I Was Haunted by 1967 (Ten Days in Newark); Do You Have a Ghost?

ONE

As I lifted up the over-sized art book, I could see that something was sticking out of the middle of it. I hadn’t actually opened the book in years and so I had no idea what was tucked inside. It was an ornate and handsome book about Leonardo da Vinci, part of a carefully arranged group of objects on the top of a console table in my kitchen.

The small glimmer of plastic that I spotted turned out to be a see-through folder of black and white photographs. They are photos of me and a boy named Louis in the tall grass of a backyard in Newark New Jersey, where I grew up. I am 16, he is 17.

The photos are old and worn and I must have stuck them in the book to flatten out the corners. But why had they suddenly appeared now?

I look so tiny, not just young, but my body is so small and compact. I am wearing a shirt with rolled up sleeves. I don’t recognize it. Is it his? I’m sitting on a blanket and Louis is stretched out with his head in my lap. He has big, thick glasses on and my fingers are stroking his face.

I remember my worn, brown loafers and my long, straight brown hair. I haven’t had long hair in ages. Everyone had long hair back then. This was 1967 and the straighter, the better. Some girls used to even spread their hair out on an ironing board and then flatten it all down with a hot iron.

There was a photo of another boy too, our friend Gary; curly-haired, sitting cross-legged tapping tobacco into rolling papers. It was rare to see him in the photos. He was always the photographer.

In one picture, a tiny kitten is perched on Louis’ shoulder, but I couldn’t recall its name. There is a cowboy hat tossed on the grass nearby, Louis’. He always wore it during that summer in August.

I was shocked at my seductive pose in another picture, stretched out on the ground looking teasingly but knowingly at the camera. The mood of the other pictures, so somber, so serious. If these pictures had a soundtrack, it would be a cello Adagio mixed with Jefferson Airplane, at least that’s what life felt like to me back then.

I brought the photos into another room. These photos were from a special time in my life when I had come back to Newark for what I think was ten days to stay with Louis in a house. I guess my parents let me. We were no longer living in Newark, but Louis was and Gary was.

I kept looking deeper and deeper into the pictures and tried to remember where we were staying. Was it Gary’s house? Was it our friend Marshalls’? Maybe we stayed there. Marshalls’ mother had died, and his father had moved out with his new wife leaving Marshall on his own at 15 and so he had the place to himself.

It’s hard to look at the pictures because I am not her anymore and there is a part of me that feels like I never was her. She looks so unformed. I think I love her. I think I love that girl. I know I loved that boy. I miss that girl. I miss that boy. But in some strange way, I fear them both.

It was only a few days later when I arrived at my office to find an unusual envelope mixed in with my pile of mail. The address was inscribed in a very familiar handwriting with distinctively tiny cursive characters, I recognized it right away as being Louis’ handwriting. So here was Louis again; Louis cowboy hat boy in the photos I had just found. I hadn’t heard from him in years! Why now?

The letter inside was written on the same type of long-lined yellow legal paper and ballpoint ink that he had used when he wrote me love letters when I was 16 and 17, but I knew that this letter was different from the very first line; “He sipped his coffee from a glass, not a cup, not a mug like his Russian grandparents and mine.” And somehow I knew then that Gary had died.

“Droplets would cling to his mustache. Crumbs would shelter in his beard; tangled, untamed, quintessential. Decades ago he stopped wearing his glasses because he just decided to. He squinted into the light, his vision clear, even if his eyes were sometimes not. He moved slowly, but with deliberate pace. Flannel shirt and wool cap, even on the warmest days of summer. He used to wear my old clothes, dungarees with worn out knees recycled. He sat with me in silence, sharing space and history.”

So, our dear old friend Gary had died. Gary, a strange Newark boy, kind of a wizard, kind of a brilliant hermit. Gary, the witness to our young love that summer. A fixer, a loner, a misfit.

The letter described how Gary and Louis, both living in the same town in Upstate New York for many years had lost touch over the past summer, which was very unusual. They used to see each other just about every week. And then later, Louis found out what had happened. Gary had died of lung cancer in June, “peacefully,” as it was described in his obituary.

Gary had smoked all his life. I remember the Lucky cigarettes and him filling and rolling and turning them. Louis wrote: “A thread has snapped and you of all the people I know understand that because innocence ends, because you loved him and how I was so focused on you and you on me, while he was focusing on us.”

I read the letter over and over. There was this bit of the dreamy past to savor. I wanted to read it and I wanted to think it and I wanted to feel it over and over; that girl and that boy and Gary, who had been this third friend that whole time, the summer in Newark and how incredibly sad I felt that he was gone. I knew I would have to call Louis.

I drove home from my office, Louis’ letter tucked into my appointment book. I put my bag on the kitchen counter. I fed my dog. I walked around the house, turning on lights. I was nervous about calling Louis, but I also wanted to get it done.

I got into my study and took the letter out of the envelope and rewrote his telephone number on a Post It. My husband wasn’t home yet. It was a good time to call. I punched in the phone number. Louis answered, and I recognized his voice, but it was dark and low. The last time we had spoken in 2001, he was more upbeat and familiar, and we had reminisced, but this wasn’t a call for memories about us. This was a call about Gary and about death.

“God!” I said. “I am so sad.” “Me too,” he said. The phone connection wasn’t good, and I was straining to hear Louis’ voice. He talked about how Gary fixed computers at the school and there were people who cared about him. I was so relieved to hear that. Gary had always been an outsider, bullied as a kid, odd, but he had found a place and that place was right where Louis lived.

He was supposed to help Louis put up a backyard pool this summer for Louis’ children, but Gary had been sick. He had lung cancer. He deteriorated in a few months. Eventually, he was in hospice. Every once in a while on the phone, Louis and I breathed together in the pauses or said, “Wow!”

Then there was a change in Louis’ voice as he said, “I didn’t just call to tell you Gary died. I also have a request.” He began by describing a woman who was organizing a memorial for Gary and I couldn’t quite understand who she was; a girlfriend, Gary’s landlady, a special friend. She had gone into his basement apartment after he died and found pottery and origami and photos. I didn’t know Gary did pottery. The woman was planning a memorial at the college where Gary worked.

I wondered what Louis’ request could be. Was he going to ask me to come? No, that wasn’t it. He asked if I could send any photos Gary had taken or ones with Gary in them. It sounded like they wanted my originals. There was no mention of scanning or digital. Louis didn’t sound very tech-oriented in general. “I’ll send them back,” he said a bit impatiently when I hesitated.

I was given this very sobering task. That helped organize me because after we hung up, I felt a bit overwhelmed. There were so many memories. I also felt disappointed. It was as if I were 16 again and was expecting something from Louis when we talked.

Even though this was just a request of me and the delivering of sad news, I felt a bit worried or embarrassed because our connection was so bad on the phone that I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. I felt like this old woman who couldn’t even hear anymore. I was starting to feel like wow, I really am old! This was just like, I’m old. I’m old. I’m looking at these pictures and Gary had died, Gary, my age, you know? I’m old.

I knew I had scrapbooks high up in the closet in my study and I brought down the one that I thought would have more examples of Gary’s work that I could send for his memorial. I found photos that Gary had taken of me in Weequahic Park in Newark during a serious photo session. One staged shot captures me in a field of wildflowers.

I remembered spending time with him in his darkroom as he developed his photographs; watching him in that red light turning the paper over and over in the liquid bath with long tongs as the black and white images slowly came to light. I can almost smell the chemicals. We were quiet together during those times. I think he was smoking, but I don’t know if he would do that in his darkroom.

Looking more closely at the photo, it actually doesn’t look like I’m surrounded by wildflowers. It’s really more a field of weeds and I’m holding one up that has a little flower-like thing at the tip and I’m looking down at it and it is a weed, which strikes me as funny because it’s just like the pictures in the backyards of Newark that in my memory were teaming with lush vegetation, but it’s really just that nobody ever mowed their lawns.

I pick up the pictures of Louis and Gary and some of that backyard grass. They look like they’re having a quiet, meditative moment or are deep into one of their discussions about science fiction, Marxism, existentialism. I must have taken that one. Gary’s shoes are off and he is wearing those thick white socks.

Louis always wore them too. I can picture Louis coming into the bedroom wearing them. I remembered the bed we slept in and how we always kept our underwear on. Louis has said that we would marry someday but wanted me to know upfront that he would be a revolutionary.

I had intended to stay on task for the memorial, but I got all caught up in that hazy feeling I’ve had at other times in my life when I start to look at mementoes from the past. I just felt completely flooded because there was so much to see.

One picture is face down. I turn it over and it’s Gary alone in the backyard and he’s holding our kitten. It makes me cry to look at him. He’s so young and so sweet looking. He’s in his cross-legged position on the tall grass and he’s just petting the kitten. He looks like a young poet. His hair is curly and bushy. I can see in the near distance these tall hedges around the edges of the grass.

The last time I spoke to Gary was in 2001. He said that he liked fixing things and didn’t go out much. “Biiinie!” Gary said in that voice that stretched and twisted syllables; “Biiinie, we got ooold!” You maybe, I thought. Maybe you did.

My husband came home. My back was aching from sitting on the floor. “My old friend Gary died,” I said. He picked up some of the photos. “I’m sorry.” I picked all the photos and letters off the floor, slipped them into a few manila folders and headed off to bed.

As I lay there, I thought of how Louis had said that he couldn’t remember Gary without remembering our ten days in Newark in August 1967. I felt the same way. I closed my eyes. I would dream of all of us as I slept.

There are five more episodes of Ten Days in Newark. Would you like to read and hear the rest? Thanks to H.L. Tandberg for his cover of “Comin’ Back to Me” by Dave Van Ronk

Share