Dancer 8
A few months later, I ran into Suzanne again at an impromptu poetry reading local artists had thrown together in a desperate attempt to revive the already fading Paterson art scene.
The numbers had dwindled. The cream of the artist crop had mostly taken off for other places.
Even the bad poets had plans to leave.
Suzanne had lost her indignant air.
But she had apparently adopted a beret and black leotards typical of a Beat scene from the 1940s Greenwich Village rather than 1980s Paterson.
She didn’t see me a first and looked a lot like a lost sheep among a pathetic group of mangy wolves.
When she finally spotted me, she looked relieved at finding a familiar face, relieved enough to overlook our last encounter. She made her way across the room to where I sat in the corner among the mostly empty tables.
“I thought you were going to Nashville?” she said, taking the empty seat across from mine.
“I am.”
“When?”
“In my own good time.”
She laughed and shook her head, her long blonde hair swirling around her face from beneath the beret. But the laugh had a hitch to it, like a faulty carberator, sputtering at the end for lack of fuel. Her eyes had a pained, even scared look I had seen in other artists just before they made their way out of town.
“You’re not the same bubbling Midwest girl I met here last time,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” she admitted with a more honest, but somewhat sardonic laugh. “This town has opened my eyes.”
“As far as what?”
“Life,” she said. “I always heard bad things about places like Paterson. But I didn’t believe them until I got here. This place is falling apart.”
“That’s nothing new,” I said, but knew what she meant, about the dreams the city fathers had for restoration and how things went up in smoke with each new fire that gutted buildings they’d hope to renovate.
It was like Dresdin after the fire storm in one of the Kurt Vonegut novels, even I felt it, and I has assumed myself immune.
Long established stores like Sterns/Quackenbush fled to less charred pastures of the suburban shopping malls in Wayne, relieving their wealthy white patrons of the burden of coming to Paterson to shop. Those that held on such as Meyer Brothers burned along with the mills.
‘It’s so bad I’m almost sorry I left my father’s farm,” she said.
“You don’t really mean that,” I said.
“No, but I feel just as closed in here. Back home, my future didn’t depend on someone in Washington deciding whether or not Paterson deserves grants,” she said.
“Things have gotten worse under Reagan,” I admitted.
The presumption that the Republican president would continue to support Paterson evaporated with the election of a Democratic mayor. CETA funding that had supported so many of the cultural programs vanished under the president’s tickle down theory. The wealthy investors that were supposed to pick up the tab simply took their business elsewhere or worse, stacked their corporate earnings. Homelessness, which many thought had come to an end, returned in mass as federal substities for mental institutions dried up. Those who were too ill to commit crimes and find new homes in county, state or federal prisons took up residence like trolls under bridges or in other public spaces. This added to the impression of Paterson’s decay.
“Are you doing all right?” she asked.
I shrugged. “As all right as I can,” I said.
“Are you seeing anyone?” she asked so abruptly it took me a moment to respond.
“You mean, romantically?”
“Of course, I mean romantically,” she laughed, and then grew serious again, looking straight at me. “I’ve seen the way you look at me and wondered…if we might spend some times together.”
Shock best described the turmoil that went on inside of me, although I did my best not to let it show. She searched my expression, trying to read my reaction, and unable to catch even a glimpse of how much her statement had impacted me, she seemed to grow sad.
“I’m sorry, I should not…” she started.
In interrupted her.
“Of course, I would,” I managed to gush out finally.
Rip Van Winkle could not have felt so completely unhinged waking into a new reality he never expected, after a sleep he never intended to take.
Her eyes widened and her expression brightened, even though she also blushed.
“Great,” she said, shoving back her chair as she stood up. “Let’s go.”
“What?” I said, rising much more slowly and much more confused.
“Don’t think you it’s about time we went up to your place – to hear your music?”
I didn’t live far from the bar – a loft with a front door on Main Street, which was a short walk up Cianci Street to Market, and then to Main. This was the same loft Creeley had occupied when I first met him, and where had lived since those troubling days dealing with Puck.
Creeley, who had lost his job as a tour guide at the Great Falls thanks to Reagan’s cuts, had recently moved out to a place in more remote Lake Apatcong in a way place called his “country estate.”
But his ghost haunted the loft as if he had never left, and I stumbled over memories of him daily, strangely aware that I had taken up a similar role as his in the mythology of this troubled city.
Suzanne looked a little skeptical when I stopped in front of the store since the front door to the apartment was tucked away and not easily visible from the sidewalk.
“You live here?” she said. “In a furniture store?”
“Upstairs,” I told her, and led here to the doorway, hidden in a ripple of the front window like the entrance to a cave. This door led to a very narrow set of stairs, which we climbed with the old wooden stairs creaking under every footfall. And this led to another door at the top, the door to the loft itself.
Located above one of the few remaining furniture stores in Paterson, the loft looked and felt as if it belonged in Greenwich Village – not the rapidly gentrified Greenwich Village being overrun these days suburban misfits seeking to reinvent their lives after their parents brought them up in protective bubbles in places like Livingston or Paramus – but a Village even I had not actually known, having already vanished when my generation invaded it and changed it into something psychedelic. The loft was a throw back to the kinds of lofts Guttenberg and his friends knew along 21 st Street in Manhattan, during that time before they all became famous, before Guttenberg’s Columbia friend shot his wife in Mexico and his other whacko poet friend was decapitated by sticking his head out the window of a moving subway car.
It was a Greenwich Village I had searched for among the ruins, but never found, aware later that the face of that place changed with each generation, and that I had been born one generation too late to take advantage of it, just the way Guttenberg had been born one generation too late to take advantage of the Greenwich Village he saw evaporating on his arrival there, one filled with the beatniks of the 1920 who had become drunks and drug addicts, trading poetry to the tourists for drink.
So each time I walked up the steps from the street and into the loft, I felt transported back in time, into that post world war period of my uncle’s upbringing to when people still had hope – just as I had felt it when Creeley first took me in.
But the loft had changed since then as well, each room showing decay that I was desperate to stop yet could not. The door at the top of the stairs led to the main room to the left, and three smaller rooms – a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom – to the right. The main loft was paneled in bookcases and the skylight that filled most of the ceiling was decorated with a collection of planters that had once made the place seem jungle-like, but and since withered, leaving dead tenticals to brush the top of my head each time I passed under them.
Creeley had taken his vast library – volumes and manuscripts on local history – with him so that most of the bookcases were filled with dust and spider webs.
I had moved out of the one bedroom near the kitchen when Creeley vacated the place, and set up my new residence in one corner of the larger room like a hermit, keeping close to that corner all those things I needed or wanted, so as to create an extremely crowded space in one that was largely otherwise unoccupied.
As with most of the space above the stores along this portion of Main Street, the loft was never meant to serve for human occupation. Someone prior to Creeley – Creeley never said who – had converted the loft, creating the bedroom and kitchen in the front, allowing for some semblance of civilized life.
To the immediate left of the door was a second set of stairs, wider and fewer, that led to another door – this one accessing the room, part of a somewhat secret escape passage that led across the roof and along the skylight to a fire escape, something we could use if someone like the police showed up pounding on the front door. Creeley mostly used the roof for additional plants. I used the fire escape as a short cut to the garages that existed onto Market Street.
Suzanne, who slipped through the doorway behind me, halted and stared.
Her eyes glowed as if she saw a scene out of a 1930s film about life in Greenwich Village or the Left Bank in Paris. Then she glanced at me, her expression changing from humored tolerance to begrudging respect. I was living some version of the life she had envisioned for herself when leaving her father’s farm.
She strolled into the main room, her features illuminated by the slanted light coming down through the skylight. She studied each of the withered plants, smiling over them in unspoken approval, they, too, fitting some vision of bohemian life she had shaped for herself in her head. She seemed to think I had installed them for effect, rather than out of neglect.
“I love the plants,” she said. “How did you get them to look so good?”
“Practice,” I said, although she did not appear to get the joke.
Then, she moved out from under the lighted portion of the room to the walls of mostly vacant book shelves, dust filling the space where piles of notebooks had once stood. Creeley had spent a vast part of his sixty odd years filling them with drawings and notes on the history he uncovered during his wanderings in Paterson. When he left, he left a void I could not fill, although in one corner I had a much humbler collection of notebooks containing notes, stories, poems, and songs I hoped would some day leave their own impact on the world.
She paused at the bed, a single mattress on a somewhat squeaky set of springs that often reminded me of the bunks I had seen in the county jail. She sat down on it, bounced a few times, and then looked up at me.
Her bright eyes seemed filled with haystacks and soft fall evenings, thawing something in me I had not realized was frozen. I felt as naïve as a farm boy stumbling into a barn to find the cow girl there alone.
“Well? Are you going to play your songs for me?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, and moved around a large wooden cable spindle I had collected from near the rail yards to use as a table. My guitar stood in a stand on the other side. I picked it up, and strummed to get into the mood. Then slowly, I played one song, then another until they rang out in the empty loft as if someone other than me was singing them.
She stared for a long time, listening intently, and then when I was done, she shook her head.
“Those aren’t country songs,” she said.
“What do you mean? You don’t like them?”
“Of course, I like them. They are not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“The twangy stuff my father used to listen to.”
“I can do those, too.”
“Don’t ruin it for me,” she said.
“Okay, what next?”
“Come here.”
“Huh?”
She patted a spot on the bed beside her, and like a grateful puppy, I stumbled there and sat, laying my guitar aside near the foot of the bed.
How I came to kiss her was unclear, but once there, I could not stop, feeling her soft lips against mine, and the shape of her chest pressed against me.
She tasted wonderful, like warm farm-fresh milk on a chilly morning, sweet on the tip of the tip of my tongue. I wanted to get down deep inside her, to feel her from the inside out, and for a long time, we simply kissed. I didn’t even let my hands wander to other parts of her I ached to touch.
Perhaps this kiss was what I had wanted from the first moment I saw her, needing it to fill me up, and it did.
She drew back, her pink lips glistening with the remnants of her lip gloss, and her eyes glistening with a look of surprise.
“You do surprise me,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought you didn’t like me.”
“How can you say that when I can’t keep my eyes off you?”
“Or your mouth,” she laughed.
Then we kissed again, this time, my fingers finding the buttons on her blouse, managing somehow to pop each open to access beneath. Her bra was more difficult, the clasp in back resisting for so long I thought I would never get it undone, finally, coming open, leaving that garment to fall away and her breasts exposed.
She had small but shapely breasts, the tips of which were made firm by the chill air of the room. My mouth closed around one nipple, lips fitting around its perimeter as my tongue played with the tip. She half laughed and half moaned.
Something oozed out of her onto my tongue, and it tasted warm and sweet, and made me crave more, making me suck hard so that her laugh turned into a deep moan.
As with the first kiss, the rest was lost in a fog, my hands moving places I’d not been in a long time, lingering there, feeling her legs close around me so I could not draw myself out easily, even had I wanted to. So I clung, feeling every inch of her pressed against me, my movement becoming her movement, my moans echoed by hers.
I wasn’t even sure how long it lasted except when we fell apart, the light had faded through the skylight, and night gripped the world inside and outside the loft, with the two of us clinging to my single bed as if a life raft.
I felt her beside me rather than saw her, her breathing finally slowed again, back under control as mine was.
“Why are you here?” I asked, breaking the silence that we both seemed reluctant to break.
“What do you mean?” she asked, turning to her side, her gaze fixed on the stars glimmering beyond the skylight.
“You came to my loft after you told me you wouldn’t,” I said.
“I changed my mind,” she said.
“From my brief contact with you, I suspect that doesn’t happen very often.”
“It happens.”
“Are you sure I’m the right person?”
“What’s the right person?” she asked with a sigh.
“The person you ought to be with.”
“That depends on who you ask,” she said. “If you asked my father, he would say you’re definitely not the right person for me.”
“I’m not asking your father. I’m asking you.”
“Probably not,” she said. “But the right person isn’t going to get mere where I want to go.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m not the pretty innocent little girl you first met. I’ve wised up since then. Does that shock you?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’ve always believed that the only person you can absolutely rely on is yourself.”
Suzanne let out a harsh laugh.
“No wonder you’re still here,” she said. “Don’t you know that you can’t get anywhere unless you know the right people?”
“There’s that word again, right,” I said. “I suppose you mean something different by it than I do.”
“I mean important people, people who can put you where you need to be.”
“And where do you need to be?”
“At the top,” she said. “I want to go all the way to the top. I want to stand up there and look back down at all the people who said I could never make it.”
“People who look down often fall down.”
“People who don’t never know what it means to get there.”
“Then you’ve answered my question,” I said. “You don’t belong with me. I’m a nobody.”
“You will be. The songs you played for me were great.”
“But you don’t like country music.”
“I like your songs.”
“And you’re banking on me making it?”
“You bet I am.”
************************
Time tested her patience; and she failed.
Oh, she tried hard enough, even moving in with me when her own resources failed, filling up the vacant space Creeley had left in my life, her scent lingering the old loft like of a ghost.
But for a while, we were an item on the local art scene, a perfect artistic couple others always cooed over and presumed we were bound together by fate and attraction.
They had the attraction right, but fate had other plans, and so did Suzanne.
She needed me to move more quickly than I wanted to move, to make the transition from Paterson poet/songwriter to the big scene across the Hudson River, something I was not yet ready to do, any more than I was ready to pack up and move to Nashville.
Paterson was no longer a viable market for her. She needed to test her meddle in New York and insisted I come along with her, growing sad, even bitter when I refused.
“It’s the wrong direction for me,” I told her, keeping quiet about how I did not want to get caught up in the New York City arts scene, filled with distorted egos and a social agenda I did not share.
“But you’re not going anywhere,” Suzanne complained. “And I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Give me time, and we’ll get there together,” I assured her.
“I don’t have time,” she said.
So we parted ways.
For a time, we even kept in touch. She wrote back to Paterson giving me a kind of progress report. She was not being completely unkind, but it did have the sting of “I told you so” with each “wish you were here.”
She met the right people and began that long climb to the top she always craved for. But the higher she climbed, the less frequent she wrote until after a time, she stopped communicating at all.
Rumor replaced solid information.
Jealous artists who had dismissed Suzanne as a hick began to tell cruet and twisted tales of her success, typical tales that I had heard about other opportunists, doing all they could to worm their way through the complicated maze of art notoriety, filled with reports of who saw her and what she supposedly did to advance her career.
These jealous artists, whose own careers had sputtered out and condemned them to lives in Paterson or trivial trips to the Big Apple, made a point of seeking me out to keep me informed.
The more objective reports indeed showed Suzanne on the road to stardom. The New York Times even made mention of her when she was hired by a prestigious dance troop with the anticipation that she would soon headline.
The bad news also came via The New York times in a short brief in the entertainment section, detailing her fall during a rehearsal in which she broke her leg in two places, ruining a very promising career.
After that, the rumor mill went beserk, offering specific details about her rapid decline, such as the report of her marriage to a mobster, and her performance at a 42 nd Street peep show. One rumor claimed she even sent out invitations to her pornographic performance, although I never received one. Finally from a reliable source, I learned that she had been admitted to an upstate sanitorium – after which there was a long lull between reports.
*****************
I read about her attempted suicide some time later in the local newspaper.
She had for some reason wandered back into Paterson after being released from the sanitorium, and in what may well have been a symbolic gesture tried to jump off the bridge over The Great Falls.
The police caught her before she could leap, took her to Paterson General Hospital for a pscyological examation. And for some reason, the hospital released her again.
I figured if she tried it once, she might try it again. So I took a stroll down Market to Spruce, then up Spruce to the park that stood astride the Passaic River where the falls fell through the watergap there.
It was evening. Paterson had a queer air, thick with the change of season, winter only reluctantly giving up its strangle hold on the city and its inhabitants. On such nights, mist rose from the water feeding a greater fog that crawled down through the city streets, carving up the city into islands of dark buildings. People appeared and disappeared, passing me going the other way, or me passing them huddled against the chill in empty doorways. They were all ghosts on a ghostly night.
I could hear the muffled highway traffic, but struggled in the dimness to locate which direction it was, losing somewhat bearings that should have been ingrained in my genes.
I passed the Great Falls Grill at the end of Market where a police car sat parked with it headlights extinguished. The lights popped on the moment I passed. The round, pudgy face of Officer Wilson floated behind the windshield like a bloated gold fish. For some reason, Wilson decided to follow me – though I did not suspect myself as the target of his sudden exiting the lot.
He drove so slowly, I almost out ran him and mine was a leisurely pace. I heard the pop of the patrol car’s tires on the gravel near the shoulder of the road, and felt the car creeping behind me the way someone feels the presence of some predator. Around us, the shapes of the old mills appeared and disappeared, part of some massive man-made cavern long abandoned, and yet still impressive. At times like these I felt utterly insignificant.
So muffled were the usual sounds of the city that I might have been strolling through Paterson at any moment in its long history, striding along roads in 1886 or 1786, and if I bent my imagination to it, I might even have detected the sound of distant horse hooves and creaking cart wheels rolling over the city’s then cobblestone roads. The fog, oozing around each lamp post, made them seem like icons of the past, gas or whale oil fueled, providing only the minimal amount of light allowing me to proceed.
Plumes of smoke curled out of the gaps of the mills broken windows as real firelight flicker within the cavernous interior, warming the stiff bones of the city’s homeless or providing a way for the local junkies to brew their fix as if these were dens filled with evil witches and warlocks the city could not exorcise. Heroin and crack had become a way of life here, even among many of the artists. Those most down and out lived in these caves.
This was not a comfortable walk, even by daylight, but on nights like this, the place filled me with dread, not over the potential violence streets gangs might wield, but over something else I could not quite define. Creeley, claiming himself a warlock, said spirits of the past rose up from between the cracks of bricks to reclaim their world on such nights. While I didn’t fully believe his myth-making, the thought of it proved enough for me to quicken my pace. I needed to warm up, too, as the chill of the night settled deep into my bones.
I dreaded most that I might find Suzanne had succeeded in taking the plunge, one more dead body at the foot of the historic falls.
Wilson’s patrol car huffed and puffed behind me as much as the fat cop might have if he had tried to climb the hill without it. I realized at this point that he was behind me for a reason. Perhaps he thought I was one of the lost white boys from Wayne, who had taken a drunken wrong turn out of the strip clubs on Market and was about to wander into read danger in the fog. Such men often did not make their way out again.
A few lights glistened off the dark side of Garret Mountain as the fog thinned with the rising elevation, the worst and thickest of the fog clinging to the river and thus the falls, and I plunged headlong into it like a lost soul. Bits of ice and the remnants of soot-blackened snow clung to the curbs, as did the still more stubborn accumulations on the mountain. Both melted slowly in the above freezing temperature, liquid oozing down toward the river basin and across the slanted street. The river curved here, forming a crescent across the northern part of the city so that everything eventually dribbled into it at some point in its journey from the more distant and mystical Lake Passaic in far western New Jersey to the top of Newark Bay where it met up with the greater Hackensack River for the final plunge into New York Harbor well to the south and east.
The park gate appeared out of the fog like the entrance to a graveyard. Perhaps it was, so vested with America’s early history that no doubt ghosts wandered its paths during those hours when the rest of the world slept. I turned onto on of those paths, passing under the arch and through the gate no lock secured. This was the place where Alexander Hamilton had stood looking over the froth of the falls two centuries ago, deciding then and there that this place would become the foundation for America’s industry.
Creeley, who always preferred to have kept it as a sleepy farm community, claimed the city never recovered, and spent a majority of his time in the city sifting through the ruins seeking artifacts from a time when this had largely been a trading post and transfer point for produce sent east to the port in Hoboken.
I reached Hamilton’s bust, but could see almost nothing of the river below, or the powerhouse, let alone the falls that were imbedded into the granite walls beyond. I could vaguely see the two bridges that crossed over the water gap, the nearest carrying a viaduct of some sort, the farthest, a foot bridge over which people could wander and from which they could stare down into the watery gulf of the falls themselves.
I turned back through the gate, and then walked up and over the first leg of the street bridge. This eventually crossed over the river itself. But I didn’t go that far, taking the first right after the powerhouse and into the upper park. The powerhouse churned; its mighty turbines energized water siphoned from the falls, supplying power to a city which industry no longer needed.
I entirely forgot about Wilson until I was halfway across the gravel yard and Wilson’s patrol car pulled in behind me, framing me in its high beams. He turned on the overheads, alternately illuminating the fog in read and blue.
I stopped and turned to greet the car as its tires popped over the loose gravel and came to a halt a few feet from me. Wilson did not get out immediately, his fat face floating behind the hazy windshield like a priest behind the screen of a confessional. And like most of the priests I had met, he seemed determined to let me wait, a kind of personal torture to let me guess what it was I did wrong, and anticipate punishment.
Behind me, the two narrow bridges I had seen from the lower park crossed over the chaism of the falls, one a foot bridge for viewing, the other bearing the two foot wide duct that fed water to generating plant. The footbridge had a small sign saying “closed.”
The mayor had ordered both shut to the public after Suzanne’s attempted plunge.
Wilson oozed out of his patrol car like a body double for Java the Hut, his uniform pants so wide they might well swallow the world. He was the same cop I remembered from routine patrols near here when I was a kid, there was simply much more of him. His hair had grown gray as had his thick eyebrows. But he had the same dark distrusting eyes, and a perpetual smirk, giving off the impression that he knew more than any one else about everything, and dared anyone to challenge him. I had seen him do mean things, though he recent bulk made some of these impossible now, leaving him to depend more upon his reputation than actuality.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked, huffing, out of breath from the mere climb out of his car. “Don’t you know the park is closed after dark?”
He squinted at me, his dark eyes showing a glint of vague recollection.
“No one listens to those signs,” I said.
The metal sign near the open gate from the street was old that drips of rust showed down its face from the bolts.
“You should,” the cop said. “We had a jumper here the other day. We don’t need another one.”
“I’m looking for the girl who tried to jump,” I said.
Wilson’s eyes grew wide for a moment, then narrowed again with growing suspicion.
“Why?” he asked.
“I used to know her,” I said. “I thought maybe I could help.”
The laugh the cop emitted came straight out of the past, mocking and cynical, and his mean grin filled his face with a viciousness that I had seen too many times.
“And you expected to find her here?” he mocked. “Go to the nut ward at St. Joe’s. That’s where they took her.”
“I went there. They let her go. I figured she might come back here.”
“No on my beat, she won’t. Now get out of here before I run you in on suspicion.”
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