Paper Oy

Traffic increases on the Memory Highway at certain times of the year. September and Fall would be one of those times, with being back in school, night and darkness coming on much earlier, games of manhunt in the chill air, and the sounds of marching bands coming from a football field somewhere . . . Although much of what follows used to take place in the fall, it also spanned the other seasons too.

Larry Leeper was the paper boy in my neighborhood from the time I was in 4th grade through 6th or 7th grade. Leeper was three years older than me and for a couple years I helped him as an assistant on his paper route. "Helping" him amounted to my doing the majority of the work, after he'd come back from the dispatcher with the two pannier baskets on his bicycle loaded with folded papers and a burlap bag stuffed with folded papers slung across his handle bars. I would take the heavy bag and lug it down the street, pausing at each customer's house to either place the paper on the front porch or, if there were special instructions, leave the paper inside the front door, or side door, or breezeway or patio. I helped Larry Leeper every day after school during the school year and often in the summer when we delivered papers in the early afternoon. He paid me a paltry fraction of  what he made from his route, abused me with little games of torture which will be disclosed, and, to rub salt into my wounds, made me go around door-to-door with him when he was collecting on Thursday evenings as an inducement for my getting a measly dollar or two, if that. I needed the candy and soda money.

As it turned out, "collecting" was a fascinating business interaction with adults, a real eye opener into the harsh realities of the world. Elderly women with gin on their breath, dressed in fuzzy bathrobes, staggering to the door, saying what nice boys we were, but would we mind coming back next week to get paid? Other women and men whining about missed deliveries and threatening to stop service. Loud, bitter-with-their-lot-in-life men, some drunk, cracking ribald jokes or telling endless stories of The Depression, or The War, or past feats of derring-do, their faces flushed with road maps of veins. And there were the every day curmudgeons who didn't answer the door but sent their German Shepherds as willing emissaries. Leeper had a stack of cards attached to a metal ring about as large as a horse tether, but thinner. Each card was for a customer, and when a customer paid for our services and the daily delivery of his/her newspaper, Leeper made a heavy pencil (no. 2) mark on the card. I seem to recall that if the customer missed two weeks payment, they were given a warning; if they missed three weeks, they were warned that delivery would discontinue by the following week, and by the fourth week delivery would stop altogether if there was no payment for the current week and all the skipped weeks. Unfortunately, no one took a kid, or a pair of kids, seriously who were trying to politely persuade them to cough up a few dollars like good citizens for the privilege and enjoyment of having a finely written, finely edited and printed newspaper delivered to their doorstep each evening.

Most evening newspapers, or morning and evening editions of daily papers clearly have left us. In fact the existence of major newspapers and print media in general has been seriously undermined in the Digital Age, and it is no revelation. Around the time I was helping Larry Leeper with his paper route, New York City had at least two other dailies long gone: "The Journal American" and "The New York Herald Tribune"  Extra! Read all about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Herald_Tribune

Northern Jersey had the Star Ledger, but right outside New York City where I grew up, "The Bergen Record" was the most popular paper and the one I helped deliver. In the morning, you got "The New York Daily News" and in the afternoon, it was "The Bergen Record." Think they still might be in print.


Larry Leeper treated me as one of his unfortunate charges and told me in a big-brotherly way that he was always looking out for my welfare. Like a big brother, he abused me accordingly. Sometimes, when we were nearly at the end of the route, he would make me stop at a basketball net on a side street near his house and play a game of one-on-one with him. He was 14 years old, about 5-foot, 8 inches tall, and I was 10 years old and 4-foot, 11 inches---a fair match up in Leeper's eyes. He would also make me practice boxing with him: guard with the left, jab with the right, and when you had an opening, swing and punch with the left. I took some shots to the head, but I guess I learned a few things, like stop letting this idiot push you around.

But the cruelest torture was reserved for Winter. My hands were so frozen and red all the time, whether you were wearing your gloves or not (gloves were usually the cheap cloth variety and would become soaked with snow and therefore worthless). Leeper had a good left arm. He displayed his pitching prowess for me by directing a snowball to a high street lamp across the road. The snowball made a lovely arc and hit the lamp with a shatter and brief cascade of crystal powder. As I delivered papers with my freezing hands, Leeper would pack perfectly spherical snowballs with his highest quality gloves---they were really a marvel to look at (the snowballs not the gloves). Then, once I'd dropped the paper in a door or inserted in a mail slot, Leeper would tell me to start running while he counted to 5---fast. I was usually nailed with one of his ice missiles, and the worst spot to be hit was the back of the neck, because even wearing my winter coat and cloth cap some of the ice managed to slide down into my back and even sometimes further down to my waist. I should have worn a hood.

Some years later I heard that Larry Leeper lived near Phoenix and was working as an officer with the Arizona Highway Patrol. No longer having snowballs at his disposal, I guess Leeper had to settle for writing tickets and fines instead.

The Graces

True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer
-- Rilke



I barely knew the Graces family. Rollo and Vincent were both ahead of me in school and well known, and hardly knew me, if at all, which often happens between older and younger kids in school. My first sight of Rollo was the back of his leather jacket with some Greek club lettering stitched upon it. He was at least five years older than me and nearly out of high school, a tall good-looking kid in tight black jeans and boots with the silver zippers on the side, a pack of smokes in his shirt pocket. He had wiry-to-curly hair depending on the length and had a darker complexion. His younger brother Vincent was also tall but slightly gangly, and not as good looking as Rollo, but still popular with the girls. My best friend’s older sister, who had a beehive hair-do for a while and then one that looked like Leslie Gore, and let us play her records, knew the Grace Brothers because they were part of a crowd known in those days as “hoods.” Rollo sometimes hung with this crowd and also the club whose letters were embroidered on his jacket, but he had no real affiliations and was his own person---an individual who was popular at the same time.

I didn’t know the Grace parents, or anything about them, until one fall dance at the middle school, some time in mid- or late September. That’s when I heard that the mother, Mrs. Grace, had just died, and I saw their father for the first time because he managed Rollo’s rock-and-roll band and they were playing that night at the dance (there had recently been talk of a record deal). Why the son and his band were playing so soon after the mother’s death was anyone’s guess. No one had any details. It was late 1964, “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig” era. The band was very tight with theatrics by Rollo, who sang lead and played bass. During one number, Rollo jumped off the stage, and sliding over to a group of beehive-hair girls wearing silver lipstick, he quickly executed a cartwheel that ended in a split. As if rehearsed, the girls shrieked, and needless to say they were drawn to him, not only for his looks, but for his pain too. His mother had just died.

But before anyone had been let into the dance that night, in the great swelling murmur of conversation outside the doors in the auditorium hallway, a few of those same girls had gossiped among themselves, saying the dance should have been canceled or another band should have played. No one knew the reason. Rollo’s father, one of the few adults present (there were no chaperones), was the band’s manager, and there was talk of a record deal. Vincent was also there, dancing with some lovely girls near the stage. It seemed in poor taste; proper mourning was not being observed. Someone mentioned something about the show needing to go on because this dance was different than other school sponsored dances, the space had already been rented and auxiliary police and firemen paid for the evening. Maybe the real reason was that, even though they were all grieving, the father wanted his sons to continue doing what they did best, which was perform, and this dance may have been a diversion from the tragedy they’d suffered, and possibly would help free their thoughts, however briefly, from the sadness of losing their mother.

I met Vincent Grace once at the house of an older kid who was homosexual and used to prey on younger kids like myself. Vincent was two or three years older than me, the same age as the homosexual kid. I remember him sitting in the kitchen of this house, reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette. He wore a black leather jacket and large framed eyeglasses. He had long sideburns. I felt like I was meeting a celebrity, and I guess he was by local standards. He had a better known older brother. But though I knew Rollo was talented, I had not yet heard about Vincent.

Vincent Grace attended a county vocational school but he was clearly destined for the stage. Vocational schools weren’t known for putting on exceptional dramas or musicals, it was enough to get students to show up and keep them on the grounds without trouble until 2:30 or 3:00 each day---but this tech school had a drama department and they had staged a production of “Bye-Bye Birdie” and Vincent starred as Conrad Birdie. He garnered rave reviews in the local newspapers. Professionally, he was a cut above the rest of the cast. He was a born entertainer. Rollo and Vincent clearly had performing in their blood.

And Vincent had something else in his blood . . . Leukemia . . .

I’m not sure if this was the cancer that had taken their mother, but there had either been a family predisposition to cancer, a genetic marker, or there was an environmental risk, or both. Much of the south and west end of Wayward on its industrial borders was a toxic waste dump. The Graces may have lived near one of these radioactive dumps (Thorium had been cited in an EPA study some 15 years later). Leukemia often struck younger people, and successful bone marrow transplants were still nearly a decade away. I can recall turning the pages of my mother’s high school yearbook, seeing a few photos of beautiful young girls in the bloom of life, with their sweaters and blouses, maybe a string of pearls, and then a line of my mother’s handwriting beneath their photos: “died, leukemia,” and the year of death. But could it have been something random, a twist of fate, that had caused a mother and her youngest teenage son to die within two years of one another?

As mentioned, the Graces were popular. There were charity drives and benefits for Vincent, but Vincent went fast. He was 16 or 17.

Then, only a short time elapsed between the death of Vincent from leukemia and the death of Mr. Grace, Rollo and Vincent’s father. I must have inquired about the cause, maybe to my best friend’s older sister (who, by that time, had abandoned the beehive hair-do for a dress style that was a hybrid of that earlier period and the emerging late 60s hippie psychedelia), maybe I had asked someone else. There weren’t any specifics, but yes, as with Vincent and Mrs. Grace, the cause of Mr. Grace’s death was also cancer. If there had been a presence of cancer cells in Mr. Grace earlier on, then assuredly the deaths of his wife and youngest son hastened metastasis, pushed him toward the final stage.

I am writing about the Graces because it is hard to grasp and understand an onslaught of so much senseless and non-accidental loss in a span of a few years in the 1960s. Having lost parents in my 40s and 50s, I can’t begin to imagine what it must have felt like to have experienced that kind of loss so early on, to imagine being an extremely well known kid and musician with a mother and a father and a brother, and by the time you are at the end of your teens, not one of them is still around, and they were all around just a few years earlier. At the point of embarking on adulthood we’re often leaving our families, heading off to college, or perhaps moving out if we can afford it, but what if your family has already left you? Who do you fall back on? How would you know, as you matured, where you even came from? How does this highly unusual spate of dying shape your sense of self and your understanding of the world, when the shadow world, the world where your family has taken up residence, has been a greater force and truth? Face it, at 19 or 20 we're still mostly kids, even if some of us were living on our own, or in the military bound for Vietnam. Having matured way too quickly, Rollo, out of school, working in a record store, was essentially an orphan. Would he ever have a wife and children of his own? Would he ever want to?

A few years later I was hanging out with my girlfriend, and a friend of hers, and her boyfriend at the boyfriend’s house. During the conversation it was somehow divulged that the boyfriend’s mother’s last name was Grace, I asked if she was related to the Graces in Wayward. She said she was, and I could see some resemblance in her face, something around the mouth and deep brown eyes. We briefly talked about her family’s tragedy, the swift deaths that had taken three-fourths of her cousin's family like a modern plague. “It was tragic, so sad,” the mother had said, but she’d had no information or theories as to why the deaths had occurred. “It was just one of those things,” she had told me.

A different friend later told me that for a couple years he had worked with Rollo at a music and record store. According to my friend, Rollo had become quiet and conservative, more reserved, serious, and mature beyond his years. He’d grown up fast obviously. He had a job, a living, possibly attended college at night, maybe was already married. There was little of the former potential rock-and-roll star, or pop music aspirant. I guess at that point you would have described Rollo’s lifestyle as “sober,” not in the main definition entry of alcohol (or sans alcohol) sense of sober, but Devoid of frivolity, excess, exaggeration, or speculative imagination; straightforward:  Marked by seriousness, gravity, or solemnity of conduct or character. Marked by circumspection and self-restraint. (Courtesy of the “Free Dictionary”).

I had recalled seeing Rollo in that record store, managing the audio section, as I was picking up LPs of King Crimson, Jethro Tull, or Derek and the Dominoes, and his behavior totally squared with my friend’s account, and I remember Rollo looked OK; he was working, functioning. But I couldn’t approach him. For one thing, he wouldn’t have known who I was, and even if he had known me, how would I have said to him, “I remember your brother. I met him once. I’m really sorry what happened to him, and I'm really sorry what happened to your parents, too. . .Why did it happen?” 

. . . but all of the living
make the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions

Just one of those things. . .