BiCoastal Chronicles: The Ass of Ophelia, The Old Neighborhood and a Deer

She went out to Nova Scotia and has left us alone. Die, Ophelia, Die.
It occasionally rained on Saturday and by Sunday we had clear blue skies. The perfect fall weather. I am no fan of tropical storms.

But more to today’s point...this was the day when you hang out with your younger brother in the old neighborhood and you walk around and it’s both fun and freakish all at once.

I met my brother over at his brother-in-law’s house where they were making wine in the garage...I caught them after the wine making was over and the Bocci game was in full force. My brother was covered with grape stains. It was truly brilliant and the tradition of making your own garage wine is something I must applaud. The grapes are ordered from some vineyard in California, shipped to Suffern and then Bacchus rules. They have barrels and stainless steel storage containers. I’m sure it all began as some old Italian immigrant making wine out of apples or dandelions or a backyard grape vine...and then evolved into this. My brother’s father-in-law asked me as he looked at my little ass in expensive jeans, “So what is it that you do for a living? No one here knows. We know you were an actor, but I’ve never seen you in anything. What’d you do? Porn?”
I told him about my little collection of ways that I make money but that mostly, I’m a stay-at-home house husband who has just about finished writing a book. Good enough for him. Just a few points left in the Bocci game.

After we headed home and stopped at the A&P to buy fresh bread, my brother and I took a walk through the New York/New Jersey neighborhood where we grew up and where he has happily remained. We grew up on the New York side. He now lives on the Jersey Side. We walked down to The Black Bridge. This place/idea/happening zone was where all the good badness happened when we were kids. You get to the Black Bridge by first crossing an unnamed lower bridge with silver railings which juts out like a tail off the horseshoe shaped connection of Oak Terrace and Jersey Avenue. This lower bridge goes over a storm drainage area...the place that froze in the winter where we used to ice skate. It is always filled with skunk cabbage and cattails in the summer and becomes part of the flood plain of the river during big rainfall. It is completely wide open and frozen in the winter. A great place to burn Christmas trees and smoke cigarettes. Just past this drainage area, you go up a very short hill and you are at The Black Bridge which straddles the Ramapo River. It is a rusting hulk of a thing, completely made from industrial steel and looks like it should be in a coal mining town in West Virginia. The Black Bridge connects the New Jersey end of our neighborhood with the now defunct Mahwah Ford Plant. Everything about the old Ford Plant is gone. Even the train tracks that ran along the river have been pulled out. The plant used to give plenty of jobs. I think Bruce Springsteen sings about the closing of the Mahwah Ford Plant on some album. In any event, I never knew anyone who worked there. The Ramapo River, at the edge of the neighborhood, still runs good and strong. It’s about twenty feet wide and runs through the Ramapo Valley where Suffern sits. In the distance on two sides are mountain ranges. It is all very beautiful and sadly ugly all at once. The natural part is lovely. The dead industry is sort of poignant. There are huge voltage lines that travel next to the river that breaks the bucolic mood. They intrude threateningly. The placement of the lines along the river makes total sense in a civil engineering kind of way. The lines can run through the river valley and get to many of the towns of the Ramapo. A fire road is well cut through very thick weeds so the lines can be maintained. Many years ago, someone must have planted grapes because there are wild grape vines everywhere, running over every other weed and tree in sight. And since it’s the end of the summer, the plants could not be thicker.

Of course, my brother had some of the good green. So we did what we used to do as kids and when we decided to leave the bridge all high and we walked by the fire road back to the regular roads of the neighborhood, we both were intrigued and so we went down the fire road cut into the thick bramble and grape vines, trying to take the old path to George Lane’s House...a path that goes for three blocks, something we used to do all the time. “We should call George and tell him to get his ass over here,” my brother said. We got close to our destination and along the way, I took pictures and when I have a good DSL thing going on again, I will post them. In the thickets of weeds and thick grape vines, sitting in a pushed down area was a huge deer. The deer, as a foraging animal, always seem to me something akin to a very large dog crossed with a squirrel. It was great to see this huge deer sitting among the grape vines sprawled all over the thick briar under the power towers. Of course after I took the pictures I immediately thought of the thick weeds, deer, deer ticks, Lyme’s Disease and expensive and inconvenient antibiotic treatments followed by improper medical billings.

We could not get past a certain point, so we had to turn around and go back to The Black Bridge and then back into the neighborhood... The neighborhood is extremely varied, much more so than when I was a kid. There is the one little block near the Water Treatment area that is still a tiny enclave of Italian immigrants. There are extremely pretty blocks in pristine condition with old stone houses that are real old timey. One tiny stone house was purchased by some great new ager type and he turned it into this awesome hippie cottage with a stone wall and decorative grasses and cone flowers. The few other all stone houses are gorgeous. And then there are the 1910 houses that have been redone to look like gingerbread revivals with wrap around porches, delicate Victoriana trim and stained glass windows. Then there are the houses that have never been redone and they look depressingly grim and the same people live in them who lived in them when I was a kid and that seemed to me, in my highish state, both lovely and sad all at once. The house I grew up in is just terrible. It was a boxy thing, built in 1973 and sits on a corner lot and the fence that ran along the side has been removed and cars park right on the grass in the back yard. Like something you’d see in a holler. The particular block I lived on was never very nice, but when we lived there we did not park in the yard and we always had very coiffed shrubbery and cheerful flowers. To see your old house trashed is not a very sweet experience.

My brother knows everyone so we stopped along the way and talked to many of the neighbors. It was super homey and the strong New York accents, to the high ear, were extremely entertaining, endearing and also mildly terrifying. I met a woman who talked about expanding her house. I met a guy, an Iannacone, who talked about buying a car. The highlight of the trek around the old neighborhood was seeing Keith Hunter. Keith was the neighborhood “retard”. I don’t know exactly what was wrong with him...but he was definitely deficient in brain power and we kept him around in our group because he was older than us and he would always buy us booze. When we were kids, he had shiny, greasy, straight, black hair. Now, he has the same exact hair but it is 90 % silver. It is very bizarre to jump through time and see your local “tardo” all aged.

We returned to my brother’s huge Dutch colonial house, recently expanded with a very romantic front porch festooned with rocking chairs. Inside, my sister, brother-in-law and nephew were all sitting down and we joined them as my sister-in-law, Deb, served the macaroni and sauce while American flags waved in the yards up and down the block.