the rix mix

In July 1967, I was driving a pickup truck for Brown Hardware & Locksmiths of Roselle Park NJ. I was 18. I liked the job. I liked driving. The small company had just bought a new blue Chevy pickup truck with an extended bed, removable racks, & a loud AM radio. Usually, I made two delivery runs, one in the morning & one in the afternnon, occasionally an all-day. Sometimes the work was heavy & I had full loads; 60 pound crates of locksets for construction sites, aluminum ladders, spools of electrical wire, fragile boxes of long fluorescent bulbs. Sometimes I carried only a couple of items. Some runs there were a lot of stops & I had to rush, other times I had only one place to go. The deliveries ranged through Union, Middlesex, & Essex counties, & even farther afield, a rare drive down to Monmouth or out through Somerset. I routed them ahead of time. I rarely got lost or ran late. If I finished early, which happened often, the boss didn't much care what I did with the extra time as long as the deliveries were done. Once-a-week I brought the truck home on company time & washed it in my driveway. I loved that truck. I loved my pretty girlfriend. I was in a band.

On the afternoon of July 13, a warm Thursday, I had a single delivery, a few heavy boxes of sheet metal screws to a machine shop in Newark somewhere around the edge of the Central Ward, arriving there a little after two pm. It was tough neighborhood of rundown houses & hard-pressed small businesses in old brick buildings, but not scary. The street had potholes & trees. I'd been there before, so rather than go through the hassle of backing up to a crumbling loading dock, I decided to park on the street & hand truck the boxes through the front door, past the office, & directly on to the shop floor. Then I'd head to the Dairy Queen in Cranford, a summer hangout for cute high school girls, & have a root beer float before going back to the store & setting up the next morning's run. Why do I remember this so clearly?

After I'd dropped off the boxes, stashed the hand truck, & was about to climb into the driver's seat, I heard a woman say, "Hey, white boy." I turned & saw an old black woman sitting in a rocking chair on a porch across the street. She was very old, wizened even, with uncombed gray hair, a crone.
"Yeah?" I said.
"You all done here?" she asked.
"Yes I am," I said. "Going home."
"Good. Now you listen to me, you get out of town right away, don't be hanging around."
I had no idea what she was talking about. I nodded, got in the truck, & went to the Dairy Queen.
How did she know? Wednesday night there had been a limited disturbance in Newark over a false story that a black cabdriver had been beaten to death by white cops, some windows broken, some looting. Heard about it on the radio, it was over. The "riot" didn't begin until Thursday night.

By lunchtime Friday, crazy rumors were going around Roselle Park, a small, all-white town about five air miles southwest of the Newark border, but much more distant in every other way. News reports were wildly inaccurate, contradictory. But it was all bad news. Newark was turning into something like Watts in 1965. At the little Spa Diner, a customer seriously said there were caravans of armed black men headed for suburban Union County. Outside agitators in Elizabeth. Trenton, Atlantic City, Paterson all gonna go. Yeah, right. Paranoid bullshit. Fear. Whoever was already in that part of Newark wasn't gonna get out of it. More bothersome to me was that my rock band had a gig that Saturday night at a Rutgers-Newark frat house. It was canceled. We never again accepted a job in Newark. Fear. There were no deliveries to the machine shop in August, probably because it was a minor account & the road salesman wouldn't go there anymore. Fear. I left the employ of Brown Hardware in late August & without enthusiasm enrolled in Bloomfield College full-time. I wanted to keep the driving job & go to night school at a junior college, but I needed the student draft deferment. That was fear, too.*
***
In 1995, I went to see Allen Ginsberg & Amiri Baraka reading together at Essex County Community College in Newark. It was a great night, two old poet friends on stage, both with deep roots in Newark. They sat at a table afterward & signed books. They were both tired, Amiri hardly looking up to see who was standing in front of him. I slid a copy of his book, Raise, Race, Rays, Raze across the table. It's an out-of-print paperback collection of prose pieces that includes essays about those insane nights & days in 1967 when the State of New Jersey declared open warfare on the black people of Newark, people even an 18 year old, naive white kid knew had never not been under siege. Amiri looked at the book, looked at me, looked at the book again, & said, "Man, you're old." He autographed it. Allen glanced over, saw the book, & chuckled.

* Although this was nothing compared to being drafted, it was the point at which the Vietnam War forced me in a direction I didn't want to go, & not the best direction. Working & part-time school was a sensible arrangement for me. I knew it. But that's another narrative.

Labels: growing up, Newark NJ