Call from Jersey (9781468301625)

by Kluge, P. F.

  Rereading the old man’s note, I pictured him, sitting at the table in the kitchen nook, putting pencil to paper. It felt like a childhood memory, even though his note was only two weeks old. You come to a time—like an airplane’s point of no return— when your parents, even if alive and well, become figures out of the past. They aren’t part of your life anymore, your today and your tomorrow. It was unlikely that we had anything new to say to each other. “Things we need to talk about that can’t wait much longer.” It was probably what did I want him to do with my sash of Boy Scout merit badges, my stamp collection, that pile of 45 rpm records with my name written on the labels.

  That night, I walked along Patpong Road, the nightclub strip that everyone in Bangkok finds, sooner or later. No place for a son to be thinking of his father, but I did. In a way, I was shopping for him. The road was closed to traffic at night and stalls filled the thorough-fare, pens, copy watches, lighters, scarves, shirts, socks, silk, compact discs, videos, belts and purses. Thai shills worked the sidewalk, shoving little books in front of tourists, laminated pages that were menus for sex shows that visitors could pay to watch or join. Everybody could star in his—or her—porn movie. “I always wanted to direct.” On either side, the nightclubs were getting busy. They made a stunning first impression, no doubt about it, a beery epiphany, beloved of Australians. You could sit on a bar stool, hug a Carlsberg and watch the street parade, into the wee hours. Or you could ponder what was on display inside. The music was as loud as you liked it, the lights changed color, as if moving to the music, slow, fast, hot and cold, hard and soft. The way those rich pink and green and orange lollipop lights covered those bikinis, those legs, that long black hair, those bored high-cheeked boned faces, oh God, how could a situation be so tragic and so tantalizing. Even now, in the plague years, those bars could take your breath away. Even now? Make that, especially now. The bars caught you in the way the deep green of a baseball field transfixes you before a different kind of night game.

  Out on Silom Road I found what I was looking for, on a rack of postcards, sunrise at Wat Arun, the Royal Palace, the floating markets, and Thai boxers. The boxers were for Pop. He’d always liked boxing, Friday nights, all through my childhood, he’d watched the television fights, Jimmy Powers and the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. I could still sing the commercial, “to look sharp and be on the ball.” After that, “Greatest Fights of the Century.” Newsreel footage of the great ones, La Motta and Robinson, Ross and Armstrong, Zale and Graziano, Louis and Schmeling. I doubted he’d ever seen a live boxing match, but he always watched the fights. Back at the Dusit Thani, I filled the postcard out.

  Dear Pop:

  Hello from Thailand. I got your message. I’ll be home soon.

  Love, George

  There, I thought, short and sweet. That should hold him. I’d visit him in Jersey and, when I needed to get away from him, I’d check on the reunion. That appealed. Killing one bird with two stones, the old man said. He sometimes got things backwards. And sometimes he got them exactly right.

  II.

  “HELLO?” NEW YORK CITY, 1 A.M. JET LAGGED, just in from Bangkok, I’d been lying in bed, improbably restless, waiting to catch a wave of sleep that wouldn’t come.

  “You took your time about it, sonny boy. Hoping I’d hang up?”

  “Pop?”

  “It’s me alright.”

  The old man had always hated phones. I could call him with any news, a marriage announcement, a diagnosis of leukemia—his or mine—and he’d say “yup” or “nope” and then: “Put it in a letter son.” And then, always: “a letter is as good as a visit.”

  Maybe better.

  “Are you alright, Pop?”

  “I’m still here.”

  The last time he called, three years before, was to report my mother’s death. He called collect, claiming he was in a hospital booth with not enough change. “Well, she’s gone,” he’d said, as if a plane had just taken off on time.

  An old-timer who called a stereo a “hi-fi,” a refrigerator an “icebox,” and himself “the last of the Mohicans,” he was, in many ways, quite a guy. But when we met, he always seemed to get away from me. I was in a business that required a certain amount of interviewing. Granted, most of my subjects were soft targets. Getting a food-and-beverage guy to define what on earth was meant by “Pacific Rim Cuisine” wasn’t exactly like nailing Robert Vesco. Still, the old man escaped me, especially since Mom’s death. I used to wonder what it would take to reach him. Subpoena power and a syringe of sodium pentothal?

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “And so you called me? At one in the morning?”

  “I wanted to make sure the rates were down.”

  “From Jersey?”

  “Did you get my note?” he asked.

  “Yes. And I sent you a postcard back.”

  “It hasn’t arrived. Did you put a stamp?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, thanks in advance.” Now, a silence on the line, which always signaled a change in tone.

  “I want you to come home. Can you come home tomorrow?”

  “Pop!” I protested. “I just got back from Thailand. I haven’t unpacked yet.” Another silence. “I’ve got to earn a living, you know.” More silence. I know how you earn a living, it said. No one needs you tomorrow. You’re not a doctor. Or a baker. You don’t drive a school bus.

  “The day after tomorrow,” I said. “Promise.”

  “Okay. I can probably make it that long.”

  People from New Jersey can’t kid themselves: It occurred to me, two days later, while the bus boomed through Secaucus along the Turnpike. On one side there were refineries, warehouses, factories, mostly old and abandoned, railroad sidings, the poisoned Passaic River (“Piss-ache,” we used to say). There were garbage mountains, chemical holding ponds, salt marshes and drive-in movies that stretched all the way to Port Elizabeth, where behemoth freighters deposited Japanese cars by the thousands, like a parody of some World War II island beachhead, except here the defense was shot and the natives were lining up to surrender. People from New Jersey can’t kid themselves. Radio transmitters that had toppled into salt marshes, piles of used tires, stacks of crunched up auto chassis, walls of hubcaps and Welcome to Newark, “next to the biggest city on earth.” A new football stadium in the Meadowlands and a new prison near Newark Airport, and whenever I passed by here, I couldn’t help looking for what wasn’t there anymore, the landmark and logo of my childhood, the three-ring Ballantine Ale sign hovering over the brewery where my father worked for forty years. People from New Jersey can’t kid themselves. Onward and upward, build we must, you can’t stop progress. Now, Route 22 through Hillside, Union, Springfield, one of America’s great junk highways. The un-zoned land of anything goes: Greek diners, discount shoe stores, Channel Lumber, carpet remnants, u-paint-it furniture, Cohen Fashion Optical. Then, in Mountainside, things opened up. You got archery ranges, landscapers’ nurseries, miniature golf courses. You got to look into people’s backyards, at above-ground swimming pools, aluminum utility sheds. You got garden apartments and nursing homes and it scared me, knowing that you could live and die here. You could never leave.

  The ritual of homecoming hadn’t changed since I’d come back from college. The old man parked in the same corner of the Snuffy’s Restaurant parking lot, in the aging green Plymouth which, he insisted, would “last me out.” I pictured him on the last day of his life, trembling and gasping for air, driving a belching, lurching car with bald tires, smoking muffler and an eighth of a tank of gas to the entrance of a hospital emergency room where they’d expire—“conk out,” was his quaint way of putting it—simultaneously.

  I took my time crossing the lot. It was important to take him in now, before we opened our mouths and things fell apart. We’d had a hard time with each other, since Mom died. She’d been gentle and loving and smart. More important, she was patient. She’d believed in
me. Everything I’d written, she clipped and saved, even the mediocre stuff was forward motion. She’d died just when my first book came out: NO WRONG TURNS, all about family travel possibilities within a dozen miles of interstate highways. She’d had time to see the book, but not read it. Perfect timing, the old man said.

  There he stood, a sturdy bandy-legged guy, six inches shorter than I was. If it hadn’t been for food rationing during World War I, he’d say, he’d stand six feet. He had a broad chest, muscular arms, callused hands and gnarled fingers. He combed his hair straight back, more white than black now, but plenty of it. His face was a German face, his nose the most prominent feature, not hooked or broad or broken or pugged, not aquiline or Roman or any of those words, just big and there. If everything else was working class—look for the union label—his eyes were different. Those eyes made me feel like a target, coming into range.

  “Hi, Pop,” I said. It was awkward, putting my arms around and drawing him in.

  “Sonny boy,” he answered. Into the car. Close quarters.

  “You see this?” he said as I tossed an overnight bag in the back seat. He pointed at the sports pages.

  It was a sports-talk column and today most of the talk was about the Hall of Fame’s continued denial of Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto’s admission into the ranks of the immortals.

  “A marginal candidate, Pop. There are better men out and worse men in.”

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  “It’s the announcing that keeps him out,” I suggested. In recent years as a Yankee announcer, Rizzuto had been shilling for enterprises of the sort that crowded Route 22: Italian restaurants, tire stores, household mortgage operations.

  “A walking billboard,” the old man agreed. “They announce the Rizzuto vote and every Italian restaurant owner in North Jersey goes into mourning.”

  “The Veteran’s Committee will vote him in eventually,” I offered.

  “Not this veteran!” He laughed, he clapped me on the knee. “Boy, did we used to have fun hating the Yankees! More than we loved the Dodgers, we hated the Yankees. It felt like we were guerilla fighters out here in Jersey. Viet Cong!”

  Now we were driving up into the first ridge of the Watchung Mountains, and I sensed I was inside that net of roads that extends outward from home, like light from a campfire, those roads whose bumps and turns are imprinted on us forever, from the time they bring you home from the hospital, maybe, through childhood rides, sleeping on laps, and on through your own first drives, coming home from dates, radio pumping heartbreak music: “I’m Mr. Blue,” “It’s Almost Tomorrow,” “Since I Don’t Have You.” Roads that become part of you so you feel you could find your way along them in the dark forever, just as I knew you could walk, eyes closed, through every room of the house to which I was now returning.

  “You look … I don’t know … washed out … washed up,” he said.

  “You don’t look so bad, “ I said, “considering …” And so it began, our rough-and-ready. Human relations are way over-rated. At least that’s the way we’d been behaving. Father-son, husband-wife, brother-brother: the magic went out of them so quickly. They lasted no longer, really, than Santa or the Easter Bunny, but it took longer to shake them, to see how death and divorce and distance canceled life’s big deals. Sometimes I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t take a chance with each other, only which one of us was going first, who would take that chance, and what then? There were no gamblers in our family that I knew about.

  “So what about death, sonny boy?” the old man asked. “Where’s it rank? As a travel experience, I mean. Would you say it’s a Backyard Adventure? Or is it a Faraway Place?

  Old joke. My father knew how I shuffled my columns around, so that a piece on the Delaware Water Gap, say, would be a Backyard Adventure for New Jersey readers but a Faraway Place when it showed up in a California outlet.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” the old man said. “It depends on where you die, right?”

  “Sure. You die in Florida, it’s a Backyard Adventure. Conk out in Colorado—Faraway Place.”

  “And what about New Jersey? What about your old neighborhood? Suppose I die here? What do you say then?”

  “I say …” It came to me. “He’s gone to a better place.”

  A mile away from home now. Almost every house we passed, I’d been inside, down in cellars, even, wrapping bundles of newspapers and magazines for Boy Scout paper drives. I’d shoveled snow off most of the driveways along here, I’d cut grass in the summer and I still knew where there were above-ground roots that could wreck a rotary blade. Berkeley Heights was the name of the place. Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. It wasn’t a rural village, giving out onto cornfields and orchards, and it wasn’t a city block with gossip and laundry and corner bars where you could watch generations roll. Berkeley Heights was a gathering of lawns and houses, streets and trees. Though there wasn’t the least hint of autumn yet, the trees—oaks, tulips, beeches—were darkly, terminally green, a fullness that could go no further, and the lawns too, were past the madness of watering and mowing. They were full, fat and tired. So were the people we passed; their hot weather enthusiasm behind them, swimming pools and barbecues and yard sales, another year rolling by, a year that aged them while adding to the value of their houses, people going down with real estate going up.

  “I read somewhere, twenty percent of this country moves every year,” the old man remarked as he turned into the street we lived on. “Works out to a complete change every five years. A brand new America. What do you think of that?”

  “It makes me wonder why you stayed.”

  “What am I going to do, George? Die? Move to Florida?”

  So he stayed, re-reading the Hornblower novels, writing an occasional letter-to-the-editor, and putting out poisoned peanut butter for the grackles, starlings and other “junk birds.” He’d been in the same house since before I was born, an old timer in a neighborhood where time didn’t count.

  “Well here we are, son,” he said, “how’s it feel?”

  And as I listened to the familiar, unforgettable crunch of gravel in my father’s driveway, I felt something inside, a shudder or a tremble of the heart.

  III.

  I KNOW THAT PARENTS AREN’T SUPPOSED TO fid dle with their kids’ lives, beyond a certain point. Every job they take is a great opportunity, every move they make is a promotion, every transfer is to California. And everyone they marry, you’re supposed to love. Or else. But this is my son we’re talking about, our son, college material, our magic boy. And in these last years, it’s gone sour. I can see it in his eyes, no matter how much money he makes.

  His mother was George’s fan club, and even she knew something was wrong. That book about Sunday drives for families. She hardly had the strength to hold it. She looked at the book, which is not the kind of book you read through, you just use it like the yellow pages. She studied his photo. I could tell she was disappointed. I took it from her and saw our son on the back cover, wearing a Hawaii shirt and his special I’m-having-fun-for-free look. She loved him a lot. It was frightening.

  “It says here,” I remarked, “that he’s an intrepid author.”

  “Intrepid …” She came back to life a little. She was always looking up words. “He takes chances. He gambles with his life …” Suddenly she turned away, hiding tears, but her voice came to me for the other side of the pillow. “Things came too easy for him.”

  IV.

  WHEN I CAME DOWNSTAIRS FROM MY ROOM, I found Pop in the kitchen nook, looking at the morning newspaper, which I knew he’d finished while he was waiting for me at the bus stop. He held that newspaper the way I used to put a book in front of my face, when I wanted people to know that I had better things to do. Now he was up to my old tricks. I cleared my throat. We were behind schedule. Home twenty minutes and no argument yet.

  “Well, Pop, what can I do for you?” I decided the sooner we got started, the better. “Is this about your will?”


  “My gosh, no,” he replied. “I’m still torn between the Boy Scouts of America and the Berkeley Heights Public Library. Don’t you worry about my will, son. Around here, anyway, you’ll never have to worry about another library fine. And if you want to go on any camping trips … just say the word. I don’t guess it bothers you, but it still bothers me, you never made Eagle. How many more merit badges do you need, anyway?”

  “Five, I think.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “Pop, I’m too old! And they still require Physical Fitness merit badge. They want chin ups!”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s too bad.”

  “How are you feeling these days?”

  “I haven’t lost a step,” he said. “Never better!” But then, just as I expected him to launch into more of the heavy kidding that passed for emotional life, he looked out the window, then back at me, and his face was grim. “Could we cut this out, just for a minute?” he asked, sounding angry. “This Katzenjammer act?”

  You started it, I wanted to shout. “Sure,” I said. And then, when he hesitated, I got really worried. “My God, what is it Pop?” I hadn’t heard him speak this way before. I wasn’t sure he had it in him. “Is there—something from the doctor?”

  “Your trouble is, you think dying’s the only problem, when you get to be my age. It’s all just biopsies. You think that’s why I wrote you in …”

  “Bangkok,” I supplied.

  “… that place? Dying? You wouldn’t hear it from me. Not a peep. Millions of people on earth, not one has failed at dying yet.”

  “That’s a prepared line, Pop.”

  He smiled. Me criticizing him for lack of originality! The adventurer who hired a car and driver to the top of an Indonesian volcano and headlined the resulting column “Bali High.”

  “Living … that’s my problem,” he said. He got up and walked towards the kitchen. When he reached the doorway, he turned back to me. “I’m the oldest man in the neighborhood. I’m the pioneer. I shot at deer to keep them out of your mother’s tulip bulbs, remember? I said hello to the Italians, the ones just off the boat, carrying flats of tomatoes on their heads while they walked down Plainfield Avenue. I remember when we used to get snowed in. I remember when there were ice storms, you could hear the frozen branches snapping, it sounded like an army was out there in the woods. Nobody knows this place like I do. So the question is—you don’t have to answer it now. George, just think about it—how come I feel like a stranger?”