I worked with Mark Warner and Chris Murtaugh about 40 years ago. Good guys, decidedly straight as six o’clock. I last saw one of them maybe 30 years ago when I used to ride my bicycle up to and over the George Washington Bridge. It was on Riverside Drive in the shadow of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. It was a brief greeting and I never saw whichever one I crossed paths with again.

I may have written about Bill Murphy in a previous post. It took more than 40 years to realize I was probably mean and cruel to him. Looking back I probably took my brother Brian’s cruel line that ‘it looked like someone set his face on fire and put it out with a fork’. Cruel, graphic and albeit, funny.

Did I say that to him without cause or was it in response to something he may have said on the school bus 50 years ago? In any event, he did not let it go for four years and did his best to fuck up my high school years and I am writing about it a half century later.

Elizabeth Baldwin was a sweetheart and a talented woman I worked with at Wollf Olins or as I used to call them McMahon and Tate. Elizabeth was one of the few allies I had working on Varick Street. When we parted ways I believe she was pregnant and now that baby she had is 20 years old.

Betty Colatrella was a funny, acerbic woman who lived above Maxwell’s and waited tables. She previously worked at the Bottom Line and loved music. Betty moved to Colorado, where the climate was better for her encroaching multiple sclerosis. John Ozed was friends with Elizabeth Colatrella and Albert Ross tried to befriend her but was unable to.

Now I am home. It’s a gray evening. Occasional rain, Paterson was on the news because of floods. Rochelle Park was on the news due to a house being shot up last night. I have to say I never thought I would write that line. Rochelle Park was the route I would take on Friday nights from Lodi to the Garden State Plaza in Paramus. Mostly to buy records at Sam Goody with a 30% discount card.

I recall sitting on the floor of the underground concourse hallway and some guy mentioning the B-52’s which prompted me to pul out the famed yellow album of their first record and getting some sort of coolness recognition for it.

Then if I was not getting a blow job in the concourse mens room, or after being fellated I would run across the cloverleaf connecting Routes 17 & 4 to get to Alexander’s department store where most every album was $4.99.

I would also stop at David’s Cookies which was in the basement of Bamberger’s and inhale a few cookies before the trek home down Rochelle Avenue.

Once I got home, my parents would be out at the VFW most Friday nights and I would play my latest purchases on the family stereo, not having a stereo of my own at that time.