It pains me every time I see a place destroyed by Hurricane Sandy that once was a part of my life.
For instance, Staten Island’s New Dorp community, which was unusually hard-hit, actually destroyed, was a well-kept beach-front community we spent summers at during World-Word II. It was complete with a mini-airfield, Miller Field, and klieg lights for small aircraft, some barracks, military trucks, jeeps and a few non-fighter planes. It ran along New Dorp Lane, along a bus route that ran to and from the ‘town’ and the Tottenville train, to and from the St. George ferries.
At the other end of New Dorp Lane was a bus stop in front of an antique house with a boulder in front, a bronze plaque on it that claimed “George Washington slept here.” As a 7- or 8-year-old kid, I had seen that sign many times, and wondered why George slept around so much. Where was Mrs. Washington? And where did he keep his wooden false teeth?
Down the turn-off street from New Dorp Lane, moving towards the beach and rows of narrow lanes with bungalows, one of which we rented, was Boames beach, which sounded at first like Bones beach. At the edge of the beach was a hospital for wounded soldiers. I remember the soldiers in their maroon bathrobes and blue pajamas being ministered to by pretty nurses in those sheer white uniforms the sun shone through silhouetting their forms. I felt my nascent fire lit, even as a boy.
In fact, New Dorp reminded me of the movie The Summer of 44, which appeared in 1971, 27 years later when I was 33 years old, married with two kids, and better understood the story that wiki explains . . .”Summer of ’42 is a 1971 American coming-of-agedrama film based on the memoirs of screenwriter Herman Raucher. It tells the story of how Raucher, in his early teens on his 1942 summer vacation on Nantucket Island, off the coast of New England, embarked on a one-sided romance with a woman, Dorothy, whose husband had gone off to fight in World War II.” That film brings a pain of nostalgia even though Staten Island was not Nantucket Island.
It was a working class community, some of whose residents owned cottages, others who rented them. The year-round residents were a slightly different breed, shop or restaurant owners, people who worked and lived on the island or came from the city on weekends year round to relax. You can the see same faces in the news today, some in tears that their homes were gone with the wind and waves. The community still is mixed Italian and Irish Americans, very Catholic, with its own church. Back then there was a Protestant church whose stoop I climbed with cats’ feet thinking some strange deity waited in there. The Catholic Church was larger, had an organ and choir, more like my Brooklyn church.
I remember my friend Jacky whose father was a New York police sergeant, Jack, Sr., who drove out to New Dorp often in a police ambulance, bringing us unused holsters from the precinct for sharing in our war games. He spread them on the narrow sidewalk and all the lane’s boys flocked to them.
Jacky’s mother Minnie was a sweet lady, always nice to me. I called them Uncle Jack and Aunt Minnie. They had a player piano that went from Chopin to Scott Joplin and everything in between on Saturday night when the beer flowed like water and Jacky’s family sang all the old songs and got louder by the pint.
Jacky’s parents owned their house and had a beautiful flower garden of chrysanthemums. Jacky scoured them for Japanese beetles like the FBI hunting for spies. When he found one, he would pull the legs off, just because the bug’s name contained the word Japanese. In fact, Jacky was a bit strange and his moods turned quickly. I remember hearing my parents say that he was adopted.
One of the games we played was in an abandoned cottage with the furniture left in it. From time to time, we’d climb in a window and wreck the place, like the storm did today’s cottages, including glassware. We descended into a kind of Lord of the Flies destructiveness, spurring on our childish potential for evil, vandalizing this pristine cottage, like Hurricane Sandy destroyed the pristine beach.
Yet, Sunday morning, Jacky and Uncle Jack surfaced like young and old tom cats, the latter rubbing his eyes and ruddy red face. He was wiping away a hangover, hoping that by the time he made the church steps, he wouldn’t appear before god as too logy. It was like addressing an Inspector from the force. After church, Jacky, a kid named Jimmy, an Irish kid named Mickey, and I used to converge for various business. As the war raged thousands of miles away, we dug out our improvised wagon made from scavenged pieces of wood, baby carriage wheels and axels, clothesline rope attached at either end of the front axle, nailed to a two by four that held it all together, the rope able to turn and steer the wheels.
We were headed for the beach for reconnaissance as two kids sat in the box seat, one or two pushed, maybe one more ran shotgun. We stopped at the edge of the concrete walkway before the sand began, piled out and hit the beach running, shades of Iwo Jima. Some of us ran right in and got wet. Others fished out a fruit crate from an old ship that was probably being worked on at the Naval Shipyards that ran along the Tottenville line as it left St. George. It was amazing to see the welding torches blazing sparks as they repaired a ship or worked on a new ship. I always fled to the windows on the water side to catch a look.
Sometimes, we’d find a life preserver with a ship’s name on it in the tide, and we’d imagine if anyone had used it to save his life. Sometimes we’d find a crate of oranges or grapefruits. Seagulls would flock about, crying for a taste. But we ack-acked them away, using our invisible guns poised in our hands. Often an entire timber rolled out of the tide, maybe a felled pole or beam, and we tried to roll it up on the beach. What a catch for a handful of noisy sun-browned peanuts. What unbelievable innocence our dreams held of wearing our sailor or army suits for the July 4th parade, ready to serve or be served up to the Armed Forces one day as men.
On those parade days, the Dinty Moore saloon would open early and the beer would flow all day, and good cheer tried to brighten the dark days across the waters, where we could see land and the war even though it was only New Jersey. Next to Dinty’s was a five and dime store, where we could find a toy airplane or ship or car, still made of cast iron, pre-plastic, a toy that would outlast the war. Or there were wooden boats you could float across your bed sheets or in the tub and create your own battles. You could play harbor with them and float a toy ferry and some tug boats. Life was beautiful and sleep came easy at the end of each day. And the sun woke you for the next.
Yet, it was in the beginning of August, when I’d start thinking about school, ugh, summer ending, going back home to Brooklyn; it was on August 6, that every cottage in New Dorp exploded in joy, blaring horns, sirens of jeeps, people banging on pots and pans, and I found out that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and the Japanese were going to surrender. I looked at the big black newspaper headlines and pictures of the flashing mushroom cloud and wondered what it boded. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the Allies hit the Japanese again in Nagasaki, and the same chaos of sounds and people came running out of their cottages into the lanes to celebrate the “victory,” an apocalypse for the Japanese. I watch the distraught teary-eyed faces today on news footage and get a glimpse of the despair felt now. What a sad irony.
But I remember being lifted in the air by a pretty woman who had lost her husband; the gold star of his life was in the window on one of those tiny flags. She hoisted me up and then gave me a big hug and a kiss. I could see the tears in her eyes. Then she caught herself, as if the celebration were not for her, and put me down gently and walked back into her cottage to deal with his ghost. How joyously mad it was, I think now, as if the homeless would be out cheering after Hurricane Sandy had done its worst to obliterate New Dorp, reducing cottages, houses to rubble, scattering toys, destroying everything people owned, leaving them to the refuse of the tide we once played in that had surged so ruthlessly to wipe out most of Staten Island, including Tottenville, and Brooklyn’s Coney Island, Brighton Beach, the Rockaways, Breezy Point, Broad Channel, Howard Beach, all places in my memory like New Dorp . . .
I guess this was the “New Normal” the news people were talking about, the shades of a lesser apocalypse revisiting. And happening so quickly, as quickly as Hiroshima went up in flame and Nagasaki burned to the ground, to ashes, skin and bones, more horrific it seems than imaginable. But here they were again, human beings pouring out into the streets to see the damage, to cluster for food, to clear debris, to wade through flooded or burning neighborhoods, to wait too long for FEMA or the Red Cross, or the next pronouncement from the politicians. Our old victories so resembled this terrible setback, the rage of the waters surging, flooding tunnels, streets and people drowning at their doorsteps, entire villages and towns like New Dorp wiped out. These were places in the storm that occupied pieces of my life.
I returned to New Dorp when I was 19, in 1957, shortly after my mother died of an undiagnosed leukemia at 38. This was to help bring back her memory and escape from my new stepmother. What I found was a time-wrecked hospital at the end of an ill-kempt scrap of beach. I walked into the hospital. Nothing remained of its life. Phones had been pulled off the walls, a lost chair lingered here and there, a metal bed frame, and at my feet was a dead seagull, its wings spread in a last leap against the wind. Tears filled my eyes. Even then, the past had ravaged this town in two decades. I was disoriented with the out-of-placeness of things, the way people must now feel, as if some disjointed music played in my head. A poem came into my mind that I later wrote and turned out to be my first published piece in Prairie Schooner. But what pain was paid for it, New Dorp Beach, Staten Island.
In ’57 and on other trips, I made my way back to the bus to the Tottenville Train, passing the Naval Yards with its ghost ships, to St. George and its ferry. As I returned, we skimmed past the Statue of Liberty, the spray of bay water cleansing my memory, seeing myself holding my mother or my father’s hand, saluting it as we passed the grand icon, so steadfast, even in Hurricane Sandy, with some minor bruises only. But in my 19th year I was also headed to a new home to Queens where we were living, not far from the flooding poisonous Newtown Creek, my father, stepmother, stepsister, and stepbrother, occasionally back from College to discuss why there had to be a God. This was the same guy who would flunk out of Army Languages school years later and I had to tell my ersatz parents to get him a shrink and a letter that he was having a nervous breakdown and could no longer serve in ice-box Korea as a translator. Places in the storm, in time and space, some joyous, some painful or both, and here’s another.
The Crossbay Bridge, that goes over the bay to the Rockaways, where I would go fishing, bringing my rod and reel and lures to catch nothing but the sound of the wind. I’d take a train to Howard Beach from Brooklyn, passing Broad Channel, with a dollar or two for carfares, alone, like the motherless young man I was.
I was also a skilled accordionist. I was reading books about musical composition, studying harmony with a Julliard composer, until my family could not afford the lessons. So I wrote two piano sonatas alone in my room in the Queens apartment on a used piano my dad had bought with the insurance money from my mother’s passing. The family itself cracked apart, my stepsister, just a child moved to her grandmother’s house in Northport, Long Island, with her two alcoholic uncles who finally passed; my step-brother, now a lawyer in Florida, inherited the ambulance-chasing business from his father-in-law and bore 11 Catholic kids, his wife finally saying “no” at an even dozen. I suppose it was an achievement for both to succor that much life. As to my alcoholic stepmother, let me not speak ill of the dead.
Perhaps it is better for me now that life wipes them out of memory, so that new life can grow back, fresh as the film, TheSummer of ’44. Or like a new Coney Island at the end of old Coney Island, where I lived on Corbin Place, a block long, that ended in the already fractured concrete esplanade buckled by previous hurricanes. I was in my first marriage and had my first child, a lovely little daughter, during those four years. But the marriage ended a half dozen years later after a second child, a boy was born, after a move to Flatbush. After the breakup, I moved alone to Westbeth, an artist’s community on West Street, across the street from the Hudson River, in the West Village, where I lived for five years, and met many poets, writers, and great jazz musicians, studied piano with one, Rolland Hanna, and got to read my poems here and there and meet my second wife on a blind date.
I visited Westbeth last week with an actor friend, Joel Rooks, who lives there, and to see another resident friend of mine, Toni Dalton, a wonderful painter and photographer. She was so shocked to see me she began to ball me out for disappearing so long. I tried to explain that the responsibilities or raising three children and a past career in advertising took a lot of time and energy. I wasn’t as footlose and fancy-free as I was in the old days, the last time I saw her. She prodded me about each of my progeny and my wife, between taking phone calls from several friends lost in their own present and personal storms.
The damage of the storm had flooded the building’s basement, where many artists had left their work in storage bins. The huge building had taken on nine feet of water in its basement, most of which was still there a month later, now with mold and exposed asbestos that needed to be cleaned. The eight story building, which housed a thousand people, many elderly, had lost all its power during the storm. The elevators died with the lights, the water, and the heat. Maintenance men from the building stowed some beds in an empty loft and worked all night and through the day helping people till they simply fell from exhaustion and slept and ate. Once again, that wonderful spirit of cooperation and care kicked in. Toni and I had a long catch-up conversation and we were friends again. My actor friend, Joel Rooks, and she exchanged phone numbers. I could see a friendship about to blossom.
I met my second wife while living in Westbeth 35 years ago, and we raised the first two children from my first marriage and a third from our marriage. My older son’s fiancé, who is a classical pianist, is learning the two piano sonatas I wrote over 50 years ago in that Queens apartment. What a joy. It’s the first time in my life I’m hearing them externally, not just in my head. What a gift to hear a bit more each time she visits. I should call one of them, Places in the Storm, perhaps the other, Places in the Heart. It is in the heart as well where we live, where the storms of life hit and batter us on their way to further chaos, leaving us the pieces to reassemble.
Thus, this piece, this sketch of a life, is dedicated to all my fellow New Yorkers, all of those who have struggled to work in the drowned subways, who have endured the wars, 9/11, an oppressive surveillance state; who feed and clothe the poor selflessly everyday and whose resilience has helped us bounce back even in this first stage of reconstruction. I love these people, en masse, the project dwellers, the whites, the often-abandoned blacks and Hispanics, the artists, the Verizon repair men, the millionaire Sea Gate homeowners on Gravesend Bay.
My first love lived there when I was a Brooklyn College Student and we smooched in her attic apartment in candlelight, another place in the storm, the old Sea Gate lighthouse now out of service. And I think, oh watchman of the dark shed your light on us even now, when we need it so desperately. I stand by you in memory, watching as your red light would flash, like some warning planted in the human hard drive. I pause. Take a series of deep breaths, waking me to the beauty of it all, the sunny day, the icy stars to come. The last words of Eliot’s Wasteland resonate in me, “Shantih Shantih Shantih.” Repeated as a formal ending to an Upanishad the words represent, “The peace which passeth understanding.” One hopes for it soon.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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Places in the storm
Posted on December 3, 2012 by Jerry Mazza
It pains me every time I see a place destroyed by Hurricane Sandy that once was a part of my life.
For instance, Staten Island’s New Dorp community, which was unusually hard-hit, actually destroyed, was a well-kept beach-front community we spent summers at during World-Word II. It was complete with a mini-airfield, Miller Field, and klieg lights for small aircraft, some barracks, military trucks, jeeps and a few non-fighter planes. It ran along New Dorp Lane, along a bus route that ran to and from the ‘town’ and the Tottenville train, to and from the St. George ferries.
At the other end of New Dorp Lane was a bus stop in front of an antique house with a boulder in front, a bronze plaque on it that claimed “George Washington slept here.” As a 7- or 8-year-old kid, I had seen that sign many times, and wondered why George slept around so much. Where was Mrs. Washington? And where did he keep his wooden false teeth?
Down the turn-off street from New Dorp Lane, moving towards the beach and rows of narrow lanes with bungalows, one of which we rented, was Boames beach, which sounded at first like Bones beach. At the edge of the beach was a hospital for wounded soldiers. I remember the soldiers in their maroon bathrobes and blue pajamas being ministered to by pretty nurses in those sheer white uniforms the sun shone through silhouetting their forms. I felt my nascent fire lit, even as a boy.
In fact, New Dorp reminded me of the movie The Summer of 44, which appeared in 1971, 27 years later when I was 33 years old, married with two kids, and better understood the story that wiki explains . . .”Summer of ’42 is a 1971 American coming-of-age drama film based on the memoirs of screenwriter Herman Raucher. It tells the story of how Raucher, in his early teens on his 1942 summer vacation on Nantucket Island, off the coast of New England, embarked on a one-sided romance with a woman, Dorothy, whose husband had gone off to fight in World War II.” That film brings a pain of nostalgia even though Staten Island was not Nantucket Island.
It was a working class community, some of whose residents owned cottages, others who rented them. The year-round residents were a slightly different breed, shop or restaurant owners, people who worked and lived on the island or came from the city on weekends year round to relax. You can the see same faces in the news today, some in tears that their homes were gone with the wind and waves. The community still is mixed Italian and Irish Americans, very Catholic, with its own church. Back then there was a Protestant church whose stoop I climbed with cats’ feet thinking some strange deity waited in there. The Catholic Church was larger, had an organ and choir, more like my Brooklyn church.
I remember my friend Jacky whose father was a New York police sergeant, Jack, Sr., who drove out to New Dorp often in a police ambulance, bringing us unused holsters from the precinct for sharing in our war games. He spread them on the narrow sidewalk and all the lane’s boys flocked to them.
Jacky’s mother Minnie was a sweet lady, always nice to me. I called them Uncle Jack and Aunt Minnie. They had a player piano that went from Chopin to Scott Joplin and everything in between on Saturday night when the beer flowed like water and Jacky’s family sang all the old songs and got louder by the pint.
Jacky’s parents owned their house and had a beautiful flower garden of chrysanthemums. Jacky scoured them for Japanese beetles like the FBI hunting for spies. When he found one, he would pull the legs off, just because the bug’s name contained the word Japanese. In fact, Jacky was a bit strange and his moods turned quickly. I remember hearing my parents say that he was adopted.
One of the games we played was in an abandoned cottage with the furniture left in it. From time to time, we’d climb in a window and wreck the place, like the storm did today’s cottages, including glassware. We descended into a kind of Lord of the Flies destructiveness, spurring on our childish potential for evil, vandalizing this pristine cottage, like Hurricane Sandy destroyed the pristine beach.
Yet, Sunday morning, Jacky and Uncle Jack surfaced like young and old tom cats, the latter rubbing his eyes and ruddy red face. He was wiping away a hangover, hoping that by the time he made the church steps, he wouldn’t appear before god as too logy. It was like addressing an Inspector from the force. After church, Jacky, a kid named Jimmy, an Irish kid named Mickey, and I used to converge for various business. As the war raged thousands of miles away, we dug out our improvised wagon made from scavenged pieces of wood, baby carriage wheels and axels, clothesline rope attached at either end of the front axle, nailed to a two by four that held it all together, the rope able to turn and steer the wheels.
We were headed for the beach for reconnaissance as two kids sat in the box seat, one or two pushed, maybe one more ran shotgun. We stopped at the edge of the concrete walkway before the sand began, piled out and hit the beach running, shades of Iwo Jima. Some of us ran right in and got wet. Others fished out a fruit crate from an old ship that was probably being worked on at the Naval Shipyards that ran along the Tottenville line as it left St. George. It was amazing to see the welding torches blazing sparks as they repaired a ship or worked on a new ship. I always fled to the windows on the water side to catch a look.
Sometimes, we’d find a life preserver with a ship’s name on it in the tide, and we’d imagine if anyone had used it to save his life. Sometimes we’d find a crate of oranges or grapefruits. Seagulls would flock about, crying for a taste. But we ack-acked them away, using our invisible guns poised in our hands. Often an entire timber rolled out of the tide, maybe a felled pole or beam, and we tried to roll it up on the beach. What a catch for a handful of noisy sun-browned peanuts. What unbelievable innocence our dreams held of wearing our sailor or army suits for the July 4th parade, ready to serve or be served up to the Armed Forces one day as men.
On those parade days, the Dinty Moore saloon would open early and the beer would flow all day, and good cheer tried to brighten the dark days across the waters, where we could see land and the war even though it was only New Jersey. Next to Dinty’s was a five and dime store, where we could find a toy airplane or ship or car, still made of cast iron, pre-plastic, a toy that would outlast the war. Or there were wooden boats you could float across your bed sheets or in the tub and create your own battles. You could play harbor with them and float a toy ferry and some tug boats. Life was beautiful and sleep came easy at the end of each day. And the sun woke you for the next.
Yet, it was in the beginning of August, when I’d start thinking about school, ugh, summer ending, going back home to Brooklyn; it was on August 6, that every cottage in New Dorp exploded in joy, blaring horns, sirens of jeeps, people banging on pots and pans, and I found out that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and the Japanese were going to surrender. I looked at the big black newspaper headlines and pictures of the flashing mushroom cloud and wondered what it boded. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the Allies hit the Japanese again in Nagasaki, and the same chaos of sounds and people came running out of their cottages into the lanes to celebrate the “victory,” an apocalypse for the Japanese. I watch the distraught teary-eyed faces today on news footage and get a glimpse of the despair felt now. What a sad irony.
But I remember being lifted in the air by a pretty woman who had lost her husband; the gold star of his life was in the window on one of those tiny flags. She hoisted me up and then gave me a big hug and a kiss. I could see the tears in her eyes. Then she caught herself, as if the celebration were not for her, and put me down gently and walked back into her cottage to deal with his ghost. How joyously mad it was, I think now, as if the homeless would be out cheering after Hurricane Sandy had done its worst to obliterate New Dorp, reducing cottages, houses to rubble, scattering toys, destroying everything people owned, leaving them to the refuse of the tide we once played in that had surged so ruthlessly to wipe out most of Staten Island, including Tottenville, and Brooklyn’s Coney Island, Brighton Beach, the Rockaways, Breezy Point, Broad Channel, Howard Beach, all places in my memory like New Dorp . . .
I guess this was the “New Normal” the news people were talking about, the shades of a lesser apocalypse revisiting. And happening so quickly, as quickly as Hiroshima went up in flame and Nagasaki burned to the ground, to ashes, skin and bones, more horrific it seems than imaginable. But here they were again, human beings pouring out into the streets to see the damage, to cluster for food, to clear debris, to wade through flooded or burning neighborhoods, to wait too long for FEMA or the Red Cross, or the next pronouncement from the politicians. Our old victories so resembled this terrible setback, the rage of the waters surging, flooding tunnels, streets and people drowning at their doorsteps, entire villages and towns like New Dorp wiped out. These were places in the storm that occupied pieces of my life.
I returned to New Dorp when I was 19, in 1957, shortly after my mother died of an undiagnosed leukemia at 38. This was to help bring back her memory and escape from my new stepmother. What I found was a time-wrecked hospital at the end of an ill-kempt scrap of beach. I walked into the hospital. Nothing remained of its life. Phones had been pulled off the walls, a lost chair lingered here and there, a metal bed frame, and at my feet was a dead seagull, its wings spread in a last leap against the wind. Tears filled my eyes. Even then, the past had ravaged this town in two decades. I was disoriented with the out-of-placeness of things, the way people must now feel, as if some disjointed music played in my head. A poem came into my mind that I later wrote and turned out to be my first published piece in Prairie Schooner. But what pain was paid for it, New Dorp Beach, Staten Island.
In ’57 and on other trips, I made my way back to the bus to the Tottenville Train, passing the Naval Yards with its ghost ships, to St. George and its ferry. As I returned, we skimmed past the Statue of Liberty, the spray of bay water cleansing my memory, seeing myself holding my mother or my father’s hand, saluting it as we passed the grand icon, so steadfast, even in Hurricane Sandy, with some minor bruises only. But in my 19th year I was also headed to a new home to Queens where we were living, not far from the flooding poisonous Newtown Creek, my father, stepmother, stepsister, and stepbrother, occasionally back from College to discuss why there had to be a God. This was the same guy who would flunk out of Army Languages school years later and I had to tell my ersatz parents to get him a shrink and a letter that he was having a nervous breakdown and could no longer serve in ice-box Korea as a translator. Places in the storm, in time and space, some joyous, some painful or both, and here’s another.
The Crossbay Bridge, that goes over the bay to the Rockaways, where I would go fishing, bringing my rod and reel and lures to catch nothing but the sound of the wind. I’d take a train to Howard Beach from Brooklyn, passing Broad Channel, with a dollar or two for carfares, alone, like the motherless young man I was.
I was also a skilled accordionist. I was reading books about musical composition, studying harmony with a Julliard composer, until my family could not afford the lessons. So I wrote two piano sonatas alone in my room in the Queens apartment on a used piano my dad had bought with the insurance money from my mother’s passing. The family itself cracked apart, my stepsister, just a child moved to her grandmother’s house in Northport, Long Island, with her two alcoholic uncles who finally passed; my step-brother, now a lawyer in Florida, inherited the ambulance-chasing business from his father-in-law and bore 11 Catholic kids, his wife finally saying “no” at an even dozen. I suppose it was an achievement for both to succor that much life. As to my alcoholic stepmother, let me not speak ill of the dead.
Perhaps it is better for me now that life wipes them out of memory, so that new life can grow back, fresh as the film, The Summer of ’44. Or like a new Coney Island at the end of old Coney Island, where I lived on Corbin Place, a block long, that ended in the already fractured concrete esplanade buckled by previous hurricanes. I was in my first marriage and had my first child, a lovely little daughter, during those four years. But the marriage ended a half dozen years later after a second child, a boy was born, after a move to Flatbush. After the breakup, I moved alone to Westbeth, an artist’s community on West Street, across the street from the Hudson River, in the West Village, where I lived for five years, and met many poets, writers, and great jazz musicians, studied piano with one, Rolland Hanna, and got to read my poems here and there and meet my second wife on a blind date.
I visited Westbeth last week with an actor friend, Joel Rooks, who lives there, and to see another resident friend of mine, Toni Dalton, a wonderful painter and photographer. She was so shocked to see me she began to ball me out for disappearing so long. I tried to explain that the responsibilities or raising three children and a past career in advertising took a lot of time and energy. I wasn’t as footlose and fancy-free as I was in the old days, the last time I saw her. She prodded me about each of my progeny and my wife, between taking phone calls from several friends lost in their own present and personal storms.
The damage of the storm had flooded the building’s basement, where many artists had left their work in storage bins. The huge building had taken on nine feet of water in its basement, most of which was still there a month later, now with mold and exposed asbestos that needed to be cleaned. The eight story building, which housed a thousand people, many elderly, had lost all its power during the storm. The elevators died with the lights, the water, and the heat. Maintenance men from the building stowed some beds in an empty loft and worked all night and through the day helping people till they simply fell from exhaustion and slept and ate. Once again, that wonderful spirit of cooperation and care kicked in. Toni and I had a long catch-up conversation and we were friends again. My actor friend, Joel Rooks, and she exchanged phone numbers. I could see a friendship about to blossom.
I met my second wife while living in Westbeth 35 years ago, and we raised the first two children from my first marriage and a third from our marriage. My older son’s fiancé, who is a classical pianist, is learning the two piano sonatas I wrote over 50 years ago in that Queens apartment. What a joy. It’s the first time in my life I’m hearing them externally, not just in my head. What a gift to hear a bit more each time she visits. I should call one of them, Places in the Storm, perhaps the other, Places in the Heart. It is in the heart as well where we live, where the storms of life hit and batter us on their way to further chaos, leaving us the pieces to reassemble.
Thus, this piece, this sketch of a life, is dedicated to all my fellow New Yorkers, all of those who have struggled to work in the drowned subways, who have endured the wars, 9/11, an oppressive surveillance state; who feed and clothe the poor selflessly everyday and whose resilience has helped us bounce back even in this first stage of reconstruction. I love these people, en masse, the project dwellers, the whites, the often-abandoned blacks and Hispanics, the artists, the Verizon repair men, the millionaire Sea Gate homeowners on Gravesend Bay.
My first love lived there when I was a Brooklyn College Student and we smooched in her attic apartment in candlelight, another place in the storm, the old Sea Gate lighthouse now out of service. And I think, oh watchman of the dark shed your light on us even now, when we need it so desperately. I stand by you in memory, watching as your red light would flash, like some warning planted in the human hard drive. I pause. Take a series of deep breaths, waking me to the beauty of it all, the sunny day, the icy stars to come. The last words of Eliot’s Wasteland resonate in me, “Shantih Shantih Shantih.” Repeated as a formal ending to an Upanishad the words represent, “The peace which passeth understanding.” One hopes for it soon.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.