Forty Years On

             After a col­lege search that can most char­it­ably be described as haphaz­ard, I matric­u­lated at William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey and began attend­ing, and also not attend­ing, classes there in the fall of 1977. I was excited to try out at the col­lege news­pa­per, The Beacon, win­ner of mul­tiple awards and stuff. I con­vinced the arts edit­or, Michael Reardon, a gangly Joyce nut from North Bergen, to let me inter­view The Ramones, who were play­ing at Dover’s Show Place, near my home in Lake Hopatcong, some time soon. I pulled off the inter­view (it was back­stage at the Show Place where I actu­ally asked the immor­tal ques­tion, “Where do you guys get the ideas for your songs?” to which Johnny Ramone gave the immor­tal answer “Oh, you know, the usu­al. We watch movies, read com­ic books, take long walks.”) and tran­scribed it and Michael added an intro that waxed highly skep­tic­al on the Ramones and punk rock in gen­er­al. I objec­ted, but not too strenu­ously, as I wanted to con­tin­ue writ­ing for the arts sec­tion of the award-winning paper, and I did so, mak­ing an ass out of myself pretty fre­quently (I once mocked the size of Mel Lewis’ drum kit). Michael’s pal Joel Lewis took note of what an idi­ot I was and gave me fre­quent cor­rec­tion. (Joel, a superb poet, became friend­li­er with me over the years and we are still chums.)

            Another fel­low hanging about in the Beacon office was a guy with blonde shaggy hair and a wal­rus mus­tache; avi­at­or glasses and den­im shirts were also prom­in­ent in his present­a­tion. He had no dis­cern­ible func­tion there except to needle the paper’s editor-in-chief, Stewart Wolpin, his on-and-off room­mate of sev­er­al years. His name was Don Markle.

            Don had an unusu­al sense of humor. In the early sum­mer of 1976, he and anoth­er room­mate of Stewart’s con­spired to have Stewart killed by the United States Secret Service. President Gerald Ford was sched­uled to come to Paterson for a ded­ic­a­tion of the Great Falls there as a National Historic Site. Don and Stewart and Joe (for that is the third roommate’s name) shared an apart­ment on Front Street in Paterson and President Ford’s motor­cade was sched­uled to pass right in front of their house. At the time Stewart was employed as a Good Humor truck driver, and he had a uni­form and everything. The idea was that Joe and Don would spike Stewart’s morn­ing orange juice with vodka. This would dis­com­bob­u­late him. They would then Krazy-Glue a fake gun into his hand. Then spin him around sev­er­al times, as if he were being pre­pared to take a swing at a piñata. They would push him out the front door as President Ford’s motor­cade was passing. Stewart would then be taken down in a hail of gunfire.

            The plan did not come off. There was a tor­ren­tial down­pour on the morn­ing of the ded­ic­a­tion. The con­spir­at­ors were ener­vated by this devel­op­ment. The motor­cade pro­ceeded non­ethe­less, and the fel­lows, with umbrel­las, stepped out­side to watch it. President Ford braved the rain with open sun roof and waved to the boys as he passed.

            Don had plenty of oth­er ideas, though. When the refri­ger­at­or in the Front Street apart­ment crapped out, he thought it would be salut­ary to float it on the Passaic river (right behind the house!) in the dir­ec­tion of the Great Falls of Paterson, and film its trans­it and even­tu­al des­cent; this foot­age would form the basis of a hor­ror fea­ture he would call Blue Water, White Kelvinator. Then there was Stewart’s cam­paign for Student Government Association President, a Marxian far­rago which had the can­did­ate, egged on by Don, dis­trib­ut­ing cit­rus fruits dec­or­ated with a rib­bon read­ing “Orange You Gonna Vote For Wolpin” and so on. Once Don got to know me, he decided I had “poten­tial” with respect to SGA cam­paign stooge­dom and began to con­coct a cam­paign heavy on Darth Vader imagery. 

            I will not speak here of his Nazi Christmas Carols (except to cite one title, “Oh Little Town of Düsseldorf”).

            It was prob­ably not, in many respects, a con­ven­tion­ally bene­fi­cial thing to have Don Markle as one’s first and most sig­ni­fic­ant col­legi­ate ment­or, but that is how it turned out for me. He was really great at not doing anything—I didn’t even know if he was enrolled at the col­lege or not. One day in the Beacon offices I had said some­thing funny enough to soli­cit his notice, and then, to the mild chag­rin of the older crowd he hung with, I was included in what proved to be form­at­ive activ­it­ies. These included White Castle runs and sojourns at Paterson’s Plaza Theater, a husk of a one­time movie palace, where the gang would take in a double fea­ture of, say, Horror High and Dracula’s Dog. Well before Harry and Michael Medved pub­lished The Fifty Worst Movies Of All Time, Don was excep­tion­ally con­vers­ant with what I would come to call by Michael Weldon’s term, that is, Psychotronic Cinema. He was par­tic­u­larly besot­ted with They Saved Hitler’s Brain, which we would nev­er see together.

            Don also intro­duced me to weed. First time I smoked a joint, I think, I was depos­ited back at the Beacon offices where I stared mutely at a type­writer for maybe three hours. That was pretty much how my thing with weed turned out overall.

            He also offered attract­ive solu­tions to vari­ous exist­en­tial crises. As I grappled unsuc­cess­fully with the fact that some bor­ing sci­ence class was a required course, and I needed to both attend and pass it, Don shrugged the whole thing off and sug­ges­ted I accom­pany him to Gregory Battcock’s Film Appreciation class over at the art build­ing and watch Triumph of the Will or some spec­tac­u­larly tedi­ous Warhol film that Battcock, an esteemed crit­ic and intim­ate of artist, would pull from his per­son­al col­lec­tion and screen to annoy the pre­sumptive “easy A” students.

             “We’re not in the class though, won’t he kick us out?”

             “Oh, Greg doesn’t care,” and that was that. Greg did not care.

            It was decided that in the fall of 1978, Don, Stewart, and I, and who­ever else in our circle cared to pony up, would rent a large place in Paterson togeth­er. (Don, exper­i­en­cing poor cash flow on account of unem­ploy­ment issues, had been shack­ing up in his ances­tral home for a while, but hoped to be liquid by this point.) Various Markle-initiated social rituals, such as Spaghetti Feast (with Meat Spheres), would be rein­stated. I was delighted by my inclu­sion in this scheme.

            On the third week­end of April 1978, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, with the Erasers and the Ghosts, were play­ing three nights at CBGB. I very much wanted to go, and I men­tioned to Don that week that it might be a fun trip. Don took a con­tem­plat­ive draw off his pipe (did I men­tion he smoked a pipe, for God’s sake?) and said “As much as I’m inter­ested in punk rock as a soci­olo­gic­al phenomenon”—and it’s only been in recent years that I’ve begun to mar­vel at the fact that guys only three or four years older than myself were so affron­ted by “punk rock” that they could only con­sider it as a “soci­olo­gic­al phe­nomen­on”— “I can’t. I’ve got to go to Lakewood and be a Jew with Stewart.” By which he meant he was accom­pa­ny­ing Stewart to the latter’s ances­tral home to observe Passover. I don’t think Don was inter­ested in this as a soci­olo­gic­al phe­nomen­on; it was more he was provid­ing com­pan­ion­ship for a buddy who was ambi­val­ent about a fam­ily oblig­a­tion. But nobody at that time would put it in terms so corny. Jesus.

            Long story short, in part because I want to spare friends the embar­rass­ment of reveal­ing how stu­pid they were about deal­ing with auto­mobile mis­haps at the time. They set out with two cars, one of them broke down, a pro­fes­sion­al tow was con­sidered too expens­ive, a make­shift tow line was con­trived, and it did not hold. They were obliged to pull over on a poorly lit road near Lakewood and re-contrive the make­shift tow line. A pickup truck driv­en by an intox­ic­ated per­son plowed into them. Stewart man­aged to leap to safety and Don was killed.

            All sorts of things happened after that, includ­ing of course a wake and funer­al. Don’s fam­ily insisted on an open cas­ket, des­pite the fact that Don’s arm had very nearly been severed in the vehicu­lar assault. The funer­al dir­ect­or was a reg­u­lar Bonasera—he used all his skills, etc.—but you could still see an absence. It was upsetting. 

            There was anoth­er wrinkle. Stewart, the afore­men­tioned Joe, Don, and a fourth party had, some time before, estab­lished an entity called Tormentors Incorporated, inten­ded to pro­mote all-around japery in Passaic County and also, I think to pro­duce some kind of humor magazine. Don and the boys drew up a charter that stip­u­lated that as the found­ing mem­bers died off, their wakes/funerals would fea­ture pie fights, and they would be bur­ied wear­ing clown wigs. They actu­ally went to the trouble of not­ar­iz­ing said charter. The idea at the time, of course, was that all the mem­bers would kick the buck­et in old age, after hav­ing amassed sub­stan­tial humor-magazine fortunes.

            Given the cir­cum­stances, a pie fight at the wake was out of the ques­tion. But after some dis­cus­sion we resolved to some­how bury Don with a clown wig in his cas­ket, if not on his head. With the help of a sym­path­et­ic cam­pus cler­gy­man (thanks Father Bob, and why are the sym­path­et­ic cler­gy­men in stor­ies such as these invari­ably named Father Bob?) we man­aged to secrete this item in Don’s cas­ket right before it was sealed. (It may well have been the same clown wig in which Stewart was to have been killed by Secret Service agents. Incredible irony.)

            What can I tell you. We were a bunch of young adults who did not know what had hit us and did not know what to do about it. At one of the post-funeral gath­er­ings, I was intro­duced to a fel­low who had been at The Beacon and was part of Markle’s crew; he had decamped for NYU to get a degree in film pro­duc­tion. He was a legend for that (in Passaic County New Jersey, achiev­ing legend­hood is not par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult) but also for a spe­cif­ic abil­ity, which I quer­ied him about.

            “I hear you can recite all the dia­logue in King Kong from memory.”

            He looked at me like I had grown a second head. “I can, but I’m not going to do it at a funer­al.” Point taken.

            Despite the awk­ward meet­ing this fel­low became my second col­legi­ate ment­or, and even­tu­ally we peered, if that’s a verb; we formed a band togeth­er and had lots of oth­er adven­tures and we remain close. Stewart and I did get a place togeth­er in Paterson, in the fall of 1978. We were kicked out of that place less than a month after mov­ing in, by the own­er of the house, who inhab­ited the upstairs apart­ment and was not amused at my play­ing the first album by Art Bears at what I thought was a reas­on­able volume. We moved to a shit­ti­er place on the top floor of a house about ten blocks up. It was a time of no money, lots of frozen ravi­oli, and dope-enhanced even­ings at the Plaza, just down the street from the new place. I saw Suspiria for the first time there—the pro­jec­tion­ist skipped an entire reel (the one before the mag­got infest­a­tion) and no one knew the difference.

            Despite Don’s inab­il­ity to man­age my cam­paign, on account of his being dead, I ran for SGA President in 1979, in Don’s memory I sup­pose. I won, in large part because I was the only per­son on the bal­lot. I resigned the pos­i­tion, which I was fuck­ing up roy­ally (I did man­age to hire an excel­lent sec­ret­ary for the organ­iz­a­tion how­ever) on the night John Lennon was shot, albeit before the event took place. Ah, memories.

            Gregory Battcock, for whom I became a TA after I actu­ally signed up for his class, died on Christmas in 1980, stabbed to death. Lee Lipsenthal, who I met shortly after mov­ing into the apart­ment on Jasper Avenue, and who also thought I was an idi­ot on our first night out, died in 2011, of eso­pha­geal can­cer. Michael Reardon, who became a pro­fess­or at Passaic Community College, died in 2012, age 53.

            Today a couple of the guys and I went out to Jersey and paid our respects to Don, revis­ited the cuisine of our youth, and checked out the would-be loc­a­tion of the cli­max of Blue Water, White Kelvinator. It was a good day.

 This was wait­ing for me in the mail when I got home: