Two Sisters
For Jane and Lorraine
I met Jane the night I stole her leather jacket.
It was my first night at the College Point Malba group of Alcoholic's Anonymous. We were pushing chairs back in to the tables at the end of the meeting. We each had leather jackets on the backs of our chairs, but I must have gotten disoriented, because I thought I was taking the leather jacket from the back of my chair. I got in the car of the church parking lot, said to myself, you know, the sleeves seem a little short. Does AA cause that? Collateral damage for trying to get sober? I drove home, across the highway where the Cross Island Parkway ends and the Van Wyck Expressway begins (or vice versa), and my wife says, "Where'd you get that leather jacket?" I realized it was Jane's. I was so new that I didn't know her last name, or phone number. So I got in the car, raced back to the church, which was locked and dark. Jane wore my leather jacket home.
For the next few days, I showed up at every meeting Jane might attend, and eventually, we made the exchange. We laughed so hard that I made Ray, her husband, my sponsor. Ray is a painter. Not like a Soho loft dwelling painter, making the art gallery scene, but a union painter, employed by the city, to paint school buildings and the like, until he retired. He still works, still paints stuff. But Ray and I are also connected by a love of particularly well-crafted songs. We both love Guy Clark's "Picasso's Mandolin," which Ray identifies with because, like Clark sang of Pablo, "I like to mix the paint with nerve."
Jane's sister Lorraine lived near Ray and Jane in College Point, a part of Queens set in such isolation that most people in Queens could not tell you where it is, if they've heard of it at all. A colleague of mine at St. John's University, who grew up on the other side of the parkway in Whitestone, said he had never been to College Point. It was considered "the Ozarks." I can't say he's entirely wrong. Jane had grown up there, a family of a bar owner, at a time when this one time cloistered German-Irish enclave was noted for having the highest number of saloons per capita than any place else. Now it is becoming more Latino and Asian, the churches now providing services in Korean, Spanish, Hindi, and more. More restaurants and bakeries than bars. At meetings I was often asked to define arcane words or phrases from the AA Big Book, although I still couldn't tell you the derivation of the phrase "boiled as an owl," though it seems clear by context to mean "really drunk."
My quintessential College Point moment may have been going to the sober anniversary of a woman at another group in town. Outside, before the meeting started, I saw a guy in the t-shirt of a heavy metal band, with a naked woman's breasts on the front. It turned out that he was not only one of the speakers at the anniversary; the celebrant was his mother. Bare titties on your mom’s anniversary. I told Ray that was the most College Point thing I'd ever seen, and he could not disagree.
Lorraine was an avid reader, almost certainly the most avid reader in College Point. You see what I'm getting at is that, in jest, College Point is to Queens what Newfoundland is to the rest of Canada. At one point, naturally, she worked at the library. I'd see her on College Point Boulevard during my visits to the Empire Market, one of the two best known attractions for foodies, a third or fourth generation German butcher shop with its own better-than-organic, additive free, privately sourced beef, pork, chicken, and holiday turkeys. They make their own andouille sausage, and my friend John, part of the Empire family, said years ago I was the only customer who pronounced that word correctly. Also in College Point is Le Cheesecake bakery, at which lines form around the block for its namesake specialty before holidays. Lorraine and I would go to the thrift shop on College Point Boulevard, hoping to scrape up some cheap good paperbacks. The thrift store, tiny and narrow, was what passed for a cultural hub in College Point.
Two weeks ago, Ray called me at what for us was an unusual time, kind of mid-afternoon. I could hear the sadness in his voice. He and Jane had found Lorraine dead in her apartment. He wanted me to know because he sometimes forgets to tell me when one of our large network of people from the program pass into the next realm, and he knew that Lorraine and I had been friends.
A few days ago Ray called me again, the same gravitas in his voice, only deeper. His wife, Jane died. I was bereft. Ray and Jane had become couple-friends with my wife Maureen (who enjoys a sip of beer or glass or wine but never more than that) and I. We went out to dinner together for my 65th birthday. We had sober New Year's Eve parties at their house. They've been to my daughters' bat-mitzvahs, weddings, graduation parties. Though neither are Jewish, a few years ago they  invited us to a Passover seder at a friend of theirs: the wife worked with Jane for decades at Queens College; her husband is the Rabbi of a conservative synagogue in Queens, a Canadian who, Ray, said, wore a Toronto Maple Leafs yarmulke making a condolence visit after Lorraine's death.
Yesterday was Jane's wake. It was remarkable for the friendliness, camaraderie, and shared fond spirits, as if everyone was channeling Jane's big heart, which stopped prematurely April 26, a few months shy of her 67th birthday. There were many people from the program, many from Ray and Jane's and Lorraine's large family and mishpochah from various marriages. What stopped me in my tracks was the decision of the younger generation to wear rock and roll t-shirts as a tribute to Jane. I'd known her for about 20 years and we never talked about music: Jane was always about doing the right thing, helping others.
I told Lorraine's lovely and smart adult kids about my job writing about music and teaching it. One of them was wearing a Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers t-shirt. I told them my favorite, corny story about Ray and I talking about music. He has a deep and pronounced Brooklyn/Queens accent, with some hard consonants. He told me he had heard a new band he liked on the radio. Dawes, Laurel Canyon-style harmony rock, a bit like Jackson Browne. The way he said "Dawes," I thought he was saying "Doors." I said, "The Doors? They're an old L.A. band, Ray, you know that." He said, "No, Dawes." I knew what he was saying, but I pranked on. "What about the Doors?" No, you knucklehead. D-A-W-E-S.
But our careers and hobbies are not that important in recovery, and Jane was all about recovery when we spoke. So it was kind of mind-blowing to discover, at her wake, she was a rocker. Someof the younger generation wore Ramones t-shirts in her honor; there was even a small Ramones banner folded above one of her memorial pictures. The winner in the t-shirt contest, however, was the one or ones wearing a Jane's Addiction shirt. Multileveled and very cool, just like the two sisters, Jane and Lorraine, who I already miss much too much.