I Remember Joseph Failla

In 1973. 

[I learned yes­ter­day that Joseph Failla, who I’ve men­tioned on this blog and who con­trib­uted to Première’s Home Guide when I was run­ning it in the 1990s and 2000s, died in hos­pit­al after exper­i­en­cing short­ness of breath. Like me, he was 62.)

I remem­ber in see­ing Night of the Living Dead with Joseph Failla on the night before Halloween, known in our town of Dumont as “Cabbage Night.” I remem­ber Joseph’s fath­er pick­ing us up and driv­ing us back home. I remem­ber some mor­on kid actu­ally try­ing to apply shav­ing cream to one of the car’s win­dows while it was actu­ally mov­ing. I remem­ber that Joseph’s fath­er, who was not by any yard­stick a “dev­il may care” per­son, being very irrit­ated at hav­ing to come and chauf­feur us home from the movie, which had upset us into wit­less silence. I remem­ber him say­ing “non­sense.” I remem­ber this being maybe 1969.

I remem­ber see­ing Night of the Living Dead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Cowboys, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, sev­er­al Godzilla movies, and a mil­lion more pic­tures, at the Palace Theater in Bergenfield with Joseph.

I remem­ber Joseph draw­ing and writ­ing a “Peanuts” par­ody called “Charlie Blech.” 

I remem­ber walk­ing with Joseph and with Mark and Aaron L. all the way from Dumont to the Stanley Warner Theater in Paramus, over roads with no side­walks, risk­ing death, just so we could see Dirty Harry in the spring of 1972.

I remem­ber Joseph and I dis­cuss­ing our highly unreal­ized film pro­jects. The anti-Vietnam film  eroM oN (read it back­wards), told from the POV of a dead sol­dier, in reverse. Johnny Angel, based on the Shelley Fabares song, the story of the loves of a girl biker. The Ballad of some­body or oth­er, a Peckinpah-inspired Western.

I remem­ber get­ting off the phone with Joseph after we had a long and ram­bling con­ver­sa­tion dur­ing which Joseph insisted that Fellini was pre­par­ing an adapt­a­tion of the com­ic strip Beetle Bailey. I remem­ber after I cradled the hand­set my puzzled moth­er asked “Don’t you two ever talk about any­thing real?”

I remem­ber Joseph and I cre­at­ing a book togeth­er, called Canadian Alligators and Otter Things. It was a group of illus­trated com­ic­al stor­ies about a quarter of alligators who were mem­bers of the Royal Canadian Mounties. I remem­ber many years later an uncle of mine ask­ing why we had nev­er done any­thing with the book, because we had appar­ently cre­ated what could have been the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of its day. I remem­ber say­ing to my uncle, “Well, we were ten.”  

I remem­ber in eighth grade, dur­ing gym class, sit­ting on a bench with Joseph, as we invari­ably did, because after a long peri­od of being picked last for base­ball or dodge­ball or what have you teams, the gym teach­er decided to leave well enough alone and just exclude us from play. I remem­ber telling Joseph that I had been invited to a party that even­ing (a rather extraordin­ary occur­rence) but that I wanted to get home in time to catch Psycho on the 11 p.m. movie on some loc­al sta­tion. I remem­ber our gym teach­er, Coach M., whose life claim to fame had been being on the 1964 Mets frm team, over­hear­ing me and smirk­ingly say­ing, “What is it, Kenny, an all-boy party?” I remem­ber Joseph and I then clam­ming up.

(I remem­ber many years later Joseph telling me that Coach M. had died of a heart attack. “Oh well,” I said.)

I remem­ber tak­ing a bus home from a movie in Paramus with Joseph and telling him about a small piece I’d read in Time magazine stat­ing that in California, a TV ad for con­doms was run dur­ing a late-night slot. I remem­ber we con­cocted a story­board for a con­dom com­mer­cial then and there, and that later on Joseph, who was get­ting more and more uncom­fort­able writ­ing expos­it­ory prose, then mak­ing a com­ic strip out of the fake ad for health class. I remem­ber many years later the both of us being flum­moxed by actu­al con­dom com­mer­cials fea­tur­ing “Trojan Man.”

I remem­ber that Joseph some­how got to see Mean Streets before I did. I remem­ber him call­ing me and describ­ing its open­ing scene, the “home movies” and the Ronettes song “Be My Baby.” I remem­ber him say­ing, “This is for me.” I remem­ber we both had to have been 14.

I remem­ber in his seni­or year in high school Joseph writ­ing and draw­ing, for a class pro­ject, an elab­or­ate com­ic based on Dante’s Inferno, with the nine circles of hell rep­res­en­ted by eight class peri­ods and then the prom. I remem­ber that he drew me as the Virgil character.

I remem­ber Joseph telling me about one of his instruct­ors at the School of Visual Arts, Art Spiegelman, and of his ini­tially appalled reac­tion to Spiegelman’s com­ic about his mother’s sui­cide, “Prisoner on Hell Planet.”

I remem­ber stand­ing on line with Joseph and with My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ at Cinema Village for a double fea­ture of The Shining and The Killing. I remem­ber a couple of fel­lows stand­ing behind us going on about Clint Eastwood’s dir­ect­ori­al career, talk­ing about how with Play Misty for Me Eastwood hadn’t yet found his “water level.” I remem­ber Joseph squint­ing at me and say­ing, in an Eastwood rasp, “What do you know about my work, punk?”

I remem­ber being mildly irrit­ated with Joseph for not hav­ing sub­mit­ted any work for an SVA com­ic magazine that pub­lished stu­dent art, and which con­tained a ton of work by his fel­low stu­dent Drew Friedman.

I remem­ber Joseph admir­ing Friedman’s tal­ent but being very dis­ap­prov­ing of Drew’s classroom beha­vi­or, espe­cially with respect to the instruct­or Harvey Kurtzman.

I remem­ber an anim­ated char­ac­ter Joseph con­cocted while at SVA, “The Slug,” which was, indeed, an anthro­po­morph­ic slug who smoked a cigar and made wisecracks.

I remem­ber Joe’s graph­ic novella, “Ed Victory,” about a paunchy, washed-up former super­hero liv­ing in a North Bergen tenement.

I remem­ber when Joseph was a co-manager of the Stanley Theater in Jersey City, and how he once pro­posed to put up on the mar­quee: COMING FOR XMAS: TAXI ZUM KLO.

I remem­ber Joseph work­ing at a video store in Teaneck where one of his reg­u­lar cus­tom­ers was the jazz gui­tar­ist George Benson, who once made a spe­cial order for Raymond Chow’s Lady Kung Fu.

I remem­ber Joseph telling a group of friends at lunch that anoth­er cus­tom­er came in request­ing Henry V: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

I remem­ber when Joseph became the man­ager of the laser disc sec­tion at Route 17’s Tower Video, where he quickly acquired the nick­name “Laser Joe.” I remem­ber his cli­en­tele included Ernest Dickerson and Gordon Willis, and that he became friendly with them both. He also had a couple of New York Yankees as customers.

I remem­ber hav­ing Joseph over at the very messy stu­dio apart­ment of a Manhattan girl­friend for some reas­on, and of him say­ing upon enter­ing, “It looks like Catherine Deneuve’s place in Repulsion.”

I remem­ber also hav­ing an intim­acy mis­hap with that girl­friend, in which I bonked her nose with my fore­head, which caused her con­sid­er­able pain and swell­ing. I remem­ber her being very angry with me over the course of sev­er­al days and at one point say­ing “I’d like to grind your bones into dust.” I remem­ber relat­ing all this to Joseph, in great earn­est. I remem­ber Joseph then para­phras­ing a Raging Bull line: “She ain’t pretty no more.”

I remem­ber the funer­al for my cous­in Mark, who died of lymph­oma in 2002. I remem­ber my fath­er show­ing up for the wake, which I had not expec­ted, as he had been self-estranged from this side of the fam­ily since the early 1980s. I remem­ber he spoke to me with a ser­i­ous­ness that was unfa­mil­i­ar to me and that he said, “I can’t ima­gine any­thing worse than for a par­ent to lose a child.” I remem­ber my fath­er perking up when Joseph appeared. I remem­ber my fath­er ask­ing him “So do you still get to spend time with Herman here,” using a nick­name for me that he con­cocted after I had a sud­den growth spurt at age twelve, a nick­name my dad knew that Joseph would be the only per­son in the room to get. I remem­ber Joe giv­ing my dad an affec­tion­ate half-smirk and say­ing “We manage.”

I remem­ber sev­er­al years after the Route 17 Tower Video closed, its build­ing was repur­posed to be the gym in Burn After Reading. I remem­ber Joseph telling me of see­ing hand-painted signs with an arrow and the word “BAR” painted on them, on the north side of the highway.

I remem­ber in one of our last phone con­ver­sa­tions telling Joseph that I must be get­ting soft in my old age, because I didn’t think No Time To Die was so bad. “For me the Bond fran­chise ended with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” he said, and I could hear the shrug. I remem­ber respond­ing, “Man, you are hardcore.”

I remem­ber learn­ing recently that my cous­in, Tommy Gentile, who had been so help­ful with my mother’s funer­al and who helped Joseph a great deal when his own moth­er died about a year after mine, had him­self died in May of 2021, and that for whatever reas­on our side of the fam­ily had been kept out of the inform­a­tion loop on this one. I remem­ber that I had inten­ded to call Joseph and to say to him, “So if any of you are think­ing of DYING, you should know that there’s a small change of man­age­ment at Gentile Funeral Home.”

In 2020.