King 11
Sardi saw the two of them at events afterwards, but they did not seem together.
"He watched her all right," Sardi said. "You could not miss her even in the biggest crowd with her blonde hair and her pretty face."
Suzzane enjoyed herself. Zarra did not. She laughed a lot. He grew annoyed. He tried to get her attention. She ignored him. When she couldn't avoid meeting his gaze, her eyes seemed to cloud over and her mouth puckered up with distaste."
"Everybody could tell he wanted to talk to her, but every time he tried, she ignored him," Sardi said. "Then, I watched them at one of our seasonal folk festivals. The band played some version of Dixieland. I watched him screw himself up to ask her, and when he finally did, she told him to go away."
"Why?" Zarra asked. "What is your problem, anyway? Are you still offended by what I said about Guttenberg?"
"No, it's not that," Suzzane said. "It's the others. They say you ruined the Falls Festival by scaring him off."
"I didn't ruin anything," Zarra said. "They got their funding cut and they're blaming it on me."
"I don't understand."
"Most of the poets here have been getting money through SETA. Ronald Reagan cut them off and now they're pissed. But instead of blaming themselves because they're addicted to grants and federal money, they blame me. They can't live with the fact that Paterson's great art revival is falling in around their ears."
Suzanne nodded her head slowly as if the things Zarra said made sense. "I've heard talk that some want to go off to San Francisco," she said. "Some place where the scene is still alive."
"They won't find what they want in San Francisco or Cincinnati or even New York City," Zarra said. "It's not a place that makes art, it's talent."
"Oh you!" Suzanne said and marched away.
**********
Months later, they ran into each other again at an impromptu poetic affair, something thrown together in a desperate attempt to revive waning interest in the Paterson art scene. The ranks of writers, poets and artists had thinned -- down from hundreds to loyal dozens, many of whom were secretly making plans of their own for trips out.
Suzanne had lost her indignant air, though not the 1950s Greenwich Village black beret or her long-legged tights. Her blonde hair and green eyes drew Zarra's continued admiration, only this time, she did not glare at him, in fact, she moved towards him, apparently relieved to find his familiar face in the crowd.
"I thought you were going to Nashville?" she said.
"I am."
"When?"
"When I'm ready."
"But how long will that be?" she asked.
Later, Suzzane would confide in him of her own growing panic, each of Paterson's fires making it look as if her own dreams might vanish in their flames. Even the last of the main stream businesses had begun to falter and fail, or betrayed Paterson by moving to the malls -- thereby sucking the last drops of financial blood from the city.
She spoke about her desperation and the near regret she felt for leaving her father's farm, where her doom did not depend upon declining federal dollars, and where she did not have to live with the pretense of art.
After knocking around with these people, Suzanne had apparently finally come to the same conclusion that Zarra had held all along, predicting the death of the city and its art. After a decade battling the malls in Wayne, Paterson could not handle sucker punch Ronald Reagan issued. But Paterson itself had changed, and if a new Gutternberg or Williams were to rise from its streets today, someone would mug him, steal his money, burn his poetry and laugh over the foolishness of anyone stupid enough to think this place worth writing about.
"I'm still polishing my craft," Zarra told her, explaining why he had not yet left. "I'll know when I'm ready."
"Are you seeing anybody?"
Zarra's diary for that date -- part of the collection of documents seized after the shooting at the falls -- described his reaction.
"The question came out of nowhere," he wrote. "The shock must have showed on my face. She had a look in her green eyes I never expected. And she licked her thin lips as if she was hungry."
"What do you mean?" Zarra asked, shifting as if uncomfortable with their sudden closeness.
"She smelled so sweet," Zarra wrote at some point later that evening. "I kept staring down at her small breasts and how pointed them seemed, poking against her white blouse."
"What do you think I mean?" she asked, her sharp fingernail touching his chest and slowly lowering, coming to a stop at his belt. "You didn't answer my question. Are you seeing anybody? Romantically?"
"Well, no," he stuttered. "I guess I'm not."
"Would you like to see me?"
"How the hell could I answer that?" Zarra wrote. "I was practically shaking with desire. See her? I had thought of nearly nothing else since the first time I met her. I dreamed of singing my songs for her and writing poetry to her. It was like I was trapped inside one of those silly romantic movies I always mocked."
"Well?" she asked.
Zarra whispered: "Yes."
She grinned, and took his arm. "Then maybe we should go to your place and listen to your music, eh?"
***********
Zarra had taken over a Main Street loft after Jackson Creeley moved out.
Located on the sagged upper floor of a furniture store just north of Market and Main, the apartment resembled something straight out of a 1930s Greenwich Village movie. Old photos of the place taken during the decade or more in which Zarra shared the loft showed an interior thick with plants and books. The plants, however, had not survived Jackson's leaving, since Zarra apparently lacked Jackson’s green thumb.
The front door was situated in such as way as to not be completely visible from the street, located behind the bend of the store window and lost to reflections. This door led to a small bottom vestibule and a sharp left turn up twenty three steps to yet another door on top.
Like most lofts, the space upstairs was never meant to serve as a residence, designed instead for storage -- so its largest space remained open and high with a large, cracked skylight. Someone had installed walls along the front portion that created a small kitchen, bathroom with toilet and shower, and a small bedroom. But for the most part, the loft had one large room, with a twelve foot ceiling through which the skylight was installed.
The stairs from below came into the loft at its northwest corner, where another smaller set of stairs led to the roof above and the loft opened to the right. Little had changed from the photograph except for the plants hanging around the perimeter of the skylight, dead and brown, but never removed. The bookcases stood along two walls. A cable spool about as large around as a small child's swimming pool served as a table -- the stained dishes left there suggesting the occupants ate their meals on it.
Other subtler differences from the photographs showed on the book shelves and around the cot-like bed in the corner. Whereas the older man had stocked these shelves with volumes on history, geology and such, the younger resident stuffed them with music books, record albums, poetry books and as many as fifty handwritten journals, thick with observations he had made during his travels around the city.
Zarra also maintained several guitars, that had grown dusty since his most recent detention, their strings vibrating with ghostly chords with each stern footsteps of searching officers across the apartment floor. The court warrants had permitted unlimited inspection, and our staff burrowed into Zarra's private life with the focused efficiency of worker ants. Every book got opened, every page turned.
From this, we learned that Zarra occupied one corner of the main room, around his most personal possession were kept: guitars, dressers full of clothing and a portable open closet bar for his better if rarely used clothing. His shoes stood near the door from the street, lined up like little soldiers, one stained set of work boots reserved largely for his job as short order cook at the eatery, another brown set reserved for more social occasions, while a third, a pair of sneakers, showed the wear of his daily jogging ritual.
His roommate, Jack Shaw, apparently occupied one of the three rooms along the front of the loft, with a small window looking down onto Main Street. This space had apparently previously served as Zarra's room when the old man still maintained the loft, but had become the possession of Shaw once the old man moved out and Zarra took on a room mate.
Where as Zarra, for the most part, lived a largely Spartan life, each possession assigned to a particular space in his corner of the loft, or set upon the bookshelf in the public portion, Shaw seemed to lack every sense of order, his bed strewn with crushed pillows and tangled bedding. The floor was a clutter of magazines, dirty laundry and other jetsam, as was the top of any flat surface. Piles of change, store receipts, used tissues, and such filled in the gaps left. The small room, although as sparsely furnished as the rest of loft with only a dresser, bed and end table, seemed crowded, bearing the slight tang of human occupation the rest of the loft lacked.
The small kitchen in the room next door had a small 1940s style refrigerator, a similar stove with two burners and an oven too small to fit more than a small roasting chicken, a table with two chairs, a counter top, sink and some metal cabinets filled largely with jars of honey, oats and other cereals, and a variety of packaged dry goods. A cup bearing the brown stains of coffee sat in the sink. Coffee rings showed on the table. A pile of newspapers sat in the corner, as did a bucket full of plastic and glass bottles, apparently prepared for recycling -- although the city had not yet instituted a recycling program. Another container was half full of trash. In this, investigators found several hand-written notes from Shaw to Zarra, mostly making excuses as to why the former would be late for work.
The stair leading to the roof showed significantly more traffic treed than the stairs down to the street, and we soon discovered the one or both men used the roof regularly to as a way in and out of the loft. A trail of scuff marks across the tar surface led from the roof top door, passed the skylight to the top of a fire escape. This descended into a gated car port below, where a series of garages faced into it, helping to form a small fortress.
Our investigators also found a dead pit bull below, which had been shot twice within hours of the shooting at the Great Falls, suggesting that there might have been some connection between the two.
Oil stains along patches concrete and dirt showed the car port had served as a home maintenance center for many of the people who rented out garages there, and Zarra's garage had a ample collection of tools, auto supplies and such to testify to his own participation in this. He also had a variety of body working tools, explaining many of the repairs performed on the 1968 GTO found in the garage he had rented.
A check of VIN number with the state Division of Motor Vehicles showed a surprising history. This was not just any GTO, but the very automobile Zarra's uncle, Charles Grimes had purchased before his trip to and ultimate death in Vietnam. The original documentation claimed the vehicle was originally mustard green with a black interior. But the upholstery had worn so thin inside from years of use, Zarra had covered over the seats in the front with slip covers. He had purchased two used seats, which sat in the back of his garage, apparently waiting for when he had time to install them. The car's exterior color had changed more dramatically from his mustard color to a dull gray. This was the result of sanding down and painting with a primer, as well as significant patch work to combat rust.
DMV records showed the sale of the car in early 1969 to a Jose Gurevera of Paterson, who in early 1970 reported the vehicle stolen. Police recovered the car in 1972 as the result of a motor vehicle stop and eventual drug arrest in Wayne, from which Nicholas Rivera was later charged. Gurevera could not be found to claim the car and it sat in the Paterson City gauge for two years until it was auctioned off to a William Weatherbie of Little Falls for $1,250. In 1977, Weatherbie reported the vehicle stolen, at which point the official records ceased until 1983 when Zarra attempted to register the car again, having purchased it from a Pine Brook junkyard. After some legal issues were resolved -- Zarra paying some restitution to Weatherbie, a new title was issued to Zarra, who apparently set about restoring the vehicle.
In searching Zarra's apartment, I discovered he kept a daily journal, a habit he had apparently only instituted about the time of the festival 1980, and perhaps inspired by his budding romance to Suzzane.
In it, he detailed their first night together, clearly puzzled about her sudden affection for him, after so much previous hostility.
"I asked why she had picked me," he wrote. "She stirred me in the bed beside me. I could feel her nakedness under the covers, so smooth I began to get excited again. Her face came close to mine, her smile a little devious, her green eyes were dilated from the dark of the loft."
"What do you mean?" Suzzane asked.
"You came here even though you didn't want to. Are you sure I'm the right person?"
Suzanne sighed, and stared up at the arched ceiling and the shadows created by the sun through the skylight. "What's a right person?" she asked.
"The person you ought to be with."
She laughed. "Then that depends upon who you talk to, doesn't it? If you ask my father, he would give you a different right person than I would."
"But I'm asking you."
"I don't think so," she said with a sigh. "But the right person isn't going to get me where I want."
This apparently alarmed Zarra, and he wrote that he sat up in bed, "Which means?"
"Which means I'm not the pretty little innocent girl you first met," Suzanne said.
"Suzzane had an odd way of looking at me," Zarra wrote later in recalling that moment for his journal, "staring up through her batting eye lashes, mockingly innocent."
"Do you disapprove?" Suzzane asked.
"I'm not sure," Maxwell said. "I've always believed you can only depend upon yourself."
Suzanne's laugh, Zarra wrote, was harsh.
"No wonder you're still here," she said. "Don't you know you can't get anywhere without knowing someone important?"
"That all depends upon where you want to go," Maxwell said.
"I want to go to the top," Suzanne said (Zarra reported a sudden look of intensity in her eyes.) "I want to stand up there and look down and laugh at all the people who said I couldn't make it."
"People who look down often fall down," Maxwell said.
"People who don't look down, don't know where they are or why it's important to be there."
"Then it makes me wonder why you would associate yourself with me," he said softly. "By your standards, I'm one of those nobody people you wouldn't want to know."
Suzanne shook her head.
"No, you're different from the way you seem. You knew all those people around the falls were phony. You even told Guttenberg off. I was very angry with you at the time. But now I think you're the only one who knew what he was about."
"But am I worth knowing?"
"I think your music is."
Maxwell laughed, shaking the small bed in which the two of them had managed to fit.
"But you said you didn't like country music."
"What you do isn't country music," Suzanne said. "At least, not the kind my father used to listen to. You don't have the godawful twang."
"I'm not a singer from the west or south, why should I have a twang?"
"Because most of them do," Suzanne said. "And you're better than they are, too. I don't know how to put my finger on it, but you touch me in a special way, as if you're inside me, reading what I'm thinking and feeling. That kind of music will go very far someday."
"And you're banking on me making it?"
Suzanne snuggled closer to him. "You know I am."
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