King 14
A street urchin named Morrow said he saw Zarra that night descending from the area of the falls.
Morrow suffered a growth impairment that had caused doctors to predict an early childhood death.
Morrow believing he had nothing to lose but his soul devolved into every vice and associated with every junkie so that when he survived to adulthood, he became something of a living legend, a pixie floating in the old mills section respected if not loved by the general population of junkies and thugs, looking more like a child than an adult well-versed in vice.
“He was always wandering around through the abandoned mills,” Morrow told me. “But I remember him that night because it was cold and he was still wet from mists near the falls. He looked like a ghost wandering around those old mills.”
Although the city fathers kept promising to renovate the area, for years the mills sat, a canyon of crumbling brick that represented the heart and soul of the historic district.
Morrow head heard the echo of Zarra’s steps and looked out one of the uncovered windows to see him strolling down the other side.
A few electric lights glowed from the overly tall windows of the factory at the corner, one of the handful buildings from Paterson’s glorious past converted for modern-day use. The city restored Rogers Train Manufacturing Company building for use as a museum, though the windows remained dark and its halls mostly empty. Nearby, the 1827 Union Works stood, in much less pristine condition, used now as a Christian school with toddlers stumbling in and out during the day.
But in the growing dark, both buildings looked like the dead remains of some fallen giant, windows sealed like penny covered eyes, while further in, shrouded by the remains of last year’s brown weeds, stood the crumbling bricks of the unused mills, their faces scarred with frequent fires or the spray can messages of street gangs claiming them as turf. Most remained dark except for the flickering glow of trash can fires from inside, giving these the grim grins of jack-a-lanterns faces.
Editorials in The Paterson Evening News lambasted local officials for leaving these attended, repeating back the boasts about their serving as the Renaissance of the city, when for the most part only the junkies used them: to melt their dope or warm their bones.
“He kept shivering,” Morrow said. “And he wasn’t dressed for winter. He had a thin denim jacket on like he was expecting and early spring.”
The few unbroken and still operating street lamps along that stretch gave Zarra’s brown hair a silvery crown, and shimmered off his mist-moisten eyebrows and lashes.
“He had a piece of paper clutched in his fist,” Morrow said. “He kept looking down at it as he walked, and mumbling `how could they let her go after what she did?’ I didn’t know what to make of it. I thought maybe he was high or had gone a little Loonie like his old roommate Jackson. That old faggot used to wander the streets talking to himself, too.”
Although that section seemed deserted, Zarra was not alone, and his movement stirred up shapes out of the shadows who fled ahead of each footfall -- slipping silently from shadow to shadow, their faces invisible except for the flash of alarm in their eyes.
Zarra had wandered often these streets, following in the footsteps of his former roommate Creeley Jackson after the elder man had moved out of Paterson for a more distant retreat in the hills overhanging the lake region of Western New Jersey. Jackson had served as the city’s official tour guide for The Great Falls under federal cut backs did away with CETA funding from which his salary was derived.
“I don’t think Zarra ever got over the old man’s leaving,” Morrow said. “He was always moping around, mumbling stuff about the old man or what the old man had said. While the old man got a long with almost everybody, Zarra seemed too cold and distant to win many friends. He always seemed to be looking for something, especially near the ruins of the old mills, making a lot of the junkies nervous. They thought he might be an undercover cop. He certainly fought like one.”
“Did you think he was a cop?”
“Na, just a weirdo,” Morrow said. “Frankly I thought we would hear some news of him jumping off the falls or something. He always seemed on the edge of despair.”
“And that night?”
“Worse than usual,” Morrow said. “He walked down Spruce Street like he was going to his own funeral. He kept mumbling to himself, asking what happened to the city. He seemed to be upset by all the spray paint the gangs had left on the walls of the mills – like that was anything new. This part of Paterson has been a dump for booze bottles, used condoms and broken syringes for decades. And even he was too young to remember when the place was any better. I guess the old man filled his head with memories of Lou Costello or the years before the war when Paterson was actually a place worth living and working in.”
Morrow said he expected trouble when Zarra approached some bored members of one of the Latino gangs that hung out in front of the old bus garage on Market Street. They were all underdressed and high, and more than a little interested in Zarra until one recognized him. Then they sat back down on a disintegrating stoop, grumbling about some girl while kicking at empty bottles and sucking on joints.
They did not look at Zarra directly, but all seemed to study him from their corner of their eyes. Zarra seemed to study them, too: where they placed their hands, whether or not they seemed ready to spring up. The largest and most likely the leader of the group flicked a stiletto into a patch of dirt at the foot of the stairs, striking the same spot again and again.
“Once passed them, he seemed to forget about them,” Morrow said, “and wandered into the area of the clubs where I lost sight of him.”
The area, Morrow meant, was the handful of blocks along Market that led up to Main Avenue that had boasted once as the heart of the Italian community, blocks thick with delis and the scent of cheese, windows advertising meatballs and fresh pasta. After World War Two, these blocks were also thick with screeching Italian children, hanging out second and third floor windows or charging through the streets. Their shouts called to friends or threatened enemies, and their voices echoed along the back allies like a sound track to generations that had passed through this place on their way to realizing the American Dream.
This was the incubator from which young chicks hatched often to the disappointment of elders who had come here in mass from the same village in Italy, hoping and dreaming of success yet with the wish they did not have to give up their old ways to achieve it, many never learning English or leaving the neighborhood in which they first settled – lingering on later as the graying heads and wrinkled faces watching their world change around them. They did not hate the blacks that arrived so much as the changes they wrought, bitter over being forced to accept the new world after a life-time living inside a bubble.
Although the younger Italians rushed out of Paterson as fast as the black’s moved in – taking residence in the hills surrounding the city where they could defend their borders better, the elderly Italian’s resisted, unable to afford the move or unwilling to surrender their habits – fighting over every inch as the black tide slowly pushed them aside.
Yet for all the conflict, nothing really changed except the language being spoken and the color of people’s skin. Poor kids still charged through the streets, poor parents still struggled to keep up hope following the same dismal daily routines that generations had since the city’s mills operated under the feudal lordship of the silk barons. Of course, one thing did change: jobs grew scarce. People leaned on new less-than-legal professions to make ends meet. Paterson’s darker streets developed new industries and attractions to bring in a wealthy male clientele from neighboring towns, while downtown drew wealthy women to shop in the department stores. The kids grew wilder. The boundaries of the turfs changed, creating nightmares for police enforcement, since violence could spring up in unexpected places.
Over time, the violence altered the buying habits so that the wealthy women ceased their ritual of shopping here – no longer safe to stroll Main Avenue as they once had for wedding or engagement rings, living room and bedroom furniture, linens and fine clothes, choosing the more distant by far safer malls of Wayne instead.
Zarra had come after the fading the Italians started, but before the importance of downtown had diminished, arriving on the scene when Main Avenue was still lined with department stores such as Sterns-Quackenbush (with the city’s first self operated elevator) or Meyer Brothers with its eloquent interior and lush displays might easily have rivaled New York City’s Fifth Avenue. Places like Grants, Woolsworth and CH Martins lasted longer only because they aimed lower, but over time, even they vanished from the local scenery, giving Wayne’s population little or no reason to come here. Many local officials claimed 1969 as the year Paterson’s decline began, blaming the end on the opening of Willowbrook Mall and other shopping malls in Wayne where the wealth could shop without the being mugged or molested.
And though city officials constantly bemoaned their loss, the city’s core wealth remained: the mom and pop stores, the corner groceries, the delis, the tiny haberdasheries, which changed hands, changed ethnicity, but went on as usual. Butchers still hung dead chickens in their windows, fish stores still displayed their wares in beds of ice, fruit stands, cheese shops, still drew a stream of business from the run down tenements generations had inhabited previously, and the streets still shrieked with the excited voices of children, as parents screamed down from three floors up to get them home.
Isolated from the real life blood of the city, most politicians saw the streets as an alien landscape, one that became a nearly constant ethnic festival celebrating pride in places like El Salvador or Terran rather than Naples or Rome.
But even in March, 1987 when Zarra strolled through it, the neighborhood – its buildings and stores – looked little different from they way they had three decades earlier, Spanish signs, hanging in the windows of the various shops he passed, just as incomprehensible as the Italian signs had been -- the Scotch tape gone yellow over time.
Lighted rear apartments still showed worried faces huddled over meager supper, mothers, fathers and children discussing strategies for keeping themselves off the streets, sweating working people who feared becoming one of the walking dead, their blistered fingers and troubled souls not much different from the uncles that had raised Zarra.
A block closer to Main, the bars began, and these too accommodated for Paterson’s diversity, each open door broadcasting its own vibration and displaying its own shades of inebriated characters outside on the sidewalk. Slick haired, big breasted Latino women mingled with silk shirted, gold encrusted Latino, men. The smell of Main Street's cheapest perfumes and colognes battling the brewery scents of the pubs, hops and whiskeys turned unreasonably sweet. Scarlet lips lifted as Zarra passed, as these women batted their heavily decorated eyes and men rattled their jewelry with each turn of their heads.
Zarra’s high school Spanish could hardly have make out a third of the words out of the rapid fire conversation exchanged there, new words, old words, mingling into a grand poetry or verbal music that shook people’s hips and tapped people’s feet, with the tinny horns of Latin pop music providing background from the jukebox inside each bar.
A few footsteps farther on, twilight introduced him to other bars predominated by black customers, whose steady stares followed Zarra’s movements along the street, broad shouldered black men and nearly hipless black women, locked into a slower, grinding dance Zarra no more understood than he had the rapid Spanish a block back. Yet the nervous laughter over yet additional subtle cultural changes stirring in their midst: jobs vanishing, rents rising, families going hungry needed no translation. Continental Can Company, the last giant industry of the town, had announced its closing only that week.
Angry music blared out of these bars, heavy with rap-like poetry that defied the world with each beat – stirring up some primitive power Zarra could not have grasped and could never control except by quickening his pace and letting the words ricochet off the empty store fronts and broken tenements in his wake.
“Jesus Row” came next, a string of store front selling salvation, dressed up with statues and candles to saints, a net of faith looking to snare the few lost souls that managed to stagger this way out of the bars. No culture was left uncovered from the grim face of a Black Madonna, whose mahogany shimmered with the distant bar lights as if miraculously inspired to the tall glass-enclosed candles upon which were painted strange saints Rome would not have recognized nor given approval, too, full of lust and pain, and perhaps a bit of the magic Jackson claimed Paterson contained.
“He was lonely,” Jackson said during a later interview, when talking about this particular time in Zarra’s life. “After his uncle died, he never felt connected to anyone or anything in the same way. I took him in because I felt sorry for him. But I was little more than company to him, someone he could talk to when the memories got to be too much. When I left, he didn’t even have that. I offered to take him with me. I knew he wasn’t going to do well on his own. But he wouldn’t come.
"`You can't stay here forever,’ I told him. `Paterson isn't the place you think it is.’
“`I won't stay forever,’ he said. `I'll leave when I have enough saved to go to Nashville.’
"`You're still on that kick?’
"`I never left it,’ he said defiantly, refusing to surrender an inch in an argument that had gone on since when he -- as a teen -- had first moved in with me.
“`But that's crazy, Max,’ I told him, refusing to let the matter go as easily as that, taking this one last chance to impart some words of wisdom. `You're too old to become an overnight success story. Country music has more than enough youngsters going to that Mecca every year.’
"`The two of us together might make it work,’ he said, turning my argument around. `You're all packed. I could pack my stuff up in a day. Then both of us could drive to Nashville.’
“`And do what?’
“`Make music.’
"`An old man and a middle aged fool, camping out on their steps of the Grand Ole Opera until we starve or get arrested?’
"`We can play our music and show how country ought to be done.’
“At that point I knew it was useless to argue.
"`I supposed you'll write the lyrics to my music and I'll write the tunes to your poems?’ I asked.
"`It would work.’
"`It's daft!’
"`I suppose you'll find something better to do up by the lake?’
“`I’ll keep busy,” I said. `You'll always be welcome to join me later if you change your mind.’
“`I won’t change my mind,’ he said. `When I leave, I'll be going to Nashville. No place else.’
"`You'll regret it,’ I said. And that ended that.”
A later police report showed a near accident that night with the description of the pedestrian fitting Zarra’s description. Apparently lost in thought, he stepped off the curb just as a set of headlights bore down on him. The officer in the patrol car said the pedestrian leaped back just as a pick up truck swerved to avoid him, squealing brakes and a blaring horn disturbing the otherwise peaceful part of the street.
Two grinning rednecks stared out the windshield at Zarra, the nearest on the passenger side – yelled out the window as the pickup passed. "Watch it, asshole."
Both men laughed and the truck sped on, leaving a wake of smoke behind, its rear bumper thickly decorated with stickers: Reagan/Bush `84, NRA means freedom to shoot, POW MIA.
The observing officer said Zarra stared after the truck for a moment, then crossed the street and entered one of the strip joints located there.
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