddened eyes bloated by the thick lenses of his old fashioned eye glasses as he stared at my face.
“Where do I know you from?” he eventually asked.
“Right here,” I said. “You came here for a reading a few years ago.”
His eyes widened with a look of sudden enlightenment.
“Ah,” he said. “You are one of the young poets who wished to study at my side.”
“No, I’m one of the young poets that told you that you were full of shit,” I said.
Sardi, still well within range to hear, let out a sharp cry.
Even Suzanne gasped.
Guttenberg, however, never blinked, though his gaze grew hard as he stared straight into my eyes.
“I also earned your ill-favor by refusing to go to a motel with you,” I went on. “If that’s what you have this time, the answer is still no.”
Guttenberg’s stare did not waver, but his gray face grew red around his glasses, and his reply when it came sounded like the sputtering of an overheated tea kettle.
“Nobody talks to me that way,” he said, and rose, the buttons on his vest catching briefly on the edge of the table as to send a shudder over it, bottles rattling, one fell spilling the remains of its contents over the hopeful scribbling of some hungry local poet.
“Mr. Guttenberg!” Sardi said. “Don’t be offended by him. He’s not one of us.”
“I’m leaving,” Guttenberg said.
“Leaving?” Sardi wailed. “You can’t leave. We’ve arranged a party in your honor.”
“Tell him that,” Guttenberg said, titling his head in my direction. “Now where is my driver?”
Sardi clung to Guttenberg’s heals as he made his way towards the door.
“That was cruel,” Suzanne told me.
“No more cruel than the false hope he seeds among all these poetic suckers.”
“You sound jealous.”
“I’m not.”
“I think you are. He’s free and famous. You’re trapped here in Paterson, growing more and more disillusioned.”
I looked at her face, her pale mid-western complexion, painted blue and red by the reflected bar lights, a tainted angel with blonde hair cascading down either side of her face to her shoulders. Her gaze was stern, but not unkind, perhaps even a little concerned as if she felt sorry for me.
A bit of anger stirred in me, then died. I shrugged.
“Maybe you’re right to some degree,” I finally said. “But enough of this. How about you come up to my place to hear some of my songs?”
“I think not,” she said, and then took up the trail Guttenberg and Sardi had taken, not angry, not cold, just matter of fact.
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