Winter 2025

THE JOY Z JOURNAL

EPITAPHS

BY WILL COMERFORD

Burying my father has put me in a cemetery mood. For his headstone, I will do what he did for his wife, my mother: the basics. Name, birthday, deathday, and an indication of relationships: Husband, Father, Grandfather. Getting poetic is risky. Even in the era of acid rain, engravings on marble last a hundred years, while words in granite last centuries. And taste in words is fickle. I suppose that’s why most people stick to the basics, by the looks of the stones in my parents’ new hillside neighborhood.

I was under the impression that our ancestors were more flowery with their death stones. But if you take a walk at the Historic Jersey City and

Harsimus Cemetery, on Newark Avenue in the morning shadow of the New Jersey Turnpike, you’ll see that most of us have always been pithy in death. There are an estimated 90,000 graves throughout these six acres, mostly burials from the nineteenth century, and many from a cholera epidemic shortly after its founding. There are not too many famous names there — the Colgate family apparently once had a plot, but the old magnate ended up in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. There is a spot holding the dust of Charles F. Durant, the first American to ascend in a balloon in 1833, and an all-around polymath and scientist. But even he kept it simple on the stone: a name and years. Charles F. Esterling is one headstone at

Harsimus that carries an epitaph: “He has faded away / Like a star from on high.” I’m no historical researcher, but I can’t dig up a single fact or shred of information about this man, other than what’s on the stone. He was not yet 32 when he died. Whoever carved the stone got it right — he has indeed faded. We’ll have to take their word for it that he was once a star. Buried with him is Jennie P. Esterling, seven years his junior, who died four years before him, at the tender age of 21. Sister or wife? Their stories are buried with them.…

THE WINTER LINNEA FOUND ME

BY DR. FRANCIS J DOOLEY

In the winter of 1887, the wind off Lake Michigan didn’t just howl, it bit. Inside the Lyon Healy factory on Wabash Avenue, the smell of warm hide glue and shaved Brazilian rosewood filled the air. A luthier, with hardened fingers from a lifetime of tension and wood, buffed the spruce top of the New Model Parlor guitar. Its body was small, light, and elegant; a “lady’s instrument,” the catalogs said. As he tapped the wood, the resonance was commanding and deep. He branded the internal center strip with the freshly struck Washburn Belt Logo, a permanent ink and fire stamp that would outlive him for centuries.

Its first owner was a young, well-educated clerk for the Pullman Palace Car Company. He christened the guitar Linnea, after the delicate twinflower of his Swedish homeland. For months, he carefully saved his earnings to buy her. In 1887, when a common laborer in the Chicago rail yards earned barely a dollar a day, a Washburn was a significant investment. While his peers chose $5.00 trade guitars from the Montgomery Ward catalog, he paid $22.00 for a professional grade “New Model.” To him, that price meant more than just wood and wire; it represented a way out of the dreary, soot-filled monotony of the railyards.

In the cramped boarding houses of Chicago’s South Side, entertainment was do-it-yourself. He felt at home with the guitar’s narrow waist fitting perfectly in his lap. While the city outside groaned with the industrial growth of the Gilded Age, he played Swedish folk melodies and popular tunes heard in Baker’s Theater. The notes rang out against the parlor’s wood paneling, a small, private beauty in a city of iron and coal….

THE DENTIST

BY MICHAEL MOON

I remember going to The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Greenwich Village one summer with someone from high school who would later become a rather close friend though we weren’t really all that simpatico at the time. We’d probably bagged a few beers each, most likely in the vicinity of Washington Square Park to kill some time before the midnight showing at the Waverly Theatre (now the IFC Center) on 6th and West 3rd.

In my Bermuda Triangle of memory, which thankfully hasn’t worsened all that much at fifty-four, I have to admit I’ve lost a considerable amount of plot & character and would be very hard-pressed to remember much about the film. What has stayed with me most about the movie though was Steve Martin’s memorable portrayal of the mad, sadistic dentist who tortures then murders his patients by employing the most unusual

methods, e.g. feeding his victims to a genetically mutated, implausibly large and carnivorous human fly trap. I can’t explain it, but Steve Martin in an eye patch and lab coat flashes through my brain every time I’m scheduled to go in for a dental appointment...

SOMERVILLE

BY PAUL HAM

Marcus said the speakeasy up Prospect Hill from Union Square.
Stayed late at work. Went over to Trina’s, just down Somerville Ave from Union, around 11ish. Cars used to line up down the Ave when the Demoulas ran specials on goat, for weekend cabrito assado or buchada, and the Irish across the street would just spit and laugh. Late tonight, it was empty and cold.
Worked through 3 Bud Heavies and a spliff, reviewed a

manuscript my boss just gave me, a pamphlet on demons and hope.
The Devil’s nature is to confound God. His mission is not to “do evil” or “kill angels,” but to protect Chaos. Chaos – the emptiness existing before God, where there is no Good or Evil because there is no control. If Chaos (Inequity, Unfairness, Misbalance) is destroyed, God wins, and every particle in the universe is under His will. And where there is only Certainty,

there is no Hope.
God and his army of angels seek Harmony and Compliance; the Devil and his handful of archangels sacrifice their demons to an eternal Tenochtitlan massacre, fighting to preserve Hope.…

THE CANDIDATE: Part Two

“Your assignment is to write a five hundred word essay on ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’….”

BY ROBERT VERDIBELLO

AMERICAN FERAL

My great grand-daddy started with cats, and by my daddy’s time we were farming carps too….

BY PAUL HAM

TRUE CRIME, FALSE CRIME, TRUER CRIME

One summer day in 1971, Richard Castellano got out of his car to take a piss on an unnamed road in Jersey City, in view of the Statue of Liberty….

BY JOE “GG” IMBURGIA

TALL TALES FROM THE COMIC SHOP

“Fearful Symmetry” is the official title of the 1987 Spider-Man story that everyone refers to as “Kraven’s Last Hunt”.…

BY ROBERT VERDIBELLO

JC HAIKUS

BY GRANT KOO

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