Colicchio All Strings Attached

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-6678-2056-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

It's the summer of 2008. As mom Linda Moore pushes forward in her battle against cancer, her sons are about to set out upon their summer adventures, one planned, one not. Alex Moore has just graduated college, and he and friend Billy set out on the mythic American cross-country journey. Little brother Tommy, forced to complete a summer internship for having failed a high school course in 'life skills,' is assigned to what he calls 'geezerville,' that is, Bon Secours Continuous Care Facility. Neither of their experiences go quite as expected, and from them arise these true tales from a single summer.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Colicchio, Joseph

Leseproben

WEEK TWO

1.

In a county that included Jersey City, Kearny, Union City, Bayonne, and Hoboken, it was Linda Finklestein’s hometown of Secaucus—associated only with pig farms and slaughterhouses, landfills and Mafia kills—that evoked the heartiest laughs locally and nationwide. It was the least urban of Hudson County’s municipalities and in the days of Linda’s youth—the early seventies—it was still home to dirt roads, undeveloped tracts of wetlands and wastelands, semi-urbanized hillbillies driving the same trucks the family’d owned since the end of WWII, and all of the county’s rural- or road-oriented clubs: The Hudson County 4-H Club (a joke to the rest of the state, as the state club was a joke to the rest of the nation), The Hudson-Essex Motorcycle Club, the Hudson County Chapter of the Lincoln Highway Association, and the West Hudson Horse and Rodeo Association.

It was this last organization and its just-blocks-away presence that created in Linda a love of the Wild West. What could possibly be more magical than stirrups and chaps, an Indian head-dress, a ten-gallon hat, brown-and-tan guitars around a campfire, saying “two bits” when you meant a quarter?

For the first few years of her infatuation, when Linda was just six or seven, it was only her Halloween costumes that went the cowgirl route. But from there it spread, and Linda loved the whole of it. She loved the silver-painted plastic pistols, the holsters and gun belts that looked like leather but behaved more like cardboard, the stiff toy-lariats—throwing one was like throwing a hula hoop. She loved the outfits, especially loved them because they came by UPS and the man rang the bell: the scarves and handkerchiefs and tasseled vests; the hats of brown felt, the carved rhinestone belts, the spurs that jingle-jangle-jingled. Linda would nag and save, save and nag for months to get one of those foot-tall horse and rider models with saddles of real leather and riders so well made they could stand on their own or mount the horse, hands so real they could hold a gun or a rope, a cigar or a prayer book. To get one, she and her mom had to take a bus all the way into Journal Square in Jersey City.

Yet it was a solitary love. Try as she might to get them to, none of Linda’s friends ever caught the bug. Beyond playroom make-believe and cowboy-show reruns, there was little outlet for Linda’s passion. That’s where the Horse and Rodeo Association came in. Though it was grown-man territory, she hung out there for hours after school and half the day on Saturdays, but there were only so many times (like two) that she could convince her friends to go riding, especially when there were no long and lovely trails to conquer. Instead, a rider could choose between the Association’s third-of-a-mile track, an unpleasant mixture of mud and dung, and County Road 99 which your horse would have to share with barreling trucks as the old stage-route wound beneath the Turnpike overpass then skirted the bedeviled shore of the Hackensack River before dead-ending at the littered and graffitti’d base of Fraternity Rock. And fashion-wise, there was little support for calico and rhinestones in an age of disco and punk.

Then, in 1982 Dennis Moore moved into town. Lanky and laconic, half a mess but never frazzled, cool in an oblivious sort of way, Dennis was 19 to Linda’s 18, somewhere having lost a year of school among his parents’ frequent moves. Because he fell in love with this red-headed girl—tall and lanky, too, and with barely a cup size—he claimed to have fallen in love with the cowgirl obsession of hers as well, agreeing that there was no dancing like Western Swing, learning the names of heroes and heroines of the old west (celluloid and real), spending more than one Saturday afternoon on Linda’s couch looking through Western Fashions, Native American Crafts, or Old West Design. They travelled on overnights to beautiful Pilesgrove, New Jersey, for Cowtown Rodeo weekends, and a few years later, Linda and Dennis Moore honeymooned in Albuquerque during U.S. Rodeo Championship Week.

A sweet and unambitious guy, a hippie without the trappings, Dennis was, in Linda’s terms—and intended as a compliment—the world’s greatest underachiever. After they graduated Secaucus High School, at Linda’s urging Dennis went straight to college, Montclair State, just ten miles from home. He graduated with a double major in Business and English, a nice compromise between the practical and the day-dreamy. He wrote a handful of short stories, mostly science-fiction, and even sent a pair out for publication, but with little in the way of genuine passion and even less ambition, once those two were rejected, his literary career ended.

By the mid-eighties, the Secaucus Mail Terminal of the U.S. Postal Service was the county’s largest employer. Dennis scored number one out of the hundred individuals who took the Clerk/Carrier test—“See, the world’s greatest underachiever”—and began working there eight months after college graduation. Linda, meanwhile, worked as a girl Friday at AJ’s Plumbing and Supply, a position she’d held on and off since she was sixteen.

Linda relished Dennis’s love and warmth, his good nature, his openness, his presence. She had a sweet, good-looking husband who had a steady job to boot. A year after their marriage, they rented an apartment above a chiropractor’s office in the more upscale town of Weehawken. That’s when Linda decided to become an enterprise. Enter Oakley Moore, the Riding, Roping, Singing Cowgirl, Available for Parties and Occasions! Well, the riding portion was a bit misleading. For an additional fee, the Horse and Rodeo Association would deliver a riding rink and three ponies that she’d have to promise not to sit on herself—and no fat kids either! The roping was no problem. She brushed up on it and she was fine, but she was even better at the knot tying. None of those, though, compared with the singing. She turned herself into a passable guitar player and grew a repertoire of western songs, all of which worked as sing-alongs. The initial outlay for promotion and all the cowgirl schtick was $2,000. But Linda found the whole thing a blast and Dennis was her biggest fan.

In 1986, Linda became pregnant, and, when she could no longer squeeze into the denim, into the chest went the Riding, Roping, and Singing Cowgirl. Temporarily, she hoped. But no. Thereafter, appearances of Oakley Moore would be rare and free (though Linda’s singing of cowboy songs would not be rare), coming out to play on her boys’ birthdays and on those long summer days when a backyard rodeo seemed like the only and therefore the best idea.

2.

Dennis had been at the Post Office for six years when he was promoted to a supervisory job, just in time to oversee the phase-out of the old Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, a job he was promised would take no more than two years. Thanks to the unions and politicos, however, Lackawanna was destined to die a slow and contentious death. Five years later, in September of 1997, it was on life support with only sixty employees working in the cavernous hulk compared to the thousand who’d been there when Dennis took over. After the four kids who were hired as summer temps were terminated mid-August, a new one, a Black kid named Josh Ulmer, was added as a provisional employee, which meant little more than that he would be kept on if the guys he worked with liked him. Not a problem—Dennis loved the kid. “For whatever reason, he always puts a smile on my face,” Dennis would say. “One nutty goofball.”

Alex was eleven and Tommy six when Dennis was killed in the forklift accident: it was the first day Josh had been allowed to operate the heavy machinery. By mid-afternoon, simultaneously driving and carrying on a conversation that had begun over lunch, Josh was feeling pretty good about himself—“like an actual man, you might say.” At lunch, a guy named Oscar and his friend James had been trash talking hip-hop—a daily nuisance topic—with Josh defending it in his own way: “I just like it. I like R&B, too. I even like The Beatles. I bought a CD just last week. It’s personal taste, that’s all. I got nothing more to say.”

But out in the warehouse an hour later, Oscar was still at it. If he used the expression thug-life once, he used it a dozen times. Josh was maneuvering the lift which was loaded with letter- and small-package-stuffed duffle bags.

“I live by the motto live and let live. Ain’t no savage in me, ain’t no thug, neither.” Turning to Oscar, he showed his own bare arm: “See that? That’s black. I’m black, real black. And I’m not like what you’re saying. I’m a person who naturally likes people, always have.”

More animatedly, Josh continued to gesture and explain when one of the bag straps hooked onto a column of stacked pallets and the lift lurched right. Josh began pulling handles—red knobbed, yellow knobbed, white knobbed. In his panic, he managed to jerk free of the pallets and raise the fork, but he didn’t slow the machine, he sped it up. He pinned Dennis Moore to the cement wall where his splintered ribs busted through his chest, blood spurting out. He was a mess, dead before the EMTs arrived.

At their father’s wake, the two Moore boys were dressed in churchy suits, seated on either side of their mother. Hunch-shouldered, Tommy, the younger one, played with his Gameboy. When a mournful classmate or family friend approached, he lifted a limp hand to take the one being offered, accepted any kiss that came his way, nodded his...