The Going Places Club: A Memoir of Youth

By John Baldan

The Going Places Club is a collaborative memoir of childhood and adolescence.  During the 1970s and early 1980s, the author and his best friend grew up in the town of Madison, New Jersey, fifteen miles west of Manhattan as the crow flies.  Although not a large or particularly famous place, Madison is a quintessentially suburba

• Language: English
• Publisher: Upper Right Hand Corner
• Release date: Jul 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9780692160473

John Baldan

The Going Places Club is John Baldan's first book. He grew up in the suburban town of Madison, New Jersey during the 1970's and 1980's. As a reader, John favors memoirs. Perhaps to no one's surprise, his favorite book is In Search of Lost Time, that most famous of fictionalized memoirs. More generally, John enjoys nonfiction about the recent past, contemporary enough to be recognizable and distant enough to be strange. More than most people, he is amazed by the disparity between how things were done in the past and how they are done now.

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The Going Places Club

A Memoir of Youth

John Baldan

Copyright © 2018 by John Baldan

Second Edition

ISBN 978-0-692-16047-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Upper Right-Hand Corner LLC

Cover photography by the author

Contact the author at [e-mail]

Additional book material at www.thegoingplacesclub.com

Dedication

Youth is a time of powerlessness. This is a story about youth, so it reads occasionally like the world’s worst Santa List, long in things asked for but never received. That’s okay. Nearly everything described in these pages no longer exists, but we’re still here.

John dedicates this book to his wife Carol, who supplied the legal pads and leisure hours; to his mother Betti, who has long encouraged him to write; to Marcel Proust, who prematurely inspired his adolescence; to Harley, the best cat ever; and especially to his friend Clay, whose prodigious memory supplied the raw material for what follows.

What Is This Book?

This is a memoir of childhood and adolescence, but only partly mine. (I am John in this book.) It’s mainly the story of Clay, my childhood friend, who instantly became my best friend when my parents transplanted me to the small suburban town of Madison, New Jersey, fifteen miles west of Manhattan as the crow flies, in late 1977.

By that time Clay had been living in Madison, observing it closely, for six years. And ever since then, he has helped me to see my town in a way I never could on my own – in stereo, so to speak.

Even if you haven’t been there, you’ll recognize Madison’s features if you grew up in the suburbs during the Seventies. Do you remember when your mother went on that health food kick and bought those strange crushed sesame seed sweets, glazed with honey, from the little co-op that was big on soy and tofu? And then your father built a plywood snack cabinet in the kitchen that he padlocked, as if those sesame snacks would inordinately tempt you? And then your brother found a way to liberate them by finding a way into the locked cabinet from behind? And then you took your bounty to school only to find that your classmates scorned you, making them less desirable after all?

I remember stuff like that. But Clay remembers more, and especially more about people – his mind is a steel trap, which you will see as you read on. Even today, forty years later, Clay remains my closest confidant of those years.

Not long ago, we agreed to get this stuff down before it was too late. For a year, Clay opened his memory bank, composed e-mails, and shot them to me through the ether. I ordered, polished, and added memories of my own. The story is mostly Clay’s, but the book is a collaboration. It’s also the tale of a friendship that has stood the test of time and of a world that has not.

We hope you enjoy the trip down Memory Lane.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there

– L.P. Hartley

***

I keep looking for a place to fit

Where I can speak my mind

I’ve been trying hard to find the people

That I won’t leave behind

– Brian Wilson

Statement of Porpoise

No porpoises were harmed in the making of this book.

Author’s Note

This is a memoir, so the events described herein really happened.

25% of the names have been changed for reasons of discretion or fun.

Table of Contents

Overture1

Elementary School21

Junior School109

FM:era193

High School195

Coda287

Overture

Brittle

The streets are vacant, the night air still and cold.   Orange, grey and black clouds, fat like cats, their plenitude illuminated by a full moon, reflect the street lights of Waverly Place.

Of all Madison I have survived:  from a hard, rime-frosted bench I witness a deserted scene, breathe in the boughs of the municipal Christmas pine arching over my shoulder, hear the click and hum of the traffic light relays, and watch time drip off the pixelated lights of the Crestmont Savings Bank time-and-temperature sign: 3:21 a.m... 35° ... 3:22 a.m... 35°.  Two of the degree symbol’s four bulbs have expired. Did the branch manager needlessly order new ones on this last of all days?

I sit safe and warm, numb in an invisible curtain.  I don’t want this moment to end, not ever.  I ask myself how long the lights will shine with no one to tend the grid: how long will I last?  If I move, I may never feel like this again, but I will forever remember how I feel now. And remembering will only make me long to feel it again, full-strength and real-time.  I stand, turn, face the bench, and gaze at the treetop. I wonder if the fire department placed the lit star.

I sense the ground slide past.  I am on the sidewalk near the railroad bridge spanning our town.  I’m headed home, but there aren’t any people anymore, so any home I want is mine.  At Kings Road I stop at the red traffic light planted in the middle of the street. Across the road, the spotlit Hartley Dodge Memorial Building, our town hall, looks grand and move-in ready.  Craning my neck skyward, I smell snow.

Suddenly – a truck, I think – travelling west on Main.  Panic overtakes me; my heart races and my cheeks burn as I run to the bench under the railroad bridge where I duck my head.  I can no longer see past the bench where I sat moments ago.  After a pause, I run to the knee-high granite wall girdling the front lawn of Hartley Dodge but mistime my approach, jumping too soon, and the back of my right heel strikes the memory of John Lennon’s death, only one week in the past, and the far side of the top of the wall, my left knee squarely meeting stone. I curl up on the grass, manicured and glazed with frost, my back to the wall.  The moment is over, the feeling replaced.

The Madeleine

One gray day of middle age, near my home where an America-shaped envelope would read Place Stamp Here, I was feeling down. But I recognized someone in worse shape than I, an old acquaintance living his last days. He seemed to shrug it off as he shuffled around his cluttered garage, proudly showing me his old automotive equipment. Pausing at a splintered shelf that supported a large flask of Dewar’s, he asked if I would like a whiff. I demurred. He insisted. So I unscrewed the cap with a liberal dose of elbow grease and inhaled. My heart fibrillated, and from deep within me something stirred, something like the fuel level float inside a gas tank.

The heady aroma that I hadn’t savored in forty years was leaded, ethanol-free gasoline. A confused medley of decade-spanning images came to my mind’s eye, from a station wagon idling in the driveway on a cold winter morning to a string of self-serve gas stations glimpsed on out-of-state car trips with my family.

Something else came to mind: summer afternoons of my earliest Madison years, the Borough Mosquito Control trucks crawling up my neighborhood streets, flatbeds toting gas-powered pesticide foggers spewing thick clouds of bug killer.

I was young enough to be in pajamas just after sunset, but on those calm, hot evenings (they were always windless), it didn’t matter. When I heard the growl of the trucks laboriously climbing Prospect Street at a walking pace, I felt the same giddy tingle in my lower back as at the arrival of the Good Humor truck. Neighbor kids joined me for a run through the fog banks that crept across our lawns, overspilled our porches, and refracted columns of fantastic, sherbet-colored light. When the fog retreated, it left behind a wrack of kids with sweaty PJs plastered to their backs and a chemical taste that lingered in the mouth for days.

Returning to the present, I regarded the old man. An unasked question hung in the air with the scent of gasoline, and as was his wont, he answered it in a roundabout way.

In the Seventies I lived in Far Hills and worked as a chemist in Summit, where I managed a laboratory for a major pharmaceutical company. I owned a 1968 Porsche 912, which I had serviced regularly at a posh garage and showroom in Gladstone called The Stable." One day, I overheard a service technician and a customer discussing the evils of unleaded gasoline – an impending phenomenon – in particular its effect on the valve seats of British sports cars, which relied on gasoline additives to prevent quick wear. No worries for me and my Porsche, but I started mulling over the other effects of gasoline reformulation.

The following Monday, back at work, I commandeered one of my staff, a rolling table cart, and a dozen rubber-stoppered thousand-milliliter Erlenmeyer flasks, and set off down Morris Avenue. We must have been quite a sight in our lab coats, and indeed the first service station where we stopped refused to fill our flasks. The second, though, served us no problem. Back at the lab we tested the fuel, recording the ratios of its constituent compounds.

Two weeks later, under my direction we deliberately mislabeled the fuel samples, falsely logged them in registers, stored them in liquid nitrogen, and placed them in our onsite Long-Term Stability Storage Facility. There they remained until an audit was performed in 2003, by which time I had completely forgotten about the project.

But now I had a choice: to own up to my dishonesty and face the consequences, or to prolong the deception. Of course I chose the latter. I relabeled the samples as valuable assets and had them shipped to a long-term, subsidiary-owned holding facility in an old Kansas salt mine. I forgot about the samples once again, until I recently received my terminal diagnosis. I thought, Well, fuck. Time enough to tidy up.

I began to disentangle my obligations and wind down my career. The first task I assigned myself, while still physically able, was the retrieval of the gasoline from Kansas. It wasn’t as simple as driving there: I needed to replace the gasoline with a like amount of liquid at a like temperature; to do otherwise would have trigged alarms at the holding facility. Accordingly, I filled a flask with my own pee and cooled it in liquid nitrogen. It sat on the passenger seat all the way to Kansas, where I swapped urine for gasoline and drove back home."

As the old man spoke, my eyes pored over the shelves of automotive gear that recalled shelves belonging to my grandfather when I was a teenager, and my nostrils flared at the unmistakable smell of leaded gas, the perfume of 1975. These stimuli conspired to activate in my brain a web page containing hyperlinks to all parts of my past; memories long archived had been retrieved; and as neurons fired, my entire childhood was completely reconstituted from that flask of gasoline.

The Hot Dog

Before we moved to Madison, New Jersey in August 1971, my family lived in urban East Orange. My first memories were formed there, the earliest of them predating the birth of my sister Heather, when I was my family’s one center of attention.

Then, East Orange was a vibrant, bustling community, a home to thriving businesses. We had department stores and large chains such as Orbach’s, Two Guys, Woolworth’s, and Newberry’s. A second tier of independent stores sold everything from licorice allsorts to orthopedic shoes. Many stores had lunch counters.

My father patronized stores where the owners took an active hand in running the business and where the staff greeted him by name. One such shop, located a few blocks from the Brick Church train station, specialized in adhesive paper. There my father bought the paper that he used after showers to tape down his sideburns until they dried.

My mother, my father’s opposite in so many ways, preferred discount stores. She often took me to one with a lunch counter, my very favorite, on South Orange Avenue, a short bus ride from our house on Williams Street. I looked forward to going there, ordering from the children’s menu, and receiving a free balloon… to have popped! I’ll explain.

One warm summer day, we boarded the South Orange Avenue bus. We were going to the lunch counter! From the bus stop I could see the store, its shop doors open wide. (Few places then had air conditioning.) I raced past my mother, now distant and futilely calling, bolted through the open doors, and clambered atop a rotating stool where I waited for Mom to sit and order for me. My order was simple since I always had the same thing, a boiled hot dog.

I wouldn’t touch a dog with skin. And it had to be in a New England style bun, the kind used for traditional lobster rolls, slit on top and lightly toasted. If the bun was side-slit like at the street cart vendors, no go. If the bun wasn’t properly toasted, or if the dog split during cooking or had visible char marks, no go. Only when all my requirements were met did I allow Mom to cut my dog in sections. The bun remained on the side, uncut and empty. While I chewed pieces of hot dog, I circled the lunch counter talking to myself and to any diners I fancied, occasionally returning to my stool to take a bite of bun.

Lunch over, I eyed the underinflated balloons that were kept in nets on either side of the dessert cooler. Having attracted a server’s attention, I selected my balloon with care and pointed at it. One time my server, having some fun with me, feigned ignorance of exactly which balloon I wanted.

DUM DUM! I yelled at the tip top of my voice, so obnoxiously that Mom had to smooth things over.

At this lunch counter, the ritual was that the child would get to pop a balloon. But Mom would never let me, even though I desperately wanted to; instead she had the server pop it for me. Inside the balloon he fished out a little square of paper with a number. After reading the number aloud, the server, with a flourish, removed from beneath the counter a wooden block roughly the size of a thick hardcover book. Then he located a small hole on the block corresponding to the number that he had just read and stuck a thick metal pin through the block, which pushed a tightly rolled scroll out the other side. The server unrolled the scroll and announced whether it conveyed a free soft drink or ice cream, or if it was just a riddle and a drawing of a circus animal which the child could color and take home.

One day I had the fidgets. I was getting older and less lovable, so my mother discouraged me from getting up and hassling the other customers. She also insisted that I eat my hot dog whole and inside the bun, like an adult. Frustrated, I felt an intense urge to jump up on the lunch counter and run its length, which I repressed with great difficulty. (Since I can still summon this feeling, I must conclude that its repression pushed it into long-term memory.) A few stools to my left, a black woman in her late forties awaited her meal. She exchanged pleasantries with Mom, who preemptively apologized for any fidgeting and staring I might engage in. I was intrigued by the lady’s flowery dress, the head scarf that she had tied off below her chin, and the loads of rings on her fingers. Each time I looked her way, she flashed me a broad smile of gleaming white teeth, but her smile angered me because it seemed to mock the discomfort I felt at being forced to sit while the other counter patrons got to roam.

The server brought the lady a dog of her own. On it she slathered mustard (yuk!) and green relish (yuk!). My mother told me to quit staring. The lady took a big bite of her dog, but when she removed it from her mouth I saw with horror that her teeth were still attached. I began to cry, making her so uncomfortable that she hurried her meal and left.

Mom and I took the bus home. Just before we reached our stop, Mom explained dentures to me. She also told me why she never let me pop my balloon: she feared my lack of dexterity might cause it to explode into her eyes, rendering her blind and unable to read.

Night Walk

My father bartended nights at an establishment in Orange called Dodd’s Bar. Dodd’s was owned by State Senator Pat Dodd, the Orange native and future president of the New Jersey Senate. Pat told me to call him by his first name and explained to the five-year-old me how one needed connections to get personalized license plates, at that time a prestigious acquisition. In my mind, I pictured bungee cords.

Dad worked five or six nights a week from early evening until the wee hours, when he would catch some shuteye before heading off to school. On his free evenings, he stayed up late watching our black-and-white television because he was unable to switch off his nocturnal bent. Notwithstanding his example, Mom warned me against joining him: TV would rot my brain.

One night, awakened by the television, I padded to the living room in my pajamas. My father had his feet up on the steamer trunk that Mom and I had found in someone’s curbside trash and dragged several blocks to our second-floor apartment. My mother had painted the trunk with a thick layer of oil-based enamel paint, a smell that whenever I encounter it today – something that happens less and less often – reminds me of that trunk’s white wood faces and black corner brackets. An open pizza box rested on my father’s lap as he watched something on PBS that I didn’t recognize. When he noticed me standing there after several minutes, he walked me back to bed. But I had trouble sleeping in our muggy apartment, which lacked air conditioning. Dad listened to me shift for a few minutes and then appeared in the doorway, where he noticed my warm pajamas sticking to me.

Let’s take a walk, he said.

Now this was something!

Footwear was a problem. I had my booties on and didn’t want to lace up the corrective boots that my parents ordered specially from Wentch’s, the neighborhood shoe store. These were a pair of dead weights that shackled the middle of my shins which were supposed to ameliorate my hip pain. Dad improvised, placing me atop his shoulders: in this way, we greeted the cool night air of East Orange at 1 a.m. where, despite the hour, Main Street was abuzz with activity.

It was very exciting, seeing the world from an adult’s perspective. I saw everything that had previously eluded me. No longer did my lack of stature render everything the wrong scale, as it must to dollhouse figures whisked in as extras to a miniature train hobbyist’s crowd scene. The diner was open, the one with the waitress from India who could move her head from side to side while keeping her shoulders perfectly level, whom I asked to do that thing each time Mom and I visited, to my mother’s mortification. As we passed, patrons looked up and waved, and I waved back. No waitress.

The chilly night air and the play of lights, automobiles, and pedestrians thrilled me. We passed Spring’s News, the small corner shop that sold newspapers, periodicals, and candy, where my dad bought Callard and Bowser toffee in small white boxes wrapped in clear plastic with peel-open strips like the ones on his cigarette packs. The owner was lowering the metal gate to the sidewalk, and he and Dad exchanged greetings. In the pizza palace people queued two deep at the counter for slices. The submarine shop was closed, and so was Mecca Magic, the destination of local magic fans, an emporium of tricks that my parents bought and I never mastered. Upstairs at Mecca, Mr. Collins shared tips and secrets with aspiring young illusionists.

My father noticed that I was shivering. He suggested we loop back, but I wanted to remain on the scene! I tried to forestall our return by pulling his ears the way I wanted to go, but that didn’t work. Alas, so much of youth is trial and error. We crossed the street and a man called out to Dad, who responded, It’s my son, Clay. The gas station attendant, sitting on a stool near the pumps, waved to me and called out:

Looks like we’re having a good time!

Seagulls Screaming

Early summer, a new decade. My baby sister was not yet one. The Beatles had broken up that spring. And we were going to the beach.

Later in life I learned that when I was an infant, I would laugh hysterically whenever my mother accidentally dropped me, knocked me over, or stepped on me. But with Heather, Mom was more careful: she handled her like a figurine of blown glass. Mom wanted to stay home with her daughter all the time, so she resisted when Dad proposed a Saturday trip to the shore. She certainly wasn’t on board with his plan to rise by 4 a.m. to reach Sandy Hook by sunrise, but she agreed to a 10 a.m. departure.

On the big day, Dad and I walked downtown to gather supplies for Mom, including cigarettes, chocolates and newspapers from Spring’s. Then we stopped at one of Dad’s favorite haunts, our local Blimpie Base. Blimpie was a chain of submarine sandwich stores exclusive to Northeast New Jersey whose stores smelled of vinegar, which made me ill. (I loved their milkshakes, though.) Dad ordered himself two subs, one for the beach and the other for a late-night snack. The evening sub would be all the more delicious having marinated to perfection all day in the trunk of our hot car.

We returned to the apartment to help Mom ready the baby stuff, and then set out to retrieve Dad’s street-parked car, our black Hillman Sunbeam with red vinyl interior.

During my life I have dealt with many poorly performing cars, but this one was the absolute nadir. It never completed a trip of any length without a subsequent garage visit. The Sunbeam was a kissing cousin of the dysfunctional Hillman Minx, scions of the British manufacturer that stopped making both models the year after our car limped off the assembly line. Most Hillmans were Minxes and few were Sunbeams, but both were as rare on American roads as clear-thinking motorists, the Sunbeam more elusive than the quarry at a snipe hunt. Parts catalogs claimed Minxes and Sunbeams had interchangeable parts, but my future training as a mechanic put the lie to that. Good shops tried to track which parts were interchangeable, but there were no good shops near us. Most garages simply refused to touch our car.

Eventually Dad found a place called Mini Motors that not only dared work on our car but actually made it run better than before. It was in the deep wilds of New Jersey, in a town called Madison.

Mini Motors worked mainly on Volkswagens, but they would take on our car as an interesting case. Sascha, the owner, a no-nonsense Russian émigré with a world-weary view and acerbic tongue, was only in his thirties but spoke frequently of retirement. (He was still talking about it thirty years later.) His office, which faced the intersection of Kings Road and Green Village Road, was an organized mess with partial wood paneling and a pin-up calendar that wasn’t the typical tawdry girlie review but rather a classy European glamour calendar published by Wurth, the German auto parts manufacturer.

Having retrieved the Hillman, Dad double parked in front of our apartment building and helped Mom and Heather into the car. Heather sat on Mom’s lap, the place Mom felt her baby was safest. We pulled into a service station where after a moment, the pump guy said:

Hey, Professor, (Dad got called this a lot even though he was not yet a full professor) I can see gas dripping from your tank.

My father got out of the car, dropping from my line of sight as he lowered himself to the ground. When he reappeared, his face told the story: no shore trip today.

Good, said Mom.

The station owner emerged from a nearby shed. I knew his face, and he always smiled and said hello to me. To Dad he said:

You know, we could seal the tank with a screw. Just coat it in window sealant caulk and turn it in that hole in the tank. It might slow the leak.

The car having already been patched a dozen times, Dad figured it was worth a try. My mother sighed: the trip might be back on. The owner ran next door to his house for the caulk and then returned and spent a while beneath our car. Then he stood up and flashed the all clear! My father got back in the car, rolled down his window, and started to pull some cash from his wallet, but the grimy station owner just pushed his hand back:

Have fun at the beach, folks!

The trip took forever, but at last we reached the sky-blue sea. On the beach, Mom let me race to the water’s edge. (She wouldn’t allow me in the water, not even ankle deep.) She and Dad laid out towels and made a niche for my sister while I ran amok, getting sand into every body cavity, swallowing some for good measure, until I was tuckered. I returned and flopped down by my father who lay on the sand in his swim trunks, sunbathing. Mom asked him if he would like his sandwich.

Yes, that would be nice.

Mom returned with Dad’s beach sub and for me a package of Pillsbury Space Food Sticks which I ate because Pillsbury said the astronauts did. I finished three before Dad began – even on the beach he ate fastidiously. In the distance seagulls cried and circled, and one lunged at my unattended bag of Space Food. Meanwhile Dad stood, swept a bit of sand off his chest, leaned over his sub, and began to eat.

It happened with such fury! The first gull swooped from the sun for the submarine, a second gull in its wake. My mother screamed. My father was unfazed but, keying off my mother’s reaction, I screamed too. Screeching seagulls came from every direction. Father kicked one squarely in its midsection, producing a sound like the one I made whenever I dropped the lid of the old steamer trunk that held my toys, and it sailed a dozen feet before thudding in the sand and stumbling off. When another gull went for my mother, she abandoned camp – I tried to follow, but she was too quick. My father rose, sighed, and walked quickly after us. He was smiling, chuckling even. I didn’t know what was so funny. I was angry.

Then my mother, still screaming, ran back. At first, we couldn’t make out her words, but then my father comprehended; he turned on his heels and ran faster than I had ever seen a human being run, profoundly shocking me. My mother was yelling:

My baby! You left my baby to those beasts!

Pal’s Cabin

A few days before we moved to Madison, we attended my cousin Tony’s wedding reception at Pal’s Cabin in West Orange. Tony, who managed the Flemington ShopRite, was marrying his full-figured fiancée Genie whom he would later divorce and then remarry. Genie kept Tony slaving his whole life. After all, someone had to pay for her plastic surgeries: eyes, lips, teeth, breasts, derrière.

Genie had quite the lingerie collection. She saddled bags of last season’s corsets, bras, garters, and other contrivances on my mother, who shuddered at their awfulness. Yet for some reason Mom never rid herself of them; they accumulated through the years in several garbage bags in Mom’s closet. As a child I rummaged through these bags and tried to imagine where people might wear such clothes. At the beach? In the movies?

Pal’s Cabin was an American restaurant, a friend to fat and cholesterol, the exact likes of which no longer exists. In Madison, the Widow Brown’s was its closest counterpart. If you look now for those restaurants and their slabs of red meat, their potatoes broiled in their own skin and served in aluminum foil, their Chateaubriand for Two, their dark pumpernickel loaves and carrot cakes denser than brick served amidst wood paneling, stucco ceilings, stainless steel salad bars, and faux Tiffany lamps, you will search in vain. Several times a year on Tuesdays, my family dressed up and ate at Pal’s. My mother was a fiend for their London Broil, my father loved their T-bone steak, and I ordered the club sandwich with crispy bacon and five kinds of melted cheese, mainly for the fancy wooden sandwich picks with Pal’s Cabin flags fluttering atop.

For his wedding reception, cousin Tony had rented out the joint. Dozens of Polish and Italian kids in their Sunday best spent the afternoon racing down dusty, thickly carpeted halls through a sprawl of dining rooms, playing tag. A girl I didn’t know who seemed to know me grabbed my hair, pulled me to her, and tried to kiss me – luckily, I got away. One of her cousins, an older boy, later asked me over a glass of Bosco whether I had done a certain thing to her. I didn’t understand, but his Uncle Sam, who had overheard his question, must have, because he smacked him so hard that blood streamed from his nose.

That upset me so much that I decided to leave the party. Since I had paid minute attention to my father’s driving, I was able to walk the three miles to my aunt’s apartment in East Orange by keying off landmarks. She was shocked to see her five-year-old nephew on the doorstep when she opened the door! She drove me back to Pal’s, where my folks were getting ready to leave. During the ride home I threw up, effectively punctuating the end of my days in the Oranges. Next up, the Rose City of Madison.

Time Machines

Sometimes a movie’s star is its setting: think Seventies-era New York City in Taxi Driver, The French Connection, and Dog Day Afternoon. On the other hand, Madison, where I grew up, was the actual backdrop of films like A Beautiful Mind, Deconstructing Harry, and The World According to Garp. Clearly Madison engendered a subtler, more suburban style of dysfunction.

I have not completed my time machine, but I have chosen destinations. I’ll forego Fort McHenry (Francis Scott Key scribbling in the background) and Waterloo (Bjorn Ulvaeus doing likewise) and instead set the dilithium crystals for ordinary days in the Seventies and Eighties when, as the humorous plaque would have it, nothing much happened. I don’t want to change the course of history: I want to revisit half-forgotten rec rooms! I want to see beanbags and shag carpets, bumper pool tables and wainscoting, and notice details I missed the first time, things I haven’t thought of in ages. While I’m doing so, perhaps I can solve unanswered puzzles like: what exactly was that glass and amber thing hanging in a yarn net outside the office of my junior school vice principal?

But when I watch Garp closely I can truly time travel, at least for a moment. There in the background, between the cobblestone carriage drive and the stone stairway to the eastbound train platform, I can clearly see my friend Shane and me watching the scene where Glenn Close gets shot on the steps of Hartley Dodge.

A New Home

We arrived in Madison on August 28, 1971, a stiflingly hot, humid Saturday. When we stepped beneath the lintel of our new front door at 42 Prospect Street, a cauldron of chemicals and a passel of uneasy workmen greeted us. After struggling to dissociate the chemical fumes from my homesickness, I realized they were emanating from the floors and walls, derivatives of the oil-based paint and floor varnish being applied by laborers who had promised my father to finish a week earlier.

I had been to Madison. My family would take the train there from East Orange so Dad could visit Drew University. While he did, Mom shepherded me and my swaddled sister to Baskin Robbins. Then we’d explore the downtown until Dad finished his business. On later visits, particularly after Mini Motors had put it right, we took my father’s Sunbeam. We would visit the public library and then drive to what we called the country.

Sometimes we would go as far as Meyersville, a village on the far side of the Great Swamp. Where five roads converged (near the future site of Casa Maya) was an antiques shop called Archie’s Resale Shop. It was actually a congeries of rundown houses, tumbledown garages, and rotted sheds, with narrow paths threading them between piles of rusted metal and broken junk. On fall Sundays my father would take us there to my mother’s great dismay. She believed we would all get tetanus, then be crushed underneath a landslide of scrap metal.

Amidst the outdoor junk was a rusty, dizzyingly tall, free-standing birdcage. If the weather