02 - Cleaning Day

Dave can’t say where he comes from, because he comes from all over, a shiftless gypsy life he can’t always remember, one cheap apartment bleeding into another so that sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night forgetting which one he is in or just where he can go to find the bathroom.

Not that his mother wanted to keep moving, she just does, she loses a job, money runs out, and they move before the landlord comes to collect rent they don’t have, finding a place just as bad in another part of Paterson, loaded with other apartments and other landlords, if not other jobs.

Dave says she moved them to Clifton because she didn’t want him to get killed going to the schools in Paterson, Dave being big but not tough, on the verge of going to high school where no white boy like him in Paterson is likely to survive.

But Clifton isn’t Paterson, and people on this side of Crooks Avenue don’t like renting to family’s like Dave’s, even when they’re white, and want too much when they do, and she couldn’t find a place deeper in Clifton than right across the street, and it wasn’t cheap.

Once Dave came to see me in my house, he wouldn’t let me come to see him in his, blaming his mother for not wanting strangers around the week his father came home from the hospital, or that they’d had some problem with plumbing the landlord hadn’t yet fixed.

I knew where his door was on the street since I’d seen him go in and out of it daily for weeks, his limbs pumping as he rushed out from it on his twice daily chores to the store, and back, a slime pealing paint door stuck between the jewelry store and the hair salon, almost a non-door since it had no number of its own, and a worn brass slot into which the mailman thrust the mail.

But inside was mystery, full of haunting, foreboding spirits I ached to see, if only to know what Dave was all about, when I had already exposed everything I was to him, and the more he said I shouldn’t see it, the more I wanted to, needed to, recalling those days when my mother was a gypsy, too, and we had gone from home to home just as Dave and his family had, a vague memory – if it was a memory – my only memory of my father.

Then, as if on a whim, Dave, needing someone to bear witness in some way other than someone of his family, invited me in, saying he had to get ready to bring his father home, and that he and his younger brother Dennis, with too little help from their younger sister, Debby, had to clean out the place and make it acceptable, not for the arrival of the man who had sired him – a man who had seen the worst of a great war and have come back too damaged to appreciate anything he had fought for or be appreciated by a wife who could care less about war overseas as the wage war he lost when laid off from his job – but for the social worker who had to visit the house a day before their father, inspecting it to make certain it lived up to the basic standards that the state required for such visits, and Dave’s mother, needing the husband home in order to sign over his veterans checks left Dave and Dennis and Debby to clean up the mess in time.

Dave warned me, claiming he wasn’t completely to blame for what lie above, partly blaming the age of the pre-war tenement-like structure the city hadn’t get gotten around to demolishing for the more acceptable one and two family houses Clifton preferred, and partly blaming a mother, who said she was too weary after a whole day work to be bothered with demeaning chores like cleaning or cooking, and who did her best to keep her own corner near the TV and her lounge chair free, leaving the rest to her sons to maintain, when neither could.

Dave holds open the door to the street with its pealing paint coming off in his fingers, and I step in, stairs to the left rise up, narrow and cramped with the stain of boots wearing down a layer of cheap white paint until the raw wood showed. The other door, straight ahead, Dave says, leads to the basement and the boilers, and opening it for a moment, Dave unleashed the grungy scent of heating oil and mildew, and the scent of age I always smelled in the cellar of my grandfather’s house up the street, his cellar, I later learned, hewn of the same rough stone, solid but ancient, filled with spirits of some other time and place, some historic adventure city fathers had not yet exorcised in their need to erase the past. I felt nostalgic and vulnerable, curious enough to want to take refuge there, until Dave closed the door again, and led the way up the stairs to the hall that was not a hall at all, but one long back porch with windows looking down onto the backyards of houses along Vernon Avenue, windows that showered afternoon light in, but did little to dispel the dimness, or create cheer in a place full of splinters and dust.

In summer, we would stand here and look down at the children playing in the yards, hear their laugher rising as they spayed each other with hoses or wrestled each other to the ground. In winter, chill artic air rushed through the gaps and left icicles dripping on the inside sills, a heatless tundra we could not stand without hats, gloves and coats.

Dave makes me tiptoe passed the first of two doors that open into this hall, telling me a grumpy old man lives behind it, a man I later learn had once been our postman. The door beyond leads to Dave’s home, but he doesn’t immediately going in, making me promise never to tell anyone what I see inside, his face red with shame, and I agree, and he opens the door into chaos, nothing like the chaos my uncles created at home in the hands of my grandmother, hobbling in their wake to fix.

Dave had no grandmother to pick up the pieces of this disaster where piles of laundry clean and dirty created a Sahara of wasted, unwashed piled high on the drain board and in the sink, and trash overflowing from receptacles spread across those few portions of floor unoccupied by dilapidated furniture, broken toys, and other items I did not recognize for their deteriorated condition, with Dave telling me he does his best to keep up with it but can’t, explaining why he spends more time with me than he does here  – his mother blaming me for getting Dave into trouble when she really meant I distracted him from doing chores she would not do herself, except to keep clear the area near her TV, where only her ashtray overflowed.

Today is different; today Dave and Dennis half to clean if they want to see their father, so

Dennis holds open large plastic bags as Dave fills them in with junk on a snow shovel, disposing of everything and anything, useful or not, in the hurry to get the bags filled and dragged down into the basement, out of sight until the trash trucks come. But they cannot dispose of the stench so easily, even as scrub the maggot-infested dishes and stick them in the cabinets to dry, using up can after can of Lysol in the hope that the combination of soap suds and disinfectant will ease the stink, keeping the hall door and front windows open, regardless of the temperature outside.

Dave’s father never signs the veteran’s check while at the hospital, knowing his wife won’t bother bringing him home if he does, a crazy man’s revenge considering the mad dash to make his social worker welcome, and providing him with a clean place to spend few days in before his wife drags him back, he leaving the scent of alcohol behind from the equally mad consumption that takes place when his wife isn’t looking.

Dave’s mother rarely cooks, leaving this to Dave or Dennis with the strict order that they have a meal ready for her when she returns home from work, the quality of which varied, with a menu that often-included hamburgers, hot dogs and spaghetti. When dishes pile too high, they order takeout from the nearby Chinese food place or the two pizza parlors up on Getty Avenue. When Dennis or Debby cook, things often burn, forcing Dave to throw open the windows to ventilate the room of smoke. This often results in them throwing out pots with food burned beyond cleaning inside them. Cooking, burned or not, often leaves its scent lingering in the apartment for days, building up a stench that only those who lived there did not notice.

The door to the apartment comes in from the south side, off the long rear hall and its windows, Crooks Avenue traffic buzzing outside the windows day and night. The kitchen, a compact collection of appliances on either side of a yellow porcelain sink, sits on the left under the slant of the stairs going up to yet another floor above. Strips of flypaper thick with insects, dangle from under the stairs.

Furniture divides the room into sections, rather than walls, with a kitchen table near the windows on the right, a sagging sofa with its back against the windows straight ahead, and Dave’s mother’s tiny world that includes an end table, lounge chair and Sony TV, an island of its own, surrounded by the litter of their lives, clean on occasion, but mostly not, making up a kind of strange terrain requiring a guide – usually Dave or Dennis – to navigate.

With the first flood as clean as they might get it, Dave and Dennis head up to the second floor, stairs overflowing with toys, blankets, bags of laundry, a stroller or any other wayward object Dave or his mother did not wish to have in the middle of the mess below or objects misplaced during the transition from one floor to another, shifting the way sand shifted across a windy beach, items buried and unburied, lost and found.

Two bedrooms divide the upper floor with a bathroom between them. Dave and Dennis use the bedroom fronting the street; Dave’s mother and Debby use the rear bedroom; Dave’s father sleeps on the coach downstairs.

I watch them work, the way I might watch ants struggling to carry loads in and out of an ant hill, both boys overburdened by something far larger than even they know, carrying on, determined to make this place acceptable for that moment when their father comes, knowing that like Prometheus, they roll a stone up a hill only to see it roll back, an endless vigil, a conflict they can never win, but must endure for that brief moment that passes even more briefly, and he is gone, the way my father went,  they wall all fathers go, an invisible presence we live with and without, endlessly.

email to Al Sullivan