Nashua, NH

I’m not even sure I know, as I write this, what this post is all about, and perhaps that’s the best thing that could happen. So, let’s discuss, for none of us has ever been in this place before.

I had a ‘Gansett last night over dinner. It is a popular beer brewed in New England that is currently on the “cool”/ironic list — like PBR — and I was reminded of my best friend from high school and college, Dave, and his family.

First and foremost, Dave and I were THISCLOSE in terms of thought. We finished each other’s sentences. It was to personality what the Everly Brothers’ voices were to harmony. An optimal blend. Paired strands of a seaman’s rope.

We came from different tribes and it did not matter. My dad was an accountant. He was a white collar Dilbert. Dave’s dad was shop steward for the MTA, Local 806, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. He supervised a crew of subway station painters. You know, the guys who stood around smoking Camels while maybe — MAYBE — two of their buddies slopped Exorcist-green paint onto station stanchions.

My mom was a loudmouthed faded glory blonde and sometime saleslady for Lee Jewelry on 59th Street, and Wilson’s House of Leather and Suede. Talk about selling snow to Eskimos: at Wilson’s a guy could walk in for change for the parking meter and after she got through her hard-sell, he’d walk out with a $900 leather trench coat.

His mom? An itty-bitty little lady, a homemaker, with a tangle of blue-rinse curls who presented as “cute.” She was anything but. She snarled. Her stare could gut glaciers. With an omnipresent Kent lit between her lips, she could make ten out of ten underhand free-throws from the foul line on a Reservoir Oval basketball court. I’d seen it with my own eyes.

I was in their presence many times, and I do not remember either of Dave’s parents saying a word to me. Not even a “Hi, Marty.”

NOTHING.

And so I was surprised when, one summer day, Dave invited me to his family’s compound in rural New Hampshire. Which is kind of an oxymoron, for what IS New Hampshire, if not “rural” (note to out of town readers: I say that as a son of broken-glass Bronx tenement life).

The idea of this trip was exciting but it would take a financial toll, for back then, I worked summers in the bursting room of a publicly traded financial services company. It was an exhausting, filthy job that required repeated lifting of heavy boxes of six-part carbon forms used to print ledgers for various departments. We got them from the speed freaks in the mainframe computer room on the third floor. These guys worked nights so the reports would be ready for the execs on the next business day. They shot crystal meth to get through their double-shifts and dealing with them when they were “going down” was, um, somewhat disagreeable.

We first removed the carbon (decollated) from them on a decollating machine. This required throwing heavy rolls of shmeary carbon paper into large barrels and, then, carefully fitting each copy onto a bursting machine, which snapped — with a machine-gun decibel report — page perforations and, thus, created readable material. These would be loaded onto steel-wheeled wooden skids and delivered to different departments. Who read them? What did they say? To this day, I have no idea.

The bursting room. That’s a bursting machine right there, folks. Left-to-right: Bob, Jesus, Carlos, Morris (our boss), Jerome, and Richie.

I lived at home and went to CUNY. That is, four-year commuter college. My co-workers were sons of the working poor. Some were just back from ‘Nam. Others had just graduated high school. Some, like Bob, lived with their moms. Bob lived in a railroad flat on the (in)famous Hell’s Angels block in the East Village. After work some Saturdays, we’d get thoroughly baked on weed and Pagan Pink Ripple, listen to Dylan singing “Talking World War III Blues” and laugh until we cried or, rather, until his mom came in from work, smiled to see us having a safe good time off the streets, and fried up a platter of pierogi.

Jerome lived in Harlem and on weekends (no supervisors!) he’d bring in his little brothers and we took turns babysitting them while we worked. We’d all go to the (brand new! clean rental shoes!) bowling alley at Madison Square Garden afterwards and I’d keep an eye on the kids while Jerome went for beer-frame Buds.

Some lived in East New York. Jose carried a .32. David sold a little dope. Mike skin-popped smack in the men’s room, and most of us smoked hash right under our boss Morris’ nose. We’d take a crumb of mossy goodness, place it on the lit tip of a Kool, spark up, and inhale the spindly ribbon of blue-black smoke that got us through this hard job.

I got paid $2/hour and worked lots of overtime so, over a summer, I netted all the money I needed for CUNY registration fees, books, a new winter coat and Georgia Giant work boots for the coming year.

I needed every penny and going to New Hampshire meant foregoing a weekend of income. I didn’t even take off to go to Woodstock, as did some of my more affluent CUNY chums.

Nevertheless, a trip to Nashua and Dave’s rural family compound had appeal. I imagined big blue skies! Fresh country air! Woods teeming with wildlife! I was totally down with that!

So I stuffed clean clothes into my old Boy Scout backpack, went to Port Authority, and took a Trailways bus to New Hampshire. It smelled like a hamper and I cared not one wit. I was going to visit Dave and his family in the New England woods.

The bus ride to Nashua took forever. It seemed to stop in the asshole of every jerk-water town in Connecticut and Massachusetts. But I finally got to New Hampshire. Dave was waiting in his Dad’s green Maverick. The clouds were dark and low and the New Hampshire air smelled like froggy lake water.

Worse, there was a distinct desperation in the air. The town had clearly seen better days. I was naive. I never expected the cast of Deliverance to be perched on the porch of the local town rooming house. This was once an area of factories and mills that made the country’s shoes and carpets. The derelict, big red Civil War-era structures we passed looked to me like the brick buildings in Red Hook, Brooklyn, like the one on the pier near IKEA that burned down last week.

My ESP was right, for in years to come — according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse — New Hampshire had the second-highest rate of opioid-related overdose deaths in the country. Second only to West Virginia. Take me home, country roads, indeed. Go Mountaineers.

We passed rickety farm stands, burned out barns, small private houses with snarling dogs chained to fences and rusted F-150s on cinder blocks. From time to time we passed billboards with pictures of frosty cold beer: “Hi Neighbor…Have a ‘Gansett” the billboard screamed.

My heart sank, for this was not what I expected after countless plays of James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James”. These were not the “dreamlike Berkshires” at all. Wrong state. Wrong direction.

Down the road from a dilapidated stand that sold cannonball-sized tomatoes for ten cents a pound, we clunked onto a lumpy dirt road. Ferns raked the flanks of the Maverick.

Finally, a clearing. Voila: three buildings with tarp-covered mountains of firewood out front, that made a semicircle around a large patch of balding lawn.

“Well, this is it!” Dave said. He showed me inside. I was to sleep on the couch in the living room. His mom and dad were in the yard. I reach out my hand to his father to shake. I got not a hand, but a grunt. His mom ignored me and turned to Dave. “We’re eating at six,” she said, walking off.

Dinner was boiled hot dogs and corn on the cob. There was a large bottle of French’s yellow mustard and a stick of margarine enrobed in its gold foil wrapper for the corn. There was the four of us around the dinner table, plus Dave’s uncle Deacon, who seemed pleasant enough. I remember the unlit cigar in Deacon’s mouth, his Oshkosh denim overalls and flannel shirt, and very long fingernails.

There weren’t many wieners and ears of corn to go around for the five of us. I remember being starving but reticent about asking for more than one, but seconds weren’t offered anyway, so that was moot. Dessert was Deacon’s home made apple pie. Dave turned to me and, sotto voce, said, “If you find a big cigar ash in your pie, don’t say anything. Deacon smokes while he cooks.” The pie was tasty, as I recall. No ashes in my slice.

The next day I leaned on the Maverick in the yard and whittled a stick with my big yellow folding knife I got from a bursting room kid to settle a $2 pre-paycheck loan. The slivers of bark fell at my feet. As I sharpened a point on the stick, Dave’s dad came over and whispered into his son’s ear.

“Let’s get a broom and clean up the wood,” Dave said to me. Dave was my bestie and I cleaned up my wood chips and wondered about surviving the rest of the weekend.

After dinner, Dave and I drove around. There was really nothing to see, or do, and I knew for sure my presence was not wanted at the family compound. We passed the tomato stand and I bought $3 worth of red-ripe tomatoes. At ten cents a pound, that was a basket full. When we got back, I presented the big wooden basket of fruit to Dave’s dad.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” I said. “This is for you. Thanks so much for the invitation.”

They sliced up one of the tomatoes and served it alongside scrambled eggs fried in margarine the next morning. I packed up my belongings and Dave drove me to the bus station in town. We were very quiet.

I fell asleep on the bus and felt quite lucky that my pack wasn’t stolen by one of my fellow passengers.

I traded 20 hours of labor in the bursting room for a short visit to Nashua, New Hampshire, where billboards greeted travelers with optimistic “Hi Neighbor!” messages of camaraderie. At two bucks an hour, the trip left me in the hole for $40, plus three bucks for the tomatoes. Plus the bus fare. That was real money for me back then.

But in retrospect, I got more than my money’s worth in life experience. More than I’d learn in class at CUNY, in any anthropology textbook, in any newspaper, People are essentially good. Not everyone is bad. Some people you click with, and some people you don’t. Not everyone is your friend. Or wants to be your friend. Or is emotionally capable of being your friend. And that’s OK too.

It is important, I learned at the time, to “play it as it lays” as Joan Didion famously wrote. This is a golf idiom meaning to accept circumstances and play the ball from where it rests, even if the spot is shitty. It also refers to accepting and dealing with the realities of a situation, whether it’s a golf game or life, without attempting to change it or complain.  I thought I was cool with that. But that was then.

Oh yes, one other thing. The hard hat riots of 1970 exploded the following May, days after Kent State, and I realized there were many new life lessons to learn.

And it looks like we still do. Yeah, none of us has ever been in this place before.