Patterson, New Jersey, birthplace
of Allen Ginsburg and William Carlos Williams, is one of those post-industrial
cities that has seen better times. Market Street had a collection
of the usual shops full of cheap clothes or furniture, a dime store,
restaurants with counter service, hardware stores and so on. Above
these businesses were empty spaces, some up to 3000 square feet,
that could be rented for as little as $100 a month. There was an
interesting mix of people living in those spaces, attracted by the
cheap rents and Patterson’s proximity to New York. A Japanese
poet had come all the way from Japan to live there just because
William Carlos Williams had. There were a couple other poets, a
few painters, a cornet player, a few old beatniks and me.
I had come to Patterson to fill in as instructor for a Tae Kwon
Do school, sent there by my headmaster when he lost his teacher.
When I discovered there was an old ballet school upstairs I could
rent for $70 a month, I decided to stay.
 We
all liked Patterson, although most people who worked in the downtown
area would flee the city right after work, hoping to be out of town
before dark. After dark, if you didn’t make the trek to Manhattan,
there was not much to do. A block north of Market Street was Cianci
Street. It had a string of go-go bars, an innocent precursor to
the table dancing joints of today, a few Italian social clubs, and
one Italian restaurant. When bored, the loft people would hang in
the bars and social clubs and eat in the Italian restaurant, which
was very good. We were made welcome by the Italian, Irish, and Latino
clientele, who saw us as oddities. Artists, imagine. We often spoke
of how nice it would be if someone would open a café, someplace
without a loud jukebox and a girl in a skimpy outfit dancing on
a stage behind the bar. We were realistic enough to know this was
unlikely.
One block south of Market Street was City Hall. Patterson was the
county seat so during the day there were lots of lawyers, secretaries,
cops and judges running around. I would sometimes drop in on small
claims court for its entertainment value. (This was before the ‘People’s
Court’ was on TV.)
Across from City Hall was a bar called, as you would expect, City
Hall Bar. It too, like the city, had seen better times. You would
think, considering the location, that it would do good business.
It had no spirit, like the two women who owned it, and they had
it up for sale for some time. None of us, as far as I knew, had
ever been in the bar. Through the big front window you could usually
see a couple cops or a few guys in suits grabbing a sandwich and
a beer for lunch.
One fall day my friend and painting teacher Gilbert, Gilbert’s
girlfriend Dee, a painter named Frank (who had actually grown up
in Patterson), my girlfriend Linda and myself, were passing by the
bar when we noticed it was full of carpenters and painters. The
ugly green paint that covered the liquor cabinets behind the bar
had been stripped down to the original oak, the old carpet had been
torn up exposing the original floor, and it looked like they were
tearing down the drop ceiling to expose the vintage hammered tin.
Corky spotted us and herded us in for a beer on the house. He was
6’6” tall with a pockmarked complexion and a patchy
beard that had bald spots here and there. His eyes were close set,
small and glinted. He sat us down at the end of the bar and explained
he was selling a house in Clifton, an upscale suburb of Patterson,
and that as soon as he closed on the house he was buying the bar.
 He
told the two women selling the bar that he didn’t want to
wait for the closing to get started with the changes he wanted to
make. As soon as the renovations were over he wanted to open right
away before winter arrived. He convinced the two ladies that they
deserved a vacation and said he would pay the bar’s operating
expenses while they were away. Once open, he would send them a percentage
of the profits. So they went to Florida.
By the time we left the bar Corky had hired Frank as a cook and
me as a helper. Our pretty girl friends were tending bar. Gilbert
had recently taken a vow never to do anything for a living but paint
even if he starved to death.
When Corky finished with the bar it looked great. He bought a baby
grand piano and hired a guy named Roger who sang just like Tom Waits
for $90 a week. On Corky’s opening night the place was jammed.
The artists, the beatniks (who snapped there fingers in approval
of Roger’s performance), a few go-go dancers, a judge, some
lawyers, cops and some known criminals all showed up. It was a hell
of a bar, one of the best I have ever known. An Assistant District
Attorney sitting next to me at the bar said, “Patterson, who
would have thought.”
The bar maintained its momentum after opening night. We hung our
paintings on the wall and made cartoons about funny conversations
between judges and hippies. We were all getting paid, including
Tom Waits, and our girl friends were making good tips. I liked my
3am to dawn job cleaning the kitchen. It was simple, I enjoyed the
walk home at dawn. I would sit on the roof and watch the sun rise
before going to bed.
After a while, however, it started to become evident we were the
only ones getting paid, and maybe the two women in Florida. The
carpenters and painters and liquor salesmen, and others started
coming in for money. Corky would say there was a snag in the closing
but his lawyer was due at three with a deposit. At three thirty
when they would get up to leave and Corky would insist they sit
down and have another drink, curse his lawyer, and look at his watch.
Finally, pretty drunk, they would slip out when Corky wasn’t
looking.
 Corky
had taken to making big bets during football season. He would announce
at the bar that he had ten grand on the game on the bar’s
t.v. He would bet by phone, on credit.
Angelo the bookie was one of the last to come looking for Corky.
He wouldn’t wait though. After a while Corky took to hiding
behind the grill when Angelo came in, and we started thinking that
maybe it wasn’t safe working for Corky. Some other hard guys,
who someone said were drug dealers, were also stopping by. We were
also wondering about that house closing. There was just one thing
that made us hold out hope that Corky was telling the truth about
the house. It was six cords of wood, prime split oak.
A friend, Matthew, and I were in the habit of cutting wood together
to heat our lofts. Matthew lived in an old wooden house right off
Market Street that had a big back yard where we would store the
firewood. Matthew would find dead trees in the most god awful gullies
or sides of hills and we would cut big pieces of the trunk and branches,
haul them to his truck, and finish the job in his yard. I hated
it.
One afternoon he came by the bar when he couldn’t find me
painting. He said it was time go cut wood, the weather was turning
cold. Corky, hearing our conversation, told us we didn’t have
to cut the wood. He said he was pretty sure the six cords of wood
he had at the house were not included in the contract to sell the
house. He said we could have it.
Matthew did not know Corky. When he wasn’t working with his
small construction company, Gonzo Construction, he was floating
in the isolation tank he had built. Once he had threatened to kill
us when we yanked open the lid after he had been in there much too
long. Matthew was almost as big as Corky and we knew he meant it,
so after that we let him stay in there as long as he wanted.
Matthew was allergic to alcohol, made him turn bright red, so between
that and the isolation tank he didn’t spend much time in bars.
Corky promised us several times the wood would come, but each time
there was another reason why it had not been delivered. Finally
Matthew lost his patience and in front of Corky told me I was an
idiot for thinking someone would give away six cords of firewood.
Looking sheepishly at Corky, I put on my jacket and went with Matthew
to cut wood.
The next day Matthew called me and said his backyard was crammed
six feet deep in firewood. Oak. I went over for a look and sure
enough there was enough wood to get us both through the winter.
However, Corky’s debt collectors continued to line up at the
bar, and Corky spent less and less time there. Basically the help
was running the bar out of the cash register but we were running
out of booze.
One quiet Monday afternoon I stopped in to see Frank who was tending
bar. He said a woman with a worried look had been in asking for
Corky.
“Maybe it was the red and black lumber jacket,” Frank
said, “but something made me ask if her looking for Corky
had anything to do with wood.” She said yes, it did, and explained
how Corky had managed to get her to deliver a truck full of wood
to some yard without even a deposit.
By early spring Corky was gone. Angelo assured us no one had killed
him or he would have heard. Although he kind of missed him too,
Angelo said if he ever found Corky he would break his legs.
The two women came back. Corky had been sending them money. They
pretty much paid off everyone except the bookie and drug dealers.
We eventually paid for the wood. The women ran the bar for a while
until they sold it for more than Corky was going to pay.
After that, whenever Frank heard something he thought was untrue,
he would say, “That sounds like a wood story.”
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