There’s more for your life

At some point during the horror show of 2020, I found myself actually getting wistful about the 80s – a decade of personal satisfaction and professional growth but culturally soulless and the start of a political shitstorm we’re still caught in. It was a great decade for football and basketball however, so I indulged my nostalgia watching DVDs of vintage pro football games.

During the original broadcast of the 1983 USFL championship game between the Philadelphia Stars and the Michigan Panthers, this commercial popped up:

Seems like a fun place, doesn’t it? Despite the looks of the models cast in the commercial, Sears was solidly blue collar. And practical. No kid ever looked forward to a visit to Sears during the Christmas season.

Just before we got married in 1983, we went with my mom to the Sears in Hackensack and bought a refrigerator for our apartment. I applied for my first Sears credit card and in time we found more for our life – generally all the big-ticket stuff like tires, a snowblower, a lawnmower, maybe our first washing machine and dryer, I don’t remember.

Fast forward to last August. Although we had nothing planned and nowhere to go, I took a week off from work. On one miserably depressing day, clammy, humid, an overcast sky spitting rain off and on, I went for a drive and ended up, as I inevitably sometimes do, back in Hackensack. Driving by Sears, with its art deco tower a city landmark since 1932, was a banner declaring, “Store Closing Sale.” Facemask on, I had to go in.

The smell of roasted nuts always greeted you at the Hackensack Sears; you could buy them there, along with weird candies that only old people ate, like Swedish fish and bridge mix, whatever that was.

There was nothing quite so welcoming this time. The place had the vibe of the last helicopter leaving Vietnam. Hispanic women rooted through racks of unwanted children’s clothes. Hangars were thrown on the floor. Every wall was bare, with one cash register open. I took a loop around the store, which now seemed small and wounded, and quickly left.

It was raining harder as I left and took off for home. This was one visit to the old turf that I truly regretted.

It might have been nice to get one last ride on the store’s escalator, but it was blocked off. Watching scenic footage shot by drones reminds me of riding escalators as a kid, rising silently above all the activity below. Looking over the railing, a panoramic view of the entire store, changing as you go higher and higher!

I’m reasonably sure that a psychiatrist would tell me that I keep going back to Hackensack because I’m looking for something that may not exist anymore. Maybe all I need to do is ride an escalator.

 

 

 

 

One person’s treasure

One of a meter reader’s underrated skills is the ability to move quickly through other people’s worlds, sometimes sweeping through nearly 100 homes in a day. There were the regulars with whom I kept up a running conversation for months. Old ladies in housecoats. Retired guys who would wait for me like it was the highlight of their day – at least until the mailman's arrival. A woman I went to high school with, now married and with kids who, if she recognized me, never let on. The woman with her elderly parents in side-by-side hospital beds in the living room. The older couple who always apologized for the state of their basement with references to the Collyer Brothers. We’d carry on our brief monthly conversation, then say pretty much the same things 30 days later.

Otherwise, I spent most of each day in basements, garages, closets hidden behind knotty pine paneling, apartment house laundry rooms – the places where people left the stuff they didn’t want to look at, deal with, had no room for, outgrew or forgot about.

In an ancient basement in Bayonne, old comic books spilled haphazardly out of a plastic garbage bag. Old Marvels from ’61, ’62. Early issues of the Fantastic Four. Spider-Man. The Hulk. I thought about returning to the house and claiming I was in the neighborhood looking to buy old stuff and did they have anything, maybe old comic books, they wanted to sell? It was a fleeting fantasy. I could never find the house again, let alone find my way to Bayonne.

A shuttered candy store was another Bayonne treasure palace. A grim black woman accompanied me inside and stood watch as I read the meters. It wasn’t until I looked around that I realized the reason for the high-security paranoia. The place was literally a step back into time, with old soda and tobacco advertising signs and so much stuff on the shelves I couldn’t make it all out. But for sure, there were boxes of old baseball cards and freaking Disneyland trading cards – rare as hen’s teeth as a coworker used to say. Places like that just don’t exist anymore, at least not on the East Coast.

Somebody in Washington Township had albums in a box under the meter. Right in front was Sgt. Pepper with the yellow band across the top stating it was MONO, which nobody bought; everyone wanted the stereo version. The stuff of legend back in the 80s (the mono version offered different mixes so that some instruments and other effects were more pronounced) today the album exists on YouTube for your listening enjoyment.

Scattered on a table in Hackensack was the record collection of another woman I’d gone to school with, all Motown and Stax singles, each with her name written on the label.

And there were the magazine hoarders. Stacks of LIFE in a house in Teaneck. Over to horny Hillsdale where one guy had boxes and boxes of porn (heterosexual) in the basement. Just down the street – and fittingly in a closet – a neighbor kept his stack of gay porn near the gas meter.

An inexplicably random Supercar Golden Book next to a meter in Hillsdale. Cartons of junky knockoff toys in a Teaneck basement (G.I. Jeff figures anyone?), probably overstock from a five and dime store. In an industrial maintenance supply store in Hackensack that always smelled of floor wax, a sign in the basement for Hobby Land – a remembrance of what the store had been in the 50s and 60s, with its memorable electric train layout.

In a well-lit, neat cellar in Maywood, there was a dead raccoon stretched out on the floor. When I told the homeowner, he replied, “I know.” I shrugged and moved on to the next house.