Glen

Tuesday, July 21, 1970

       On another glorious sunny day during that same summer of 1970 the people were still rioting in the streets over race relations and inequality. Rage overflowing entering our daily lives. My cousin Glen was just twenty at the time and somehow got in the middle of things and ended up dead on the floor of an empty apartment  near Rutgers University during a riot.

Was it a drug overdose?  Was it murder?  We never knew.   The police were too busy to investigate due to the riots.  He was found three days  after he’d died.  The neighbors must have called.  

 

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While growing up we often visited my mom’s sister, Aunt Shirley, and her husband, Uncle  Paul, in their basement apartment of the tenement where they lived; low ceilings, one high window—sidewalk level,  dark and musty, a tenement in Newark. My Uncle managed the building in exchange for rent, holding down two jobs to pay for their four sons and my Aunt Shirl’s prescriptions.  She had lost both legs to gangrene from not taking care of her Diabetes in the past few years and was confined to a wheel chair.  Alcoholics, both of them, the visits were always entertaining, at least.

We’d park at the curb, pile out of the car, my parents and little brother Bart and I, and walk down the narrow alleyway between the buildings covered with asbestos shingle siding to their door that was two steps down on the bottom floor of a five story building. Just inside the door to the right was a chrome dinette covered with beer cans and overflowing ash trays surrounded by three chairs. We were a kitchen table family and that’s where we’d sit, there was no living room. 

They drank beer, lot’s of  beer, laughing and talking in innuendos and whispering over my head.  I knew it often had to do with my older cousin, Glen, but I didn’t understand what they were saying.  I sat on my Dad’s lap with him tickling my back, my rightly  place in the world, minding my own business so they wouldn’t  notice I was still there while they talked. 

My cousin Glen was about sixteen  at the time and seldom at home when we visited. One day he and his friend Carmine spent the afternoon in his room. We could hear them giggling down the dark hall. When we all heard the bedroom door open the kitchen table talking stopped. I’d never seen boys before with makeup on and their hair teased and sprayed, dyed blond. I didn’t understand why but they sashayed their way through the kitchen, the two of them, and swished right out the kitchen door without a word. I just thought that’s how some boys were.  I was about ten years old at the time, I didn’t know.

For the next little while there was a lot of whispering and a bit of hissing from my Uncle Paul, a blue collar worker with tattoos on his forearms.  He and my boxer dad seemed to agree, disgusted, both of them. My mom and Aunt Shirl, rolled their eyes and looked at each other with some sort of understanding between them that was over my head.

Under his breath, I heard my dad call them ‘a couple’a queers’, while curling his lip; my mom glossed over it with a wave of her hand and changed the subject. 

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It was four years later, the day Glen was found. I had been at the beach with some girlfriends, like I was every day, I was fourteen at the time getting ready to enter high school.  We were sitting Indian style on our towels, maybe ten of us all talking, playing cards and looking for boys when my little brother Bart came running down the boardwalk yelling to me, “Hey, Lin!” 

I stood and ran the short distance to the shady sand at the boardwalks edge.  Bart looked down through the chain link fence at me and said, “You have to come home now, Glen’s dead.”  

“What? Hold on, let me get my stuff.”  I ran back to tell my girlfriends that I had to go home with my little brother and grabbed my towel then ran back to get off the scorching sand again.  

Bart was wearing the same long cutoffs with the three inch fringe that he always wore.  No shirt, no shoes. Bart ran wild at eleven though I wasn’t much better since I had no cover up or shoes either, just my bikini and a towel under my arm.  Our parents both worked full time and we were left to take care of ourselves and each other.  This day, Bart, a little kid running down the boardwalk all the way from home looking for his big sister, was sent to bring me the news.  

We walked home together, bewildered.  I don’t remember what we said but I know we wondered aloud to each other  trying to figure out what this all meant.  We walked down the boardwalk past the pavilion and Spring Lake on our way down to 4th Avenue, were we lived. 

There was rioting in our streets, they were burning down the towns around us.  There were murders and suicides and I escaped all this by going to the beach everyday. In essence putting my back to the world and looking to the vast ocean for hope and cleansing of the spirit. 

Bart and I slowly walked up the five stairs and across the wooden porch through the screen door and into the living room where my parents sat, stunned and saddened. Both of them truly moved.  Bart and I new enough to just be, sit, and not be heard, they just wanted us at home, safe.  

We weren’t told how he’d died but we knew everyone was very uncomfortable about it.  Three days later we went to the closed coffin funeral of our cousin Glen.  All the family was there.  It seemed like the only time we got together as a family anymore was at family funerals.  

My cousin Mark, Glens’ younger brother, was the same age as me.  He didn’t seem to want to be inside with everyone else so he went out the front door of the funeral parlor and sat on the front stoop.  I went out too, just to be with him.  There were no words of comfort.  We didn’t know what had happened and we didn’t know what to do or say, so we just sat there on the stoop next to each other.  Sometimes it’s enough to just be.  

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Ten years later, when I was twenty-four years old, I was taking my Grandmother grocery shopping when it seemed she wanted to talk.  We parked but just sat there in the car for a while in the shade of a tree so she could tell me what she thought I needed to know.  

My cousin, Glen, had been a transvestite.