Looking Down from
Ivy Hill
by David Robert Boyce
It ends with an incident I’ve memorialized in a poem:
“What do you got in your pockets!?”--WHOMP!
He never gave me a chance to reply:
“I just have napkins and all sorts of junk.”I was minding my business when suddenly this punk
started crossing the street to my side.
“What do you got in your pockets!?”--WHOMP!I had white shirt, necktie, I.D., backpack,
and grey khakis bulging at the sides
from just napkins and all sorts of junk.He wanted some weed to juice-up his joint
and thought it was cash swelling up my thighs.
“What do you got in your pockets!?”--WHOMP!To what kind of low had this punk sunk
if he thought I should pay for his high
(but I had just napkins and all sorts of junk!).If in the hereafter I meet this chump,
I will finally give him my reply
to: “What did you have in your pockets?”
“I just had napkins and all sorts of junk.”--Vailsburg, NJ 07106
The post office might get p.o.’d if you use “Vailsburg” in addressing letters to the part of Newark, New Jersey, that includes the Ivy Hill Park Apartments. For them, the proper name of the area is “Newark, NJ 07106” and everyone addresses their mail that way. Although the City of Newark thinks Vailsburg is just a neighborhood in its West Ward, it remains a separate place for me.
Newark, as a whole, is the largest city in New Jersey with a total population of over 270,000. It is also located five miles west of Manhattan in New York City. At one point, Vailsburg existed as a separate municipality. In fact, in an attempt by the Mayor of Newark to absorb some of the outlying communities in 1905, Vailsburg was absorbed into Newark. Today, Vailsburg stands out from the rest of Newark like a peninsula (some people refer to it as the “finger of Newark”) and is separated from the rest of the city by the Garden State Parkway.
I was acquainted with Vailsburg as a Mormon missionary in the first six months of 1995. The area a fellow missionary and I were assigned to proselytize included Vailsburg and East Orange. We were living in the second story of a house at 745 Irvington Avenue in Maplewood, New Jersey, near the place where Newark, Maplewood, and Irvington met. In fact, we could walk north on the sidewalk and be in Newark before we reached the next street corner.We had a nice apartment. Our landlady, Maria, was an Italian Catholic who spoke English with a thick accent. Her husband, Joe, hardly spoke any English. I remember leftover Italian food from what I think was her daughter’s restaurant. There was also the occasional “Tay-ka de Gar-beh-gey out (take the garbage out)” from our landlady and her husband. Also, there would be an occasional plea for “Boys, stop the noise.” Mind you, for boys our age, we did not make much noise. Her grandson (I think) on the third floor listened to heavy metal music and smoked pot. As missionaries, we were only allowed to listen to classical, church, and Disney music. Also, we could get chastised by some for drinking Coca Cola.
We lived just a quick jaunt from many of the things we needed. There was the Panda Chinese Restaurant on Parker Avenue we could see from a small window in our apartment; there was the Extra Supermarket, a few lots north at 741 Irvington Avenue; there was the Town and Country Pharmacy south of us at 747 Irvington Avenue; there was a gas station across the street (for the missionaries who used a car); there was also a bank across the street (too bad it didn’t have an ATM or MAC as they are called there).
Ivy Hill, which some sources call the largest housing complex in New Jersey, is comprised of five large apartment buildings, half of each being a separate street number in the City of Newark. Each building seemed to be its own neighborhood. There was the African-American enclave, the Spanish-speaking enclave, and the Russian and Ukrainian enclave.
There was one family, the Ellis family, who lived in a few of the apartments in the African-American enclave. They were an institution there. Grandpa Lal Ellis was the patriarch of the clan. He was mixed-race and had married Alma, who was part Native American. Their children married people of different races. One of their sons married an African-American Muslim, Karen, who was strength for everyone. I would grow to love these people.
During my six months there, we walked or rode the bus all over Vailsburg. There was a major bus stop at the intersection of 18th Avenue and Stuyvesant Avenue. It was there on June 30, 1995, that while waiting for the New Jersey Transit bus to take us north into East Orange, the events memorialized in my poem took place. It was not the first time that my friends or I had conflict with the locals. In fact, we once had a run-in with the owner of the gas station across the street from our apartment.
Our friend’s car was having some problems with its battery and we asked the people at the gas station to get it jumped. There didn’t seem to be any problem. We also set up an appointment for the following day to get the battery replaced at the K-Mart in Kearny (which was east of us). That next day when we needed the battery jumped again so we could go get it replaced, we were told we had to pay some exorbitant fee. The owner of the gas station then came out in his Italian New Jersey glory telling us to get our piece of junk (I remember him calling it that, although my memory may have bleeped out what he actually said) off of his property. We would have gladly gotten it off once we were running. Besides, we were going to get it fixed that day. He slapped Elder K., a fellow missionary, on the face. It must have been God that kept Elder K. from punching him back because, at that moment, a police officer showed up. The cop did not jump our car, but we did manage to get it back into the parking lot behind the gas station, where we waited for some female missionaries to come and jump our car.
Anyway, we were waiting at the bus stop to catch a ride north. Earlier that day, we had eaten at a McDonald’s in Irvington and I, as usual, had taken a bunch of napkins and stuffed them in my pocket. Including my friend and me, there were about ten people at the bus stop. Most of the others were older than us and all were of a different race. Across the street, there were teenage boys who believed as much in marijuana as we believed in God. One of them, who I had had a run-in with earlier, started coming over to me and asking what I had in my pockets. He would repeat his question a few times, each time punching me in the face. His friend asked him what he was doing.
After a few punches, he threw a punch at my friend. When the punk missed, my friend got into a fighting stance. That was when all the punks came over.
There were at least six boys punching my friend and me. My friend covered his head. I, a nerd even amongst my own, held onto my three-ring binder. I didn’t believe that this was happening to me, but I had no idea when it would stop.
I never watched much Dudley Do-right, but I can imagine that there may have been a time when the villain, Snidely Whiplash, was doing something of “ill will,” only to be scared off by Dudley who was going somewhere else entirely. Well, the Newark Police were Dudley, the punks were Snidely, and beating-up two white boys in ties was the “ill will.” A police car running with lights and siren was our savior, even if turned down a different street before it reached us. In any case, the punks were scared away. An older lady who was standing by us handed me some Kleenex for my bloody nose. There was a Number 1 bus waiting at the corner (which we gladly boarded) to take us west back toward Ivy Hill and our apartment on Irvington Avenue.
The next day, I was transferred out west to the New Jersey countryside. A short while after being transferred out of Newark, I was transferred back into a different part of Newark. This allowed me to keep up with Karen and her family for a short time. In fact, one time, a friend and I hopped on the Number 1 bus to Ivy Hill for a farewell party for a couple of our friends. I was a little nervous sitting in the bus as we went by the spot where I got my first black eye.
Two years later, while visiting New Jersey, I saw Karen. Her family was doing all right, at least as far as I probed. She still seemed to be strength for her family in such a place. I have since learned that Lal Ellis has passed away. The last time I set foot in Jersey was in 2001, just after 9-11, and that was only for a couple of hours in Jersey City.
I occasionally wonder what happened to the other people I grew to love in New Jersey. Sometimes I will send postcards that way, but I haven’t gotten anything back in a while. However, there is a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, and, someday, while working on that, I may return to Ivy Hill.