One last time to Haledon

 

December 31, 1998

 

 We had to go back to Haledon for a prescription, and stopped at the old house for mail, with the intention of making a purchase at the hardware store up the street.

 We had moved to Haledon on account of a change in jobs, and found the town dying.

 I remembered it from when I was a kid. My best friend was born and raised there. I had also wandered down into it from time to time when I attended William Paterson College. But it's dying had always escaped me in the past. Until we moved there in February, 1998, I hardly noticed the aging population or how many of the store fronts had grown empty.

 History favored Haledon. Its importance as a labor capital far exceeded it size, with some of the greatest left wing radicals planning the Paterson silk strikes here.

 But its prominence as a capital of the left vanished many years ago, as the working class and their unions turned sour and right wing. For most of my life, it was a center of pickup trucks and American flags, and men shouting at my long hair as I walked down the street.

 If anything, Haledon became as fascistic in its old age as it was socialistic in its youth, tight-fisted if aging politicians struggling to keep taxes low despite a vanishing of business. While it still had a soda company, Haledon had lost most of the industrial base upon which it had based its low taxes, and so over the last decade or so, has resorted to cutting services.

 A man across the street from where we lived had huge curb-side trees falling onto his car and house, and the town refused to do anything about it. People who failed to recycle properly were ticketed. People who put out their trash too soon were ticketed. People who used to much water on their vegetable gardens were ticketed.

 A shady business opened up in the back of a closed store, up the street, with all sorts of characters coming and going, each with that criminal attitude typical of the entrepreneur, cellular phones dangling from their waists instead of keys. The few legitimate surviving businesses blackmailed town hall into setting up regulations to keep them from facing extinction, too.

 We ran into one on our return, when I parked my car in a 15-minute parking zone that had clearly been set up to help the local shoe-maker. Since parking by the hardware store was simply dangerous because of the angle of the spaces, I chose to park across the street. I didn't notice the shoemaker at first, though he pounded on the inside of his window to get my attention.

 He did not want me to park in front of his store, and a moment later, came out to warn me against being more than 15 minutes there.

 "You're not going into that dentist office are you?" he demanded.

 "No, why?" I asked.

 "Because this here is 15 minute parking and if you're longer than that, you'll get a ticket."

 I should have thanked him for the information and kept on walking, but I didn't like the idea of his threat.

 "And you'll be sure to call the police if I'm not back on time, right?" I said.

 The short shoemaker's face went purple.

 "You're a trouble maker aren't you?"

 "No," I said.

 "Then you're an asshole."

 "Yeah, right," I said and continued to walk, only to have someone else shout at me from across the street, some middle aged man wearing leather hat and britches, who should have ridden in on a motorcycle.

 "That's my uncle you're talking to!" he shouted, clearly aching for a fight.

 "Then teach your uncle some manners," I said. "I don't like jerks threatening me."

 Then we crossed the street, me mumbling something about Nazis and wondering why we did business in a town that clearly hated everyone except its own people. When we came out, the shoemaker and his nephew were nowhere around. But then, my 15 minutes wasn't up either.

 As I drove away, I took comfort in the fact that the shoemaker had to stay in Haledon and live in his own filth, while I had moved on, as if rising from death itself.