Jake scrunched down in the filthy, red-brown sofa and pointed to the two young boys.
I didn't know their names, but I figured I'd get to it. I asked him if his wife was around, and he said "No."
In fact, he wasn't married. "Their mothers aren't here," he said. "But my woman is."
"His woman," he said, was in the other room, where his dad, Jake Sr., was with his own "woman."
Both of these women had to be tough to put up with this, I thought to myself, as I scanned the porch where we sat.
The women, I discovered, both were named "Vera."
Jake said he was "18 or 20" years old. And yet he had these two kids, probably 4 and 6, who were drooling around with toy trucks.
I'd only ended up here because I had lost control of my Saab and sped, recklessly, into the service station fill-up area -- a few feet from Jake's house -- and hit a motorcyclist and his vehicle.
Well, actually I just tagged both. The motorcyclist was a guy I knew, a former pressman named Richard Salmon, a fellow I considered a long-time friend from our days spent at 1100 Broadway, where I would go to the pressroom to check on special section covers and other issues. I had no worry that they always would be done right.
I just went there because I liked the pressmen much better than most of the assholes up in the newsroom, especially the management types and their ass-kissing supplicants.
Anyway, I had steered the speeding Saab between Richard and his Harley. I bumped him in the hip. I worried because he had been seriously injured recently in another spill. And I scraped the front fender of the bike.
"Don't worry about it, Tim," Richard said. He brushed the hip I had tagged and said he was OK. As for the bike, it was just another scratch.
"You should see what kind of scratches I get on this thing when I'm riding," he said.
After hugging Richard, I looked over to the house near the gas station. A man, I later learned was Jake Sr., looked like he was splitting wood.
Seemed like it might make a good column for the paper. I was only out here looking because my friends back at the newsroom -- Peter Cooper, Jim Myers and Brad Schmitt -- had encouraged me to do it.
"Just get back out there with your people," said Peter, Jim nodding. Brad rubbed at his blood-red eyes and concurred.
Problem was, and they knew it, that the management had taken my column away from me. For almost a half-century in journalism, I spent my own time, after the work at the newspaper, going out to find regular people to write about.
People are more alike than different. We have the same hopes, dreams, fears and ambitions. That was the basic "message" of my half-century of columns, many of which were about lovable losers, no-account boozers, honky-tonk heroes, barbecue chefs like Ole Steve, barbers and, well, really the salt of the earth of various shades.
The column had been taken away because "the people don't fit our demographic," I'd been told. I'd been offered the chance to write about young, white professionals instead. I thought of the Dylan line "They asked me for collateral, I smiled and pulled down my pants," that I'd taped on the wall outside my dorm room 50 years ago. Then I said I wouldn't change the scope of my column, and since I did it on my own time, I'd focus on my other duties instead. In other words "Fuck you." And I don't know what the Dylan line has to do with it.
I went from the gas station to see that the man I'd found out later to be Jake Sr., wasn't splitting wood. He was just piling dirt. Digging it from a small hillside and piling it up. He didn't know why he was doing it, he told me.
That was before I went to the screen door, where Jake Jr., invited me to come in and sit down with his kids.
I never did meet either Vera. And the age of Jake's kids and the fact he had custody at such a young age was of interest.
I reached into my pocket for a Reporter's Notebook, which I opened up. It was filled with notes from other interviews, but I found room on several pages to use for our interview. I crossed out the old stuff on each page so I wouldn't get confused.
And then I woke up. Yep, this was all a dream. Around 6 a.m. June 2, 2022, in my sleep, I was doing what I loved to do, something that had been taken away from me and I was happy.
I really didn't want to wake up when I did.
I really had wanted to find out more about Jake Jr., and Jake Sr.'s dirt pile.
