It is chill enough most nights now that the door at Oxford's Pub remains closed when young people aren't ejecting themselves out into the night or lurching to get back inside. Tater, on the door, keeps to his stool just inside and only occasionally brings his grin out to the crowd congregated on the sidewalk.
These are nights of black pavement. Monroe's palette of sooty brick walls is dankness darkened and the sky clouded.
All the Avenue's spatter of colored lights, the cars tht run up and down to the Christmas colored commands of the traffic lights work to liven the scene and the crowds of kids with their laughter and chatter, even their flashes of anger kick in, too.
But it's no longer summer any more. The door is closed more than it is open.
This guy who came along the other night wore a gray sweat shirt and had his hood up and bound tight about his face. It was that chill that it seemed reasonable enough. He came around the corner under the Lola sign and turned as he was passing 640.
"Y' bin here long time," he said.
And I have been. Four summers I've been here on the Avenue.
He said he lives, now, on Wellesley, the street that runs behind our block. But he used to live in the Cornell. That's the building alongside 640, the building on the corner of Wilmer Street that houses Lola's and Oxford's on the Avenue and has apartments above and around behind.
How did I like my building? I like it fine; I like having Monroe on my doorstep. Yeah, that must be great. Yeah, he was living over on Wellesley, now, he told me again. And, he imagined, I must know Gene.
"Everybody knows Gene."
Gene Chandler is everybody's building super here about and, famously, Gene knows everybody on Monroe and all that happens on the Avenue.
"You rent from Tom Adams, too, if you live on Wellesley," was my guess.
"Oh, yeah! Yeah! Tom's the coolest! Tom's a great guy!"
He certainly is, too.
The hand at the end of his gray wool sleeve seemed smudged more than tanned. He asked if I wouldn't happen't...?
I didn't happen to have a cigarette. I was explaining how, unfortunately, if I had anything it might be a cigar but that that would be bad for me - blood pressure, strain on the heart - when this chick popped out of Oxford's door fumbling for a smoke with a cell phone in her hand.
"Hey, hey? Y'wouldn've one t'spare, wouldjah?"
She was dark haired and slender in jeans that were designer stylish or, maybe, just new and stiff. Sure, she told him and took the couple of steps over to my doorway pointing her pack his way. Her smokes were in one of those cases girls carry their packs of cigarettes in and keep in their purses sometimes.
There began a pumping, umphing familiar musical start up back of the bar's black tinted plate glass window while the Wellesley Kid's nubby fingers grubbed out a slender white stick. They curled about her Bic's yellow flame.
The door at Oxford's burst, again, and the music gushed out in full onto the sidewalk followed intantly by the spilling out of a chorus line of girls on the town grinning and singing,
"Oblah-di, Oblah-DAH! Life goes on - BAH!
Lalalala - life goes on!"
And, then, it is 1968.
As yet untracked, a Christmas snow is inches deep and everywhere over the front lawn I'm looking down on from a window on the Second Floor of Kent Hall, one of the freshman dorms at Plattsburg State. Fallen in a storm overnight, the snow is white as a sheet of typewriter paper as yet unrolled under the ribbon. Perhaps to pound out a late paper for a 101 or possibly to compose a letter home to folks that, though nothing you write in it would suggest it, makes you, nonetheless, feel achingly homesick.
Sun and snow make it a brilliant afternoon all silver and blue. One of those days after a winter storm.
None of the kids going out from the dorm lobby are hurried or particularly burdened with books. It is an early Friday afternoon and the last day of class before Christmas break.
There is white snow all over the ground below and the White Album is on the stereo. Oblah-di...Oblah-da....
The stereo is borrowed, a provided stereo that was gone after a half hour into listening to Danny Dunaho's new purchase on his roommate's crappy phonograph, gone after by some of the guys who have come around to listen.
"Whud'e say? 'E say bra? Life goes n BRA?"
The kid, Greg, I think they call him, beams giddy with this discovery.
A good-looking blond kid, he has always looked as though he should be larger than he is - a well put together kid but just undersized. He talks big, too. His friends are always goading him into bragging about this and that just to expose him as immature and not very bright. And he will brag about just abut anything you might suggest. It's a joke that never gets old with them. A Kunt Hall Klassic, you might say.
Greg is from across the hall and, almost any other day, wouldn't be visiting in Downey and Dunaho's room. Few of the kids that wander in and out of the room and back again later this afternoon are regulars in Pat and Danny's room. It's the music that brings them in. It's the Beatles, their latest album, a double album no one else has had the money to buy as yet. 'Sides, Christmas coming?
Danny, who is always hand-to-mouth and doesn't care because he's a folkie, a Dylanesque Hobo any way, took his first paycheck that he wore a food stained dining hall apron for and blew it on guitar picks, strings and the only copy of the White Album any of us have seen.
Now, even Mugs Manka has come as far as the open doorway of Dunaho and Downey's room. He hangs by his thick arms from the transom but he won't come in. Handsome George Halla, his roommate, tearing his pink cheeks away from his mirror, does, though, intrigued enough to want to go through the portfolio of photos that came a bonus with the new album with its white as winter cover and the green apple label on the platters. Mugs hangs and his young Joe Stalin face, a bit resentful, looks on with a seriously puzzled and intent expression. It is like he can't believe an album, any album, even from the Beatles can shift the epicenter of 'cool' more than half way down Second West and away from the room at the crux of the second floor that he made his way to and appropriated from its assignees Day One we moved in.
I double, till now, Mugs has even noticed the limp haired leprehaun folkie Dunaho.
Danny is sitting on the edge of a chair he's turned out from one of the room's desks beneath the twin side by side windows. He's on his toes, his heels are up under the seat. His dumpy body, bent forward, leans over as though hiding behind the big shapelier body of his twelve-string guitar. His one hand rests on its top-most shoulder while the other is draped out its neck. When otherwise unengaged, hearing something he especially likes, Danny's fingers will start to shadow play over the doubled strings of his instrument. His eyeswill absently dart about as though the notes he's hearing must be visible somewhere. He may come, at some point, to be looking right at you and, only after a moment, will he see you looking back at him.
His grin grows and is not at all shy, passing the thing off with a cock-eyed smirk.
Now, Danny is recounting toyet another newcomer how his first Food Service paycheck came to him and he decided to blow the most of it on 'a little Christmas' for himself a week early.
"My money!" he smirks and bobs his head compressing his lips and gnarling his chin and, then, smirks again, and swivels his face from side to side in the affirmative, "I slopped for it....I'm gona spend it...."
And we all who are left about on Second West, all who haven't cut a last day of classes to break for home, get to meet Rocky Raccoon, Lovely Rita, Desmond and Molly Jones....
Some other one is saying,
"They're sayin'..."
Because the World, because Our Generation has been waiting - after Martin, after and after Bobby, after the Hilton - for direction, some hint to how, after the horrors of this year, we should conduct ourselves, get on with our lives....
"They're sayin'...you don't have to get old. Like, life is gona happen and all but you don't have to stop being young 'cuss...."
A dissident voice grumbles,
"Ev'rybuddy gits old!"
"...you can still be a singer with the band, y'know, like....You can get married and have kids and a job but that doesn't have to be all there is. You can...."
"We're all gona grow up and we're all gona get old," the conservative persists.
"All I know is - I'm stayin' pretty!" Mugsy mugs one of his great wide handsome grins from the doorway.
It is a self certain delectable grin so grand that he shows it all around to every corner of the room he won't come in and so typical of him.
Even those who don't particularly like the Mugs have to smile with him.
"Molly stays at home and does her pretty face
And, in the evening, she's still singin' with the band.
Oblah-di, Oblah-da..."
Pat Downey, Danny's roommate, is back still just-out-of-bed gruff. He has had a last minute afternoon lunch for breakfast all alone in a near deserted and chilly dining hall and, coming in, he found a couple of clowns on his cot. After brusquely walking through Manka in the doorway with a grumble, he stopped mid-room. He didn't so much stare as lower his craggy Celtic forehead and seriously wonder in the direction of his cot as though questioning where his familiar sprawl space had gone....
The space that, then, magically reappeared for him.
Patrick tears off his rawhide coat and - with all that sleeve fringe whipping about, turning to sprawl in his space, tosses it on his desk.
The only person in the room too cool to take an interest in what everyone else is so into, Downey makes no complaints, keeps to himself and, staring in a trance of his own grumbles monosyllabicallyback at any effort to engage him. He has the mature good looks that make him seem older, to us, than even Kent's RAs and none of the boyish charm of a Halla or Manka. His beard shaves a dark shadow along his jaw line, his chin is a hard cleft knot and his cheeks flank his face with a wasted look. Only his blue eyes are younger than he otherwise seems. He has the thick and tousled hair and, often, the brooding stare of a dissolute Rock Star; he has, too, the late-rising, drugging and drinking in barrooms to closing life style to match. Girls don't expect to hold on to Pat and can't keep from caring for and about him.
Pat is from small town well off folk who sent their troublesome black sheep to military school where he learned to drink bad liquor and bend rules. Now it is his grandmother, the one with the real money in the family, who is paying his way through State College and sending him a check the first of every month. It funds some of his barroom days and nights and he has learned to sociably take whatever free drinks and drugs come his way in the course of an evening. He should be down now, already, at the long bar in the Union Hotel on Margaret Street...
"We get where we want to be, living how we want - and they send us home to our folks!" I venture and see Pat crack one of his grim smiles and laugh one of his odd tipsy sounding snickers.
I tell him, "I'm gona to miss not being here with you guys!"
It is not how I feel about going home for the holidays - but it is, in a way. It is how I know Downey feels about it - and Danny, too, for that matter, with his martinet Air Force Sar'Major Dad.
"I gotta put an appearance in," Pat admits with his chin in to his chest broodingly and, then, grins another of those laughs of his, insisting, "ButI'm hangin' here till I gotta."
And he is hanging around now because everyone left in school would seem to be in his room - he doesn't know why! And he is enough of a social animal, now, my guess is - guys always buying him drinks and giving him acid to drop and girls always taking him home at the end of the night - that he wants to be where ever there is a crowd. There is something prowling in the way his eyes take in the room.
Soon enough, though, he'll get restless for the Union, for the College Inn, and he'll jerk himself up and grab his jacket tearing out of here.
I'm looking out at the snow.
Out on the low couple of deep front steps up to the dorm lobby door out in the cold, the guy from Two East they call Schmutzy - who looks like a mangy buffalo and behaves like a clown, is leaving with his dad, Stan, and his Uncle Phil, neither of whom look a thing like him. The two of them came up late yesterday from Longuyland to spend an evening with him and his college friends spending their money freely and doing the town right and red. The Schmutz looks harried and is hustling to get his bags out to the car still embarrassed at having his folks. All evening and all morning his pals have been raving what great guys Schmutzy Senior and Uncle Phil with the receding hair lines and big mustaches are - but he won't have any of it.
Two a.m., when Orange Julep delivered my pizza, Uncle Phil and the Schmutz crowd were down in the lobby and Phil was posing for a picture with the GI mannequin from the 'Christmas in Vietnam' display there. Only Schmutz wouldn't laugh when, at the flash, Phil's fingers peace-signed rabbit ears over the poncho clad figure's surplus store helmet.
I'm looking out at the snow and the students and their kin departing for home. I'm in Pat Downey and Danny Dunaho's dorm room with the White Album being played through for the tenth time ever for any of us and the first time for some who have just now heard about it and come around to hear.
And, for some reason, I know I want to save the moment.
Saved along with it are Christmas card-like memories of the drive home late that night in the rear seat of my folks latest Plymouth Fury. After the storm, the mountains by moonlight south of Champlain and before Albany, were a blue and ivory snowscape with dangerous dark clusters of pine forest and sudden rock faced road cuts at the tops of passes.
Long, long after midnight my home coming was that strange sensation of seeing old familiar scenes with new long absent eyes.
I'm truely on Memory Lane, now.
Somehow, too, preserved with the rest is the image of a sun flooded moment over morning coffee with my Grandmother, the two of us sitting alone together at the end of the kitchen table beneath the east facing window. She has just heard that Jim Baxby's dad had had to go and take delivery of his boy's body, shipped home from Vietnam in the middle of the night. So near to Christmas; they should never have done that! Not that way. All her cronies agree. He was a year or two ahead of me in school and one of the good ones - good looking, good at sports and good at being decent to everyone.
A guy with a bright future.
"Hey!"
The Wellesley Kid brought me back to the future, to what was passing for the present.
"I know who you remind me of," he pointed a knuckle up at me. "Y'look like that comic, that George Carlin guy!"
I get that time to time.
"I'm George Carlin."
The Cigarette Girl suspected there was something wrong with that.
"Hey, didn't he just die or something?"
"What's your point?" I tried my best Carlin on her.
It got me a grin - though, from the cross-eyed look she gave me next, it hadn't quite squelched her suspicion that I wasn't that dead comedic legend.
Maybe it was just she was trying to hit a drag on her cig and question my sanity at the same time. Maybe smoke got in her eyes.
"Aw-kay - " she wanted to know - riddle me this, "So, what's that like?"
"Times change - but everything's pretty much the same."
The times change but, if you look around, everything is pretty much always the same. You don't get that until you've been around for a while, Freshman.
"What can I tell y' - I'm still singing with the band."
