pt. 57 - murray and martha's

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 57)

You know how it is about life, how

sometimes things about others flabbergast

you when you think of them later, or sometimes

it's things about yourself that you still can't

believe or understand? I go through that a lot,

in that I spent a lot of my time with with

people I liked  -  other kids around me, with

whom a certain sort of local-brotherhood took

root and grew, and then one day was just gone.

The ones who are gone and dead, yeah I'd like

to talk to them now, sure  -  some sort of local

Inman Avenue area megaphone to the new and

shiny dead. But it can't happen and it's all the sadder.

My friend Joe, who blew his brains out with a rifle

shot (I guess it's never two) and was only found an

afternoon later in his back driveway, in his car, plastered

over as it was with his brain mattter   -  found only

because his dogs were howling and the lights had

been left on. Yeah, you know, Mr. Big Deal, found

dead in his freaking Renault Le Car, the running (but

only sometimes) joke of the later 1970's. Right up there

in Pacer heaven with the rest. Yeah, I'd have a few

things to say  -  and just as much I'd like to hear.

Death by death is one thing  - but death by 'interdiction',

yeah that's another thing entire. It ain't right. How are

you supposed to grieve for someone who only ended

up, selfishly once more, doing what HE wanted?

-

My other friends who've died. What of it? What can

I do now? Just gotta' move on. Things about myself

that flabbergast me  - my (living) friend Al Zinze, he

tells me about a verbal showdown he remembers me

having with Martha, of Murray and Martha Candy Store

fame. I can't believe it, nor can I remember it, but Al

has it down right. Martha was Jewish  -  I've written

before of that  -  it never made much matter to me. He

says one day she'd scolded me for throwing down some

paper candy-wrappers in front of her store instead of

putting them in the trash can. In the verbal scolding,

evidently I turned to her and sarcastically said back,

after she said something like the old 'do you live in a

barn?' routine  -  I said, 'Yeah, well at least we don't

eat with our hats on.' That's crazy. I tell you, crazy,

and he remembers that like one of my golden,

Oscar-moment lines. I remember nothing of it; nor,

I here swear, does it seem like something I'd say

or even have the gumption to say  -  let alone even

know about (eating with hats on?), yet he remembers

it perfectly. Another time, he says, a few years later

in my later-teen years after all the squibbling and

squabbling problems I'd gone through, he remembers

himself and Robert Stewart seeing me near them on

a bicycle, passing along, and they called out to me

to have a moment, say hello, all that, and that I

simply looked right past them, completely ignoring

them, and went along my way. I don't recall that

either, and again it doesn't really sound like the

'me' of me. For these sorts of things, now, I'm

humbled, sorrowful even, to these people, for

what I've apparently done, and for being a schmuck.

'Flabbergasted' is what I called it, right? I have to

live with it, and can't take anything back. And I

will. What is this life anyway?

-

Murray and Martha's was a candy store  -  of gold to

us. Cherry Cokes and candy, ice cream, all that stuff of

Summer, after playing stickball in the schoolyard nearby.

It was something like 7 cents for a refreshment. They 

had a million stupid little penny-candy type things in

an open glass case to the left of the register. The register

itself was in a sort of little box-cage corner, but not 'caged'

as in today's security caging, just like 'removed' so it

got to look important and serious, and of course it 

overlooked the open-faced candy trays too  -  glass

display, endless array. My friend Alex tells me the

shoplifting quotient was pretty high -  I don't know, and

it seems like it would be a pretty difficult heist, but he

was tight with the family, so maybe so. I can recall,

in a closed-eye visual of the place, pretty much every

last detail of the interior. Newspapers. Magazines. 

School supplies, rulers, models, hair pins, glue, a

entire array of things. It was something. I had, in my

fourth-grade class, under Miss Evans, a girl named

Patsy Ann Zionce (check the spelling; a guess), and

there was a time, that Spring, when for some reason

the class or the grade was having an 'ice-cream party'

for something. The classroom windows looked out

over Avenel Street, and Miss Evans sent Patsy out to

get the ice-cream order (another time I can recall

Murray himself limping over with the boxes). Anyway

the boxes were plain, gray cardboard, with little round

holes every so often, about the size of a quarter, I guess

for air flow into the interior or something. I can remember

Miss Evans looking out the window with us all, at Patsy,

holding the ice cream, maybe two or three square boxes 

of twelve ice creams each, or something, and she remarked

'Look at her, isn't she a beautiful girl?' And Patsy, was, yeah -

her reputation, for a fourth-grader, was that she was very

pretty. But, hearing Miss Evans say that, aloud, it was weird.

I only think she was a 'Miss' anyway; could have been a 

Mrs., I guess. Don't know.

-

Murray and Martha  -  I mentioned earlier  - seemed always

to be at war over something, seething and screeching at each

other. Somedays the Cherry Cokes (all made from syrup)

would be made with happiness  -  other days you could just 

feel the anger and animus with which they were made  -  so

much so you hardly wanted to drink it. Funny. I guess they

always made up.

-

Over on that other side of Route One, right by the light,  our

neighboring family, the Raspitzzis (check my spelling anew),

they moved out from Inman and ended up there  -  a big house,

still there (but not for long, I'm told) behind that little building 

that later became Nelson House Printing, but which at the

time was the original Introcaso Cleaners. Walter and Betty

Fehring  -  with the encyclopedias I mentioned in an early 

chapter, they bought the Raspitzzi house, and moved here

from Elizabeth. The house the Raspitzzis moved to was

nothing like the Inman Avenue houses  -  it was large,

really large, and rambling, and from another time and 

another Avenel day entire. I never really heard from

them again. They had two kids, I think  -  Laurie, the

girl, and perhaps Peter, the younger boy. That's an 

example of the sort of 'layering' that I mentioned  -  in

which Avenel has so many different stratas of housing 

and people  -  the new, the old, settled and recent, all 

mixed into these varied sections. The mingling between 

them all  was just never that much. Things from 'another'

time were always so much more rambling and over-sized.

As was their idea of 'Time' itself, I always thought.

-

Across from them, there was  -  for a while  -  another

'supermarket, when those started happening. Foodtown

or something, and later then, a 'Fine Fare'.  Now it's

been a print-shop for years  -  my once-friend Steve

Glassman moved it there from Perth Amboy, where he'd

started out in a little dump named 'Business Cards

Tomorrow'  -  which at first was just that; a niche supplier

of next-day business cards to other printers, so they didn't 

have to bother (business card printing was always a pain in

the butt -  small size format, ink washes, etc. The idea of

'gang-running' a bunch at a time actually made some sense).

Near him also was another friend, Louis Schlesinger, whose

father, right there in the next building, ran Schlesinger's 

Hardware, for years. It was a really nice, crowded to the

hilt, with a massively great hardware store aroma, traditional

hardware store. Louie himself, in later life (now) has become

a fairly important psychoanalyst or somesuch, forensic stuff,

etc., with a few of that subject reference type books to his

name. I lost touch years ago. There was, also, just around

the corner there, in a house now right next to the pizza place

there, another friend, and his sister, a twin, Peter Panzarella.

I think I remember his sister's name as Patricia  -  it was one

of those family-deals where the kids names began with a 'P'.

They disappeared early on too. A lot of stuff I just lost

touch with. That older side of Avenel  -  closer to the 

origins  -  also had a number of places, in the middle of the

blocks, that were local stores  -  foodstuffs, cakes and

bread, milk and eggs, stuff like that. They're all gone now,

but one or two of the buildings remain. This was all the stuff

which pre-dated 'supermarkets' -  which eventually wiped

out all these very neighborly and local stores, in one fell

swoop, they came in, got everything consolidated, and

closed up all the little guys  -  because people always went

with the new, the latest, the largest. Go figure, yep, go figure.