LEAVING IT ALL AGAIN : Book Three
75. I never became an adult. I think that may
have been one thing in my favor. A physical adult anyway. I was always a
'mental' adult. Physical adults have lawns and driveways, care about paint
schemes and decorations and design. Worry about their foods and keep lists of
restaurants where they've eaten. They have eaves and gutters and keep them free
of leaves. They buy new clothes and watch their manners. They shovel walks and
repair damages. Follow rules. Accumulate things and share in the popular
assumptions of the day. That all keeps me out - by contrast my circle of being
is the dark and the foul.
During the 1990's, maybe '96 or '97, I got involved with
a weekly NYC publication called The New York Press - like an alternate,
snarkier maybe, Village Voice. A fellow I met there, Mark Eneret, for a while
became a regular pal, sidekick, whatever. It used to be said, back about 1965,
by Honda motorcycles, in an ad campaign - 'you meet the nicest people on a
Honda'. It was their way of showing that those new, small-displacement Japanese
motorcycles were fun and happy - no brutes or riding-rapists nor outlaw bikers
need apply. Mark Eneret was a guy from the Big Apple Circus - where he got his
NYC start anyway. This was a much smaller scale, but still vital and
strong, version of the traveling Ringling Brothers Circus which used to travel
with the seasons from town to town back in the old days. Supplanted later by big
arena and sports places, where they could encamp and perform indoors whenever
they chose. The Big Apple Circus was a NYC institution; setting up on abandoned
lots, waterfront acreage, uncared for parking lots - whatever large enough
locations they could find. They'd plop down, erect a tent or two, or not, and
charge for their performances - high-wire, a few lions and tigers, elephants,
monkeys, clowns, flame-eaters and all that. Regular circus stuff, traveling
around all of New York season in the good seasonal weather. Year after year,
their regularity became a feature, and it helped them grow and prosper. Last I
knew, they'd been established in some Lincoln Center back-lots for long
Summer-duration performances - but that too was, by now, years ago. Presently,
I have no idea of their whereabouts though I know he's easy enough to find on
the usual links and clicks. Mark Eneret came out of that - he may have been a
clown or a hired hand, at first. But then he grew into a regular, stalwart; a
traveler and part of the team. We'd gotten to know each other a little, over
time, here and there - through NYC stuff, the newspaper, a few articles I'd
written, a couple of notes. One day he contacted me - this was back in the
heady heights of my motorcycle gang days - and asked if he could tool along
with us, riding hither and yon, drinking and carousing, so that he could do a
story on the Biker culture as he saw it, or experienced it. I said sure.
I should have known. There's always more than what meets the
eye. He smoked pot like most people drink water. On again and off again but
always and whenever, and this particular day he'd been out in his mother's
convertible K-Car, a bizarre, fake wood-grain side of a car that looked like a
block, with a windshield sticking up. It was actually pretty funny - seeing a
crazed young, dynamically bristling counter cultural hipster type tooling around
in what was basically an 'aunt's' car. His mother had died, and he'd gotten the
car - his first set of honest-to-goodness wheels. Being a NYC guy, he kept it
garaged elsewhere; somewhere in Jersey, Jersey City or something. He'd gotten it
out for the weekend here, and brought along with him an equally strange,
brazenly sexy, black-haired and black-featured Brooklyn babe - tattoos,
piercings, attitude, all that. She was quite the site (I mean sight). In this
real junker of a crazy car they arrived. Mark didn't really have a license -
he showed us, pridefully, some weird sort of military ID from when he was in
Kansas, for use on base. But, whatever. He didn't care, and certainly neither
did I. His story was that he'd been some sort of oddball military police guy at
Fort Leonard Wood and never really left base except to chase down AWOLs and such
other runaways, petty crooks, sex thieves and things like that. He'd never had
to do any real action or go overseas or anything, and he said the military-base
boredom was what drove him to smoke almost lethal amounts of marijuana, pretty
much government-supplied and, like any other contraband, easily accessible on
base - booze, porno, pot, dope, guns, whatever. Never no mind to him.
He'd made mention, in fact, of how marijuana was pretty nearly
almost a currency on base - one of the mainstays, that and wife-swapping. I
guess it certainly paid off to stay stateside. As a 'currency' pot was used
about and moved about like 'small change in a pinball arcade', just all over the
place and once the habit had gotten him it never had left and now he just liked
it and took it as natural, like water or breathing, and it took constant efforts
on his part to stay high all the time and that was all he wanted - circus
life, military life, regular life and the rest be damned. They'd taken the car
out that day - the girl and him - to smoke with the top down all the time as
they drove, see the Bikers, see the famed Jersey shore and its creepy
attractions, get drunk and stay in one piece - all like that, together. They
figured they'd end up in the worst places and not really have much to do except
groove on it all - nothing much to do with the ocean though they had already
seen it. First thing was the Sandy Hook Lighthouse and the old officer's homes
along the bay side of the post. It was a real hoot finding myself in some
strange National Park Service setting - in an abandoned array of battery
emplacements, bunkers, military bases and homes - with a renegade outsider
high on pot. The modern day was a spinning wheel of its own, and right then it
had come down out of the sky and landed right on me. Having been part of a
traveling circus, and having done circus emplacements on the Coney Island
beachfront - talk about weird and off-putting - none of this should have
really meant anything to Mark by contrast; but it somehow did. There was a time,
perhaps early on, perhaps right up to and through the First World War era, when
the forts and emplacements at Sandy Hook were very important parts of the
defense systems of the USA - the east coast, always vulnerable, the entries
into NY Harbor, the sneaky German subs and all that. This place really did once
scream with activity - maritime and military emplacements, ships, guns, cargo
and tonnage - the waterway was vital. Since modernity arrived, it all had
changed - as had that grand, old ethos of the very way of life which went with
all this - the slowness of time and rank, duty and protocol, the polite
commands of officers and commanders who'd live and walk the waterside - bay on
one side, ocean on the other, personifying the US of A. Parade grounds,
bandshells, and - through there 1950's - NIKE missile emplacements,
mechanized underground launchers, huge cave-like underground cuts leading to
sub-surface ammunition batteries and storage units. This was one crazy place -
even right then, with Mark, in its ruinous state (and his). There were old
buildings, things marked with cornerstones of 1904, 1912, and 1914. There was a
grave marker for dead and washed up revolutionary-era British soldiers who'd
washed up, tried to survive, and whose dead and hidden bodies were only found
later, and rightfully buried no matter the cause or the side. These are things
we live with, and mostly today all that is unknown; and no one really cares
anyway. Too bad. What can a person do? It's all like living in a ghost town
where no information is passed unless money first changes hands - someone is
paid to tell you about it all but only in the most approved fashion - bad
information and propaganda for truth. Sandy Hook was actually Fort Hancock. Yes,
of course, there were endless jokes about 'this man's army' and Fort HandCock
and all that - but it couldn't work that way now. People never did realize
(and Mark and his wonder-babe (I'll call Oona, another circus 'sword' swallower,
I bet) and myself, we discussed these points in depth, as I introduced all this
'historical' perspective of my own on them), that there was a time, really was a
time, when things were simple; when immediate points of view demanded a
different intensity and length, when the actual defining description of Life and
Land was different. This spit of sand we were on - maybe three miles long and
a mile or so wide, I really didn't know - was once a vital connection to the
land. People lived and died on these sands. The local Navesink Indians called it
home - seasonal or not, but home. Everything was different. The entryway to
the harbor was vital - ocean, land, roadway, river. The geography was local
and real - people walked about, watched the horizon, looked for sailships and
harbingers of arrival. It was like talking to a blind man - a stoned one. He
said they'd been able to get into a few of the empty gun emplacements and of
course all they did was fuck and he said it was a few times anyway, even if he
was usually gay and sought out guys. She was pretty cool, and, he stated, she
'enjoyed a good slamming' and they'd gotten high enough that nothing mattered
anyway and it was all fun - she was just 'practicing' was how he'd put it. And
to Mark anyway nothing ever much mattered. One time he told me how the true sign
of a 'friend' was in how that purported 'friend' reacted when asked to 'go out
back and have a smoke' and that's how he judged people - no matter what else
the trust-factor of a good friendship or any friendship meant NOT saying no to
such a request - however that did pretty much seal my fate with him as far
as that went. Smoking pot was never my thing. I never did see him much for years
after that - for the one time I did finally just say a simple 'no' to him was
I suppose the one time he was standing judgment. Fact of the matter was that,
after a time, I began to just find him annoying anyway and the less I was around
him the better it was for me and my 'no' was more the result of simply not
wishing his sole and undiluted company 'out back' for even a minute. He, of
course, misconstrued it all as a refusal to smoke with him - which was a
secondary matter to me for sure and, screw him anyway. What I did miss was his
blazing, dark-featured Israeli beauty sidekick Oona or whatever her name was.
She I could have smoked for sure - I was intrigued and exhilarated by her
far-emotive bearing, from somewhere else, some ancient, strange foreign dark
land, as smoky and distant to me as that Latakia tobacco used to be - a pipe
blend, that was. About him, on the other hand, I just didn't really care; he
somehow bugged me and I had found a lot of his interests and phrasing annoying
- never shutting his trap and just running on about things when fueled with
alcohol and the rest. The sort of character who demanded singular, one-on-one
attention with a flippant character-quality which drove me nuts and it became
like 'why don't you just once shut the fuck up because I simply cannot any
longer hear you.' And he was all fake and stupid anyway - all caught up in
those stupid cultural things-of-the-moment stuff I hated. As it turned out,
it all ran down anyway : even,
eventually, Ruda or Oona or whatever she too started getting on my nerves -
her manners nasty and cloying and I don't think she ever laughed or didn't take
things well - dead, stark serious like some foul black existential huff, sucking on
cigarettes and the rest - funny how grace and quality can disappear so
quickly. Here it happened. Funny how it was all business and serious and dour, a
sort-of excuse for otherwise doing nothing at all except what nothing wanted
doing. The weirdest thing is that they ended up in a 'beachfront' sports bar in
a certain hell-hole known as Keansburg, NJ (which has neither a beachfront nor a
view, but is rather a blank spot on a really bad map that just looks out on a
poor-man's waterway of the Raritan Bay). The low-income people there make do with
it as their beachway. The only wave that place ever sees is when boats distant
go by and people wave, or when fat people jump into the bay for a swim, and I'd
bet the fat people do a lot more
jumping in that the boats do passing by - the place is rank and foul and
infantile and disgusting, yet there they stayed an entire afternoon and into the
late evening, drinking and smoking and staying high around some gross outdoor
cabana-type thing with big TV screens blaring and bunched of knot-faced and
probably inebriated locals from the town staggered stupidly along and by and in
: the bar itself I forget the name but it's still there and seems as foul as
ever - nothing ever changes when it comes to these things. My biggest gripe
was how someone would 'cover' something, say, like his 'biker weekend' in
Jersey, by doing it from the rank confines of a series of sleaze ball bars and
encounters - all the while being high. No sense to me. I don't think either
one of them has ever returned to follow up their coverage. Mark has just
disappeared from my life - the article came out, it covered the things we, as
bikers, had done with him and Oona or Ruda or whoever she was, portrayed me and
us fairly enough, and seemed flip and
hip about the NJ exploits, and was featured as first page, with an inside
continuation. But, it all missed a lot too. He never was an insider. I guess my
time with him was over by then - the Big Apple Circus, in those earlier days,
was out on the old dunes and sand-holes at the bottom west-side of Manhattan -
yes, hard to believe now - all that area having long ago disappeared. In the
70's it was a crumbling elevated highway, with old buildings and trucks stops
and weigh-stations along the way; then in the 80's it was all falling apart and
was dismantled and the area suddenly seemed to return to nothing : a wild-west
of vacated old buildings, empty, sandy areas, and a long, open 'beachfront' where no one really
went. By the late 80's it was a sunbathing and play-space for the locals, gays,
yuppies and performers. The Hudson River went running by. Now, thirty years on
again, it's all displaced by a long, riverside park and a thundering city -
Battery Park City - million-dollar condos, restaurants, shops, schools, clubs
and gyms. You'd never know it now, but it was once a desolate spot - and one,
in fact, I loved. On those dunes the Big Apple Circus would set up, practice and
play.
I can mostly keep my mind and stay civil, but there are
things which set me off just now and then. I try to remain far enough off from
things so as not to be packaged emotionally or set to explode. Don't get me
wrong, situations drive me crazy, and often, but I do not register them to
myself. I try to live at another realm, another level of 'things' - which is
probably the worst word in the world but used here nonetheless.
I spent lots of time at the crumbling of those piers just
mentioned - essentially it was where I lived, on foot or by bicycle, that
entire first Winter - between things, but always returning. It's difficult for
me now to try and recreate the ruination and decrepitude of what once was there
- most especially now as how since it's all become fashionable and quaint -
parkways, joggers, bicyclists, gymnasts with their weird clubs, stuff I just
don't really understand, all done by people I understand less, and care to
understand even less than that. Another world entirely has eclipsed any of that
which I may have been or inhabited, and that's fine with me. You can take your
sensitivity stuff, your girl as boy and boy as girl crossovers and emotional
bleeds, sob-story sentimentality, feeling for other and all that 'it takes a
village' myopic bullshit and shove it. It's ruined a world already, and working
on another, as soon as all today's nitwit kids grow up and get where they're
(supposedly) going - eyefuls for brains, keyboards for teeth, and distraction
as a nice, tight underwear beneath it all. You don't have to be an outlaw to be
an outlaw, or, better put, you don't have to murder to be an outlaw, you can
just be one by standing way off and watching and wondering about all the other
puke you see. Some call it the shits of an old man, the foibles of passing on.
That's fine. They can have it. What passes for the education of what they're now
coming through with, alas, is the fault of these oldsters anyway - all that
'we pretend to teach, and they pretend to learn' dictum - meaningless, but
true enough to be said, even if in some form of jest - by the self-satisfied
and superior mouths of the minions who pretend to teach. In 1967, when I hit,
the streets of NYC and these old dockworking piers - all of that stuff now of
old calendars and sweet words about 'vanished' New York, all of that was
run-away destroying itself and hated by the locals anyway; those doing it, the
workers, the cops, the crime stoppers, the stevedores and longshoremen, the
killers and thieves, the whores and bullwhip dick-lickers, transvestites and
multi-sexual Martians. They were all there, and just laying about, doing their
stuff. To call it back now, in retrospect, a 'golden age' of prime New York City
is bizarre and unwarranted. But, it's done. The waters were foul and stank. The
sky was always a dismal scoff of brown or yellow; breathing was sometimes
difficult, traffic was beastly, crowded, smoke and noisesome. So, that was it
- think of a black and white movie of old, dark, smoky scenes, furtive glances
and half-baked views and schemes. That well gets it to you.
I'm just getting going here, again, but it's necessary to
point out the odd paradox that I'd constructed, or ran myself into anyway. I had
somehow overlapped times - I had somehow let the switched allegiances of
things reverse course with each other. It happens; it's easy to do, and to get
all caught up in doing. One suddenly finds oneself in the midst of a crowd of
people and operations that one has absolutely no confidence in nor commonality
with, and all the while having a realization that these people are what they say
in name only. They have no realization themselves that they do not represent
what they think they do - and all their gibberish and mind-numbing
undertakings are just sideshows and distractions. To keep them 'cool'. That's
how it was, after not too long at all, with Mark Eneret and his amazing Jew-gypsy
friend. They were nuts, off the wall, Hedonists, in fact, and 'New York' in name
only, by geography alone. Nothing else of them represented anything but the
seepings and bleedthroughs of a miserable and foul modern day. I got out, and
quickly.
76. One other thing to mention here - one of those days with Mark Eneret and Ruda or whatever her name was, one of the times we cruised the beaches, again at Sandy Hook - this time not the military field, not the officer's houses, not the abandoned fortifications or the fuck-palace ammunition bunkers, not the implanted, under-the-soil NIKE missile emplacements to defending the American sky, but instead a rat-commercial place much nearer to the entrance of the 'Hook'. It was a multi-level bar, booze outdoor deck and restaurant place - large, sprawling, usually crowded and busy - called the 'Seagull's Nest.' The owner's name was Ed Siegel, a man I knew well enough. He'd made a bunch of money off of us (me) from my having run a few motorcycle rallies which conveniently ended up at his place for the bike shows, the raffles and prizes, etc - thus keeping a crowded bar-deck of at least two or three hundred bikers busy with the ringing of his cash-registers, tips and flirting with his beach-babe waitresses and all that crap. He would always call me up, begging for another bike run, knowing full well that he'd prosper from the debauched drunkenness of whatever level of constituent I brought his way, two wheels or not. Ed was old then, about 73 or 75, and that was back in '96 or whenever. As the only concessionaire on all of Sandy Hook he'd made a fortune, gained some fame and notoriety, and was a wealthy man. Short, small, cranky, gruff and even rough-looking, you'd never know his attainments. He looked like a pugilist. I always wondered how he could stand it all - hiring any number for Summer help kids and teens about whom he'd then have to constantly watch and worry over for pilferage, theft, giving away food and drink to friends and family, underage drinkers being served, laziness, sloppy habits, and all the usual problems of the possibilities of bad food, mishandled food, fights, brawls, arguments, tips, cash, stolen tips, stolen cash, money on the bar, wives and others' wives and husbands, drugs, violence, drunk drivers, accountability, record-keeping, ordering, having enough stuff always on hand, dealing with deliveries and supplies, opening and closing, days of operation, hours, and, lastly, the weather. A lot of accumulated stuff to eat up any man's dollar. People who start and run businesses, it seems to me, must sacrifice an awful lot for the gains they claim. I don't think they really ever honestly do the accounting. In Siegel's case, it was apparent he was immersed - and that immersion indubitably led to being immersed in money and its continued accumulation. One look at the guy and you'd understand : he had that 'look', the look of the leer of money, the man who, ever-faithful to his tribe, thinks nothing of accumulating, and then accumulating more, one banana at a time, one hot dog at a time, one old book at a time, one after one. After a while he'd bought buildings and had tenants, and was - in fact - an absentee landlord in parts of Jersey City where apartment buildings still came cheap; bad and unruly tenants, but cheap housing and money to be made, one dollar at a time. I once had a boss who kept on his wall a picture of a cow. Beneath it was the slogan 'Remember the Cow Story'. It somehow bolstered his idea of what he was doing - the story was, in some manner, that one cow plop after another cow plop, seemingly meaningless, small and incremental, if you stay at it at keep doing it, soon enough you'll have a real 'shitload' of cowplops (money). Fortunes made, a dollar at a time - yes, you had to be there; evidently it's a businessman's inside joke at Kiwanis Clubs and things of that nature. It takes patience and forbearance (and mostly a belief in your tribal God, as one of His chosen) to think that matters one hoot. No matter, the story here is thus : a complete afternoon and early evening of drink and talk and more drink, with Ed Siegel mostly at the bar most of the time, talking to Mark about absolutely everything - life, philosophy, wins, losses, the whole gamut - I look over there and I see Ed Siegel broken down, shattered, in tears - sobbing like a baby. The man had somehow, over the course of the afternoon with Mark, completely destroyed himself, telling secrets and experiences he'd never wanted to re-live. Mark Eneret had somehow gotten this out of him. Ed finally did go home; asked to be excused, apologized for what he'd done, and slobbered away in the company of one of his adult assistants. The way the tale went was this : Ed had been a concentration camp survivor, had the numbers on his arm to show, came to this country as a refugee with nothing, worked, and worked some more, eventually bringing himself up to the point of ownership, through some government deal, of this site-protected, sole-franchise for food and refreshment on Sandy Hook, in Gateway National Park. He'd made a fortune, from nothing, even after the rents and paybacks and percentages the host 'government' took for him to keep the franchise - no matter, he'd built a cool, clean beautiful piece of real estate right there, the Seagull's Nest. In order to help his family along, do something with his money, he'd begun buying buildings in depressed areas. In order to advance his son along the way - once reaching adulthood and family and all that - he'd made him the Superintendent/Landlord of a few of these holdings. All was going well, in this rags-to-riches story until the day his son, out collecting some back rents, was killed, shot in the head by a recalcitrant tenant not wishing to pay. Ed Siegel, in re-telling this story, in spilling his guts about this horrid, pent-up emotion, and everything connected with it, had let forth a gusher of fury, regret, sadness and emotion that was unstoppable, He felt HE had killed his own son. It was an amazing scene. I went over to Mark and simply said 'What the fuck have you done? What's going on?' Mark, drunk and high as an ever-skunk, claimed a certain bemused detachment, claimed not to have known what happened, but told the story completely well, with no regrets. That part of the experience, by the way, never entered his news story, and that was the really last I saw of him and Ruda. I did see Ed Siegel once or twice after that, over time - he mumbled something the very next time about regretting what had occurred, I played dumb enough, and that was it. This has stayed with me a long time - I think of it often. The Seagull's Nest, by the way, was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy, about 2012 or whenever, and Ed has not been able to re-open or rebuild it, though, at 90 or whatever he is still willing. His last phone message to me was that - all of sudden now - 'people' have arisen who oppose his again re-opening the sole concession, without a bidding contest, a complete airing of the issues and the submission of new and completing plans. He's missed, for sure now, at least one Summer season I know of, and as of this writing I do not know his plans, intentions, those of others, nor his current health and status. Sad, weird story. 1945 to 2014, how strange is it to still have concentration camp experiences influencing present day activities? It's all still vacant and boarded up.
76. One other thing to mention here - one of those days with Mark Eneret and Ruda or whatever her name was, one of the times we cruised the beaches, again at Sandy Hook - this time not the military field, not the officer's houses, not the abandoned fortifications or the fuck-palace ammunition bunkers, not the implanted, under-the-soil NIKE missile emplacements to defending the American sky, but instead a rat-commercial place much nearer to the entrance of the 'Hook'. It was a multi-level bar, booze outdoor deck and restaurant place - large, sprawling, usually crowded and busy - called the 'Seagull's Nest.' The owner's name was Ed Siegel, a man I knew well enough. He'd made a bunch of money off of us (me) from my having run a few motorcycle rallies which conveniently ended up at his place for the bike shows, the raffles and prizes, etc - thus keeping a crowded bar-deck of at least two or three hundred bikers busy with the ringing of his cash-registers, tips and flirting with his beach-babe waitresses and all that crap. He would always call me up, begging for another bike run, knowing full well that he'd prosper from the debauched drunkenness of whatever level of constituent I brought his way, two wheels or not. Ed was old then, about 73 or 75, and that was back in '96 or whenever. As the only concessionaire on all of Sandy Hook he'd made a fortune, gained some fame and notoriety, and was a wealthy man. Short, small, cranky, gruff and even rough-looking, you'd never know his attainments. He looked like a pugilist. I always wondered how he could stand it all - hiring any number for Summer help kids and teens about whom he'd then have to constantly watch and worry over for pilferage, theft, giving away food and drink to friends and family, underage drinkers being served, laziness, sloppy habits, and all the usual problems of the possibilities of bad food, mishandled food, fights, brawls, arguments, tips, cash, stolen tips, stolen cash, money on the bar, wives and others' wives and husbands, drugs, violence, drunk drivers, accountability, record-keeping, ordering, having enough stuff always on hand, dealing with deliveries and supplies, opening and closing, days of operation, hours, and, lastly, the weather. A lot of accumulated stuff to eat up any man's dollar. People who start and run businesses, it seems to me, must sacrifice an awful lot for the gains they claim. I don't think they really ever honestly do the accounting. In Siegel's case, it was apparent he was immersed - and that immersion indubitably led to being immersed in money and its continued accumulation. One look at the guy and you'd understand : he had that 'look', the look of the leer of money, the man who, ever-faithful to his tribe, thinks nothing of accumulating, and then accumulating more, one banana at a time, one hot dog at a time, one old book at a time, one after one. After a while he'd bought buildings and had tenants, and was - in fact - an absentee landlord in parts of Jersey City where apartment buildings still came cheap; bad and unruly tenants, but cheap housing and money to be made, one dollar at a time. I once had a boss who kept on his wall a picture of a cow. Beneath it was the slogan 'Remember the Cow Story'. It somehow bolstered his idea of what he was doing - the story was, in some manner, that one cow plop after another cow plop, seemingly meaningless, small and incremental, if you stay at it at keep doing it, soon enough you'll have a real 'shitload' of cowplops (money). Fortunes made, a dollar at a time - yes, you had to be there; evidently it's a businessman's inside joke at Kiwanis Clubs and things of that nature. It takes patience and forbearance (and mostly a belief in your tribal God, as one of His chosen) to think that matters one hoot. No matter, the story here is thus : a complete afternoon and early evening of drink and talk and more drink, with Ed Siegel mostly at the bar most of the time, talking to Mark about absolutely everything - life, philosophy, wins, losses, the whole gamut - I look over there and I see Ed Siegel broken down, shattered, in tears - sobbing like a baby. The man had somehow, over the course of the afternoon with Mark, completely destroyed himself, telling secrets and experiences he'd never wanted to re-live. Mark Eneret had somehow gotten this out of him. Ed finally did go home; asked to be excused, apologized for what he'd done, and slobbered away in the company of one of his adult assistants. The way the tale went was this : Ed had been a concentration camp survivor, had the numbers on his arm to show, came to this country as a refugee with nothing, worked, and worked some more, eventually bringing himself up to the point of ownership, through some government deal, of this site-protected, sole-franchise for food and refreshment on Sandy Hook, in Gateway National Park. He'd made a fortune, from nothing, even after the rents and paybacks and percentages the host 'government' took for him to keep the franchise - no matter, he'd built a cool, clean beautiful piece of real estate right there, the Seagull's Nest. In order to help his family along, do something with his money, he'd begun buying buildings in depressed areas. In order to advance his son along the way - once reaching adulthood and family and all that - he'd made him the Superintendent/Landlord of a few of these holdings. All was going well, in this rags-to-riches story until the day his son, out collecting some back rents, was killed, shot in the head by a recalcitrant tenant not wishing to pay. Ed Siegel, in re-telling this story, in spilling his guts about this horrid, pent-up emotion, and everything connected with it, had let forth a gusher of fury, regret, sadness and emotion that was unstoppable, He felt HE had killed his own son. It was an amazing scene. I went over to Mark and simply said 'What the fuck have you done? What's going on?' Mark, drunk and high as an ever-skunk, claimed a certain bemused detachment, claimed not to have known what happened, but told the story completely well, with no regrets. That part of the experience, by the way, never entered his news story, and that was the really last I saw of him and Ruda. I did see Ed Siegel once or twice after that, over time - he mumbled something the very next time about regretting what had occurred, I played dumb enough, and that was it. This has stayed with me a long time - I think of it often. The Seagull's Nest, by the way, was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy, about 2012 or whenever, and Ed has not been able to re-open or rebuild it, though, at 90 or whatever he is still willing. His last phone message to me was that - all of sudden now - 'people' have arisen who oppose his again re-opening the sole concession, without a bidding contest, a complete airing of the issues and the submission of new and completing plans. He's missed, for sure now, at least one Summer season I know of, and as of this writing I do not know his plans, intentions, those of others, nor his current health and status. Sad, weird story. 1945 to 2014, how strange is it to still have concentration camp experiences influencing present day activities? It's all still vacant and boarded up.
I've always thought that there are so many dark secrets
locked within the potential of each of - we either get them put of the way,
ignore them deal with them, or crash-land. Much of it remains as taboos; one way
or another, things we cannot do. Face it. We're totally constrained. We've had a
Catholic President, and a black one. Next up is probably a woman president. At
one point or another, each of those were big things, for whatever reason -
people's heads, I suppose. It was simple to talk about that, mention each as
specific issues, debate the items, talk about. But we've never had a Jewish
President. Most near-recent one would have been Arthur Goldberg, back in the
1960's - NY political guy, eventually UN Ambassador - sort of a big
power-broker in his own right. Back then. But he never moved really forward -
he was a Jew, and everyone knew it, but no one could say it. It's very, very
primitive. Certain people are just different stories; sorry to stay. If I were
to say to you that such and such was a
person of a tribal, pagan cult, with beliefs in the powers of an unseen and
mystifying, angry, nasty and powerful God, whose will must not be defied (and
must be deified), who speaks through lightning and thunder, rules over the sky,
rumbles deep space, descends upon mountaintops, writes, dictates, and comments
upon stone, burns but does not consume bushes, floods and kills at will, sends
plagues, locusts, famines, tragedies and the like, seemingly at random, and
whose name cannot be spoken but must be heeded, and, to boot, who has chosen a
select group, and that group only, for his own and his righteousness, at the
expense of all others, etc., etc., you'd say that that person was a crazy
person, a pure superstitionist, one not to be trusted. In addition, if for some
reason I tried to explain to you that that person's beliefs, in spite of
themselves, kept this person hard at work only to amass lucre, wealth, money,
fame - all through means of falsity, misrepresentation, gossip, folly, slander
and coarse manners - while this person's 'God' supposedly kept them above all
that, you'd say that that person was insincere, a liar and duplicitous, all at
the expense of others. Well, there you have it in a nutshell. Traditional secular religionists. The superstitious, traditionalist, self-righteous,
secretive ones. Catholic, Jewish, Born Again, the whole bunch. Deal with it,
live with it. No, not yet President (way too obvious) but everywhere else -
finance, entertainment, banking, armaments, trading, money, federal reserve
systems, etc. All hands on each lever, and manipulating, but just not at top,
not the figurehead; leaving that supple maneuver to the stupid goy. I think
that, in one way, that was what was shattered by Mark Everet when he burst
through the shield around Ed Siegel - the realization of which essentially
just, on the spot, at the moment, destroyed him. So, OK, now we can argue all
day, and you can hate me for bringing the proverbial cat out of the proverbial
bag. Truth be told, no matter. You cannot deny any of this, or, anyway, I won't
let you.
One of the total weirdnesses of this world is that - on
the complete opposite extreme - we have all those Christian faiths with their
own lock-hold on things - another form of 'secular' madness masquerading as
deceitful control, prodding and lies. Their take on all this God stuff is, to
flip the Jewish equation, is that somehow this disembodied God takes triplet
form in the realization, after some destruction, of the mess his creations have
made of things, and corporealizes once more in the guise of a human 'Son' of His
own, a savior who takes the human form, and then undergoes hazards, floggings,
beatings and death by the very hand of those people and who then, after that
death, arises from the dead again and Mankind is cleansed, clean, over, the
slate is wiped. If you believe, and then - complicating matters - if you
follow any of a thousand plus dictates about each little sub-prime aspect of
Life itself. Compounding the Jewish defamation of being, this same defamation
rotates and swirls over and upon itself to disguise millions of flaws and
operational sleight-of-hands. Then they all go ahead, raw and raging, to scalp
and maim and murder and kill each other over this - you can pretty much get
away with anything if you use the right words and formulas., It's all too easy.
Wild-west medicine show patent medicine guy working out of a covered wagon to
make the ladies swoon - I say. And then you get the even deeper aberrations
- the 'voices' and the God-talk leading people on, pushing to do this or that,
ascribing by fire the right ways of the world. I wanted no part of that, and
every zany story I read of the past, all those saints and sufferers, just made
me laugh. Theresa of Lascaux, Junipera Serra, popes and saints and misfits,
every from Joan of Arc to Mother Theresa and Augustine of Hippo, every one of
them as flawed as a mis-struck dime is flawed. Valued, obviously, but only
because of the flaw. It's all really just too much for a regular mind, a regular
person to handle, and no one needs to anyway. That's the objective basis of
'Freedom' and 'Choice'. Choosing not to. I never wanted to live in a world run by superstition and
fear. But, it seems I do and I must - power levers are in the hands of
'others'. Frightful and unseen others, just like their 'God' who rumbles thunder
from behind the jealous bush. The only thing I've found myself able to say back
to all this is : nothing.
I just move on. The ancient word 'Maya' describes it all
best for me. 'Illusion'. That's the given - the real impetus is to find
whether or not it's an illusion or a 'veil of illusion' of any consequence. If
it's not, just live through it and go on; you may as well remain invisible. If
it is - or if you think or decide, anyway, that it is - that's when the
heady problems come up. You then have to do something about yourself and about
everything else, and get it started quickly and steadily. There's no slacking.
That's what makes it all so crazy. That's what makes the things and the places
- even those like 'Avenel' arise - someone's personal push for glory, for the
scrutiny of others : wrecking woods and fields, planting small-scale,
all-the-same houses, built cheaply and quickly and sold that way too. Streets
named after children - Lisa Lane, Mark Place, Monica Court, Clark Place, come
to mind - things dumbed down so as to pleasant and cute and, if made quaint,
only in the most ersatz and imitative fashion. I basically have always worked
blindly, just pushing on. These others, however, I've noted, work by plan, one
deliberate and crafty step at a time. Everything is orchestrated. The end-idea
is to make money, whatever the cost. Nothing else matters - the quest for gain
and profit and lucre takes precedence, takes over in fact, and carries with it,
in lockstep, everything else. Everything can be sacrificed for that end. The
larger the effort, the more corporate the effort, the fewer and fewer chances
exist to convince someone of the errors of their ways - they're starry eyed
and dumb and stupid, looking at figures, returns, amortizing this or that,
cutting deals, figuring ways in and ways out, quickly and stealthily, so as to
bring for themselves the most return for their own least effort - as if
they'll live forever, take it with them, and have something that matters. Then
- and only then - will they worship their G-d, while proclaiming that, all
along, it had been their first concern anyway. It's all and everything a lie.
There is no reality. It's all gibberish. In their endless confinement to a
cosmic Timelessness, they end up, surprisingly and oddly, worshipping only the
moment - which is constantly slipping away and never stops and thus is never
really 'here' at all. It's all illusion, once again. Dumb bastards.
I used to like cars - even way back, when I was young,
I'd look at them, learn the names, the forms, the engines, the way they worked,
etc., and I'd watch too - who owned what, which person bought this or that,
and try to find out why, or wonder why. Styling clues, sculptural clues, color
clues, the push and the prod of design, the thrust of a fin or a rear-swoop, the
barreling of headlamps, the bump of a grill. Everything, it seemed, was trying
to say something : even with toasters and TV's, lamps and roller skates,
bicycles and radios; everything portrayed something, was trying to get a point
across, a point just slightly different and off-site from the 'use' of the same
object - as if two voices were coming through everything. Had I been present,
I figured, in the 1860's or whatever, I'd have had the same point of interest
towards yoke collars, oxen plows, gate latches and lanterns and wagons and pails
and shovels. Who knows? I certainly didn't. Other things had come along and
completely taken people's minds off the essentials - sound had come in,
emitting itself, or being emitted anyway, from those boxes and cabinets I was
looking at; light and pictures came, same thing - from television sets. Planes
and helicopters; bombs and bullets came from them. No one really 'made' anything
anymore - which was immediately one
distinction from the older days. I guess anyway. I don't really know who made
shoes back in the 1400's, I guess people made them themselves? Or was a
shoe-maker's guild already in control of that? No matter, the design concept is
what I'm writing of, not the means of making it. I loved all that, and I
questioned it all. And still do - for it seems to me basic and cosmic that we
live with the shapes and forms that we do. It all has to come together and go
right so as to unify the thinking by which we live. We have the concept
'streamlined' - no other reason except that we have it. By same, we then
define the curve and the arc of anything made for motion, or in motion, or
simulating motions, as 'streamlined' (which, in point of fact, once meant a lot
more than it does now - streamlined is passe now, but once it was a
cutting-edge parallel to the way mankind was about to be living). That idea,
that 'concept' took precedence, defining itself and all other things by its
meaning. A bullet, piercing the air, had to be streamlined. But, was a
cannonball? Was that round, globular shape defining the same thing - without
mankind's knowing it? How important was any of this? Where did 'art' enter - a
Brancusi form, a gentle, un-gilded curve? What did that signify? I'd guess this
form of thinking made me a bit more solitary than others. I'd sometimes find
myself standing on a ball field somewhere, smelling the leather of the baseball
glove on my hand, thinking about the cutting of those fingers and the webbing
and the leather strap intertwined and closing on each of the four fingers off
from the thumb - the feel, the passing, the lining, the label - lost in some
crazy space between here and there, until the crack of a bat anyway would call
me back in. What did others think about? I never knew, but I just went on,
adequately covering my bases, and keeping my counsel. it was all a charade
anyway - all that stupid banter and boyhood small-talk between bases and
innings. I knew I really cared little for it. But I went along. Maybe, what else
can one do at 10 years old or whatever? Cops and detectives, they pick up on
clues and tics and evidences of things. They do that after training and after
cop-school progress and education. I had that same observational context, early
on, in everything I did, without being a cop or having a training. It was just
how I lived, and how I learned to pick up on things, on the signals and things
being sent my way by the world around me. I may have more than this wished to
'BE' on Mars or someplace else, but here I was - here, and stuck here, and
thereby forced to continue my own experimentations and works.
All day long, even to this day, my head splits with
quickly-passing ideas, phrases, words and concepts. If I don't just cease what
I'm doing and jot them down - and I don't always - the gruesome truth is,
ten minutes later, they're gone and most never recoverable. I try to associate
the thought with something, as a memory aid, or recite it in some form of parody
or rhyme, but I lose a lot, and it pains me. It's a bummer. I try and I try
getting the idea back, re-creating the path of thought I was on, trying to
reclaim the field, but cannot. I don't know what the word for this is, if there
is on, but the very continuity of this page hinges on it, as early today I had
some grand notion of how to extend this concept here, the episodes of this
chapter, but they're gone. That can only show what a vast Whimper this entire
idea of Life itself is - a thought, a passing puff of something, and then it
too is gone. There's a certain flow that has to be maintained in order to make
something like this work, and I have to stay hard at it doing its bidding, or
lose it. When I was a kid I wasn't really aware, in these terms, of what loomed
ahead of me - just instead I stayed watching. What's it called, I wonder too,
when a person lives a life but stays out of it enough so that it both fails him
later on and at the same time it allows him to hone and sharpen an incredible
outsider status into a vast, long period of creative energy? And, between the
two, which is worth more? I'll take the latter, thanks. And, anyway, I already
did.
Even as I was growing up and seeing the other 'Dads' and
'Fathers' around me (that in itself was an important distinction), I never used
the term Dad, always said 'Father' when relating to my own - as in 'my father
says' or 'I have to call my father to pick me up.' Others in those sentences
would have used 'dad'. I never did. There were distinctions between families,
and I saw it much more in the fathers than in the mothers - the mothers always
seemed more or less the same : clotheslines, washing, cleaning, dusting, having
afternoon coffee so as to babble on with another other or whatever. Let's just
say, on Inman Avenue Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan were yet afar off. Some
of the mothers were, obviously, vastly better-sexed than others; in fact, even
as a young boy I sensed one or two of the local mothers putting great, enormous,
crazy streams of sexual energy everywhere, and probably having sex with a string
of men and keeping it all steady and concealed, or just maybe dumping all of it
on their own husbands, but I somehow doubted that. The Fathers were different
- there seemed to be the 'Executive' sort of Father, and the 'Sporting' type
- two different sorts. One was distant, removed, superior, pre-occupied. The
other (sporting) were good old boys, throwing snowballs, playing ball, sitting
on front stoops, monkeying around with the kids, remarking on things, getting
sassy. One type was seen everywhere - Little League fields to backyard
barbecues. The other type (Executive) never seen. Silly of me to make only two
distinction like that, but that's it. I soon enough got out of all that anyway,
since it didn't matter to me and none of those ideas stayed long with me. The
seminary to which I was going had men being both Fathers and Mothers to teen-age
boys - if you can imagine that, or a need or a reasoning for something like
that. It was medieval right from the start, as if I'd gone from 1961 right back
to 1451 in one fell swoop. All I needed was yoked oxen and grape fields on a
hill somewhere. The weird thing about the seminary too - in light of the
aforementioned guardianship and medieval atmospherics of it all - was that
after all was said and done - all the rigor and routine and recitation and
practice - a seminary kid could still steal off to the athletic section, where
there was a gym and basketball courts, play fields, tennis, etc., and select
from a bevy of vending machines any of the very normal candy and junk one could
want : M&M's, soda, pretzels, Mars bars, ice cream sandwiches, mints, gum,
etc. It was pretty crazy, like light seeping in from somewhere else (or maybe it
was darkness). And, in the most Portnoyish of behaviors, jerk off to any of the
mid-1960's Sunday NYTimes Magazine underwear ads or models.
At the same time, you have to figure, we all have our own
beginnings and our own references. Between the little triumvirate here I was
writing of, myself, Mark Everet and Ed Siegel (we'll forget about Ruda or Oona,
or whatever her name was), what really could there have been in common? Our
life-stories were vastly different, so much so that it's a wonder we even
understood each other's terms. What a weird confluence. Even weirder in thinking
of little-boy Ed Siegel, in some concentration camp somewhere, in the midst of a
strange, downtrodden world of his own little-boy eyes, wondering and looking out
to determine a world, to be seen in the mid 1990's having to face some sort of
mental firing squad all over again by the likes of a crazy, urban, muddle-headed
hipster intent on breaking down the world and coming through with some cheap,
in-tune and parodyzing view of things, under the soft gauze of marijuana smoke,
hemp, booze and beer. A hallucinogenic, all of that, all of its own. And for me,
to think how did I get somehow in the middle of all that as well - coming from
where and to what. I never even knew what hit me - was almost just reacting
hard to stay atop the twirling barrel I was standing on. It was all around me,
and it was swirling - the overlaps of seventy-five years of wartime
atrocities, twisted reasonings and basically just dirty and bizarre politics.
Anything of the 'old' ways had long ago been moved off point-center, and a vast,
new, noxious autocratism was stepping in to fill the void of that which it had
already destroyed. And no one knew a thing, or cared.
78. There's something going on. I have realized that I've never been more alive. Even though I've always followed the dictate of Marcus Aurelius who said 'Live life as if you were already dead.' Or I thought. Maybe it was from the 'Memoirs of Hadrian', I don't remember. Maybe 'The Consolations of Philosophy', by Boethius. Now when I look for it all I see is it cited as an ancient 'Samurai' saying. Perhaps I got it from Yukio Mishima back in 1967 - all that library scribbling. I don't know, but however wrongly attributed it's been bringing me magic of late. I look at people and I can actually see their self-excitement. It's very difficult for me to proclaim, but when I see someone I can sense their humanity, their satisfaction at being alive - even if, in the midst of all their other problems, it seeps woefully, to them. I can sense that girl's happiness and self-satisfaction with her nails, and her shoes, that day - her finesse about her toilette, her happiness at possessing grace and beauty. Or that man, with his stance and bearing, the shine of his well-done hair, his perfect business mien. Acumen. A Strength. None of those mean anything to me, but from each of those I feel it surging. It possesses a certain 'quiet', internal. It's Dignity, for sure - the same sort of holy dignity with which a dog licks its paws or cleans itself with its own tongue; or a cat does its own solid hygeine. Self-possessed, solid, sound. A complete Human possession of all matters. Last night's sex, this morning shower, the application of eye makeup, the selection of coat and hat, the wearing of that pencil and that lapel pocket. In point of fact, it's pretty much the only thing that allows me to forgive them for their stupid lives. I think, through all the ages, that's what people have meant by Grace and by Goodness; perhaps even by their quaint term 'God.' It's simply the knowledge of that self-possession. And I realize now that I have no place else to go. It's a possession of Self by being 'outside of self'.
And, yet, knowing that, it's all been pissed away today. People live as if there was no living at all - minute by minute interactions with nothing, nothing higher than the dirt they walk on - endless blabber, the scoff and babble of stupid conversation, the twaddle of an ass. I know I openly cringe when I get near it - I can hardly go anywhere at all. People make me puke; a curious subterfuge of convincing themselves of their own rightness and then reinforcing it by thinking everyone else wants to hear about it. Have you ridden a train lately? Every poor-man's stop, every Elizabeth to New Brunswick to Newark, brings a new load of sick wanderers onto the train. Just when you think you're settled in for a decent ride, quiet car or not, some fat-assed, lard-mouthed blubberface comes bumping and grinding in with his or her malfeasant telephone and begins the shit all over again. I want to grab a pair of pliers and go squeeze their tit or dick until they at least agree to shut the fuck up and text, if they have to do anything at all. I know I don't want to hear their lame-ass, underprivileged, new-fucking-sneakers voice. Sure, I'm a bigot, go ahead call me that. See if I care. I'm stating my position and my personal rights at an intellectual level far different from anyone who objects, that's all. Go learn some social manners and then come back and bother me. So - I wonder - is that what 'Avenel' made me? Sure as hell not; Avenel instead made them. Today's sorry-assed no-goods, whom I'm supposed to support. Yeah, right.
77. One good indication of the how the world has
changed, in these parts anyway, is the old fact - now long done away with -
that there used to be places where gasoline stations actually had signs out that
said things like 'Last Gas before Parkway', or 'Last Gas before interstate' or
whatever - in order to goad people into gassing up before that (imaginary) long
stretch of untended highway came upon them. That's all been done away with and
most every large convenience-store or discount house now also sells its own
cheap version of named gasoline - everywhere and most anywhere, and no one
really goes anywhere anymore anyway. Nothing's uncharted, to be sure. The twist
and glimmer of older days' travel has long since disappeared and been subsumed
into a funny mass of miscellany - fast-foods kid-kingdoms, playgrounds and
clowns and buffoons and the obese (and all the wondering why obese),
bargain-shopper membership clubs and the endless array of the punk-cheap and the
tawdry. Walmarts and the rest belittering the Walgreens and the rest which
belitter the Burger Kings and the rest - all somehow interconnected by a wiry
rope of corporate poisoning which goes into each item to make it more saleable
cheaper and with better return. Fat is the fat of the land now, and we live off
that fat of that land. Robinson Crusoe where are you? Part of the appeal, going
back once more, to Mark Everet, for that free-on-Mom driving around vacation
frolic that he took in that crazy K-car was in the idea of such passage - him,
a city-boy, an isolator, all of a sudden free and at-loose with a car to do with
everyone else in those 'hinterlands' always had done - wastefully scribble
around in wheels taking from the land whatever it was offering at whatever cost
- beer, food, utensils, places, adventures, highways, roads and streets. Doing
in his way whatever he thought the rabble did. (I remember once greeting some
people with the words 'Now I get to be with the hoi polloi' - thinking hoi
polloi meant high people. It doesn't. I was corrected, but found a way to
quickly elide off the problem of grammar and make good amends. It actually means
the rabble, the regulars, the mob. Could'a got myself killed!). That's
where Mark was - cruising through the mid-Jersey dumps but thinking he was
experiencing the real Jersey shore - which even I never experienced.
Keansburg, NJ, let me say, is Nowhere Man personified. It has a 'history' of
sorts, but the same kind of dead, once-upon-a-time-way-back-when history that a
lot of these places have. When there were small fishermen cooperatives, little
rows of clammers' huts, fish factories, boat launches and docking, shacks and
waterfront sheds. All that stuff was a century ago and it's all gone now; even
the Raritan Bay, which Keansburg faces - not even the ocean - is a ghost of
itself, a pale relic of a waterway long ago useful and well-used. Now it's more
just a gas-pod of either indecency or tanning oils and debris. There was a time
- and oddly enough now you can still walk the varied municipal bay-front
beaches thereabouts and see the markers in place, as if put there by municipal
officials with a guilty conscience - when this was a coastal beehive of high
energy. Before the nation had really spread its vainglorious industrial
tentacles everywhere, this very busy coastal area, both sides of NYHarbor, here
and points south and north, were covered with operational maritime enterprises
- clamming, oysters, shellfish, lumber, agricultural items, cartage,
brick-making, iron and steel, and well as a huge fishing and vacation industry.
It's all gone now. Here and there, by surprise, one occasionally can see pieces
of old piers and pilings jutting out of the water, or, in the case of the section of Staten Island across from Perth
Amboy and Sewaren, an old boat graveyard, where the old wooden ships and boats
were towed to languish, list, rot and fall away. It's all mostly gone now -
waterfront development, expensive homes, parkland walkways and all that have
replaced it all, and wanted to, by design, obliterate even the memory. Yet, as a
young boy I can well remember, with my father in his 6 horsepower motor on the
rear of a rowboat, boating the few slow miles out to there, looking at the
pilings and ruined things, sloshing up on the Staten Island beachfronts, just to
explore and traipse around. Pieces of boat, things sticking up out of water,
skeletal remains of hulks and keels and all of that, at rakish angles and
dangerously hidden submersions. I never really wanted it to, but somehow that
stuff got into my head, and stayed there - memories and fixations of maritime
stuff, sad and silly and dead, stayed in place to this day. When we first moved
to Inman Ave., and I try well to remember this, my father's head was still in
the mode of a seafaring kid, a young turk who'd run off, set out to lie about
his age and join the Navy, during wartime. He did so, took his training, went to
California and was shipped out to the South Pacific for the years it took for
that part of the war. He was a gunnery mate on a battleship tender - which
meant supply ship for the larger battleships - bringing them food, provisions,
clothing, medicine, tools, books, toys, whatever was needed to keep a ship at
sea going. His ship, in addition, would take flak in the doing of its job - it
was well-equipped with guns and battlements. In addition, they'd pick up dead
bodies from the other ships, and one of his jobs was to sew the bodies into
canvas bags for burial at sea. That's a joyful task I'm sure, especially in the
midst of wartime, but at any time as well. He was, by 1954, not that far removed
from all that in his head, and - as I well recall - he carried around with
him the envisioning overall of being a seafaring guy. Avenel was at the coast,
Sewaren, Perth Amboy, Raritan Bay, not that distant from the Kill Van Kull, the
Atlantic Ocean and the real first-class maritime stuff. We spent half our time
going back and forth to the Jersey Shore - all those rabid sea-coast towns,
small time fisheries, fishing boats, boat rentals, day trips to the offshore
bluffs and islands, days at the beach, etc. It was always boat this or boat
that. After a while, even I got tired of the crap, but it went on. Fishing and
crabbing, fishing and crabbing. It was all engrained into him, and he never
shook it. I could sense, always, that to him being at home or being idle was
like being land-locked, stuck on dirt, far from the ocean. He hated, just as
well, back then anyway, the mountains and any idea of the lakes or freshwater
stuff. That was then anyway - later in life he got over all that, began
visiting the Catskills, mountains and lakes, even places like Colorado and the
Rockies. I guess time and money mellowed him out, on that count anyway.
That old part of Staten Island was curious. I'm talking
1958 now - right across from Perth Amboy, which had a waterfront of its own,
of sorts, and an active ferry service back and forth to Tottenville (a town,
across, at Staten Island). We took it often enough, as I recall. But, adjacent
to that, and over a little from it was this boat graveyard I've just written of.
Like the Kill Van Kull at Bayonne (my father's other, more original haunt) where
the waterway faced tugboat repair yards and tugboat junkyards - also with
submerged hulks and odd-looking wrecks in and out of the water - this area was
a quieter sluice of old activity, and everything was old, wooden boats and
ships. It was very curious. These watercraft, of whatever vintage, must have
been sitting in the water since the 1920's (this was in 1961, say) and 30's. Old
boats, put out of service, waterlogged and listing, just left there to finish
their rot. At shallow tide you'd see the stuff and be able to walk among the
hulks - careful not to get pinched or splintered or cut by any of the pieces
of this or that now exposed by the wood-rot. I used to just sit there - not
much interested in anything else - and just stare into the wrecks. The water,
the island behind me and the expanse of Perth Amboy and all those oil tanks and
refinery things around me little mattered. The boats still carried some of their
own arsenal of other days' sense and sight and sound. Smell. Scents. Of this and
of that - I knew I was part alive in another realm, another place, doctoring
somehow to an in-between land that owned me more than the land I was on had
claim to. Wood is fanciful in its own way as it gets darkened and moss-covered
or seaweed-covered or whatever. It takes on another appearance - startling,
deep-sea stuff, back from the depths of some watery subconscious which is
somehow still alive in each of us. You know how they say the body is this or
that percent water, a big number, I forget - well whatever that watery current
is which yet flows within each of us can still resound a telling bell - like a
lighthouse keeper pinging his gong for the passing, lonesome ships outside.
That's what it felt like to me.
I get the feel, from life, now, after all these years, that it's but a half-measure to our consciousness, and that all we are placed here to do is get through the necessities of the everyday - all that shit we make up about Society and the way it works and getting along and getting ahead and thinking forward and riches and achievement and fame and all that crud, yes, get through all that WHILE at the very same time progressing and putting together the ancient formulas of our inner Beings - the ghosts of all other previous lives and histories, the manners and the ways of thought by which we each ourselves now have patterned THIS existence - to which we really are meant to have little allegiance; fast, fleeting, and spurious as it is. I want to be sure not to get stuck on this point, but 'Leisure' us the key. It's a killer, an ease and a dreaded dead-end to which we seem all to want to careen into. But. Not. Evil lurks, and it lurks in Leisure. That's why there's so much emphasis, in this stupid, flat society, put on it. It's how people make money, and lots of it - if individuals can be suckered into the web of distraction and addiction by which entertainment, play, acceptance and accumulation, fantasy, distraction and all the rest, and in turn be coaxed out of some money, each, for doing so, there's a golden money-rainbow waiting for whichever schmuck wishes to throw his or her Life away chasing it and piling it up - the stock market (a true, illusionary gambling-whore's paradise, just using larger words and concepts). It's how we are slowly killed, and there are many murderers.
In my father's mind, and then in mine too, in those days, around 1960, these old waterways represented a presence and a reality of a world that he sensed was passing, and a passing I was only witnessing. All things were gone, falling away. The old wooden hulks of those watercraft sunk beneath the Kill, left there to die and rot as piers and fish-attractants (but they forgot all about the pollution), they were still present as ghosts - I knew my father was seeing things I couldn't see when he looked out over the water. We somehow inhabited two different realms - overlapping, perhaps, in their ways - but different nonetheless. It was a deep and dense divide we needed to step over or fall into. Whichever way we went, it was there. My father and I, in those (early) years, never came to any real agreements - and all his and my later lives, together or not, were pretty miserable with and towards each other - but for us they were at last a period of shared golden years, of a shared glory in the knowing that the two of us were watching a film together on a completely different screen than was the rest of the world. In a sense, we both were watching an over-and-over replay of a figurative 'Titanic' going down. To our satisfaction we were part of the script, and we were writing some of it too. There were never happier, yet lonelier, moments between two people, ever. If I ever had to say 'when' I knew my father best - it was then.
I get the feel, from life, now, after all these years, that it's but a half-measure to our consciousness, and that all we are placed here to do is get through the necessities of the everyday - all that shit we make up about Society and the way it works and getting along and getting ahead and thinking forward and riches and achievement and fame and all that crud, yes, get through all that WHILE at the very same time progressing and putting together the ancient formulas of our inner Beings - the ghosts of all other previous lives and histories, the manners and the ways of thought by which we each ourselves now have patterned THIS existence - to which we really are meant to have little allegiance; fast, fleeting, and spurious as it is. I want to be sure not to get stuck on this point, but 'Leisure' us the key. It's a killer, an ease and a dreaded dead-end to which we seem all to want to careen into. But. Not. Evil lurks, and it lurks in Leisure. That's why there's so much emphasis, in this stupid, flat society, put on it. It's how people make money, and lots of it - if individuals can be suckered into the web of distraction and addiction by which entertainment, play, acceptance and accumulation, fantasy, distraction and all the rest, and in turn be coaxed out of some money, each, for doing so, there's a golden money-rainbow waiting for whichever schmuck wishes to throw his or her Life away chasing it and piling it up - the stock market (a true, illusionary gambling-whore's paradise, just using larger words and concepts). It's how we are slowly killed, and there are many murderers.
In my father's mind, and then in mine too, in those days, around 1960, these old waterways represented a presence and a reality of a world that he sensed was passing, and a passing I was only witnessing. All things were gone, falling away. The old wooden hulks of those watercraft sunk beneath the Kill, left there to die and rot as piers and fish-attractants (but they forgot all about the pollution), they were still present as ghosts - I knew my father was seeing things I couldn't see when he looked out over the water. We somehow inhabited two different realms - overlapping, perhaps, in their ways - but different nonetheless. It was a deep and dense divide we needed to step over or fall into. Whichever way we went, it was there. My father and I, in those (early) years, never came to any real agreements - and all his and my later lives, together or not, were pretty miserable with and towards each other - but for us they were at last a period of shared golden years, of a shared glory in the knowing that the two of us were watching a film together on a completely different screen than was the rest of the world. In a sense, we both were watching an over-and-over replay of a figurative 'Titanic' going down. To our satisfaction we were part of the script, and we were writing some of it too. There were never happier, yet lonelier, moments between two people, ever. If I ever had to say 'when' I knew my father best - it was then.
Going back to that section of Staten Island today, and
even from the Perth Amboy side, everything has been changed. In the 1950's it
was still possible to find shacks and cottages, small, ramshackle homes - of
eccentrics and loners, but not solely - facing the old waterways. Aging sea
men, home on land and waiting out there time (not that far away, into Staten
Island, around the coastal rim was Sailor's Snug Harbor (of which more later) a
vast and quirky rest home for retirement sailors). The coastline still was
peppered with maritime atmosphere - ship berths and ship repair yards, tugboat
yards, all sorts of tank repair and service facilities, oilmen, trucks, a sort
of Fulton Street NYC in reverse - the tack and sail shops of Staten Island
itself, instead of lower Manhattan. The houses they've built now - and the
endless rows of condo units - have taken control of the area. It's as if the
developers wished for no trace of the old but instead only the idea of the sea
and the water - no reality, just the plume of image. These are ultra-modern,
sprawling and up-to-date places, on old, old ground. No one speaks any longer of
what's underneath it all - myriad layers of coastal Indian lore, dead
colonials, dead seafarers, dead boats and ship. Too bad; at least when he could,
my father brought me there, reaching blindly for the idea or theme of whatever
he was he couldn't articulate. I think he was trying, in his way, to share or
impart to me the deep feelings that came through him for stuff like this, for
his displacement, his awkwardness in the more modern world of 'things'. My
father was an emoter, a fiery, impulsive person who didn't quite understand why
that had to be given up - almost blunt and tribal in his ways, he still
possessed many of the attributes of older 'Man' on the move, stumbling across
plains and oceans, man on the move, pushing forward in a blind energy -
without words, or the craft of words. It all sounds strange, but to this day I
understand his need. I understand, as well, what things he was trying to get
across to me, in his wordless way. I listened, I nodded, accepted. That's why
we'd return there, many more than once, in his ridiculous rowboat and
small-displacement crazy-man's Evinrude outboard motor, precariously strapped
onto the rowboat and madly dipping through ship lanes to get to these strange
places. The 'open' sea these trips weren't (though we'd had them too), but
riding the ship-lanes in a 6-horsepower rowboat was always a bit
crazy.
78. There's something going on. I have realized that I've never been more alive. Even though I've always followed the dictate of Marcus Aurelius who said 'Live life as if you were already dead.' Or I thought. Maybe it was from the 'Memoirs of Hadrian', I don't remember. Maybe 'The Consolations of Philosophy', by Boethius. Now when I look for it all I see is it cited as an ancient 'Samurai' saying. Perhaps I got it from Yukio Mishima back in 1967 - all that library scribbling. I don't know, but however wrongly attributed it's been bringing me magic of late. I look at people and I can actually see their self-excitement. It's very difficult for me to proclaim, but when I see someone I can sense their humanity, their satisfaction at being alive - even if, in the midst of all their other problems, it seeps woefully, to them. I can sense that girl's happiness and self-satisfaction with her nails, and her shoes, that day - her finesse about her toilette, her happiness at possessing grace and beauty. Or that man, with his stance and bearing, the shine of his well-done hair, his perfect business mien. Acumen. A Strength. None of those mean anything to me, but from each of those I feel it surging. It possesses a certain 'quiet', internal. It's Dignity, for sure - the same sort of holy dignity with which a dog licks its paws or cleans itself with its own tongue; or a cat does its own solid hygeine. Self-possessed, solid, sound. A complete Human possession of all matters. Last night's sex, this morning shower, the application of eye makeup, the selection of coat and hat, the wearing of that pencil and that lapel pocket. In point of fact, it's pretty much the only thing that allows me to forgive them for their stupid lives. I think, through all the ages, that's what people have meant by Grace and by Goodness; perhaps even by their quaint term 'God.' It's simply the knowledge of that self-possession. And I realize now that I have no place else to go. It's a possession of Self by being 'outside of self'.
And, yet, knowing that, it's all been pissed away today. People live as if there was no living at all - minute by minute interactions with nothing, nothing higher than the dirt they walk on - endless blabber, the scoff and babble of stupid conversation, the twaddle of an ass. I know I openly cringe when I get near it - I can hardly go anywhere at all. People make me puke; a curious subterfuge of convincing themselves of their own rightness and then reinforcing it by thinking everyone else wants to hear about it. Have you ridden a train lately? Every poor-man's stop, every Elizabeth to New Brunswick to Newark, brings a new load of sick wanderers onto the train. Just when you think you're settled in for a decent ride, quiet car or not, some fat-assed, lard-mouthed blubberface comes bumping and grinding in with his or her malfeasant telephone and begins the shit all over again. I want to grab a pair of pliers and go squeeze their tit or dick until they at least agree to shut the fuck up and text, if they have to do anything at all. I know I don't want to hear their lame-ass, underprivileged, new-fucking-sneakers voice. Sure, I'm a bigot, go ahead call me that. See if I care. I'm stating my position and my personal rights at an intellectual level far different from anyone who objects, that's all. Go learn some social manners and then come back and bother me. So - I wonder - is that what 'Avenel' made me? Sure as hell not; Avenel instead made them. Today's sorry-assed no-goods, whom I'm supposed to support. Yeah, right.
It was never
my intention to go scooting away, running or leaving things. It just came to be
that, as I seemed to 'grow', Avenel seemed to diminish. Everything became a lie;
there was no foundation there, no clutch, no grab. Walking through town at some
evening hour, watching the closing of the sunlight breaking down the light,
tingeing the windows and glassways with its own diminished light, the entire
scene seemed tired and sad and small. I realized that it was only other places,
the large, the dynamic, the strength-of-cities with all their heritages and
pasts, that made the definitions and the shape-forms of the lives we lived.
Avenel was manipulated - it was periphery. It was not to be for me.
Weirdly
enough, now, it's somewhat turned about - subdivisions and new, large homes
are bringing people, once again, out to these places and draining still again
the 'cities' nearby of their better inhabitants, as it's put, and leaving
repeatedly behind the big churn and turmoil that's left in cities, Manhattan to
be sure, but others too - either the well-to-do or old-monied, the very top
strivers, or the reckless low-level dwellers, those who just skirt by or are
stuck there (Manhattan). Avenel itself has started becoming a catch-basin for
the people who want something; something small, maybe a little yard, close to
transportation - highways, parkways, turnpikes, shopping, and the rest. A
'small' investment (by contrasts), in a small life. Avenel has sort of
flat-lined at some 'lower-middle-class' monetary stage that's become perfectly
acceptable. Manhattan, and other places, by contrast, have become keen and
cutting - it's very difficult to find the middle; and it's too bad. My own
life was always distorted by the infraction of the lens which twisted the light
- to put it oddly - into a fashion of rainbow hues, none of which had any way
for me to cling to or grab at, for they were just that - hues, chimeras,
illusions.
Some things
were just always outlandish to me. I remember reading, when young, about the
medievalists, or people in the medieval era anyway, who in their piety would
make it a point to follow around a king or a royal or whatever nature, the
higher the better, whenever one was within or passing by their area, their
village or locale. The idea present then, and pushed as religious dictum, was to
not miss the opportunity of praying in the presence of that Royal, wherever it
was this person stopped to pray - a wayside church or cathedral, then for
sure, enter in the throng with him - for any prayers sent to Heaven then were
for more surer of being answered. The feeble thought behind this, of course, was
that God hears better the prayers and supplications of Royal stock, whatever it
may be. Entire structures of religiosity were built around this. It
flabbergasted me. Just to have to realize the dumb subservience of the poor and
the meek in these situations - fawning and following the hem and stride of a
Royal just so as to be able to pray with them, in their presence, even if
unknown or unseen, because God better hears their prayers. What kind of thinking
was this? How could people live like this? And then, as I looked around myself
and saw the local activities, family, friends, neighbors, etc., I did realize
and have to admit that here, in this new situation, it just wasn't that far
afield from what I just described. The poor had transformed themselves, somehow,
into this newer class of freshly-arrived people moving into Avenel - to their
little homes and streets - and nearby, never far - was the church. In my
case St. Andrew's - old building or new. Mothers fawned over the local
priests, the old ones and the new, young ones. Kids flocked, entire families
trudged off to Sunday Mass. Some sort of automatic accolade of prayer and
supplication, en masse, and closer to God only by being closer to his minions
- in this case the priests and ministers who did this stuff (and in their
'Royal' vestments too). Without fail and without question, money was given
weekly, approval sought, public display played up - all so as to be seen being
'closer' to the Lord by being among the minions who prayed with His
representatives. I guess all of this is still going on. Now I see families of
Filipinos and Hispanics of all stripes dutifully doing their Sunday walks to
church - parking cars, walking haphazardly in clothing fit for but a street
fair; and white families too, all doing the same. The French used to say the
more things change the more they stay the same. I guess that still stands. It's
nothing ever that I can figure out; the logic of any of this escapes me. I don't
understand what these people seek - what ostensible fulfillment to them could
come from church-going and attendance. One can balance rationality against faith
and find them both sadly blemished; but these people don't even take it that
far. It's just, rather, for them, another version of blind servitude, never
knowing what they're really doing, but just doing it anon.
Anyway, what
was destiny and who had it? The little old Bond Bread man, with his silly Divco
truck, trudging from house to house and talking up all those mothers and kids.
Never seeing dads at all - what did he know, really, of the places he
serviced? It was a fantastical life, a visitation, and his always having to be
on, talking and more, was probably enough to drive him, or anyone, crazy -
yet, a lot in life is a lot in life; you are where you are and you are what
you've made. Here all the streets were new, and wide and mostly straight. There
were no dangerous twists or alleys and churns where danger or thugs lurked.
Everything was above-board and there really were no old stories. They were
custom made, these streets, for the straight-line logic which would drive a
bread delivery man to become a local confessor, one to confide in. He probably
knew more about the happinesses and unhappinesses of all those families he
served than anyone else around. People become what they are, without title. They
did then anyway. Mike Cohen, this crazy-serious, Jewish, dark-suited guy who
would walk around the blocks with his thick, black, breviary-like payment book,
filled with little tear-off payment stubs for each of the subscribing families
- he'd walk the local streets monthly, quarterly, whatever it was, to pick-up
the life-insurance policy payments due. To my mother, he was sacrosanct, and for
whatever reason the need to continue paying him was sacrosanct. His actual name
was 'I. Mike Cohen', a mysterious name, always, to me, which turned to be
Irving, hidden instead by the simple initial. Much like the bread-man - though
the complete flip-side, personality-wise - he'd achieved a particular status
all of his own making - no deeds, no documents needed. All these people were
knee-deep in a weird sort of secular parochialism. A religion all its
own.
Somewhere a
long time ago I ran into a quote by the poet Frank O'Hara which always stayed
with me. I took a comfort in it as I hated my pale and suburban life. I sought
the attraction, verve and vibrancy - nay, the intellectual and philosophical
firecrackers - that it portrayed and I took it as my own. I wanted to flee,
just be gone. The quote went : "I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I
know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do
not totally regret life." I loved that quote. As I probably
noted previously, I'd often walk out to the highway at the end of the street -
Route One - and just watch the cars and the traffic go by: all those
headlights heading north, straight into the maw of the Holland Tunnel, 17 miles
off, give or take. I'd see the cars in the other direction, whizzing south. In
both cases I'd wonder and watch - who were they, where were they off to, where
had they been, what were their lives about, what was going on? My questions
seemed to all come from my own fact of being stalled, in-place, stuck, in
servitude to a ratty, foul 'tradition', growing stir-crazy and mad-wild about
release. It was always there, and always unsaid. This was pretty much at the
same spot where my father and I had walked - me as a young boy - trudging
through new footsteps through the fierce snowstorm's aftermath as he and I too
looked out at the highway, white and slick and bare of traffic at that moment. I
knew what Frank O'Hara was getting, for sure, even in 1960. Funny thing too -
because the distance down that highway wasn't really any 'visible' distance; you
couldn't 'see' anything special, just a mile or two of roadway and cars
patterning by, and the rest was imagines. Much like Life itself, I always
figured : you peer down something, look into somewhere, get your ideas and
assumptions lined up, masked or unmasked, and pretty much all the rest is
imagined or surmised, based upon the assumptions you make. Had I ever assumed
that the roadway ahead of me ran, instead, directly to Vermont or wherever, then
THAT would have been the paramount issue, the fruition of my
desire. As it was, my endings were all endings of smoke : a place, a weird
masterland of goofballs, beatnikism, crazed performers and artists, singers and
shiners, all doing their things. It was the precise opposite of this 'I. Mike
Cohen' thing, which was, by comparison, a miserable straitjacket into which
parents and elders had allowed themselves gleeful entwinings. They simply didn't
know any better.
The way it
comes down is that none of it has to matter - I cannot be the one to get
stuck; it's against all my preachment. I've always thought anyway that I've
achieved my own sort of 'State', my perfection, in my way. It hasn't been money
and fame, starlight and glitz, but even dearer to me has it become a way of life
itself with some weird form of acclamation through others. It all amounts to
some sort of other kingdom for sure. Not of this earth anyway. You can't take it
with you, especially if you've never had it and it's never been in this place
with you. That's OK. I review, I review, and I think, I draw conclusions and
from those conclusions build a continuance of all that which I want. Not of this
world - or have I said that already?
The main
key, I always thought, is to not be linear. Linear thinking is a square box into
which everything has to fit - the form of the box is fixed and closed, and
though the box itself is open, it's being closed at the same time, and that
comes from the fact that there are no new options for that which can or will go
into it. Funny stuff. Linear thought is like tracking - your nose just goes in
one direction and only follows a scent which it recognizes. Here's an old
example that's always stayed with me. Back in May/June '67, those long, dreary
days at the very end of high school - as a finished, ready to graduate kid
there's not much to do for those final two or three weeks. You end up as a high
school senior just sitting around, unless you're in the social whirl stuff, the
autographs and messages and dances and proms and all that crap, well you sit
around wasting time. The long, warm afternoons. And in doing so, an enforced
idleness sets in. You're stuck with someone, and you just start talking,
endlessly sometimes, day after day. Back in this time of 1967, the Beatles had
just finished with their releasing of Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane.
I think each tune backed the other on a 45, as I recall. Maybe not. Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts...was about to break but hadn't yet. It was a time of
psychedelic breakthrough, a changing of all meanings and mores, people were
running, they were confused, everything was breaking down (it's hard for today's
folk to really understand what I mean; like the Roaring 20's bullshit was to me,
I guess). Anyway, in a fortuitous turn of events, Penny Lane was perfect in this
time and place. I had a oft-time friend, name actually right now I do forget,
and I never saw him again in all my life after this school day, but I'll call
him John. He was cool enough, I liked him, I liked the way he approached things,
his mind seemed open, he was ready to listen and learn, hard or not as it were.
The thing that happened here was almost perfect for me to realize the great
divide, the way people think and how the mass of people simply are not equipped
for the leaps needed to think creatively. This guy, John, was totally caught up
in his linearity. We compared notes one afternoon, the entire school day in
fact, on Penny Lane. We sat around, just letting the time pass, in some pathetic
ante-room adjacent to something in the 'auditorium - where people mostly
'heard' nothing. We butted heads, talked it through, used it to bring us to
other places and subjects. The problem was, he could only accept the song in one
way and one way precisely - it had to be, and was, in his own mind, a linear,
straight, progression of 'story' As in 'a guy walks into a barber shop, in the
small town he's from, storefront along the main street. He plunks himself down
in the barber chair. They talk about small town things, the fireman polishing
his truck, events that occur, and then the fireman they'd just spoken of, rushes
in, because there's a fire, alerting them, in a hurry, rushing back out, the
pandemonium of the event ensues, etc., etc.' That was his take on the tune and
the words of the tune - a related episodic event where things happened in a
progression, a straight line, nothing existing without reason for being, in this
story, useful, everything in place. I simply could not accept, nor believe his
take on the song. We went back and forth and I kept hitting home the idea of how
wrong he was, how much he was missing. 'It's not a story, things aren't
'happening'. It doesn't 'go' anywhere; get over that. It's an assemblage, an
abstract of the moments of the life we live, each moment. The portrait of the
Queen, the barber shaving another customer, the pretty nurse, selling poppies
from a tray, who feels she's in a play and she is anyway, the fireman, rushing
in, liking to keep his fire engine clean, it's a clean machine... These are just
momentary and instantaneous fragments, illuminated moments that accumulate and
amass. They don't need to 'go' anywhere.' I tried to convince him to get over
the line of things that his closed mind was demanding - the idea that very
thing has to go to something else, that stories must build, that things have to
happen, without reflection, move along, as if they all had a life force of their
own needing to produce a dynamic moment. He couldn't get it - and I'd bet if I
saw him today, whoever he was and wherever he is, he's still lost amidst that
same conundrum of looking for achieved results, looking for all those connected
moments to 'make' something, and not just be. That's the peacefulness of Life,
the Zen sort of article that just goes by us, the stream we must inhabit, the
way our souls and spirits - eternal and infinite - must exist. We,
ourselves, are just bad bumps. Momentary diversions, on the Being that is. Well,
anyway, that's what I took from those last few days of high school. Not that
anyone there would teach me that. School and education by the established
machine is a big, creepy lie run by the vilest people you could
imagine.
'A Portrait
of the Artist As a Young Man ends with a beginning'. I read that a long time
ago, sort of when still stuck in Avenel. My addition to that (pretty obvious
statement, I thought) was, so does 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' and so
does 'On the Road' - all that stuff and probably a hundred more. That was too
easy a statement to make, especially for someone (Seamus Dunne) who'd been paid
by Penguin to write an Introduction. But, at the same time, I also knew that the
industry of the publishing world was like that - academics, scholastic types, working hard all the time
at pulling new rabbits from the same old hats - or maybe even the same old
rabbits from new hats. It's difficult to say something new, especially when made
more difficult by the rigid standards of the established academy which -
though it claims new thinking really doesn't accept any until too long after.
The author's usually dead and gone, hopelessly finished after a life of
destitution and labor to his or her task, and some nitwit looking for a break or
a new subject or another spin on something already spun, decides to stake out a
new claim on an author's Being - what this or that means, how such and such
was influenced by, the 'idea' of property in Dickens', the 'new outlook of
Modern alienation in...whomever' The industry gobbles this up - so that the
resultant stuff comes out like 'Portrait ends with a beginning.' Yeah well then,
so it does, bravo. It also begins with an ending, if you'd be so kind as to flip
your stupid premise. I'm being facetious, perhaps, but no more so than any of
them. Some great industrialists may have made iron and steel empires.
Publishing-world industrialists often try to make empires of word-shit, endless
run-on premises of sentence after sentence. Often called 'Blather'. It's a trap;
just like the trap I was in and from which I knew I had to get out. Endlessly
pacing the streets with my (metaphorical) ticket book to collect monthly
payments. No thanks - even though that's pretty much what most of life is like
anyway. My better image was of people staking out new places and new lands, a
proposition of oneness and singularity that I shared...with how many others I'd
not ever know. I felt like a Destiny was descended upon me, something I had to
do, some way I had to do it. Being where I was (Avenel) was like being
sequestered and just out of reach - a few, mere highway miles from the vast,
internal, city wherein all the real; stuff happened. People in clumps, odd
people, beatniks, wiesenheimers, doers, single-stakers, artists, lovers,
drawers, people of no regard for the rest of this crummy, make-another-day world
of business and commerce. I they were there, just out of reach, and I knew it and I
wanted so much to be there instead. The bond breadman could have his role of
Avenel's town-crier. I wanted to be THEIR town crier, from deep
within my soul. Alas, now, from here, this vantage that I write from much later,
not much of this ever really did occur. I eventually got to where I wished to
be, ate up the place, savored it, reveled in it, but the big mark somehow eluded
me. I stayed with it, realized the location of myself with in, and just kept
lugging my baggage around. It ended up Okay; not what I'd really wanted or
wished for, but okay enough. My body of work is valid and strong, and it's the
result of all that - so I'm fine with it.
'The switch from the neuter third-person narrator, commanding a discourse that is dominated by quotation, repetition and carefully constructed rhythmical effects, to a first-person whose discourse is by comparison disjointed, careening from petty local detail to the declaration of his solemn ambition, is dislocating for the reader. Yes, for all his self-absorption, Stephen Daedelus recognizes himself to be a member of a community; it is in relation to the collective, the race, that he formulates his individual aspiration and the techniques of individuation, although it is by a process of inversion that he achieves his ambition to be self-born.' That's from the introduction I mentioned. It's pretty interesting 1. as an observation and a point of view, because - in fact - it does happen, and 2. because - outside of the interested grad student working on a tome, or an over-sized academic seeking power - it's really not interesting at all as a point of observation except to the fact that - in the writing 'industry' it's the sort of stuff non-writers dote on. Like the endless line of dweeby, non-athletic types selling sports memorabilia and baseball cards at any of a thousand sports expos - seeking as it is usual for them to make their filthy lucre from the 'outside' of anything (if you can't 'do it' then by all means make money by doing commerce 'about it' from the outside). If you can't do it, then talk about it - baseball or writing; no difference in the pocketbook.
To him, the 'others' represented theory - those who did not dig and cut and struggle and fight. You may not understand or agree with what I'm stating here, but through the eyes of 'me', the representative atom in this quest of self, that's what it always appeared as. To fight back, my father would build - massively overbuilt things, yes, but he built. Piles of lumber turned into cornices and shevles and alcoves. Sheds and doorways. Cellar entrances and overhangs and eaves and shelters. Fences. In somewhat a fury, he built single-handidly back-room extensions, six-room attics, complete hallways and cedar closets. It just went on. He simply translated the world into 'things'. I was speechless, mostly, never knowing what to say - certainly not to offer an object-lesson in alternatives. By age eleven or twelve, there was no real alternaitve for me but to leave. I had to get out of the stifling atmosphere into which I'd been placed, showing no alternatives, allowing nothing else. I did not want that form of life. Simply knew I did not. My reality I'd already encrypted, and it included (already, early on) words and books and booklets and information and writing, colors and forms, finesse and gradation. I was up against a solid wall, totally, and I knew it. A writer named Mary Jo Bank put it like this once : 'It's like sleep if sleep were a film that didn't include you, but no, whatever is happening, you are always in it, the indispensible point of view.'
I think it all has to do with what you care to believe; from top to bottom, that's the essential point. It just goes on from there. Here's a for-instance in, even, the present day : deep Autumn, ten million morons, in the name of their 'ecology' awareness and drive, raking leaves, endlessly blowing them, noisily piling them with enormous leaf-blowers, hiring endless landscape companies with marginal employees slaving away to keep yards cleared and looking perfectly serene. It's a mad-person's paradise, of course, totally off the wall, and un-natural as all get out. The leaves are meant to fall, decompose, become the composted and enriched soil for the future, the loam of Nature's own love. Yet, having been propogandized into believing they only do what they must do - these people expend more energy, at every level, in order to 'supposedly' reach their end-results of a clean ecology - it's asinine. Leaf bags, replete with company names printed on them, corporate monster hardware names and not, are left at curbside for municipal pick-up. The leaf bags themselves are an entire other industry, complete with the processes of the printing and gluing which goes on to make them - an industry which uses endless resources, mechanical and fuel, transport trucks, distribution, etc. Then the municipal trucks and fuel, and wages, which go into the pick-up and drop-off collection places. The endless fuel and travel exploits of the huge landscape trucks, the noise and energy use of the mechanical blowers - etc., etc. I'll stop there. Suffice it to say, without even a thought, this endeavor is everywhere undertaken in the name of 'ecology' and 'green' recycling, etc., etc. No one thinks. They all accept, and just go on about their merry, stinking ways. It's all a belief system adopted, and never thought about again. People have been 'told' what to do and, knowingly or not, just accept that. There is no reason for them to allow themselves to be convinced of things, be turned into consumers, buy premises of falsehood lock, stock, and barrel (a good, old firearms reference), get suckered into believing that - through media assault - they'd be salvaging and promoting the environment by enlisting themselves into the mass-effort of gobbling up resources to do so. Completely senseless, but no one thinks. And somewhere, some chucklehead corporate type is taking it all to the bank, and then re-using (the real recycling factor) those funds to promote more waste and destruction, all the while talking the other case.
Mankind, or humankind, was made, was seeded here, as a slave-race. It's never really risen above that. In order to keep that image of liberation and breakaway in check, the usual myths of Being and Life have been pounded into people's heads so as to keep them in place; by kinder means, by different words. The story of The Fall, and all the rest of that - it was all invented and promulgated by scribes - those who once first controlled the language and the recording of same. We've just then gone about our business; assuming, amassing, acquiescing, going along. The 'Gods' in issue here have long ago left us, abandoned this planet and place as the mining efforts of the slave race of ape-men created was no longer necessary. They were done, and their needs of having and using us were done as well. A little tinkering, a few adjustments, and a number of steps up, Humankind was pushed to advance by steps, throiugh strages, Cro-Magnon, Neandrathal, Australeus, etc., into the 'reasoning' creature we are assumed to be today - a long, wearying process, filled with deat, drama, deceit and debacle. And some good things too. You can figure that stuff our for yourselves.
82. Sometimes I think it's all in how you can answer the question 'are you in love with the world?' that designates how we get along and go about our daily occurrences. I know that for myself on many a day the answer for that would have been some sullen form of 'no' but that then there are other days altogether different for which that same question would get a 'yes' answer. Resoundingly, and without any further thought. The seeming idea here is of changeability and the persistence of change running through all things. When I was a kid, looking down or up Inman Avenue (I lived in the middle), I could recite, eyes-clesoed or open, pretty much the car - make, model, and color - of each household and what car should be where, whose car was just visiting, and the rest. detective-like in some stupid and meandering broad-interest, it was observation : all the 1954 and 1957 Dodges and Buicks and Fords, and all the models of same which fell in-between. Each supposedly, in some way, reflecting the income and/or status of the inhabitants of the house connected to the car. (Pretty much an impossible task nowadays, with leasing and easy car-loans having afforded everyone alike the option of essentially buying and driving whatever they feel like, for as long as they wish. It's no longer connected, really, to any other indicative signifier at all). Then, as 1958 broke, came the crazed preponderance, suddenly, of 'dual headlight' cars - a new and more powerful motif that, along with the bizarre style renovations of that era, suddenly made it look as if everyone had a crazed, dragon-like warship in their driveways or out front of their houses. And then the snows would come, reinforceing the bizarre shapes and forms of each design and fin and tail and nose, with bulbous, bizarrely infracted drifts of snow seemingly violating yet still clinging to each design and form. It was difficult to pin down, and more difficult to put into words. By 1960, a memory that stays with me as well is that of myself and a few friends draped over one of my father's '53 Fords, parked in the street, and just langorously watching a new car, 1960 something, waddle it way down the street - all those inglorious curves and swoops and angles - this was the same day, as I can recall, that the news broke that Adolph Eichmann had been rounded up and captured in Argentina and taken to Israel for trial or death. I recall our joking asides about 'Whew, that's over; we no longer need to worry.' Meaningless prattle, but meant as a joke about no longer having to worry about concentration-camp round-ups. Dumb kids. (Eichmann was finally hanged in 1962).
Out of any context, of course, none of this makes any sense, but that's what it all was, actually. 'Context'. For Avenel came without any, we had to make our own. Just as all those cars in the driveways and streets would be constantly changed over time, so too the world around all of us, the context of the brittle lives were were leading or being given, would also change. Newer cars, different schools, even different mothers and fathers, sometimes - though that was still rare - divorces and broken families not yet having set in so much. Like the leasing and the driving of cars, that too evolved over the years into a spectacular ease, a simple 'no problem' to be dealt with. Again, that was context - and it was all out before us, the things we hadn't yet faced. The vast compromises and needs and desires of Sex, with a capital 'S', and all the things that would be done for and with it. And because of it.
My 'yes' answer to the question here originally posed, when 'yes' would be the answer, I decided was actually the situation I'd prefer to be in - in 'love' with life, as it's put - without any further thought; spending the bulk of my time in that operating condition because it makes all the other things move along much more freely and happily. It's like suddenly being liberated from a cramped, stuffy room all cluttered and falling down with things and being out instead into some more airy and free-lit space in which each item is placed carefully and separately and unequivocally out for what it is - authentically and with each its own 'perfect' qualities instead of the sham and expectation-fulfillment that so often goes into the ruining and soiling of pure life and the unlimited appeal of creativity. Why most people - and why more people - don't ever understand this baffles and confuses me. They instead fall easily into the same pitfalls and openings that have gobbled so many others up. Unthinkingly, without fail, and - certainly - without reflection. The feeling of 'yes' here is of much order and much clarity - there's a spatial difference which somehow reflects back upon the quality of that same space, and it's NOT that I'm ever a big fan or 'order' if it's just for order itself (I'm not) but instead I mean the order-through-grace which comes when correct things just correctly fall into place and the soul somehow knows it. It cannot be planned, yet serendipitous does not describe it either : it's more like a NASA shot, when a million variables, high-intensity things, heat, flames, fire, chemistry, flow, resistance, power, speed, electronics, ignition, thrust, space, movement, cargo, emissions, radio-signals, and the rest - when they all come together, combined in their own life-moment span of interacting and working together and within each other, combining qualities and transferring evidences and signals, one to the other. Perhaps (only, perhaps) that's what I'm trying to sum up with the ideas presented here of place and new place and change and context. The 'new' and jumbled mass of 'Avenel', the no-place in time of our childhoods.
In some ways an interesting corollary with which to exemplify this is the building of a new highway, a 'scenic' highway along the bluffs and ridges atop or alongside rivers - this happens now in lots of places; you can stop, pull over, and use the viewing points for the 'scenery' before or below you - and you know as you're passing that this is all engineered and cleared and laid out and paved with the most rigorous and strict ideas of line and angle, but at the same time affording the enfused force of 'openness' and vista which 'Nature' brings forth (in spite of all else, in spite of, even, the roadway affording you this supposed view). It all bespeaks of the paradox it is - you simply 'feel' what's happening and what's passing in spite of the fact of all the industrial power and might behind it, and the 'awe' that too would bring. As if there was a difference? Should there be difference? In each case, the 'awe-inspiring' veneration of what's before you should come to the fore and take precedence - no matter whether Nature or Industry, they both present the same show.
Being a youngster in a place like Avenel, there was little to follow - it's as if, one day, you simply awake to something else and accept it fully. Upon first arrival, the yards of these new homes weren't yet finished. Out behind our house, for instance, were jagged, bulldozed hills and piles of raw dirt, trunks and broken chunks of trees, tees I guess that had recently been cut and dragged. I don't recall a thing - neither any of this being an obstacle to us, not how and when it eventually got cleaned up, straightened around and planted with seed. From all this, eventually, came the long rectangles of each yard, the right-angled corners, and after that the fences and hedges and things which were put in. And that was only the back. The fronts, I remember nothing about. Seventy feet or so behind the rear property line, all along the row of homes on my side, ran the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks - the 'Bayshore Local' trains, a major-enough adjunct of the mainline, from Rahway right down the the Jersey Shore, the Bayhead Local - which stopped at places like Woodbridge, the Amboys, Red Bank, etc., all the way down to Bayshore, last stop on the line. After crossing the Raritan River between Perth Amboy and South Amboy, the later-electrified trains, heading south, would revert back to the older steam locomotives. When we first moved to Inman Avenue, the trains passing by our back yard were all still steam trains - it was quite a thrill, if you would imagine, to hear the chug-chug of the approaching locomotive and the vast, heavy cloud of smoke it brought along - a cloud of smoke that would spread and float along, each time, dropping small particulates onto everything. The smoke went 'up' as well as it spread 'out', and was quite an exciting sight. People complained right from the start : laundry on the lines would get blemished, people talked endlessly their car-finishes getting stained and marked - soot, hot cinders, ash. As kids, of course, none of that was our concern and we'd run with the cloud as it spread and rose over everything, until dissipated. It was a moment, just something 'new' to do. I know that I'd never seen anything like it before, and neither had the others. We regaled in it - and then about 1958, perhaps, the line was fully electrified (at least until South Amboy, where they were still switching over to other engines (steam) into the 1970's at least).
I was mentioning 'context' just a minute ago. One aspect of the context I was put into here, on Inman Avenue, and one which you'd never really have thought of, was this 'railroad' context. Living with the trains, the railroad in the yard aspect, was 'context' for sure. I don't know how it was for others - what items caught their eyes or which objects bore their attentions - but for me, from this constant experience, it was the railroad and the trains. Various images and concepts stay with me, to this day, from it : there was a massive sense of solidity, a strong idea of 'scoiety' having a constant context of its own into which peoeple were always throwing themselves and for which these 'trains' were in service. I'd see the commuter cars rolling by, at night and - in Fall and Winter - during commuter times in the dark too, and they'd be lit from within. Small white lights passing, little fixtures, and near each fixture a head or two of passengers within. Fixed objects on a moving scrim - a passage by which travel and work and jobs and achievements and progress were somehow seen to take place. These were committed people, set in their elaborate ways to proceed with their lives and take part in the rotating 'maw' of business and society. I knew no one at all, knew nothing about these people, but instantly sensed I could read them and knew exactly what they were doing. They didn't need to speak, they didn't even need to look my way - heads down, reading their Life or Look magazines, book, or Saturday Evening Posts, I had them both sighted and cited. Notation and reference. I knew them all. This was their life, the big sprawl of place and activity - this was 'what it was all about' - how people lived their lives. If I climed a tree, a big oak tree at the end of the yard, overlooking the tracks, I could make out, in the distance, and especially clearly on clear days, the skyline and details of New York City - the spires and sprawl of 1958 Manhattan. It was incredible to me. I somehow always connected this to the train - long time ago I stopped climbing that tree, but I did so at least until 1961 and it was always the same (I had made a plywood platform, a treehouse of sorts, 3/4's of the way up that easy-to-climb tree - limbs, and some step boards hammered into the trunk - always within easy access, for escape). And I did so. Below me, the trains would pass, going this way or that, one or the other, and above it all I'd have, as well, the vista - a silvery, shimmering cityscape on the not-so-distant horizon. I all felt right. I knew I'd get there one day, one way or the other. Perhaps that really was my 'context', given to me so as to constantly goad me on to other things, always hanging out there for me, the 'otherness' of the real world - out there, a bit farther, but just a bit. Like some jagged emerald city, it always had me in its tug.
Somehow the world as presented to us
was a vertical stacking of possibilities, rights, ranks and privileges. We were
supposed to know our places and the schools and churches were only there to
reinforce that. Early on, as things were kept to scale, I'd say it worked to an
extent that was considered passable. Only later, as society itself grew and its
things began encroaching upon us, was some mystery and meaning first subtracted
- the process had begun. The local meat-market guy, about 1956, with his
business partner, decided to close up his little, independent grocery outpost in
the middle of Avenel Street and open instead a 'Shop-Rite' - a newfangled,
then, idea of supermarket grocery store where ALL categories of foods and such
were kept and sold under one large roof. The 1957 American had emerged. After
that, it didn't take long for the rest. I can well recall, on Boy Scout meeting
Wednesday nights, with my friend Larry Walker, stopping by choice at this
Shop-Rite along the way to John Hugelmeyer's, to pick
him up for the scout meeting in the old, now unused, church - it had become a
social hall of sorts for basketball stuff and scout meetings while the bigger,
fancy 'new' church held (or was 'thought' to hold) all the sacredness and church
rites - and waiting for Larry - a master-thief of sorts evidently - to
exit the supermarket a few minute later, pockets bulging with stolen candy,
enough for the rest of our evening, during and post-meeting. Go figure that out
for societal change and the premise behind the new world. Where once before the
meat-market proprietor would nab you and slap you down for the theft, now it was
all becoming as easy as it could be. Somewhere in there we all were able to
discern a meaning.
'The switch from the neuter third-person narrator, commanding a discourse that is dominated by quotation, repetition and carefully constructed rhythmical effects, to a first-person whose discourse is by comparison disjointed, careening from petty local detail to the declaration of his solemn ambition, is dislocating for the reader. Yes, for all his self-absorption, Stephen Daedelus recognizes himself to be a member of a community; it is in relation to the collective, the race, that he formulates his individual aspiration and the techniques of individuation, although it is by a process of inversion that he achieves his ambition to be self-born.' That's from the introduction I mentioned. It's pretty interesting 1. as an observation and a point of view, because - in fact - it does happen, and 2. because - outside of the interested grad student working on a tome, or an over-sized academic seeking power - it's really not interesting at all as a point of observation except to the fact that - in the writing 'industry' it's the sort of stuff non-writers dote on. Like the endless line of dweeby, non-athletic types selling sports memorabilia and baseball cards at any of a thousand sports expos - seeking as it is usual for them to make their filthy lucre from the 'outside' of anything (if you can't 'do it' then by all means make money by doing commerce 'about it' from the outside). If you can't do it, then talk about it - baseball or writing; no difference in the pocketbook.
79. Catholics always give me the heebie-jeebies. I guess I just never understood what was supposed to be going on. Even from my own oddly-situated vantage point, it never made sense and makes much less sense now. Everything has been accelerated. Even, for instance, the 'path' to sainthood - a crock if there ever was one anyway - which path has now been grandly shortened to the extent that recent Popes of no real great standing except from their own side of the fence, so to speak, are pushed along, beatified and then sainted in matters of years, as if some weird pop-stardom has instead taken over. Forget the 'miracles' stipulation - they can always manage to come up with some nitwit who claims a cure was effected by repeating that sainted person's name, mantra-like, or having been touched on a hair of the ear or something by the person who's touched a person who'd touched the Pope, or case worker, or missionary hoot, some extemporaneous Cumbaya Mama like Mother Theresa was supposed to be, or Padre Pio. It's all so nuts : stupid false, insincere, cheesy and fat-fake for sure. Just even the nomenclature here involved gets silly. 'Mother'. 'Padre'. Give me a break. I really don't know how any of these people believe any of this stuff. And I have tried - as you may have read here, a goodly portion of a certain party of my earlier life was taken up with all that pious sqeaming on and off about Salvation and deliverance and the Rules and Regulations of all the God tended to see as the correct and only way. Or something : go to find out it was all technical politics anchored in the 'Soul', without any real anchorage at all. My mother used to have these Padre Pio books hanging about during the 1990's - short, adoring bios, prayer sequences, the whole bit. He seemed like a Euro-midget to me, but she was in it hook, line and sinker. Very off-putting. In the same way I can recall my father - and my mother for that matter again - taking serious direction from otherwise inconsiderate things like the Knights of Columbus Newsletter, or the monthly newspaper of the local diocese, which was entitled 'The Monitor' - lists of proscribed movies Catholics should not be seeing, reviews instead of the otherwise bubbly and stupid shows, films and television to which 'Catholics' would be permitted and should be glad of. Even more ridiculous, to me, each time I read one, especially back in the '60's, were the squirming editorial addresses which The Monitor printed as essays or columns trying to speak to their flock about the strange societal uprisings taking place everywhere - actual commentary and reviews of rock-song lyrics, hippie behaviors, 'changes' in your child's demeanor, meanings - hidden and not so - behind occurrences. It was all so funny, all so lame, yet it went on. You could tell the nervousness and fear which was operating behind it all had more strength than did the reactions being purveyed. No one knew what to do or how to react to anything, and this mild, staid and stupid 'Catholic' newspaper attempted, most stupidly, to address its flock within the confines of a church-directed and catholicized purview - what they should think (which was non-thinking at all costs, just following orders instead) and what they should do in reaction. Masses had to be enlisted to combat this new anarchy. It was crazy. My parents' kitchen table was often littered with this stuff - little pamphlets, newsletters, newspapers - as I said - attempting to drive them through this storm. They themselves took no cognizance of anything outside of that. I don't know what they thought they could do, or how they'd attempt to run this festering dilemma through, but it went on. Catholics were increasingly stupid - and from that point on it just got worse and worse until, even today, in the midst of rubble, we are presented with the flip side of defensiveness. Celebratory Catholicism, which turns everything on its head, had smiling and joking Popes and homilies, hip church comedians, Saturday night masses, walking Sunday church strollers, people in vacation clothing, weird blue hats and yellow shorts, walking into their churches both defenseless and oblivious. It's pathetic stuff.
I don't know why anyone would anyway try to mix up their premise of religion with their premise of a social location in which to live. I didn't then. Like some Taliban effort today, it reeks of a hard-headed fierceness that in its turn can do nothing but cause bloodshed and trouble all around. The American Dream, by 1965 was fading anyway - it was still a premise, and - yes - it regained strength by the 90's - but it was always a sham. You know what the American Dream in essence was? It was Destruction. No matter now many times it was proclaimed as an idea of Freedom and Free Thought and Self-Reliance and all that, it never was. In order to succeed and have any validity, it needed to destroy - land, water, property, rights, choices, etc. It was pretty simple, and always seemed so to me. Yes - I saw clearly - that no one ever got it. It's Corporate Statism, and not much else. There's no real regard for 'individual personhood' within it. Here's what the American Dream amounts to : a person has an outdoor grill, a nice Weber, or something they're proud of. On that grill, they perfect what, to them, is an ideal concoction - a burger or a meatloaf or a way of serving a grilled meat with a sauce or covering. Something. They decide to 'market' this, since all their friends rave and tell them how grand it is, what a 'product' it would be. So, in incremental steps, they go about the procedures. Many, many hassles, yes, but all undertaken, all knowledgeably done (I've experienced the likes of this with people, machinery people, printing people. I only use the 'food' thing as the example) in the hopes of product placement, stores shelves, sales, and the rest. But, the real bugbear here is, always, how these entrepreneurial types, how they always end up talking of their hopes of selling out; how they hope to make a really big bundle, millions and millions, when Armour or Tyson or International Foods, buys them out. And, of course, yes, these big corporations do that - yes, that very process goes on; they buy up small competitors one after the other, they purchase for large sums the up and comers, the artisanal this or that, and do so in the expectation of either being able to co-opt that effort, sell that product under their own purview (compromised and blemished, yes) or, in extreme cases, just shutting it down or merging it indecorously into the mix with their other 'products.' It's all overlapping things, one option overtaking the next option until the bottom line and the quarterly corporate statements look right. To investors. Who demand a constant upward stream of revenue; which stream has to be met somehow, fabricated or manufactured if need be as needed. The original guy, he or she is happy - having walked away with their bundle, they no longer rightly care. The Corporation, if it's done right, can boast of having added this or that in their reports and mastheads and product lines. Devil may care, and the rest be damned. So then, the 'American' Dream becomes a concoction for personal lucre, at the expense of anything else - the Corporation, once it is involved bespeaks for itself (and is willingly granted) the rights to usurp property and purity, to whittle down quality, to lessen a product to the extent that 'profit' can be increased, to despoil land and water in so doing, to use trucking and transportation means to bring these products to where they must be brought, and to universally claim the right of pre-eminence over all else. Examine that, I ask you, and examine what the profit-motive then really is, what free-enterprise amounts to, and what the 'American' system has been rigged to for this all to advance. There's is nothing sacred at all about it - and to see any phony religion (they're all phony) tied into the equation of also standing for the State, for Success and gain and lucre and profit, is to understand immediately the sham that organized church/religion is - a secular deal composed of magic, mystification and the smoke and mirrors of credo, belief and mystery so as to continually bamboozle everyone into a status-quo of comatose adherence to Dogma. That's really all it is - a partnership with ideology, both working together to falsify a selected 'Reality' later presented as fixed being (and, just as well, being fixed).
In my mother's house, (my father's as well, but he didn't take a presiding stance in this local religion stuff) there abounded a minutiae of Piety. I myself, in the early seminary years, got involved in this - a miserable concoction of following religious precepts which had no real presence, just vague, community-oriented mutterings. Believe me, it was a bad feeling. Plastic, poorly ornate crucifixes on the walls. Pictures here and there of saints or personages important, with palm leaves from the previous Easter drooping over them, novena candles here and there, missals, holy cards, etc., etc. all about. It was perverse - as perverse in its way as was the thing that happened after I'd purchased my property in the 'countryside' of Pennsylvania later on (previously written of, that little Baptist church guy Wallace McKnight). Yes, in much the same way the occurrence I'm about to relate bears the same relationship, in its way, as the earlier household did to religion in its way. After the second or third trip out there, my father and mother decided to go 'country'. They purchased two or three big wall paintings - reproductions, already framed - of farmyard scenes, red barns, a mountain backdrop, a stream, a pump house, a horse, all that stuff. In addition to that, they managed to grab somehow an old wagon wheel from the area of the rear of our house (it had been left leaning on a tree) and, as well, a milk crate which no one wanted. These items, brought back into New Jersey, became at 116 Inman Avenue, the new decor attesting to the 'country' atmosphere of their design scheme. Early American, perhaps, it would be called. It was funny in its way - the painting, placed on bland, poor paneling, dark-tinted brown wood, looked needy. Out of context, of course, both the wagon wheel and the milk crate dairy can placed on the simple cinder-block/concrete stoop seemed meaningless and without all context to anything. Which they, of course, were. But, in fealty to 'something' to some strange 'ethos' in the imagined air - just like their religion - it all made sense and came together to close the open threads of narrative and storyline needed. They could fill in the blanks and make for themselves whatever necessary connections had to be. Just as it was done with their survival and salvation. The huge gaps in processed belief were able to be filled in and scanted. There was, precisely, nothing wrong; Nothing ! as long as one had Faith and believed. That's about all it ever came down to - and that's about all the world ever amounted to in their eyes and in the eyes of all their cohorts; the churchgoing mob analogous to swarms of rioters who'd maim and kill if the chance was given to overrun the infidel. It's always been like that. There is no false, and their is no real. There is no belief, and there is no non-belief. It's all carping at necessary enemies; changeable enemies - which is why these sorts of 'crusades' never end.
I think all it takes in life is a certain removal, a detached kindness, a distancing, in order to be calm and centered. Essentially, that gives time for reflection and the poise of a thinking man. Which is what I was ever after, even from early on. Erasing the emotions, deleting all those horrid scenes, the misery, the angst, well it just had to be done. Oftentimes my home was a center for all that stuff - I never got it, understood little, and just wished to wash it all from me. I did so. Italian Catholicism carries with it all the stigma (thank God not stigmata too) of the intrepid fires of emotion - all that delirious screeching on, the preening, the wailing; like finding a sanctified meatball in the middle of a plate of pasta. Right away, they start up about something. That's all, really, this Catholic stuff was - not 'religion' not a 'Credo' of any real goodness; just stupid junk. How it ever got started like that, how it took off and spread and flourished all over European city-states and countries and then later to the missionary outposts and far-away places, I never understood. It was never what it purported to be - it was, in other ways, just another finger of the State-Powered hand that ran things. Pure stupidity. Pure capacious bullshit, everywhere - and then they tried to bolster its continuation with mitred hats, Papal appeals, money crusades, lectures and stern admonishments, sermons about nothing. Whew! Not a piece of this had to do, ever, with 'God Consciousness' - which is and ever was a completely different thing than the brick-and-mortar church establishment crap. All those medieval meanderings, papal states, fights and furies; total gibberish. God laughs, if then that's the case. God laughs heartily in anger. God Consciousness is a different thing entire - no tithing, no rules, just a natural and steady infusion of light and consciousness into the human element pervading the shades of the reality we are seemingly presented with. It speaks. It talks and eases things; it bends and smooths. It's just there. Everything is going on at once - a million concurrent things into which this God-Grace stream of light is always flowing. It needs nothing else at all. It just is : a 'present' and a 'past' all jumbled together making a 'now' into which all these things constantly flow and are constantly changing and being changed by. There's really nothing stable, nothing fixed, no point onto which you can rest or prop up your foot. Flux and change, that's God. The idea of Doctrine and Church. That's not.
Anyway, reading the Gospels was always a conundrum for me. The church I was born into paid very little heed, very little at all, to the Old Testament - it claiming that all had been surpassed and finished, sealed and made final, by the New Testament, the coming of the Messiah, the Passion and the Resurrection. Sure, in the Mass there was a short spot near the beginning where a quick and simple reading of a passage from the Old Testament, with proper citation, fell in, but no homily, no indication of context or meaning, was ever given. Sermons and discourses never took place on Old Testament stuff - and only in the Gospels had the church craftily planted and disguised those reference which would be used and held to prove that 'Jesus' was the completion of all Prophecy, the fulfillment of many of the referenced citations pulled up from the Old. I knew that and figured most everyone else did too. But no one really cared : it wasn't that sort of religion - no zeal towards research or even a scholarly commentary in the Jewish fashion. It was all to be held as hit or miss. Again, no one ever paid any mind to this stuff - frankly, no one cared. It wasn't like the Middle Ages, where by saying 'the church I was born into' you were totally acceding to something quite specific - and a role for life. This was nothing. This was an American, materialistic culture which gave nothing put for the specifics of grace and consciousness except where it could be used to promote sales, lies, mis-representation, cheating, graft, corruption, and varied forms of usury. That's the kind of crud people lived with - they all wanted it and they all got it.
At the root, in light of what I've learned, people's behaviors in reference to their 'Religion' (the bespoken cause they live for, let's say) is a sham. They all end up wanting comfort and things. Comfort and things are the last items for which 'religion' has been put together. The 'Salvation' they seek is their own personal Salvation. Nothing to do with the rest of the world at all. Why isn't that just called pure selfishness, putrid skepticism, and absolutely no interest in their fellow Mankind? Why? Because it's all shibboleths. All crap, from one end of the wafer circle to the other. Just like a faulty idea of an Infinity, running back over onto itself anew. When I first moved to Avenel there was a perfectly serviceable, small, country-style brick church, set in a clutch of trees and a nice yard. It soon had to go. A new monstrosity was built, right next to it, and the original, slammer was later torn down. Why? A burgeoning population which had ensued from the rapacious development of the area, and the rapacious greed of the developers. The stupid church preached population growth, unlimited procreation in the Christian manner. The result of all that is the result of what Avenel and environs had to deal with and become. A hole, a funnel into which lots of this new 'population' had to fall - of course, needing - again - that new church. So the 'parish' could prosper. Money and lucre raised up, the twin-headed beast of greed, in this case, church greed. Nothing was ever done with that money to alleviate anything at all except further growth and outreach. 'Peter's Pence' once a year, as well - a bundle of money collected and set aside to be sent to Rome, to the Vatican, to help support and defray all the tremendous costs of all the tremendous riches already there. The Pomp of the Pope. More stupidity. I don't know how these people think, or thought. It's all such a senseless, myopic, made-up pile of senseless doom. There's no avoiding. Senseless Doom and death. It would seem to me that - according to the dictates of even Biblical lore - the mission of Man, of Humankind, on this Earth was to have been the proper husbandry of the earth and its lands and resources and bounty and Lifeforms. Husbandry. Good Husbandry, as in marshalling the energy and impetus to take care of, and preserve, 'God's Kingdom.' Showing the broken end of the bargain, just look, LOOK I ask you, look, by contrast, at what Mankind has done.
Look then, anyway, at the big picture. What sense does it make to consider 'Religion', with all its tenets and proclamations, to be serving only the individual? It makes no sense at all. I had a brother-in-law who used to say I was the most 'haunted' person he'd ever known. He was probably right, I guess, so what. One of the things that most made me that way then, was this concept I just mentioned. No one ever seemed to grasp this; in my eyes they were all cheats and fakes and liars because of it. Perhaps that made me seem haunted, or at least made me what I was. A malcontent? Already bereaved and angered by that? You've got 'religion', in all its facets, that teaches Salvation, Deliverance, Comfort, Love, Brotherhood, Selflessness, and all the rest. What it's most intent upon, when it's brought right down to its essence, is that one, single person's personal Salvation, personal path, to 'Heaven'. For his or her self. It all comes down to a big silence - don't let the secret out of the bag. 'We don't care about no one else.' All the doctrines and practices and tenets of 'Religion' (which is all a made-up scrum of ineptitude anyway, I advance) preach one thing - and even, with some audacity drag their own constructed God figure into the demands and enforcement of it, actually 'quoting' and proclaiming that God said this - and that one thing is a personal and individual Salvation. In turn, now, really, isn't that at odds entirely with the actual overall play of the church and the credo? Sensibly, following their logic, would it not be far better, and make more sense, to have a religion that proclaims that ONE person, doing it for his or her self, can then do it for all - that a personal Salvation would save the world and all its creations. That the essence of the religion would be that, at the 'conclusion' of this dedicated drama, the individual who had 'saved' his or her self would, as well, have saved it for everyone else and that even the sinners would be forgiven and entered into this Heaven? Would not that be more satisfying for the little game they've contrived and are playing? Wouldn't it not be more generous and giving, rather than having a game played one way all the way to the end, whereupon the rules are suddenly changed and only an 'elect' are allowed 'in' and the rest (suddenly) be uncharacteristically damned. FOREVER, no less. I mean, really 'forever'? What the fuck is 'forever' anyway? It's Man made concept, with Time being used about something that is, obviously 'out of time' and fer removed from iy. Do they mean 'outside' of time, which is but a construct meant to bolster the edifice of all the rest of the fiction? There is, sorry, no Reality, and nothing actually exists. That which you put your hand upon is the illusion you've bought.
In foolish contrast to this was the world I was in : mothers and fathers dutiful and silent about their habits, their churchgoing and their beliefs. During my early years it was, at least, a different world, one made a bit strange by the fact that all of this was at least kept one step away, made special and strange - Dads and Moms dressed up for church, looked or tried to look successful, pleased and happy - business suits, hats, clothes and shoes. Nowadays it's all been dragged down to a foolish level of informality, making it even worse - trying to make it colloquial. Shorts and sandals, old pants and comfortable clothes, as if the church stop was a moment on the way to the beach or to a party. No one gives a petty care to what they do, but they do it anyway. Seems to me that if one is going to go through with this sham it should at last be done with some serious intent and purpose. None of these idiots anyway get the ideology. Know not the history or progression of that which they are purporting to profess by their presence. And presence alone is what it is. Going through the motions...of something. The rest be damned.
It's mostly death, weddings, baptisms and that sort of thing to which people adhere for their church business anyway - it's disquiet, it's unease. In much the same way as it can be said that the 'bigger' the wedding, the more spectacle attached, the more unease there is with the bride's, or at least her parents', idea of Sex. Their little daughter being taken. That still causes a lot of people a lot of pain - and the idea of spectacle supercedes the idea of 'happy-party to show our happiness'. No matter.
Much of religion is ethnic. Small-village stuff, old-world hill country. It's medievalism as such. It has no place in a 'modern' world, one which willingly comports itself in every way, shape and form in an opposition to any tenets of any religion - to the extent of murder and mayhem, killing and war, done in its name. Their ideas of the 'sacred' are laughable.
80. It's funny how the mind remembers things. Later on, far past the time, I suddenly find myself remembering things, of no real import, from youth. The stuff I did yesterday, still and quite vivid, is always there, but this other material seems to float up, through some chinks or cracks in the armor, and resurface all these years later without any real control by me over or upon it. I don't feel compromised by this, it just makes me quite curious - what's going on, what's underway. My own theory (unfortunately) is that while the mind slowly deconstructs itself, begins falling slowly apart, it fragments things, sets them loose, and they somehow filter up and out, or whatever directional imperative the mind uses. One of the fine uses of being a writer, after many years and much intent practicing of the craft - prose, poetry, stories, memoirs, what have you, even drawing captions - is that these can be savored, examined, listened to and used and re-crafted. It's only the idiot who loses it altogether, the babbling old-timer with abstracted and loose memories swiftly blasting off into the ether. What is this life anyway, perhaps, but an unconscious mixing of all these blasted-off pieces of other people's life re-made into the contortions we then find ourselves dealing with - the meanings and definitions of our everyday existences. I don't know. I actually don't think it is so, but so what? My own memories - a different category - I accept and deal with. Luis Aparicio, I believe of the Baltimore Orioles, about 1958, and another Aparicio, a brother, maybe a Ken, somewhere else, playing. The two Boyer brothers; Ken, a third baseman of renown for the NY Yankees in that same period, right up to the 60's, early, and his brother too, Ken, playing somewhere else. Minnie Minosa, Moose Skowren, Lew Burdette, of the Pittsurgh Pirates, I think. A vicious World Series sometime back about then too, Pirates and Yankees, '58, again I don't know, where many of these names clashed. Some sort of epic baseball battle. Red Shoendienst, Ted Klazewski and Don Clendenon. Like a baseball card hall of fame, or a gum-flat assortment of names and ideas, all this sticks around. I don't know why. Names linger. Not just baseball either. Bernard Baruch, Adlai Stevenson, dying on the street in London, I think; Robert Lowell, dying in a taxicab, I think. Hemingway, blowing his brains out. Christine Keeler, some British sex scandal, John Profumo. It's a riot. It's upon everything - my own life a wild, blown-out assortment of abstracted names and beings seen only by a child, but somehow absorbed. Marianne Moore at her endless Mets games. I could go on; but I'll simply stop myself right here. I'm sure you too have your own lists. It's like, as a youngster sick in my parent's bed and home from school for some days, I'd drag down the huge family bible, all those glossy and idealized pictures and stories, and get to portions of Genesis and other places which were nothing but lists and lists of names and begots and begats. I never understood that stuff; wanted to jump and run. But I can see the precise, infantilism involved just as much as not. A determination to make valid the claims and lineages of the people within the story the narrative of which you were trying to control. One has to show complete and exact mastery of name and place and subject in order to make convincing twaddle instead of just twaddle. I read once where novelists, it was said, go through old graveyards finding names for their characters. Maybe that's true, there are some good ones and some ordinary ones too - but mostly they are, in fact, pretty dated. I can't remember the last 'modern' book I read with a character named, say, Jedediah, though there is Jedediah Purdy to reckon with, even if he's not a 'character'. Maybe a run through old baseball rosters would work just as well. Except for the weird nicknames, things like Pee Wee and Speedy and Gopher and Lick.
I always sort of lived my life outside of definitions, and I never knew why. It wasn't the sort of thing I could put my finger on. When people died, I never missed them. I could never get involved with people's illnesses or sorrows. Just didn't matter to me, wasn't real, had no 'necessity'. As a youngster I could blow all that off, run right by it; but later on as I grew older I started wondering about it, why it as so. I may have mentioned already - I actually do forget - by one time I somehow managed to say something to my father like 'all the good people are dead', or something like that. He'd asked who it was that I had regard for, or something. He couldn't figure that out at all, but he too just let it go. What I meant to say was that it seemed to me that any people of real import - the ones with the 'ideas' and things by which we'd built society, had already all long ago died. He sort of took it as an affront to those living, as if I was beholden to them, I was duty-bound to respect and select someone from among the living with whom to gauge the bywords of my time. He always took everything wrong, and got offended by everything, or so it seemed. And maybe, just as well, I always said everything wrong. Anyway, I hated the world and just wanted to run and hide - which is sort of how I ended up in the seminary.
When I got there, everything seemed different. It seemed sacred and holy, secretive and quiet, reserved and reclusive. It seemed, at the least, to be a place which allowed and expected an interior life and gave over long periods of time for which to have that happen. I'd never seen that anywhere else. All the other fictive stuff of which we were supposed to believe and fall all over ourselves with, that was okay, doing all that was easy enough and passable. It was a trade-off that never bothered me. I'd never seen anyplace else that didn't mind if you went inside, way inside, yourself - and they'd allow you to use any excuse of 'religious' purpose to get away with it. It was like a philosophy book always open - no one knew what I was ever 'really' thinking; they all just figured I was within the program and thinking all that crap through. Fact was, I couldn't have cared less for all that rosary and Holy Mary and sacred heart and Jesus the Savior stuff. They were always going on about something - downright pitiful and stupid mostly - but I could just let it roll through me without too big a fuss. And it wasn't even that I was thinking of girls - that wasn't so difficult to forget about, even though I did think about them, in a simple way. What can you expect when this place was way out in the sand-woods of a faraway pineland and there'd be girls' underwears and bras and stuff hanging from trees, as I did already mention, signifying some local boy's Saturday night car-conquest of some girl's virtue. The rules of the boy's clubs were that you hung her panties on a branch of the tree where you'd had her. Weird, frightful custom, but, whatever. I guess some girls just brought spares since they already knew this stuff was going to happen. We track-team runners and meditative walkers and wanderers through the woods, or at least me, had a hard enough time figuring out the 'virgin' in Virgin Mary, and then that difficulty was compounded by these spectacles defaming all our ideas of what was really 'Life' and its Godly happenings. What a bungle it all was. And then, to make it worse, we'd have to learn about the 'Passion' of Christ and recite 'ejaculations' - what the hell? What was a kid to do?
It soon enough worked its way through. They'd figure I was dwelling on Christ or something and I'd be going over in my head the most recent something else I'd read (thank God for their library, ironically) - The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, comes to mind. I'd be balancing Salem Witch Trial stuff with what was supposed to be the 'Good' parsons and religious folk of that time, the saintful twist of American history and all the weirdnesses just seeping out its pores. It was all different than Doctrine and the professed catholic believes put forth around me - it was erratic, and extreme. Just like I wished to be. The story lines never matched the pabulum which was made of them for mass consumption - Sunday magazine crap about America's unblemished rightness. It was mostly apparent to anyone who looked how wrong it all was and how bad it was going. Once the first crack shows up in the belief-wall, it sure enough begins spreading quickly and widely. This country had never been straight and placid and logical. These people, those before us, they stank and were mean and ugly and shot and killed for principle. They faced nasty hardship and unbound toil and sorrow. Nothing of which - and I mean nothing - the modern, 1960's fool American could do or withstand or put up with. There was some real nasty shit back then - the goings-on were pitifully snaky and shrewd, tough, angular, nasty, coarse. The material which was being peddled, by contrast, was mass-consumption bullshit pushed by huge corporate power-staffs and idiotic politicians and control-freaks and school boards and company heads to conceal their takeovers and manipulations of society - for the benefit of profit, gain, and their own exalted money and status. Stockholders. Military machines. God-awful stuff everywhere, and it was all then just beginning. By the time of Kennedy's open-car assassination it was, for all practical purposes, already gone. Over, and done with too. All that was left to us was aftermath. (I was stunned, a few years later when, of all things, the Rolling Stones titled one of their 60's era record albums 'Aftermath').
As you leave New Jersey, at the bottom of the New Jersey Turnpike - the 'seemingly lawless' NJ Turnpike, where 85mph is pretty much a norm - a sign greets drivers just after exiting : 'You Have Left the NJ Turnpike, Obey Local traffic Laws'. On the Turnpike, one of the more interesting aspects of a supposedly 'democratic' society: nullification. When enough people decide that a law (like a speed limit) doesn't jibe with the way they want to live, they collectively ignore it. A federal judge is reported to have once said that the great risk of bringing moonshiners to trial in his district was jury nullification. ('The burden of proof may be met, a crime clearly committed,, but the members of the jury will exercise their right to disregard that law and acquit the defendant regardless, because they just don't care.'). It's something like that with ideas - or it was for me. I nullified any of them I wished, or even any part of them. As soon as I realized that what was being peddled to me, taught to me, professed in 'truth' as such, was mostly bunko, mostly just a means of keeping - in this case me - in control, under duress, and 'in stir', as it's put, I ditched it. I nullified all that was around me. Imagine a 16-year old kid doing that! It was dangerous, lonesome and stark. It almost drove me mad. School was prison, and I was just completing a 12-year sentence, done cruelly and insensitively, to me. Nullification could be a great thing - I'd like to nullify plenty of stuff : the church, the IRS, the American bullshit system, big government, little government, big corporations, little corporations, anything grouped for the pursuit of money, live people and dead people too. Hell, nullification is a great thing. I'd like to nullify hundreds of things, as I said - the military, the IRS, small-time thinking, big corporations, little corporations, any groups put together in the pursuit of money, education, schooling, the rational way of thinking, churches, police, coercion - but that's all enough of that. How much more simple it all would be if that were so, if the individual had the power of one, so to speak. There are, of course, entire schools of self-help and new thought which proclaim this stuff (yes, of course, for money and fees), which proclaim you can 'actualize' your dream and wishes into reality, producing wealth and fame and riches only if done according to their precepts and thought, helping you 'actualize' what you wish for. More vapid stuff I've never heard. I remember one time, at my Aunt Anna's once, with family members all in attendance - for some event or another (uncomfortable, creaky, rough, yes) my one-time brother-in-law was there, a creature by the name of Nick, having just done EST or something, or at least talking blowhard stuff about it. My Bertrand Russell fan aunt fell right into this stuff, going on and on about how wonderful 'transformation' was and the rest. I took the bait and started destroying verbally all that was around us. I asked my aunt to prove to me that that telephone on the table was really 'there'; that it even existed, that it was connected to 'anything' at all. Outlandish premise, outlandish challenge, yes, to be sure, and stupid, but I primly won the moment - which was all I really wished for. The conversation stopped, fell into a desultory morass. Reflections upon reality. No one thought to take that black phone and hit me over the head with it, throw it at me, to actualize what it was, its presence : three-dimensional hard object which could, by those terms, pretty much prove itself into existence, or at least into my own realization of its existence by the lump on my head or the stitches in my scalp. But no one did. Any approach to these sorts of ideas can only, eventually, turn mean. I still say nothing exists, and I'd defend that to the hilt, and most craftily too. (By the way, this was an old-style, 1970's land-line bulky, physical-object desk-top telephone, probably weighing in at about 5 or 6 pounds. You don't see much of them any more, years later now). Speaking of 'actualization', what is a liar anyway except someone who is intent on actualizing the lie they're peddling? It's pretty much the exact same thing - a really good liar has it all worked and framed out perfectly, that what he or she says, or puts forward as their proposition, the 'lie', so to speak, actually is, actually comes to be. Convincingly, the liar has already willed into actualization what he's said. There are so many interesting variations on this - and, as a writer, I've realized the guilt of it in many of the things I do. In order to 'write' convincingly, does one not have to, first, 'lie' convincingly, at least to oneself. In order to write about the stretched-out hobo I've seen on 14th Street I have to, by need, describe and explain a premise, a situation, portray a scene, etc. And it all needs be done in the most convincing, or nearly convincing manner, in order for the reader to ascribe some form of 'truth' to what I've written. Yes. But, not having been there, not having viewed that 'scene', it's essentially all a lie albeit one made up and filled in by me alone. So, carry it forth : all writers are liars. Posing that as a question, I'd say no. There are writers who cannot lie very well at all. It's called being a bad writer. I guess.
When I was young, I used to read most anything I could - I mean everything: product brochures, box labels, can and soup labels, Boy Scout handbooks, church flyers, newspapers, magazines - whatever I could find around me. I loved it. I'd walk a supermarket aisle, as I recall, just gazing at text and product, words and signs and displays. I remember one year (I was 7, by the year), walking along some food aisle and seeing the product line of relishes or mustards or something, for Heinz. Back then it was called, the company name, 'Heinz 57' - that was the actual company name they used. I guess they had 57 products or something. But, anyway, in seeing this, at that time, which was as I said 1957, I thought they changed that each year, so that there had been a Heinz 56 and would be a Heinz 58. Turned out I was wrong. Heinz 57 was their name. I don't know if they actually still use that or not. Another time, I remember when Kellogg's Special K was introduced, something around the same time, maybe 1958 or so, and some guy was waking along with another person, next to me, down the cereal aisle, and his attention was caught by the new product - he said to his companion - 'Hey, look at this, something new, Kellogg's Big K.' He called it Big K, and, yes, the 'K' was a large, red 'K' that did jump out at you, visually. But he ignored the scripted word, in black, 'Special' in front of it. Calling it 'Big K' instead. that struck me as really odd. It's stayed with me all these years, both of these instances I've mentioned, the Heinz 57 and the Big K. What does that mean? Is there some inscripted, internal equilibrium of 'Language' that has me caught up? Am I different in this respect from other people. Is that part of an ingrained 'writer's gift', the evidences of which have driven and directed me to this very (late) day?
81. I began writing at an early
age, I mean early, like age 10. It took. But I never really became a writer
until just recently - well, a decade or two, a few years back. That happened
after a long while, and a long while after I became, as well, a 'reader'. You
can't be a writer without being a reader. I don't mean one of those chumps or
chumpettes who are all over the place with their poems and stories of the
beleaguered broken heart, the self-centered and self-absorbed centurion of their
own hurts and feelings, dealing with nothing but their angst and tears and pain.
Loves lost. The result and struggle of fearsome hot sex, grim irony under the
delicious covers, hurt, pain, loss, abandonment, and all that. That's all
bullshit; it's emotion recollected emotionally and with, as it were, all the
pangs of a young girl's pining and broken heart. Men writing as girls would
write. Girls being girls with wet eyes. Or writing about snows and bluebirds,
slings and happiness, songs and the singing of songs. I mean, instead a 'writer'
and a 'reader' of a centered and deepened intelligence - replete with
referential whisperings and the allusion of other things of, oftentimes, far
greater worth. A pulling from the past, of ideas and feelings and activities and
happenings. Seen in reflection, newly put. This is - what I'm speaking of
here - material that never stands alone, so to speak. Each word and sentence,
every premise draws along with itself the referential broader picture, the
endless, by which so many things are connected. You, in that sense, can't really
just 'stake out' new territory and call it your own. ('That's not writing,
that's typing', as Truman Capote once indecorously put it in a really negative
reference to Kerouac). That's what makes a writer, and you cannot attain that
without first being a reader. They both take a long time and a lot of reflection
along the way. Reading, of course is one thing; real reading is another thing
entire.
Most of -
or much of anyway - the 'Reading' industry, the publishing field, has been
turned to slander and pulp. Junk volumes, made up to sell - smarmy, artificial
things, replete with all what's needed to titillate, entice, bring the reader
in, and, alas, proclaim much of nothing. Hand in hand with the movie and
entertainment industries, they move along. Again and again, and dangerously, I
find myself saying this - but look over very carefully what you see, the
names, the rankings of people and titles, the audacity of the very stink of the endeavor, and I truly believe,
you'll see the root of the problem. And the root of the problem of much of our
country, quite frankly, is the 'people' who make up this and other industries.
Historically, and now. That's all I'm allowed to say, because - yes, they own
the issue and control the narrative on that one.
'I like to
look at people's faces when they are waiting. Things we used to wait for : the
news, mercury in a thermometer to rise, letters from overseas, boats to come in
from whaling expeditions, the fifth act, the fifth course, a phone to ring, a
tape to rewind. And if waiting is lost, then with it are all the unconscious
processes that take place during waiting to get lost. And then we might see the
death of the unconscious and the death of culture?' Yes! And I say, 'Luxury is
nice, but creativity is nicer.' I'm not sure anymore who wrote that first quote,
or the what or the who of what they were referring, but I always liked it -
'the things we used to wait for.' Really nice.
Most men
of assumptions speak first, think only later. It's not as difficult to stop that
habit as it may seem. Yet, in fact it's easier for the herd, at most a moment's
displeasure, to just keep it rolling along. I have tried in a million ways to go
over and over the things of all my days, and what's left is a startling mass of
moments - things piled up which only now I sift through and find many of those
'assumptions' which went with them still fighting to get out. But I've overcome
a lot of that - believe me, truly overcome. As I turn my mind inward it seems
that each particularity of what I'd been brought up with had been false or at
least false to the effect that it first demanded the adoption of false premises
by which it was undergirded. And none of that has ever stopped, only gotten
worse. Because of it, I have a million enemies, demons, spectres which still
haunt. I admit to that - but I also own up to the fact that my own life has
been a constant re-alignment of these things. All the usual psychological
components of clinical behavior, perhaps, but one of those people, I'm not
(psychology types [see 'How I Began Writing Drama']). I was brought up -
rather distastefully - in a home with an atmosphere where there was not much
of anything except sentiment. It was an 'Italian Catholic' mileau, if those
nettlesome words need be applied. But it was way more than that. It was two
people (my parents) yet embroiled in their own overwhelming adventures and
personal almost horrific scenes, trying to get through all of that but having to
ignore most of the 'real' aspects of that as they pressed in. There was never
any self-reflection or rejection - they bought into and went along with all of
what they'd been somehow presented with as the right way and the correct route.
There are millions of ways to interpret a rejectionist's life. They had both
been rejected, for sure. A rejectionist is someone trying to fight their way out
of the middle of vast confusion, but having or allowing no other means to do so
except by reaction. They sought after no learning, they delved after no deeper
threads. They accepted the life they'd been handed as being of a part and parcel
with 'tradition' - a tradition of racial characteristics, old European
geography. They considered it all valid. What a 'rejectionist' never realizes is
that the 'society' they're so set after achieving does not want them - spews
them out like dirt, in turn only rejects them again - messes with their heads,
takes their money hand over foot, breaks up their time with rules and
regulations, sessions of this and that, calendar blocks of time, scheduled
plans, boilerplats formats of social and political belief; all while convincing them that this is
not so. They are always confused, not knowing where to turn. Not realizing there
is nowhere to turn except within. And within equals the Kierkegaardian sense of
dread and fury and might : the decisiveness of singularity. Singularity must be
achieved first, ahead of
and before anything else - because it invalidates any and all of the previous
characteristics I've just mentioned, which are merely thr characteristics of
control and duplicitous autocracy. A Dictatorship of the Ridiculous Folly.
Politics is certainly not the answer - though those who profit from politics
try with all their might to drag you in and think that it is. Consumerism is not
the answer - that's more control and more uselessness. Having a good time,
being entertained, is not the answer - though that's mostly all of what's
thrown at you : inanity, idiocy, stupidity, race, sex, perversion, acceptance.
You are given no choice except the societal choice of going along. My parents,
helpless as they were - nay, primitive as they were - were more like
cave-people in a diorama within some deep and dank museum somewhere, wondering
what that distant thing called 'fire' was that they'd glimpsed; still painting
their own frail pictures on dark cave walls, they were yet set adrift, lost and
functioning slightly on the tundra and the plains and steppes of a brave
now world, to them. But, like so, so
many others, even today, they never made the leap, found the manner by which to
surpass, to best and overcome, all that was holding them down. The one, vast
myth of empowerment and overcoming, which was presented to them and which they
readily accepted, was more control and regulation and stipulation in the
mega-guise of 'Religion'. The bifurcation of their lives had been broken down
into two absolutes - the sacred or the profane, the secular and the religious
- as if there was to be any difference at all. They bought into all of this,
each delicious but foul and poisonsous morsel. Somewhere in the midst of this,
came I. It's been said in magical circles that we only know a minute portion of
reality, that we are greater and grander than anything we can imagine, and the
we 'choose' our family and situation for the psychic-adventure values they will
bring - all known about beforehand, all readied for, and all accepted
previously. No undue surprises, just what I've always termed, in my years of
writing, 'Lesson Learning Catching Up With Itself.' That's worked for me.
Perhaps then, if we choose it, I had chosen this thin branch on which to try to
stand. Who knows? And I'll never know, because it's part and parcel of the
doing, the not-knowing. I came, I somehow survived, and I got here. All of my
steps were put before me - of which you've been reading some here. Infancy as
a blur, a muddle, a story-line repeated back to me. I know nothing of it.
Whatever small, internalized memories I may have of things, start well after
that - the scrapbooked reality of infancy and toddler years somehow muddied or
yet blurred, if ever there at all. Maybe waiting to pounce back at me and all
recur in those famed 'reviews' of the last moments of Life - on the way out, a
distant movie for the final flight.
Language
becomes the gift that never stops giving, though devilish as it is it can
destroy as well. In my parents' household, in Avenel, in fact, language was a
stepchild of nothing at all. No care was taken, nor given, to words, nor to the
structure of things to which words can lead - the articulation of ideas and
internality, the revocation of the 'rejectionism' fabric so easily accepted. My
house, the place in which I was raised, only had language as utility and
message - the to-do's and when's and how's of things. Many people commented
upon my father's brawn, his muscularity - back then - and how he got things
done; throwing spadefuls of dirt around, cutting wood, building things, altering
the 'scape, as it were. That was, for his time, his own communion with the
world - though unknown to him. His physicality was his response somehow to the
void. The nagging void of the absence of language. There was nothing finer than
base. Hammers, saws, dirt, chisels, concrete and lumber. It was all of one
contingent. When he was up against the opposite of that - as I mentioned long
ago - those neighbors who walked home from the trains, with their overcoats
and briefcases and tophats (few those these neighbors were) he harbored anxiety,
professed a hatred, swore off them and their effete ways. It was instant, the
response didn't even take a minute to boil before brimming over. I always
thought of it as his reaction to language, or against language. Stupid on my
part, yes, but as a ten year old, or whatever, what else was I to condition my
response as? He wanted me to be like him? In his revolt and festering anger at
the scenes around him, he sought to duplicate me into another version of himself
- shouting down or belaboring points of distinction between 'world' and
'theory'. To him, the world was this harsh terrain he dealt in.
To him, the 'others' represented theory - those who did not dig and cut and struggle and fight. You may not understand or agree with what I'm stating here, but through the eyes of 'me', the representative atom in this quest of self, that's what it always appeared as. To fight back, my father would build - massively overbuilt things, yes, but he built. Piles of lumber turned into cornices and shevles and alcoves. Sheds and doorways. Cellar entrances and overhangs and eaves and shelters. Fences. In somewhat a fury, he built single-handidly back-room extensions, six-room attics, complete hallways and cedar closets. It just went on. He simply translated the world into 'things'. I was speechless, mostly, never knowing what to say - certainly not to offer an object-lesson in alternatives. By age eleven or twelve, there was no real alternaitve for me but to leave. I had to get out of the stifling atmosphere into which I'd been placed, showing no alternatives, allowing nothing else. I did not want that form of life. Simply knew I did not. My reality I'd already encrypted, and it included (already, early on) words and books and booklets and information and writing, colors and forms, finesse and gradation. I was up against a solid wall, totally, and I knew it. A writer named Mary Jo Bank put it like this once : 'It's like sleep if sleep were a film that didn't include you, but no, whatever is happening, you are always in it, the indispensible point of view.'
I think it all has to do with what you care to believe; from top to bottom, that's the essential point. It just goes on from there. Here's a for-instance in, even, the present day : deep Autumn, ten million morons, in the name of their 'ecology' awareness and drive, raking leaves, endlessly blowing them, noisily piling them with enormous leaf-blowers, hiring endless landscape companies with marginal employees slaving away to keep yards cleared and looking perfectly serene. It's a mad-person's paradise, of course, totally off the wall, and un-natural as all get out. The leaves are meant to fall, decompose, become the composted and enriched soil for the future, the loam of Nature's own love. Yet, having been propogandized into believing they only do what they must do - these people expend more energy, at every level, in order to 'supposedly' reach their end-results of a clean ecology - it's asinine. Leaf bags, replete with company names printed on them, corporate monster hardware names and not, are left at curbside for municipal pick-up. The leaf bags themselves are an entire other industry, complete with the processes of the printing and gluing which goes on to make them - an industry which uses endless resources, mechanical and fuel, transport trucks, distribution, etc. Then the municipal trucks and fuel, and wages, which go into the pick-up and drop-off collection places. The endless fuel and travel exploits of the huge landscape trucks, the noise and energy use of the mechanical blowers - etc., etc. I'll stop there. Suffice it to say, without even a thought, this endeavor is everywhere undertaken in the name of 'ecology' and 'green' recycling, etc., etc. No one thinks. They all accept, and just go on about their merry, stinking ways. It's all a belief system adopted, and never thought about again. People have been 'told' what to do and, knowingly or not, just accept that. There is no reason for them to allow themselves to be convinced of things, be turned into consumers, buy premises of falsehood lock, stock, and barrel (a good, old firearms reference), get suckered into believing that - through media assault - they'd be salvaging and promoting the environment by enlisting themselves into the mass-effort of gobbling up resources to do so. Completely senseless, but no one thinks. And somewhere, some chucklehead corporate type is taking it all to the bank, and then re-using (the real recycling factor) those funds to promote more waste and destruction, all the while talking the other case.
Mankind, or humankind, was made, was seeded here, as a slave-race. It's never really risen above that. In order to keep that image of liberation and breakaway in check, the usual myths of Being and Life have been pounded into people's heads so as to keep them in place; by kinder means, by different words. The story of The Fall, and all the rest of that - it was all invented and promulgated by scribes - those who once first controlled the language and the recording of same. We've just then gone about our business; assuming, amassing, acquiescing, going along. The 'Gods' in issue here have long ago left us, abandoned this planet and place as the mining efforts of the slave race of ape-men created was no longer necessary. They were done, and their needs of having and using us were done as well. A little tinkering, a few adjustments, and a number of steps up, Humankind was pushed to advance by steps, throiugh strages, Cro-Magnon, Neandrathal, Australeus, etc., into the 'reasoning' creature we are assumed to be today - a long, wearying process, filled with deat, drama, deceit and debacle. And some good things too. You can figure that stuff our for yourselves.
82. Sometimes I think it's all in how you can answer the question 'are you in love with the world?' that designates how we get along and go about our daily occurrences. I know that for myself on many a day the answer for that would have been some sullen form of 'no' but that then there are other days altogether different for which that same question would get a 'yes' answer. Resoundingly, and without any further thought. The seeming idea here is of changeability and the persistence of change running through all things. When I was a kid, looking down or up Inman Avenue (I lived in the middle), I could recite, eyes-clesoed or open, pretty much the car - make, model, and color - of each household and what car should be where, whose car was just visiting, and the rest. detective-like in some stupid and meandering broad-interest, it was observation : all the 1954 and 1957 Dodges and Buicks and Fords, and all the models of same which fell in-between. Each supposedly, in some way, reflecting the income and/or status of the inhabitants of the house connected to the car. (Pretty much an impossible task nowadays, with leasing and easy car-loans having afforded everyone alike the option of essentially buying and driving whatever they feel like, for as long as they wish. It's no longer connected, really, to any other indicative signifier at all). Then, as 1958 broke, came the crazed preponderance, suddenly, of 'dual headlight' cars - a new and more powerful motif that, along with the bizarre style renovations of that era, suddenly made it look as if everyone had a crazed, dragon-like warship in their driveways or out front of their houses. And then the snows would come, reinforceing the bizarre shapes and forms of each design and fin and tail and nose, with bulbous, bizarrely infracted drifts of snow seemingly violating yet still clinging to each design and form. It was difficult to pin down, and more difficult to put into words. By 1960, a memory that stays with me as well is that of myself and a few friends draped over one of my father's '53 Fords, parked in the street, and just langorously watching a new car, 1960 something, waddle it way down the street - all those inglorious curves and swoops and angles - this was the same day, as I can recall, that the news broke that Adolph Eichmann had been rounded up and captured in Argentina and taken to Israel for trial or death. I recall our joking asides about 'Whew, that's over; we no longer need to worry.' Meaningless prattle, but meant as a joke about no longer having to worry about concentration-camp round-ups. Dumb kids. (Eichmann was finally hanged in 1962).
Out of any context, of course, none of this makes any sense, but that's what it all was, actually. 'Context'. For Avenel came without any, we had to make our own. Just as all those cars in the driveways and streets would be constantly changed over time, so too the world around all of us, the context of the brittle lives were were leading or being given, would also change. Newer cars, different schools, even different mothers and fathers, sometimes - though that was still rare - divorces and broken families not yet having set in so much. Like the leasing and the driving of cars, that too evolved over the years into a spectacular ease, a simple 'no problem' to be dealt with. Again, that was context - and it was all out before us, the things we hadn't yet faced. The vast compromises and needs and desires of Sex, with a capital 'S', and all the things that would be done for and with it. And because of it.
My 'yes' answer to the question here originally posed, when 'yes' would be the answer, I decided was actually the situation I'd prefer to be in - in 'love' with life, as it's put - without any further thought; spending the bulk of my time in that operating condition because it makes all the other things move along much more freely and happily. It's like suddenly being liberated from a cramped, stuffy room all cluttered and falling down with things and being out instead into some more airy and free-lit space in which each item is placed carefully and separately and unequivocally out for what it is - authentically and with each its own 'perfect' qualities instead of the sham and expectation-fulfillment that so often goes into the ruining and soiling of pure life and the unlimited appeal of creativity. Why most people - and why more people - don't ever understand this baffles and confuses me. They instead fall easily into the same pitfalls and openings that have gobbled so many others up. Unthinkingly, without fail, and - certainly - without reflection. The feeling of 'yes' here is of much order and much clarity - there's a spatial difference which somehow reflects back upon the quality of that same space, and it's NOT that I'm ever a big fan or 'order' if it's just for order itself (I'm not) but instead I mean the order-through-grace which comes when correct things just correctly fall into place and the soul somehow knows it. It cannot be planned, yet serendipitous does not describe it either : it's more like a NASA shot, when a million variables, high-intensity things, heat, flames, fire, chemistry, flow, resistance, power, speed, electronics, ignition, thrust, space, movement, cargo, emissions, radio-signals, and the rest - when they all come together, combined in their own life-moment span of interacting and working together and within each other, combining qualities and transferring evidences and signals, one to the other. Perhaps (only, perhaps) that's what I'm trying to sum up with the ideas presented here of place and new place and change and context. The 'new' and jumbled mass of 'Avenel', the no-place in time of our childhoods.
In some ways an interesting corollary with which to exemplify this is the building of a new highway, a 'scenic' highway along the bluffs and ridges atop or alongside rivers - this happens now in lots of places; you can stop, pull over, and use the viewing points for the 'scenery' before or below you - and you know as you're passing that this is all engineered and cleared and laid out and paved with the most rigorous and strict ideas of line and angle, but at the same time affording the enfused force of 'openness' and vista which 'Nature' brings forth (in spite of all else, in spite of, even, the roadway affording you this supposed view). It all bespeaks of the paradox it is - you simply 'feel' what's happening and what's passing in spite of the fact of all the industrial power and might behind it, and the 'awe' that too would bring. As if there was a difference? Should there be difference? In each case, the 'awe-inspiring' veneration of what's before you should come to the fore and take precedence - no matter whether Nature or Industry, they both present the same show.
Being a youngster in a place like Avenel, there was little to follow - it's as if, one day, you simply awake to something else and accept it fully. Upon first arrival, the yards of these new homes weren't yet finished. Out behind our house, for instance, were jagged, bulldozed hills and piles of raw dirt, trunks and broken chunks of trees, tees I guess that had recently been cut and dragged. I don't recall a thing - neither any of this being an obstacle to us, not how and when it eventually got cleaned up, straightened around and planted with seed. From all this, eventually, came the long rectangles of each yard, the right-angled corners, and after that the fences and hedges and things which were put in. And that was only the back. The fronts, I remember nothing about. Seventy feet or so behind the rear property line, all along the row of homes on my side, ran the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks - the 'Bayshore Local' trains, a major-enough adjunct of the mainline, from Rahway right down the the Jersey Shore, the Bayhead Local - which stopped at places like Woodbridge, the Amboys, Red Bank, etc., all the way down to Bayshore, last stop on the line. After crossing the Raritan River between Perth Amboy and South Amboy, the later-electrified trains, heading south, would revert back to the older steam locomotives. When we first moved to Inman Avenue, the trains passing by our back yard were all still steam trains - it was quite a thrill, if you would imagine, to hear the chug-chug of the approaching locomotive and the vast, heavy cloud of smoke it brought along - a cloud of smoke that would spread and float along, each time, dropping small particulates onto everything. The smoke went 'up' as well as it spread 'out', and was quite an exciting sight. People complained right from the start : laundry on the lines would get blemished, people talked endlessly their car-finishes getting stained and marked - soot, hot cinders, ash. As kids, of course, none of that was our concern and we'd run with the cloud as it spread and rose over everything, until dissipated. It was a moment, just something 'new' to do. I know that I'd never seen anything like it before, and neither had the others. We regaled in it - and then about 1958, perhaps, the line was fully electrified (at least until South Amboy, where they were still switching over to other engines (steam) into the 1970's at least).
I was mentioning 'context' just a minute ago. One aspect of the context I was put into here, on Inman Avenue, and one which you'd never really have thought of, was this 'railroad' context. Living with the trains, the railroad in the yard aspect, was 'context' for sure. I don't know how it was for others - what items caught their eyes or which objects bore their attentions - but for me, from this constant experience, it was the railroad and the trains. Various images and concepts stay with me, to this day, from it : there was a massive sense of solidity, a strong idea of 'scoiety' having a constant context of its own into which peoeple were always throwing themselves and for which these 'trains' were in service. I'd see the commuter cars rolling by, at night and - in Fall and Winter - during commuter times in the dark too, and they'd be lit from within. Small white lights passing, little fixtures, and near each fixture a head or two of passengers within. Fixed objects on a moving scrim - a passage by which travel and work and jobs and achievements and progress were somehow seen to take place. These were committed people, set in their elaborate ways to proceed with their lives and take part in the rotating 'maw' of business and society. I knew no one at all, knew nothing about these people, but instantly sensed I could read them and knew exactly what they were doing. They didn't need to speak, they didn't even need to look my way - heads down, reading their Life or Look magazines, book, or Saturday Evening Posts, I had them both sighted and cited. Notation and reference. I knew them all. This was their life, the big sprawl of place and activity - this was 'what it was all about' - how people lived their lives. If I climed a tree, a big oak tree at the end of the yard, overlooking the tracks, I could make out, in the distance, and especially clearly on clear days, the skyline and details of New York City - the spires and sprawl of 1958 Manhattan. It was incredible to me. I somehow always connected this to the train - long time ago I stopped climbing that tree, but I did so at least until 1961 and it was always the same (I had made a plywood platform, a treehouse of sorts, 3/4's of the way up that easy-to-climb tree - limbs, and some step boards hammered into the trunk - always within easy access, for escape). And I did so. Below me, the trains would pass, going this way or that, one or the other, and above it all I'd have, as well, the vista - a silvery, shimmering cityscape on the not-so-distant horizon. I all felt right. I knew I'd get there one day, one way or the other. Perhaps that really was my 'context', given to me so as to constantly goad me on to other things, always hanging out there for me, the 'otherness' of the real world - out there, a bit farther, but just a bit. Like some jagged emerald city, it always had me in its tug.
83. So, then, trains
and distance, context and place - they each have a place in my growing up,
even without importing the idea that a train is what interrupted my life for a
portion of itself - over the years I've read hundreds of things about this.
How 'accidents' are psychic valleys into which the greater 'Self' draws the
lower self, the earth-body, into an experience for a reason, something to be
worked out, something from which other ideas are to be taken. I do not know.
What they're saying is that - at some, probably unreasonable, level, I caused
it to happen to myself - not the little 7 or 8 year old me, but the greater
'Me' of the ageless plains (or planes) of time. In so selecting an experience I
was choosing what to undergo, to what extent to undergo it, and how to
experience it and, in turn, what to take away from it. If I say I believe this,
it's not because I want to, If I say I do NOT believe this, it's not because I
DON'T want to - those are human and language value terms and they have no part
here in this conversation. As the person involved here, I will have to say that
- all my life - I've been aware that there has and had to be a reckoning of
this item. It couldn't just be ignored. Ignoring it, at my own peril, would be to have a dire effect - as if I had selected to ignore fate and just went along on
my own. In those dark moments of 'time' since than I do know that I've walked my
way through these questions, and they've accounted for a lot of my misery - not
being able to precisely dial in what others are saying or doing, having constant
trouble with the pre-selected 'concepts' by which others live their lives - my
own not sharing those concepts and therefore not quite being in sync with the
world around me and all its premises. I was, for a while, desperate in trying to
find a way around or past this - seminary, concepts of Self and Religion, the
stories of Humanity and Mankind and all those fates and spirits. Suffice it to
say that the difficulty I've lived with has been the difficulty of seeing
anything in a one-dimensional manner - the comforting manner, the sort of
manner that brings you friends and happy acquaintances and experiences, the
stuff from which success and business and money comes. I simply cannot do it,
never have been able. Do not speak the tongue. I have found that the underlying
premise of all things is a lie - a token lie but a lie nonetheless; an
erroneous premise that is just taken on, assumed, and worked with and lived
through. Incorrectly. The hard, rough, tumble-down nature of Reality does not
have to be - I'd chosen to be smashed by the iron and steel and power and
pressure of a smelted and refined world, embodied by the term of the word
'locomotive' - as if I myself had selected for the entire world to crack me
upon the head and split aside all preconceived notions. There was nothing left.
I awoke to a far wide and more distant world, with small people still talking at
me, from a distance, and faintly - attempting to explain to me what had
happened and where I'd been and where I was, all the while I already knew all
this and knew, also already, how incorrect they were - how small and
pretentious and incorrect were their dark coats and severe hats, their shows and
implements and cars, the way in which they went about things, the looks in their
eyes, their mis-use of words and the simpleness of their matters. It was all
there, just stretched about before me - in folly, in foolishness. Yet I was
back, but not back to tell them of anything specific - they wouldn't hear or
understand anyway. Just to witness and to take care of the concerns which touched
on me, and not much else. No one would have taken wisdom anyway, from an
eight-year old wounded kid. I knew that. A prophet is not without honor except
in his own country. I knew that too. I couldn't move, but neither could I stay
put.
Most men have incoherent echoes of the
places they've been still resounding around inside their heads. They fill up,
over the course of a lifetime, with more and more as all this gets added to -
but none of the practical value of any one place is ever singled and studied. It
just becomes a mess, and because of it people get distracted and just end up not
knowing what they're even talking about. The distance
between any two places, whether near OR far, are pretty much exactly the same
- why? Because it's ALL a fiction. A momentary and made-up inkling of a graver
and deeper life flowing within. Which eventually just gets ignored; covered in
the welts of fear, repression, regret and distastefulness. Men, all of Mankind I
mean by that, simply do NOT know what to do with any of this. They get lost, are
lost, and stay that way - and eventually compromise themselves backwards into
'Happiness' - the kind of Happiness which bespeaks foolishness - and which
the 'pursuit of' a place such as 'America', this country, fictionalizes into
Dogma. It's all a lie, a fierce facade, a fabrication to cover over crime and
theft and falsehood. Bayonne was a falsehood that had lost its small purpose.
Avenel was a newer falsehood - one built up to attract and catch the simple
mayflies of a different moment who would fly there, which flies it would
attract. It was a weedstock, a denizen of the twisted and the lame. And that's
precisely where I found myself.
Amidst cut trees and soiled waters;
with huge and sundered tree trunks horizontal all over a rubble- strewn and
hilly with junk dirt yard which had not yet even been addressed as 'yard'. It
wasn't Nature - that had long ago been taken from it. It was debris, the cuts and
the pilings of the rabid force that had ripped and torn the land so as to make
something else of it. A patterned collection of cookie-cut sameness. They gave it a
name, after someone's daughter (Avenel). They had taken away from it its more
pointed name, that referential with geography (which was to be no more) name of
'Demorest on the Hilltop'. Too many words. Now meaningless. Throw in some five
thousand cars (a guess), gunny-sack roadways and side-streets, add ten thousand
more people with their own tomes and tones, systems and values, twist it all up,
produce children, make a few schools, open a cobbler shop and a candy store, a
meat-market and a grocer, and maybe a continuation (of course) of a church or
two, and there you have it : good enough anyway back then for the 'present' day
then.
I think I knew, back then, most every
road in the stupid town - bicycle stuff made easy - there weren't too many
mysteries. Here and there, yes, a leftover, lived in but decaying mansion or
something left of a family estate from when this was a woodland, though swampy,
paradise just far enough out in the 'country, in terms of 1890 and 1910 anyway.
They still stood, with their mysterious people and large, black cars. The
brewery family or two from Newark, their estate style homes hidden by large
hedges and grand entryways and doorways. Paths for a driveway. The large,
rambling home within which a murder had been committed, a man had died, never
solved. The moment of strenuous mystery lived on. Far down below, in the lowland
swamps past the prison (the National Geographic Survey elevation plus, in brass,
permanent in the ground - 'Elevation, 13 ft. above sea level'), were still to
be found shanties, and the shacks of the local 'Indians' - natives who'd been
there for generations, still living quietly, plainly and simply, lost in their
own wet woods and marshy scrublands. Nothing there but stories - the same as
the stories up at the houses of the rich people. Stories that were all made up.
We made them up, from tidbits and chinks of stories and words and tales we'd
heard other speaking about. Just like Life itself - no true reality, just
assumptions and stories pieced together and worked over, and then worked on, and
lived by. Appearance was everything, because, beneath it all, nothing was really
sound; just troubled, not sound at all.
If I had to pin a picture on a wall
and say 'this was it', I couldn't. I was between worlds - from age 4 to at
least 12, my place was some sort of in-between, psychic location; a kind of
framing-out job like house construction guys do before risers and all that are
put in. Interiors not yet quite made, just a general idea while the outside is
built, with all its parameters and edges. You do that, over and over, early
enough, to a million people - send them to schools and churches and such -
and it all gets reinforced just fine and you got 'Society'. Just like that -
minds closed, no one budges. That was Avenel, in a nutshell. I always used to
get amazed, too, in the seeing of how - nearby to any of those big, old
mansions of pre-Avenel Avenel, there was always a church - maybe small and not
much at all, but a church. That's how these places began to thrive - the
big-wad neighboring acreage holder, the rich guy with the big house, he starts
seeing what's happening and cedes ten acres maybe over to a local 'church'
entity - allowing them to build and congregate. He gets this convenient
tax-write-off, big time. His family name gets honored, called 'patron' or town
'founding father', whatever. The little church goes on, tax-exempt itself, and
thrives a bit as - coincidentally - the population grows, the development
grows, and all of a sudden you have a town. One to which newcomers keep
arriving. It serves everyone well - the local contractors, the land-owners who
sell woods and fields for great sums, the builders, graders and haulers, who in
their turns, grow quite comfortable as well. Here and there a bank, a service
station, a grocer. Things begin popping up. Everything changes and - before
you know it - no one remembers a thing. Newcomers arrive bearing only their
own baggage, mostly realizing nothing at all about the place which their own new
lives has just supplanted, altered, replaced. As I remember back on this, just as well,
one of the main parts of my memory concerns the leftovers : junk land, refuse,
piles of crap - all left about where no one cared or wanted. Small, odd-shaped
and leftover parcels that became heaps, dumps, places where old things collected
: tires, washers, bikes, carts, wheels wagons, dead and dumped animals. Then,
the next and the companion memory to this is the waste of water. Fetid pools
collect where once a fresh stream or rivulet used to pierce the soil. Water in
varying shades of cloudy green, yellow or just plain smoke-gray begins running,
slowly, where once before a clear and crystal stream had been - feeding trees
and grasses and bushes, making a seasonal pond where skaters would ice-skate or
whatever. A pleasurable spot, over time despoiled. Most of that was Avenel too.
In the years of which I speak, to further underscore the problem, no one gave a
crap about these things. Everything was made up and covered up - DDT sprays
for insect and mosquito control, not much of anything for local wildlife; birds
and ground animals wiped out, a dead, unseasoned Nature starting kids back in
the face - the same kids who then get taken into government schools to be
taught about Nature's goodness and the wonderfulness of American ways which have
brought them to this happy place.
I'd have to say, without compromise,
that's what it was like for me (us) there. A combination of straight-up false
reality, mixed with crankiness and endearment, if you can. The elementary school
principle, a Mr. Lund, who quite specifically and almost perfectly resembled
Dwight Eisenhower (2-term President). His authoritative status came partially
from that and from his tall, commanding position as head of the local school
into which we'd been unceremoniously dumped at age 5. Cast-offs, as it
were, onto a sinking raft but told to, and managing to, somehow stay on and
remain afloat. Life was a big, sidewinder dream, listing and falling off. How is
it that such adults regard these roles and their natural right? What ungainly
creature of thought could this Mr. Lund have been to assume that his role above
us was predicated upon the idea that all his opinions, outlooks, acts and
attitudes were correct and absolute? Where did he live? Where was he from? One
of those old-line big houses around? Or perhaps not even here - instead some
nearby, older town with grand, higher-class habits and livings and homes? We
never knew; nor were we ever 'introduced' to anything about him at that level.
He had one presence and one role in Avenel, and that's how we saw him, and got
him. In a military sense, early on, he was to be - we were told - our
'commander in chief' and no questions asked. It wasn't a world we were
presented, to be given and shared. It was, by contrast, the first of many
'absolutes' which would be forced upon us.
You need to remember that much of this
was 'class'. In a supposed classless society, we were, indeed and anyway,
classed with the riff-raff. Avenel was a low-class town - place, actually,
never even a 'town' to speak of. Instead it was a sort of 'shoreline' onto which
any and all sorts of arrivistes and castaways in those years washed up - the
grinning ex-soldier types, perhaps with yet a piece of shrapnel lodged in the
thigh or back; the heavy hand-laborers, building cars in Linden, or working at
the airport, forging steel or molding glass bottles. Mechanics. Carpenters. The
laborers at Merck or Union Carbide. Township workers, plow-drivers, gas-station
guys. That was the world there and about at first - and only slowly did it
change, and even then never much. Society changed first - there came a time
when - instead of single-family homes - rows of apartments, garden-apartments,
meaning horizontal stacking of people instead of vertical - began cropping up
on the swamplands and fields of my youth. They'd fill up, slowly but eventually,
with a different sort of person, a more temporary presence. One the way to
something else. Asians and people from India, white coat lab-guys, medical
technicians, more scientific types, working in labs and offices in still those
very same places - Union Carbide, Linde, Merck - and probably ay quicker and
better wages than any of our local fathers were working for. Teachers as well
moved in - the Andes Brothers, local high-school teachers, lodging with Mr. Wintergrass - also a teacher, a crazed and notorious one, became legendary
for the visible presence in Cloverleaf Gardens. Plain and bland enough to pass right by you,
they could be seen in that passing, sitting out on lawnchairs or on their tiny,
concrete stoop. Where once before the teacher's only presence was in the
classroom, now they shared real life as well. Mr Calvin, I recall, used to live
in Woodbridge in a rather squalid and large 'rooming' house, with probably 16
other tenants, on the very corner where now St. James Catholic Church has its
once-modern monstrosity of tax-exempt, overblown church and parking. A complete
waste, by contrast. Back then, if you indeed 'saw' Mr. Calvin outside of school,
you grimaced.
84. The first day I landed in New York City, it was like 97 degrees and stayed that way for like four or five days too - hot, steamy, thick. I'd been hot before, I figured, but it was never anything like this. The tar, the very pavement of the streets, had begun moving beneath my feet - literally becoming soft and pliable. Embedded in it, slowly sinking in, deeper, were soda caps, pennies and nickels, pieces of steel and metal, nuts and bolts,
debris, anything the heat-softened surface would catch, and then the pressure
and weight of trucks, cars, taxis and the rest would just push, push everything
down, in further, deeper. I don't recall the exact date, though I guess it was something like July 1st, or close. I had been ignominously 'released' from Woodbridge High School after a quite cursory 'graduation' from which I'd been summarily disinvited because of my looks (hair, clothes, footwear) and attitude, and just told, simply, to pick up my diploma at the office
the next morning. I went to the ceremony anyway, and stayed outside the field
fence, not wanting to be in there but somehow wanting to witness the event to
which I wasn't allowed. It wasn't that I actually 'cared' but more there was a
basic curiosity about what all these foolish years of 'schooling' by Government
were supposed to have led up to, brought out as 'product'. I was amazed at the
spectacle - 300 screeching, fool kids at play, in their robes and hats, gladly
receiving the glad-hand of teachers and authority which handed them a rolled
piece of paper and muttered a few words. After the previous cloying speechifying
and the effusive gratitude of the student 'leaders', the whole mess looked, to
me, like a bad version of the same paste that had been given to us way back in
kindergarten with which to stick things together. All I ever remembered was how
it wrinkled things and eventually all dried out and unstuck anyway. My essential
feeling was of being released - a low-key rumble, a glare, like some poor-boy
baseball minor-leaguer who'd had just maybe a glimmering that some scout would
recognize his innate talent at shortstop and pick him up, offer a contract.
Instead, I was being released - no contract, yes, but no longer any
responsibilities nor reasons to care about it either. The whole edifice could
burn to nothing now and I wouldn't be affected. All the teachers and officers
there could die of rot and cancer and ruin, and I'd not look twice. Good for
them and their stinking showboat. The whole thing about high school was the
charade, the make-believe, and the lies - the constant and engendered lies
which were peddled to the captive kids. You have to be able to fall for all that
crap first - insincerity, falsehood, empathy, sentiment and make-believe.
There were some kids, yes, some real assholes who'd fall for it and take their
silly, great leaps - to whom it was all real and solid and serious -
essay-writers for the fucking Elks Club with 600 words about 'Americanism' or
'What it means to me to be an American today' as if it made any difference -
fucking clap-trap so they could win a 50-buck certificate when they should have
known better and which - right after - their Americanism could be run up the
ass and right through the wringer while they were on their way to Vietnam.
Asshole mother-fuckers. The dupes, the fools, the ones off to colleges for more,
the ones getting married, the swanks, the sinners, the shitheads, the crooks and
the heroes. It just all made me sick, and three days later, at least by June
25th or so, I knew I was finished. That stinkhole would never see me again. I
remember my 'Graduation' gift was an LP,; my parents gifted me with the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper album, little knowing nor realizing what they were doing. My friend
had a '62 Plymouth Valiant; we rounded up a few other kids, 5 in total, crowded
ourselves into the car, drove at a high rate of speed into the local McDonald's
parking lot, right to the front, where there was a measly old sleepy
security-guard old man, in a uniform shirt no less, skidded in to a sudden halt,
fired ourselves out of the car and, while scurrying off, yelling and pointing at
the car 'It's gonna' blow! It's gonna' blow!'. That was our idea of a joke -
kind of a performance Dadaist skit, (my idea, yeah). Meanwhile, Mr. Sleepy, the
guard, had called the cops, and the joke, as well, had gone over kind of flat
anyway. So, with the guard and the manager staring us down, we rejoined the car
and tore out - I guess none of them had the smarts to take down a plate
number, let alone remember what sort of vehicle we were in. Nothing came of it,
ever, and I was gone a few days later. It was all one big, bad mood for me
anyway. Home was intolerable, nothing connected nor made sense. as I wrote
previously, my sister's then-boyfriend (dead now) Bill York offered me five
bucks and a ride to Carteret - a small, nondescript neighboring town, where
there was a bus station and buses for NYC just adjacent to the Turnpike. It was
called convenience, and it surely was. I grabbed, the very next day, a few
basics from home, threw a bunch of crap into his car, and took his five dollars
and the ride. I had like 30 bucks to last forever. Eventually I boarded the bus
- with my possessions intact - and made it to Port Authority, NYC - the big
bus station in the Promised Land - disgorging passengers here and there -
platforms, ramps and railings everywhere. An entire hub of four-wheel operations
I'd never fully witnessed before. I don't really remember, day or night, what
time it was, nor do I remember carting my stuff or putting some coins in a
locker to hold it there, or any of that - I do just remember immediately
hitting the streets with what I had on and heading straight downtown, by foot,
to find something, anything that could take me in or help me out -
self-assistance. I had a slot awaiting me, I knew, at the Studio School at 8th
street, technically not until September but as things turned out it was more an
international crash-pad for crazies that Summer anyway - the adjoining building
was a four-story domicile run by the happy folks of the American Youth Hostel
operation - gleefully taking in internationals, kids from all sorts of
far-flung places, Germans, Swedes, Brits, Japanese, to name but a few
nationalities - all without any base, all with money, all free and sampling
culture of whatever nature as it came to them - hippies in the streets,
free-love, smoking weed, prancing, tripping, loving, kissing, fucking, going and
returning - it all went on. No one knew me from Adam, who I was, from where
- nor did anyone care. That all worked fine. I had a place next door, in the
Studio School, in the same fashion, it was so unstructured right then that I was
able, pretty much, to simply 'claim' my spot - pick a studio room, lay out my
stuff, and take it over, No questions, 'no who-are-you and hows?' I just
wouldn't have cared anyway.
There are certain points in a life when the indivisible matter between things no longer demands attention - stuff just glides on and you don't think about it. A body knows it needs to ear, and piss and shit, but the inhabited body - looking back later on - really recalls very little of any of that. I don't remember, in the same fashion, what I did for personal hygiene : I basically recall having none for a very long time, for bathroom stuff I think I used any and all restrooms I could find, plus those generously offered, of course, by the studio School and the Youth Hostel - restaurants, donut shops and the rest as well. I recall not having washed my hair, at one point for a full year, nor cutting it. I cannot ever recall shaving, nor having shaving supplies and storage, but I do not recall ever having whiskers or a beard somehow either - so on that count, I just do not know what I did. For food, I made connections - got food from others, took what I could, scavenged, ate stolen goods, corn bread, pancakes, cheap soups and waffles, and coffee. That was about it, and most everything was a quarter - twenty-five cents, the same, for a hot dog, a waffle, a soup and coffee, and the gourmet highlight of my new gastronomy - a knish or a bagel/schmear. I'd never had them before. Thank God for quarters. I ate and stayed well. It got very hot, and then the hot turned, by Winter, to very cold. Yes, very cold - I remember wharfside fires, barrel-fires, standing around with old men around these fires, smoking cigarettes - bums, losers, infirm, broken men, each and all with their little stories and things they like to tell : me the new young kid, the mystery ('why ya' out here, kid? ain'tcha' got no home, don'tcha' got no mother?'). It was always almost sad shit. It was all together, it was indivisible and still without matter, it was just there - all these men had their broken stories, I didn't want to end up like them but I was amongst them - except that they had, actually, better coats, better shoes and hats, than did I. It was funny, back then, 1967, how so many people could still, basically, be living in a style of the 1920's - all those thick, wool, long coats, fedora type hats, black-leather shoes - all that almost-gangster-era stuff. No one even blinked. It was very curious how all these old things still hung on - old ideas, and old ways, muttered stories of wartime damages, hurt and mayhem, dead people, fires and battles, killing and murder, wives and kids even. Escapes. Missed opportunities. Very little female presence in these parts either - 45 years old men, apparently never getting laid, never even getting jerked off, never having a woman - nothing that I could see. Never figured for it. Hippie girls, 18, 19, 20 years old, for them it was a struggle to get them sometimes to keep their damned clothes on and stop them from riding a dick, but for these older gents - unwanted and unused - no one seemed ever to come forward. Strange days : cigarettes and small change. Outdoor fires and two cent buttered rolls. Coffee and stuff was taken in any of those old, rickety, westside or eastside eateries or diner places - amidst truckdrivers, cops and whores. You could sit all night or just forever at any of their counters, and just die there if needed, nursing an old, tired coffee. No one cared. No one looked or watched. A totally different world : nowadays you got liberal freaks and go-getters rounding up the indigent and homeless, forcing them into vans or buses for showers and exams and beds and cleanings. Everything's so different, and if you don't go along, they then have to right to just call you crazy and Bellevue does the rest. Seamlessly, the web of communitarian living sweeps you in. Beware and watch out.
There are certain points in a life when the indivisible matter between things no longer demands attention - stuff just glides on and you don't think about it. A body knows it needs to ear, and piss and shit, but the inhabited body - looking back later on - really recalls very little of any of that. I don't remember, in the same fashion, what I did for personal hygiene : I basically recall having none for a very long time, for bathroom stuff I think I used any and all restrooms I could find, plus those generously offered, of course, by the studio School and the Youth Hostel - restaurants, donut shops and the rest as well. I recall not having washed my hair, at one point for a full year, nor cutting it. I cannot ever recall shaving, nor having shaving supplies and storage, but I do not recall ever having whiskers or a beard somehow either - so on that count, I just do not know what I did. For food, I made connections - got food from others, took what I could, scavenged, ate stolen goods, corn bread, pancakes, cheap soups and waffles, and coffee. That was about it, and most everything was a quarter - twenty-five cents, the same, for a hot dog, a waffle, a soup and coffee, and the gourmet highlight of my new gastronomy - a knish or a bagel/schmear. I'd never had them before. Thank God for quarters. I ate and stayed well. It got very hot, and then the hot turned, by Winter, to very cold. Yes, very cold - I remember wharfside fires, barrel-fires, standing around with old men around these fires, smoking cigarettes - bums, losers, infirm, broken men, each and all with their little stories and things they like to tell : me the new young kid, the mystery ('why ya' out here, kid? ain'tcha' got no home, don'tcha' got no mother?'). It was always almost sad shit. It was all together, it was indivisible and still without matter, it was just there - all these men had their broken stories, I didn't want to end up like them but I was amongst them - except that they had, actually, better coats, better shoes and hats, than did I. It was funny, back then, 1967, how so many people could still, basically, be living in a style of the 1920's - all those thick, wool, long coats, fedora type hats, black-leather shoes - all that almost-gangster-era stuff. No one even blinked. It was very curious how all these old things still hung on - old ideas, and old ways, muttered stories of wartime damages, hurt and mayhem, dead people, fires and battles, killing and murder, wives and kids even. Escapes. Missed opportunities. Very little female presence in these parts either - 45 years old men, apparently never getting laid, never even getting jerked off, never having a woman - nothing that I could see. Never figured for it. Hippie girls, 18, 19, 20 years old, for them it was a struggle to get them sometimes to keep their damned clothes on and stop them from riding a dick, but for these older gents - unwanted and unused - no one seemed ever to come forward. Strange days : cigarettes and small change. Outdoor fires and two cent buttered rolls. Coffee and stuff was taken in any of those old, rickety, westside or eastside eateries or diner places - amidst truckdrivers, cops and whores. You could sit all night or just forever at any of their counters, and just die there if needed, nursing an old, tired coffee. No one cared. No one looked or watched. A totally different world : nowadays you got liberal freaks and go-getters rounding up the indigent and homeless, forcing them into vans or buses for showers and exams and beds and cleanings. Everything's so different, and if you don't go along, they then have to right to just call you crazy and Bellevue does the rest. Seamlessly, the web of communitarian living sweeps you in. Beware and watch out.
Some people, some of the school kids I just left from, remember, they were
on their ways all happy and go-lucky for colleges and universities and places
where they'd figure to learn more than most anything else in the world
everything they needed and had to learn to prosper and get by and be something.
In their own eyes anyway. Not a one of them could have ever held the light I was
holding, all of my own sudden, in living in this manner - I was King, goading
myself forward among outcasts, loners, the hurt and the needful. I learned a
million things a minute and saw even more. I reiterated to myself everything
necessary. I saw with double vision - I saw what I saw, and then I saw on the
other side of ehat I saw, what the reality was from which it all came. I learned
as I taight and, for sure, taught just as much as I learned. I'd found a holy
mission of my own - to reach out and share and talk and talk back, give and to
take. it was all new to me and I'd never could have prepared for it had I been
told it was coming.
Things happened fast - it didn't take but maybe a week or so for me to
get much better bearings, learn a bit about where I was and what my situation
was about to become. I was 'dependent' on no one, and considered that a plus,
but dependent for 'what' I wasn't sure anyway. I was able to do without or
scrounge for. A few tiny friendships, early on, helped. Judy Tenenbaum and
myself, we'd shamelessly steal from vegetable and fruit stands - one piece at
a time, of something or other. Nothing untoward ever came from it, and we
consumed what we got. I even learned rrom her about eating raw cauliflower. But
all that was a bit later. My first days were a foray into find a place to stay,
if one could be found, and finding somethingto do for some money, when and as I
could 'afford' the time it would take to get same. At this time, the lower east
side was all Jew, and what wasn't Jewsih was rotating - turning over to raw
Puerto Rican; the Germans mostly had moved, almost en masse uptown to Yorkville,
their own little enclave; Poles and Hungarians, still some along St. Mark's
Place, were dying off, dwindling, and being replaced by head shops, hippies, and
clubs. Amd basic junk stores. Indians hadn't yet come in - e6th street was
free of that and their incredible array of restaurants and such there now. Down
by 1st street, there were projects, the old market area, poor people, and the
dead and dying. Spanish and Puerto Rican too. Blacks, wherever they'd been or
gone, were not that much around right then and there, 1967, in this place -
they had their own areas in the west village, and of course Harlem and the
slums anywhere. Crime was ample - all over; stabbings, shootings, beatings,
robbery and rape were endemic. It just went with the territory. You tried always
to carry something - knife, shiv, pipe, club, rocks, stones, anything with
which to hopefully ward off an attacker or two or three. otherwise hopeless,
especially for girls. Pussy was held at a premium, as a prize for the taking.
Nothing else mattered. over, and done, wham, bam, thank you ma'am, and all that
crud.
You had to figure, or I did, what was it I'd actually come out of to get to
where I was? A big nothing. A total nothing - I was as fresh and green in
these new parts as a fleece-lamb on its first day born. All around me, in their
own sense of being, were citified people - selected, chosen, cultures, learned
and aware - and this was their turf I was deigning to step onto - me with
all my nothingness. Me with never even having heard Gershwin's Rhapsody In
Blue', say, or any jazz-blub stuff or hip-lingo jive, black talk, expensive talk
financial talk, the ways and means of banks and money, courtships and
schoolings, undertakings and readings and awareness - the exclusive clubs,
Yale Club, the University Club, and the rest. They were all things and places
I'd soon be learning of, having my face pressed up against and into, by others.
By me 'crowd' of people who simply lived that way, by those means, and thought
nothing else of it. My paucity was TRULY amazing, and it brought meaning to me
of the million definitions of nothing I'd learned in a place like Avenel,
millions, but nothing uplifting, except church, duty, rules and false order. Of
such are varmints and revolutionaries born, I guess. It's been said that 'genius
is a long patience.' Well, I guess; and I guess I had the both of them going
strong.
If you really want to learn something, or know something, learn it from a
crook, or a criminal. I did. They were all around me. Handymen who stole
anything not nailed down from the apartments and brownstones they serviced.
Superintendents and door guys who did small business on the side - pimping out
lonely housewives, with money and money husbands too, letting guys up during the
day, secret entrances, periods of time for 'undisturbed' to be in effect,
keeping callers away, telling no tales, stealing what was stealable, and then
stealing and covering up for the rest. Drivers and livery men who dealt drugs
and pleasure. Hardware guys who would get anyone whatever they needed, lock,
stock, barrel and door - hardware, software, as it was then known -
connections, hook-ups, cover-ups. All those words mean different things now,
yes, but back then words ahd their own uses too. Painters, maids and cleaners.
Anyone who could be let 'inside' any of these places stood to gain, immediately.
It was also a source of food for me - knowing the right people here and there
could open up a sandwich counter or a supply of food; the daughter of this or
that person, slowly becoming a hippy roustabout or an angry revolutionary, would
bring all she could carry - food, fruit, bread, sandwiches, leftovers. It was
easy, and the farther 'uptown' you got, the easier it all was because that's
where these people were, and their kids, and their bored kids, and the
money. Looking back now, maybe it was all a form of tastelessness as well, but
then, at that moment, it never mattered. Tastlessness is, I guess, only what you make it anyway, and it's a varying scale for varied people. I know I came from two lines of hoodlums and criminals, but even with that knowledge it remained a divide I could never really cross. i tried, but it never happened. Witness to the revolution, I guess, but never a revolutionary with any zeal. i was too cerebral, too aloof, too intellectual about creating my own places and scenarios - and stories. I used to think, as well, that perhaps everyone else's stories were in some ways as much like my own - we each originate elsewhere, as part of some others' schemes, be it romance, lust, or love - but the single sperm-shot from which we become somehow carries that spark which flames within us - our own tales and sources and stories. No matter what anyone else tells you, these are as soft and as pliable sometimes as the hot-tar street I was talking of before; and we each walk around with - within us - the buried bottle caps, remnants and pieces of steel and nuts and bolts that go into our makeup. That's Freud, remember, and that entire legion of Freud guys which thrives on it. Peeling us back, bringing that inside to the out. Anyway, someone like me, there, out-of-element and completely unschooled in the ways of 'New York', what was I to do? I learned what to do, quickly - observe carefully, notice and learn, and then - as skillfully as any actor ever - talk fast and confidently, and act. Act something out, don't just stand there. that's how you gain place. That's how it is you get in. and before too long, that's what I was doing and that's how I got in - it ran the gamut, and I was busy dude : Studio School artwork and art learning, steadily, fierce and ferocious; all that gaming with the crazies next door - backpack travelers intent on just being and 'enjoying' America - humor, language, touch and feel - and all those bicycle-lusts of the newly-arrived tourist; roaming the streets, all hours and all places; Jim Tomberg, junk sculpture tours of Brooklyn metal fields; Judy Tanenbaum, and the docks and the westside edgings and covers; the clubs and bars of the old Village, again a lot under Jim Tomberg's tutelage. Uptown, Central Park West and all those rich kids maxing out on their new 'hippiness' - it was a huge collage, and it just went on.
I'd left Avenel, that was all I really knew : anything I may have read or written before, all those Woodbridge Library nights and all those notebooks and drawing books, right down the drain. Everything needed now to be re-sourced and re-aligned. I was essentially no longer the person I had been even a week before, and I no longer cared about that either. Had I just left England on some chartered ship to the new world, I could not have been in any stranger straits, and If America has always been about starting anew, second chances, or whatever it phrased as, I had it placed, right there, in front of me. Call me Huck Finn.
As I said, the first few days it was a millions degrees hot out - stuff was wilting everywhere, people were drenched and sullen - not noisy, as you'd perhaps expect from the image painted of the dunn of poverty, heat, crowding and anger - no, there wasn't any of that. It was a quiet, sullen, almost a brooding that pervaded the streets. I wasn't sharing that right then and in retrospect it's apparent how - like a traveler who never actually 'experiences' the in-the-air shared experience around him - I hadn't yet been involved or absorbed yet into the place to actually 'share' its feel and its predilections. I simply observed, watched from my internal distance, still making my choices and my own adjustments towards what I saw and exactly how I wanted it to become part of me. There were a hundred choices, and I saw people from each one of them : Brooklyn? No, still, in '67, too Podunk for me, more like the sort of place I was fleeing, not coming to; Uptown? Just too expensive and - in many ways already - just too 'permanent' too It had the feel, up there, of captivity, of life at its dead-end - all those twisted and sorrowful and old and sad Jews sitting forever on those benches all up upper Broadway, the traffic island in the middle covered with short, squat, silent, old folk yet haunted by death and its Holocaust. Midtown? Nothing much there but a circus of long-term residents, all those nationalities and folk-groups still huddling together - Irish wharf-thugs, Slavs and Poles and the rest, fabric and cloth people, Spanish and Italian. No place for me. By default, it all ended up OK right where I was - Greenwich Village and all its variants of weird people, curious characters, and old-line historic types. Artists and vagrants, sleeping together maybe, but remaining apart. Heritage and legacy together. The east Village, just an adjunct of the poorer sort of Villager to which I aspired, lay just to the east, a few blocks over; and that became me, and my daily trek. Astor Place, the District 65 truck/haulers union building, St. Mark's Place, 8th Street, all those crazy, solid people spreading out in each direction.
There were lots of odd things in those first days - it seemed like everywhere I went along 1st and 2nd Avenue, all along there, and all the street within, I'd see a delivery van, a laundry truck for something called Cascade Laundry, with its logo and all on the side. I was baffled - the same truck each time ? Or were there that many different trucks around that seeing them so often was a normal thing? Cascade Laundry? People used such a place to such an extent? They didn't do their own laundry? It baffled me. The entire silly concept was something I'd never heard of - dry cleaning and laundry service? That's what New York's about? Such were the thoughts in my mind. In addition, I immediately began having run-ins with very odd people. Nothing malicious, just curious and interesting, as if they'd sought me out, or perhaps I merely came across as a tenderfoot, new and vulnerable. I don't know, but I managed to remain tough and push right back when needed. Andy Bonamo, written about earlier, who later became a 'roomate' of sorts. The killer Mexican guy, also written about previously. A guy I met, John Philips, and his wife or girlfriend or whatever, Carlotta, one day just began telling me all about his life - Irish neighborhood, midtown westside, etc. John started telling me about his Irish childhood and his very distant parents and he put it all in a way I'd not heard before - many strange images and locations, and locutions too, and he was tall for an Irish guy as well, I thought. I'd not met many like that and could only figure Norse or Viking blood too had somehow intermingled generations ago off the cold-coasts of all those North Sea and Irish land invasions and the legendary travails which left who-knows-what combinations of stranded Vikings and beleaguered Irish folk and triumphant conquerors and mixed-breed landed people of a truly ancient stock wandering over the land and now all of what it became reflects in this odd mix of occasional height or weird distortion and all the old moors, fens, highlands, castles, moats, and battlements too - and of course all the old ancient religious infringements upon everything else - resulting of course in that wild, crazed, madness that passes for Eire and the souls of the real distant people left there. And John was like that with his stories about things and just listening to him talk about his parents and the 'one-eye', as he called it, was riveting. I can't recreate it all now, but it had to do with death and murder and home turf pride and a bunch of new shit to me that I couldn't quite understand except if I thought of my own father back home and all his weird prides and offends and intentions and grievances and grudges. Something like that - but no matter it wasn't a part of me, couldn't just ever let it be. And besides, I'd left all that now, and forever. For John's stuff, I didn't know what to do but listen, and I pictured myself as writing 5-cent headlines for the Daily News or something, and it would be, what I called it, 'Significant When Hatless'. Whatever that would mean; it got me by. No matter, with John I had to fortify myself against and be ready for tales of Vikings and pillage and that awesome stage of early real-estate called euphemistically 'conquest' - and the wild, crazed torturers and slayers called 'Vikings' as they materialized (Sartre said 'Man is radically free' and I often wonder how often either the conquerors or the beleaguered land-folk being 'conquered' thought of that when they had to fight or flee for their non-thoughts and presences. How 'Free' is anybody, really, for being free does have its consequences). And in the same way that it's been said that cancer is a disease of consciousness, I realized it's all just conflict and I wasn't interested in conflict I don't make conflict and I want none of it; so for all I cared John could shove all up his Irish ass, and anyway it was Carlotta who always had my eye and she knew I was new there and wanted some help and needed things and Carlotta in her mild-manner pressure-cooker fashion knew enough to bring it forth just every so often - she fed me - and that passed for my time, even just imagining her if for nothing more than - let's say - my drawing-from-life model. Studio School stuff, that's how I approached it; Life-Drawing.
I realized, with John and through John and Carlotta, that it was all mental anyway : it's a set-up by the rational mind to see two differences where there were none anyway but be that as it may and all that it's just bullshit conflict unending and upended until you stop it and here was a guy telling me to overcome fear first, and fight, and throw back and assert. Trouble was, none of that appealed to me at all. Except Carlotta, with whom I loved pushing back. Could have gotten me killed, very easily I'm sure. John never knew. And he said if I did that, stayed tough and fought back everything else would fall into place. And he mentioned like FDR, a President, and the quote about having nothing to fear but fear itself and I understood that and what to meant - and, yeah, that was a breakthrough and I still use it to this day - but then I followed that out (in a second life, in a third life) to the idea that FEAR like all else doesn't exist, really at all, and it's just a word concept fraught with its own baggage and weight and the only thing we react to is the concept we've created (which is the root of 'fearing fear itself' as was stated) and so easy to overcome is all that if it look at it from the certain distance necessary - seeing as that all of our concepts and ideas are human and faulty anyway and made-up besides. And I was standing literally out by the Jumble Shop at Eighth Street and MacDougal, by the Alley, which is where I was living anyway, around the back entrance OR the front of the old Whitney Mansion Museums and all that - here I fucking was, it was all mine already, two weeks later, and this John guy's pulling my wear about power and force and violence going both ways and all that - what needed I for anything? - and so much had happened there over the years anyway I was lost in ghosts and I was dissolving - a new man a recreated something coming up : goodbye Avenel goodbye Bayone too : and at the thought of it all the only thing I wanted was starlight and the great deep distances of the cosmos within me and I had the sun and I had the moon - warmth, cold, dark, whatever I wished - the cold dark of the stars and everyone who came forth from them - Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Willem deKooning, each of them was with me at any one time Philip Guston, Charles Cajori, and David Hare too if I wanted, for there wasn't anything I lacked and at every moment these were the real guys the like 'tough' guys John sought but he didn't know it - ARTISTS all - and not just part of that later 1960's 'End of Art' stuff conceptual installations and color-field paintings and performance art and all that stuff even though Man Ray and Dada Art and the like had already gone through - all that Surrealism in the system already - and all that from the 1920's and stuff and 1930's of long ago but none of it mattered as everything came 'cascading' (gulp! that word again!) together and on every street corner now were new pig kids reading Hobbit books and smoking dope and the wan girls with the fey boys and the singing and the screwing and the free-love and the brotherhood freedom crap with incense and bells and robes and sunglasses and all that started taking over (and that was at the same time pretty much the end of it all for me and John and Carlotta, and they just disappeared after that) and happiness and fun soon became for most the game - food and treats and all that - Orange Julius, Blimpies, and any other sort of hot-dog chewable crap began taking off and 'watch out world, we've found the key' became the sort of battle-cry for all these new and resurgent jewboy revolutionaries cropping up with their on-again leftist infestation of leftist ideology and socialist commentary taking off everywhere and no one listening or thinking no matter anyway (the older, wizened Jewish world had already broken down and was to be seen old and wasting away on any of the nice-weather benched of Tompkins Square) and the entire old shtetl of the lower east side was growing down on its old-immigrant luck like some obverse side of the same shiny coin which was making - at the same time - some new and and infested form of great 'Amerikan' consumer culture everywhere and in a like manner making fortunes for the offspring and first-generation of all this old Jewish European pain now lingering and dying on our own fetid shores.
85. Having been processed, as it were, through all of the requisite procedural sequences, I'd ended up where I was - thinking about it, it wasn't in the least bit scary. I relaized, as I looked, that all else around me was crumbling. Out on the streets, the daily fires of anguish and pain were constantly underway - protesters and societal-changers, angry people, race conflicts, Vietnam War diversion and the battles of people head-to-head; I saw it all and knew it could not but end badly. Back in Avenel, the world as it was presented to me had been orderly by contrast, smooth and sensible - a single, homogenous thought-line which I'd been taught could be mastered and perfected by following each and any of those 'straight' lines outward to conclusion : all objects moving seamlessly, without diversion, from an accepted past to an expected, pre-concluded, future and all was governed by certainty, a saintly chosen wisdom, blessings upon US and us alone, and a sort of universal mathematical law which governed all things : God, Citizen, Fealty and Country. I used to walk the woods back there, thinking these things through. Wondering about stuff which somehow didn't seem to fit these narratives. Breakaway Katanga Province, in the Congo; Dag Hammerskold's plane crash in Africa, less a crash than a shooting down; the United Nations complex built on the east end of the 40's, was that 'US' too, or was that an organization of others, over whom we were mastering and plotting, in spite of what was said. What were the red Communists, why were they often shut out, badgered, ridiculed? How fair was the protrayals in media and television accounts of things - Kruschev's pounding shoe, Nixon's Kitchen Debate, the millions of red Chinese we were told to fear? What was all that and how did it divert from the straight and easy line of the 'good life' we possessed? Wasn't it US who dropped those two atomic bombs? No one else? Who fried the Rosenbergs? I thought this was a free country, circumspect about things, wise and procedural. No one would say. There were reasons behind everything I began to realize, but they would never really be brought forth. That was probably my first aggregation of wisdom - Avenel wisdom anyway. Nothing was true; all things were a lie. As it turned out, I was right - there was uncertainty everywhere. Instead of the fixed and linear, motly upward arc of things we'd been taught - those happy and glib stupidities given out - I realized that one could never really be 'sure' of anything - least alone what is and is not. Objects follow different rules and possess different descriptions of themselves depending on (from) where you viewed them. There was nothing fixed, no certainty - societal inputs were along what rousted things into being, mostly for mercurial and the most monetary purposes. People were being 'used' everywhere. The dismal search for scratching lucer and profit out of the makeup of the relative world was really all that mattered for 95 percent of the world. The other 5 percent, I knew, were my type....already - the writers, makers, doers, the once who didn't fit, who wouldn't stop talking back, changing the paradigm, using their own words and creative works to overcome the traps the world was throwing at them. I cared nothing for the patterned realism of what was around me. That was why I'd LEFT Avenel, in order to seek my floating debris, somehow, in the vast maw of Manhattan, and somehow hang on to that debirs as it carried me along. Make with it what I could - the world was to be mine, all new and all re-created. Nothing was fixed - it was to be 'unpredictable' forever, composed of gaps and inconsistencies and warps and bubbles, as another writer would put it years later. I couldn't even any longer communicate, nor speak the ordinary and regular language of the people around me. The supposed 'Harmony' of whatever it was that was the 'Newtonian' universe (where the apples can only fall downwards?), had already been frayed - things were not 'continuous', but instead they came in discrete and irreducable packets of a fixed size. What later came to be called the 'quantum' universe. It would be a long way off and many years into the future before things had settled down, computationally for me anyway, to become perhaps 're-defined' as a self-contained something to which I could refer. Heisenberg, Shroedinger, Bohr - those fellows were all yet ahead of me, not yet introduced. I intuited something, that much I knew, but I couldn't yet understand nor fathom what it was or to what it was leading me. It seemed to me that it was all pretty apparent that the 'mind' could change everything and that nothing existed outside of that 'mind'. The observing of a situation altered it, by interpretation. As Neils Bohr would eventually put it : the location and momentum of an object, and even whether it is a wave or a particle, was no longer a free-standing fact of Nature (could not be 'taught', was not 'there', did not exist in any fixed terms, as I would have put it), IT DEPENDED on the act of observation. What would that mean and how could it but mean what it produced? That would be the unfolding I was about to enter. Arthur Eddington, 1928, British astronomer: "the indeterminancy of the quantum universe opened the way for the introduction of the spiritual into the world, initiating a line of thinking that associates the paradoxes of the quantum world with the mysteries of religion." The other side of that thinking, of course, said the opposite - 'Quantum mechanics changed the world not by reintroducing spiritualism into science but by extinguishing the dream of perfect determinismm and mathematical predictability that [had] structured the Newtonian universe.' That was all that 'ART' had become to mean, for me - that reinterpretation underway, into which I was inputting, as well, my own and personal energy in order to energize a worlld of my own creation and liking. Many previous points, in this new place, my own, no longer existed. Quite simply, not at all.
When you're a kid, people put things into your head and you just accept them. I used to look at the prison, out back, behind my house - a strange, dark and brooding-looking place, from another era - and only know of it what others had told me. Prisoners. All I ever thought of were bank robbers, I suppose based on the paucity of exposure to anything except TV westerns and the small talk of regular folk. You figure, a big place filled with bank robbers. Not so true at all - lurking everywhere in this expanse of punishment were all sorts of crimes and criminals. I only learned later of killers, wife-beaters, child-smugglers, murderers with an organized crime bent, extortionists, torturers, swindlers, financial thieves, sexual predators, rapists, and all the rest. It was never explicitly stated - as a youngster, I guess you just don't know. My father's first-aid squad would occasionally be called into the place for 'emergencies' - he'd never say, but I learned later there were 'medical' emergencies - heart attacks, gall bladders, broken bones - and stabbings mostly - shivs, home-made knives, pokers, pointed objects. I'm sure there were other things, but I was never told. It was all curious - what did they do in there, how did they pass the time all day, and night? Basic, simply questions, with no follow-up. They were prisoners. We'd see them in the fields, threading their way behind tractors and wagons through the 100 or so acres of cornfields. It was like chain-gang stuff, but it wasn't : they were never 'outside', never - to my knowledge - alongside roadways picking up trash and such. Things like that, yes, I see now occasionally along the highways and interstates. Prison buses and prisoners - guarded over, being watched, creeping along with large plastic trash-bags, cleaning the highway's shoulders. But not then. For what purpose other than passing the time? Rehabilitation? I think not. The 'physical' world is not rehabilitation, and that's simply now how it's done.
So, from nowhere to somewhere, or nowhere to another nowhere? I had to decide which it was going to be, but I realized it was only to be what I called it, and nothing more. At least nothing was stagnant I was enjoying the alteration and the rotation. On the street, as I walked all along, I looked at everything and tried to imagine what the rest of my life would be, what options it held out for me. Those are things, of course, that no one ever fully knows - even if they think they do - and (maybe) as well they are things kids everywhere think about. I didn't know, and I don't still know. Avenel had been a nice little cave, someplace from which to learn rudiments. I always looked at my life as having had 'exile' periods within it. The train crash. The seminary. New York. Pennsylvania. Each for what they were, sort of unplanned, and each with a roiling, tumbling place in my life for pause, recollection and redefinition. Pretty good deal.
Let me get back to the part of the story I just left - the John Philips part. I didn't know the ins and outs of things and realized I probably never would - e11th street had to be a home and I hoped it could be, but it really wasn't meeting many of my thought criteria at that moment. All new and all too fresh. It all just passed along as I went about my business and it all became familiar enough soon enough. By the doing of it all it became familiar enough and I began my mental cataloguing : Spanish girls with their big tits fleecing the guys on the steps for five or ten bucks whenever they could - just to turn a quick and a decent rooftop trick - the entirety of 11th street could be seen as one big rooftop whorehouse with the yelling and the screamings of passion and irate hatred too resounding from every doorway and airshaft wherein people were stuck - for they surely were - and the only real relief was was all these luxurious girls prancing around : nobody cared and everybody stared : where I lived at 509 like some deer in the headlights and mindless too kid out there somehow on my own (just waiting for some light to change). And I once more began to think of Daily News headlines (you couldn't avoid; poor people read that rag, and it was everywhere) as I walked tiredly through the streets (where some other form of confusion ruled) : 'Senate Sees Red Art - Commie Brush Paints Wide; or 'Artfest Turns Nasty - Painters Take Bolshevik Bait'; and it wasn't funny, any of it - it was old and it was new too, and it still all walked these streets with me. Oh again, a Midrash within me and around me - all these little east European people thrashing around in their delusions of paradise or some other system of a just distribution that would include them. Their best living was yet to come? Mine was over? I didn't know. The fair distribution of resource and income all mixed with a golden age fury of Art and Beauty. Is that what they all wanted? A Utopian cornswaggle with their decrepit morning teas and coffees? 'Yeah, right', I mentioned to myself while watching the lines of indigents at the unemployment office coming and going, and the morose, broken faces of the homeless and the hungry outside the old firehouse mission down by White Street - they'd line up for hours before, these ancient, dry-faced, bedraggled old men, small, tall, stooped or straight, in their long coats with cigarettes dangling from peeled lips and faces of always-surprise where you'd have thought numbness would have taken over. I sought to laugh, or to find a laughter on someone's face, somewhere, but then I realized it was all too sorrowful for that too. And I concluded ART was a monster in its way too, no matter what other great things were attached to it. The crooked guy with cerebral palsy who knew the cop on the corner - they shook hands in the cold, and I was with them in my heart too. Far away, and distant, an ousider, but there nonetheless. I was beginning to fit. I knew it. I wasn't doing anything; I was standing on the curb and the wind was whistling past my head. It was already early Winter and everything was getting dark - the streetlights seemed always to be on and December 10th wasn't that far back and everything wanted to be overcome : the brash and stupid flow of packages and Christmas crowd had already been starting, and the after-work crowd always hummed and chattered with a certain zeal or seasonal joy as they let out from their downtown offices : faces, scarves, red cheeks, boots, glove, mittens and the girls. Yes, again all the New York women, everywhere. Dark, doubt, lethargy, sickness, hunger and want. You name it. It was there. Street-corner men with their bells and buckets for coins and the people passing in some meager frenzy of their own without much caring really one way or the other - for they all had places to go. And I heard someone speak up, 'If this is living, give me something else, quick', and I replied, 'I'm taking what you're giving 'cause I'm walking for a living', and the guy laughed and said back 'You're nuts' - and that was that, there was nothing else serene about it, and right there was a small shop selling comic books and superheroes - which books I'd always detested - and inside were a few rambling, plodding types paging through the latest comic book installments of this or that - not porn stuff or adult stuff, just regular comic books and their oddball superheroes and all that and it again struck me how absurd it was that these sorts of comics and things always ended up having Jewish origins and authors and ethchers and such - graphics, comics, entertainments, vaudevilles, ribald skits, schticks, blackface minstrelry and all the rest of that - it all just went on and one with that strange Freudian initiation, the dark, secret motivations of tightly wound, bundled outcasts, people in self-rages about things never rectified; the same sorts sitting around on all these post-war benches, still festering in their shock and fear. It had to come out somehow; some form of weirdly twisted thought which always had to bring to the fore some audacious version of covering-over reality and is grimness with a new-found strength and power which conquered, but always conquered shyly. It was a covering-shield for Reality and it seemed to keep people one or more steps away from facing reality and the 'real essence' of things - life, philosophy, religion, understanding, and the graceful happiness that really comes form within. These were, after all, God's chosen, or so their fiction went; all the while being as much repressed, cheap, whimsical, nasty, brutish and short too - to paraphrase Adam Smith. And all that sort of stuff played on my mind as I pranced around, wondering and watching, in a meek semblance of finding order from chaos and seeking exploration too - here and there between streets and places : the low lights, the caverns, the all-night bars, the places where people met furtively and stayed, the criminal sides in their little, walk-in social clubs with barred doors and screen-over windows, the winos, the bums, and those rtunning from whatever it was people ran from then, the 'only the dead know Brooklyn' types. And outside of all that it was maybe another beautiful and cloudless blue, bright day, the kind that sometimes happens in early Winter, when you can almost sense the space, 'the deep and the distant' between planets and stars, the sort of things which give 'SPACE' its real meaning, which day was drawing down now to its close and darkening and filling with night with its own usual spectres and shadows of image and hauntings and form. And the eye eventually adjusts to, most especially, the gray, smoky haze which became New York City back then after a harried workday of drayage, cars and trucks, lifting, hauling, packing, making, steam, fire, and heat too and everything else which occurs : babies born, old folk dying, chances crumbling, pain pounding, grief and hurt spreading, and all of that very limited sinecure by which so many bide their time and even here run it out.
Everything interested me, and very much. I walked around, especially in the evenings, starting out at perhaps 4pm, in that time of year when the strange descending of shadows presages the beginning of a long, slow, and then all-of-a-sudden sudden sunset into gray, chalkboard black black as all throughout the twinkling lights of commerce event the far stars, though there, are invisible. It's a turned out world, as if through a membrane's clear but wrong side. Things are all there, but there are too many of them and (curiously) the mind cannot decide if they should be closer, or farther away. I thought about what I saw doing, and I kept thinking about ART, and its place in the modern day. Thoughts ran fast, piling up, jumbled : 'Portraiture has become conceptualized. There's nothing 'real' any longer to precisely portray. All art has become psychological, in so many ways now the same battleground as money, status and reputation. Distorted art has become the norm. The 'norm' is no longer normal. Everything is seeking meaning, but all meaning eludes things. We are absurd, and so then is our art. Pretty much, everything now has been done, and the end-summation of anything about art is merely that which has already been done. Definitions are now contrived. Artists have had themselves shot or injured, for art; have done massive landworks, 'Earthworks' as a concept, things to be seen only from aloft or afar, as new vistas - of money, but so what, that was their new value. Helicoptors are now rented to see 'Art' which has to be flown over to be seen. Ancient astronauts there? Art has been made from dead things and from Death itself. Art as Death? The exact, complete opposite as the enlivening, creative art I'd always been after? Most every attribute of whatever one wishes to call anything has by now been allowed, to be called and named, to be transformed to art so that no longer do any of the labels or meanings or descriptions or categories fit and everything is exactly (first) what it is, and (second) what it is called - thus we have underscored and perhaps made vital the common duplicity of Life, ALL Life, life as we see it (to be). My walking joke was 'would you rather have more 'tality' (Mortality) or less 'tality' - as I'd call this new Art, which I mostly refused to accept. I needed TOTALITY. There were plenty of things that had to be worked on.
I knew a guy, a horse-holder, he took care of the chestnut cart horses over in the west 20's as they were brought in - other cart-horses too, but mostly the chestnut guys - there were plenty of them in the Winter : bluish metal-chrome steel carts, a few panes of glass and baskets, and an ever-present charcoal fire or two, running beneath the top counter, over which the chestnuts roasted. They were put into sales baskets on the sides, still hot, for sale. Everything gradually cooled off, yes, but mostly they were sold before that, or the newer ones put on top would re-warm then. it was a big operation, 20-30 carts allover midtown at any one time - into the late sixties they were still dragged around by work-horses, from all the stables and things along the mid-westside. this guy was an attendant there, a big deal - knowledge of horses, these kind of horses anyway, their traits and behaviors, needs and wants. Every so often Inspectors would come by, so he had to stay on top of everything fopr that too. I'd work there, four bucks a night, sometimes, sweeping, dumping ashes, wiping down a horse or two, straightening things up, heaving or opening chestnut sacks, etc. it was fun - all night work, mostly until whenever I wanted - coffee and food around, little grocers nearby, beer, bars, floozies and women sometimes hanging around. This guy was called Frontini; that was all I ever knew. He liked picture books. He listened to a record player, some lady named Ella Speed, he'd say. I don't know. Robert Johnson. Sun House, I think. He said weird things, like - if he was talking about someone he didn't like - 'He looked so bad I started looking around for eyes.' Whatever stuff like that meant to him. I guess maybe he was touched, a bit. He called everything 'thirteenth grade', everything - like 'that's so thirteenth grade, fuck it', meaning, I think, it's not worth the doing. To him everything in life after high school (the mandatory stuff) was thirteenth grade - 'You move forward, you go on' After all them years of learning the shit they teach you and feeling the cold, steely knife-hand of their controls over you, you finish with it, you go on, you move to thirteenth grade, see.' He'd say, 'Hey, the heart is a muscle, boy, work it.' He say things like: 'The sandwich shop at the edge of time.' 'Nothing kills faster than mis-placed faith, and it's the slowest quick ever.' The half-life of a scientist is about ten minutes.' He was stern, and hard, and fixed on things all the time. That's what I wanted to be. Focused, maybe incorrectly, but mad with a determination on all the wrong things, but all RIGHT for me.
I'd left Avenel, that was all I really knew : anything I may have read or written before, all those Woodbridge Library nights and all those notebooks and drawing books, right down the drain. Everything needed now to be re-sourced and re-aligned. I was essentially no longer the person I had been even a week before, and I no longer cared about that either. Had I just left England on some chartered ship to the new world, I could not have been in any stranger straits, and If America has always been about starting anew, second chances, or whatever it phrased as, I had it placed, right there, in front of me. Call me Huck Finn.
As I said, the first few days it was a millions degrees hot out - stuff was wilting everywhere, people were drenched and sullen - not noisy, as you'd perhaps expect from the image painted of the dunn of poverty, heat, crowding and anger - no, there wasn't any of that. It was a quiet, sullen, almost a brooding that pervaded the streets. I wasn't sharing that right then and in retrospect it's apparent how - like a traveler who never actually 'experiences' the in-the-air shared experience around him - I hadn't yet been involved or absorbed yet into the place to actually 'share' its feel and its predilections. I simply observed, watched from my internal distance, still making my choices and my own adjustments towards what I saw and exactly how I wanted it to become part of me. There were a hundred choices, and I saw people from each one of them : Brooklyn? No, still, in '67, too Podunk for me, more like the sort of place I was fleeing, not coming to; Uptown? Just too expensive and - in many ways already - just too 'permanent' too It had the feel, up there, of captivity, of life at its dead-end - all those twisted and sorrowful and old and sad Jews sitting forever on those benches all up upper Broadway, the traffic island in the middle covered with short, squat, silent, old folk yet haunted by death and its Holocaust. Midtown? Nothing much there but a circus of long-term residents, all those nationalities and folk-groups still huddling together - Irish wharf-thugs, Slavs and Poles and the rest, fabric and cloth people, Spanish and Italian. No place for me. By default, it all ended up OK right where I was - Greenwich Village and all its variants of weird people, curious characters, and old-line historic types. Artists and vagrants, sleeping together maybe, but remaining apart. Heritage and legacy together. The east Village, just an adjunct of the poorer sort of Villager to which I aspired, lay just to the east, a few blocks over; and that became me, and my daily trek. Astor Place, the District 65 truck/haulers union building, St. Mark's Place, 8th Street, all those crazy, solid people spreading out in each direction.
There were lots of odd things in those first days - it seemed like everywhere I went along 1st and 2nd Avenue, all along there, and all the street within, I'd see a delivery van, a laundry truck for something called Cascade Laundry, with its logo and all on the side. I was baffled - the same truck each time ? Or were there that many different trucks around that seeing them so often was a normal thing? Cascade Laundry? People used such a place to such an extent? They didn't do their own laundry? It baffled me. The entire silly concept was something I'd never heard of - dry cleaning and laundry service? That's what New York's about? Such were the thoughts in my mind. In addition, I immediately began having run-ins with very odd people. Nothing malicious, just curious and interesting, as if they'd sought me out, or perhaps I merely came across as a tenderfoot, new and vulnerable. I don't know, but I managed to remain tough and push right back when needed. Andy Bonamo, written about earlier, who later became a 'roomate' of sorts. The killer Mexican guy, also written about previously. A guy I met, John Philips, and his wife or girlfriend or whatever, Carlotta, one day just began telling me all about his life - Irish neighborhood, midtown westside, etc. John started telling me about his Irish childhood and his very distant parents and he put it all in a way I'd not heard before - many strange images and locations, and locutions too, and he was tall for an Irish guy as well, I thought. I'd not met many like that and could only figure Norse or Viking blood too had somehow intermingled generations ago off the cold-coasts of all those North Sea and Irish land invasions and the legendary travails which left who-knows-what combinations of stranded Vikings and beleaguered Irish folk and triumphant conquerors and mixed-breed landed people of a truly ancient stock wandering over the land and now all of what it became reflects in this odd mix of occasional height or weird distortion and all the old moors, fens, highlands, castles, moats, and battlements too - and of course all the old ancient religious infringements upon everything else - resulting of course in that wild, crazed, madness that passes for Eire and the souls of the real distant people left there. And John was like that with his stories about things and just listening to him talk about his parents and the 'one-eye', as he called it, was riveting. I can't recreate it all now, but it had to do with death and murder and home turf pride and a bunch of new shit to me that I couldn't quite understand except if I thought of my own father back home and all his weird prides and offends and intentions and grievances and grudges. Something like that - but no matter it wasn't a part of me, couldn't just ever let it be. And besides, I'd left all that now, and forever. For John's stuff, I didn't know what to do but listen, and I pictured myself as writing 5-cent headlines for the Daily News or something, and it would be, what I called it, 'Significant When Hatless'. Whatever that would mean; it got me by. No matter, with John I had to fortify myself against and be ready for tales of Vikings and pillage and that awesome stage of early real-estate called euphemistically 'conquest' - and the wild, crazed torturers and slayers called 'Vikings' as they materialized (Sartre said 'Man is radically free' and I often wonder how often either the conquerors or the beleaguered land-folk being 'conquered' thought of that when they had to fight or flee for their non-thoughts and presences. How 'Free' is anybody, really, for being free does have its consequences). And in the same way that it's been said that cancer is a disease of consciousness, I realized it's all just conflict and I wasn't interested in conflict I don't make conflict and I want none of it; so for all I cared John could shove all up his Irish ass, and anyway it was Carlotta who always had my eye and she knew I was new there and wanted some help and needed things and Carlotta in her mild-manner pressure-cooker fashion knew enough to bring it forth just every so often - she fed me - and that passed for my time, even just imagining her if for nothing more than - let's say - my drawing-from-life model. Studio School stuff, that's how I approached it; Life-Drawing.
I realized, with John and through John and Carlotta, that it was all mental anyway : it's a set-up by the rational mind to see two differences where there were none anyway but be that as it may and all that it's just bullshit conflict unending and upended until you stop it and here was a guy telling me to overcome fear first, and fight, and throw back and assert. Trouble was, none of that appealed to me at all. Except Carlotta, with whom I loved pushing back. Could have gotten me killed, very easily I'm sure. John never knew. And he said if I did that, stayed tough and fought back everything else would fall into place. And he mentioned like FDR, a President, and the quote about having nothing to fear but fear itself and I understood that and what to meant - and, yeah, that was a breakthrough and I still use it to this day - but then I followed that out (in a second life, in a third life) to the idea that FEAR like all else doesn't exist, really at all, and it's just a word concept fraught with its own baggage and weight and the only thing we react to is the concept we've created (which is the root of 'fearing fear itself' as was stated) and so easy to overcome is all that if it look at it from the certain distance necessary - seeing as that all of our concepts and ideas are human and faulty anyway and made-up besides. And I was standing literally out by the Jumble Shop at Eighth Street and MacDougal, by the Alley, which is where I was living anyway, around the back entrance OR the front of the old Whitney Mansion Museums and all that - here I fucking was, it was all mine already, two weeks later, and this John guy's pulling my wear about power and force and violence going both ways and all that - what needed I for anything? - and so much had happened there over the years anyway I was lost in ghosts and I was dissolving - a new man a recreated something coming up : goodbye Avenel goodbye Bayone too : and at the thought of it all the only thing I wanted was starlight and the great deep distances of the cosmos within me and I had the sun and I had the moon - warmth, cold, dark, whatever I wished - the cold dark of the stars and everyone who came forth from them - Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Willem deKooning, each of them was with me at any one time Philip Guston, Charles Cajori, and David Hare too if I wanted, for there wasn't anything I lacked and at every moment these were the real guys the like 'tough' guys John sought but he didn't know it - ARTISTS all - and not just part of that later 1960's 'End of Art' stuff conceptual installations and color-field paintings and performance art and all that stuff even though Man Ray and Dada Art and the like had already gone through - all that Surrealism in the system already - and all that from the 1920's and stuff and 1930's of long ago but none of it mattered as everything came 'cascading' (gulp! that word again!) together and on every street corner now were new pig kids reading Hobbit books and smoking dope and the wan girls with the fey boys and the singing and the screwing and the free-love and the brotherhood freedom crap with incense and bells and robes and sunglasses and all that started taking over (and that was at the same time pretty much the end of it all for me and John and Carlotta, and they just disappeared after that) and happiness and fun soon became for most the game - food and treats and all that - Orange Julius, Blimpies, and any other sort of hot-dog chewable crap began taking off and 'watch out world, we've found the key' became the sort of battle-cry for all these new and resurgent jewboy revolutionaries cropping up with their on-again leftist infestation of leftist ideology and socialist commentary taking off everywhere and no one listening or thinking no matter anyway (the older, wizened Jewish world had already broken down and was to be seen old and wasting away on any of the nice-weather benched of Tompkins Square) and the entire old shtetl of the lower east side was growing down on its old-immigrant luck like some obverse side of the same shiny coin which was making - at the same time - some new and and infested form of great 'Amerikan' consumer culture everywhere and in a like manner making fortunes for the offspring and first-generation of all this old Jewish European pain now lingering and dying on our own fetid shores.
85. Having been processed, as it were, through all of the requisite procedural sequences, I'd ended up where I was - thinking about it, it wasn't in the least bit scary. I relaized, as I looked, that all else around me was crumbling. Out on the streets, the daily fires of anguish and pain were constantly underway - protesters and societal-changers, angry people, race conflicts, Vietnam War diversion and the battles of people head-to-head; I saw it all and knew it could not but end badly. Back in Avenel, the world as it was presented to me had been orderly by contrast, smooth and sensible - a single, homogenous thought-line which I'd been taught could be mastered and perfected by following each and any of those 'straight' lines outward to conclusion : all objects moving seamlessly, without diversion, from an accepted past to an expected, pre-concluded, future and all was governed by certainty, a saintly chosen wisdom, blessings upon US and us alone, and a sort of universal mathematical law which governed all things : God, Citizen, Fealty and Country. I used to walk the woods back there, thinking these things through. Wondering about stuff which somehow didn't seem to fit these narratives. Breakaway Katanga Province, in the Congo; Dag Hammerskold's plane crash in Africa, less a crash than a shooting down; the United Nations complex built on the east end of the 40's, was that 'US' too, or was that an organization of others, over whom we were mastering and plotting, in spite of what was said. What were the red Communists, why were they often shut out, badgered, ridiculed? How fair was the protrayals in media and television accounts of things - Kruschev's pounding shoe, Nixon's Kitchen Debate, the millions of red Chinese we were told to fear? What was all that and how did it divert from the straight and easy line of the 'good life' we possessed? Wasn't it US who dropped those two atomic bombs? No one else? Who fried the Rosenbergs? I thought this was a free country, circumspect about things, wise and procedural. No one would say. There were reasons behind everything I began to realize, but they would never really be brought forth. That was probably my first aggregation of wisdom - Avenel wisdom anyway. Nothing was true; all things were a lie. As it turned out, I was right - there was uncertainty everywhere. Instead of the fixed and linear, motly upward arc of things we'd been taught - those happy and glib stupidities given out - I realized that one could never really be 'sure' of anything - least alone what is and is not. Objects follow different rules and possess different descriptions of themselves depending on (from) where you viewed them. There was nothing fixed, no certainty - societal inputs were along what rousted things into being, mostly for mercurial and the most monetary purposes. People were being 'used' everywhere. The dismal search for scratching lucer and profit out of the makeup of the relative world was really all that mattered for 95 percent of the world. The other 5 percent, I knew, were my type....already - the writers, makers, doers, the once who didn't fit, who wouldn't stop talking back, changing the paradigm, using their own words and creative works to overcome the traps the world was throwing at them. I cared nothing for the patterned realism of what was around me. That was why I'd LEFT Avenel, in order to seek my floating debris, somehow, in the vast maw of Manhattan, and somehow hang on to that debirs as it carried me along. Make with it what I could - the world was to be mine, all new and all re-created. Nothing was fixed - it was to be 'unpredictable' forever, composed of gaps and inconsistencies and warps and bubbles, as another writer would put it years later. I couldn't even any longer communicate, nor speak the ordinary and regular language of the people around me. The supposed 'Harmony' of whatever it was that was the 'Newtonian' universe (where the apples can only fall downwards?), had already been frayed - things were not 'continuous', but instead they came in discrete and irreducable packets of a fixed size. What later came to be called the 'quantum' universe. It would be a long way off and many years into the future before things had settled down, computationally for me anyway, to become perhaps 're-defined' as a self-contained something to which I could refer. Heisenberg, Shroedinger, Bohr - those fellows were all yet ahead of me, not yet introduced. I intuited something, that much I knew, but I couldn't yet understand nor fathom what it was or to what it was leading me. It seemed to me that it was all pretty apparent that the 'mind' could change everything and that nothing existed outside of that 'mind'. The observing of a situation altered it, by interpretation. As Neils Bohr would eventually put it : the location and momentum of an object, and even whether it is a wave or a particle, was no longer a free-standing fact of Nature (could not be 'taught', was not 'there', did not exist in any fixed terms, as I would have put it), IT DEPENDED on the act of observation. What would that mean and how could it but mean what it produced? That would be the unfolding I was about to enter. Arthur Eddington, 1928, British astronomer: "the indeterminancy of the quantum universe opened the way for the introduction of the spiritual into the world, initiating a line of thinking that associates the paradoxes of the quantum world with the mysteries of religion." The other side of that thinking, of course, said the opposite - 'Quantum mechanics changed the world not by reintroducing spiritualism into science but by extinguishing the dream of perfect determinismm and mathematical predictability that [had] structured the Newtonian universe.' That was all that 'ART' had become to mean, for me - that reinterpretation underway, into which I was inputting, as well, my own and personal energy in order to energize a worlld of my own creation and liking. Many previous points, in this new place, my own, no longer existed. Quite simply, not at all.
When you're a kid, people put things into your head and you just accept them. I used to look at the prison, out back, behind my house - a strange, dark and brooding-looking place, from another era - and only know of it what others had told me. Prisoners. All I ever thought of were bank robbers, I suppose based on the paucity of exposure to anything except TV westerns and the small talk of regular folk. You figure, a big place filled with bank robbers. Not so true at all - lurking everywhere in this expanse of punishment were all sorts of crimes and criminals. I only learned later of killers, wife-beaters, child-smugglers, murderers with an organized crime bent, extortionists, torturers, swindlers, financial thieves, sexual predators, rapists, and all the rest. It was never explicitly stated - as a youngster, I guess you just don't know. My father's first-aid squad would occasionally be called into the place for 'emergencies' - he'd never say, but I learned later there were 'medical' emergencies - heart attacks, gall bladders, broken bones - and stabbings mostly - shivs, home-made knives, pokers, pointed objects. I'm sure there were other things, but I was never told. It was all curious - what did they do in there, how did they pass the time all day, and night? Basic, simply questions, with no follow-up. They were prisoners. We'd see them in the fields, threading their way behind tractors and wagons through the 100 or so acres of cornfields. It was like chain-gang stuff, but it wasn't : they were never 'outside', never - to my knowledge - alongside roadways picking up trash and such. Things like that, yes, I see now occasionally along the highways and interstates. Prison buses and prisoners - guarded over, being watched, creeping along with large plastic trash-bags, cleaning the highway's shoulders. But not then. For what purpose other than passing the time? Rehabilitation? I think not. The 'physical' world is not rehabilitation, and that's simply now how it's done.
So, from nowhere to somewhere, or nowhere to another nowhere? I had to decide which it was going to be, but I realized it was only to be what I called it, and nothing more. At least nothing was stagnant I was enjoying the alteration and the rotation. On the street, as I walked all along, I looked at everything and tried to imagine what the rest of my life would be, what options it held out for me. Those are things, of course, that no one ever fully knows - even if they think they do - and (maybe) as well they are things kids everywhere think about. I didn't know, and I don't still know. Avenel had been a nice little cave, someplace from which to learn rudiments. I always looked at my life as having had 'exile' periods within it. The train crash. The seminary. New York. Pennsylvania. Each for what they were, sort of unplanned, and each with a roiling, tumbling place in my life for pause, recollection and redefinition. Pretty good deal.
Let me get back to the part of the story I just left - the John Philips part. I didn't know the ins and outs of things and realized I probably never would - e11th street had to be a home and I hoped it could be, but it really wasn't meeting many of my thought criteria at that moment. All new and all too fresh. It all just passed along as I went about my business and it all became familiar enough soon enough. By the doing of it all it became familiar enough and I began my mental cataloguing : Spanish girls with their big tits fleecing the guys on the steps for five or ten bucks whenever they could - just to turn a quick and a decent rooftop trick - the entirety of 11th street could be seen as one big rooftop whorehouse with the yelling and the screamings of passion and irate hatred too resounding from every doorway and airshaft wherein people were stuck - for they surely were - and the only real relief was was all these luxurious girls prancing around : nobody cared and everybody stared : where I lived at 509 like some deer in the headlights and mindless too kid out there somehow on my own (just waiting for some light to change). And I once more began to think of Daily News headlines (you couldn't avoid; poor people read that rag, and it was everywhere) as I walked tiredly through the streets (where some other form of confusion ruled) : 'Senate Sees Red Art - Commie Brush Paints Wide; or 'Artfest Turns Nasty - Painters Take Bolshevik Bait'; and it wasn't funny, any of it - it was old and it was new too, and it still all walked these streets with me. Oh again, a Midrash within me and around me - all these little east European people thrashing around in their delusions of paradise or some other system of a just distribution that would include them. Their best living was yet to come? Mine was over? I didn't know. The fair distribution of resource and income all mixed with a golden age fury of Art and Beauty. Is that what they all wanted? A Utopian cornswaggle with their decrepit morning teas and coffees? 'Yeah, right', I mentioned to myself while watching the lines of indigents at the unemployment office coming and going, and the morose, broken faces of the homeless and the hungry outside the old firehouse mission down by White Street - they'd line up for hours before, these ancient, dry-faced, bedraggled old men, small, tall, stooped or straight, in their long coats with cigarettes dangling from peeled lips and faces of always-surprise where you'd have thought numbness would have taken over. I sought to laugh, or to find a laughter on someone's face, somewhere, but then I realized it was all too sorrowful for that too. And I concluded ART was a monster in its way too, no matter what other great things were attached to it. The crooked guy with cerebral palsy who knew the cop on the corner - they shook hands in the cold, and I was with them in my heart too. Far away, and distant, an ousider, but there nonetheless. I was beginning to fit. I knew it. I wasn't doing anything; I was standing on the curb and the wind was whistling past my head. It was already early Winter and everything was getting dark - the streetlights seemed always to be on and December 10th wasn't that far back and everything wanted to be overcome : the brash and stupid flow of packages and Christmas crowd had already been starting, and the after-work crowd always hummed and chattered with a certain zeal or seasonal joy as they let out from their downtown offices : faces, scarves, red cheeks, boots, glove, mittens and the girls. Yes, again all the New York women, everywhere. Dark, doubt, lethargy, sickness, hunger and want. You name it. It was there. Street-corner men with their bells and buckets for coins and the people passing in some meager frenzy of their own without much caring really one way or the other - for they all had places to go. And I heard someone speak up, 'If this is living, give me something else, quick', and I replied, 'I'm taking what you're giving 'cause I'm walking for a living', and the guy laughed and said back 'You're nuts' - and that was that, there was nothing else serene about it, and right there was a small shop selling comic books and superheroes - which books I'd always detested - and inside were a few rambling, plodding types paging through the latest comic book installments of this or that - not porn stuff or adult stuff, just regular comic books and their oddball superheroes and all that and it again struck me how absurd it was that these sorts of comics and things always ended up having Jewish origins and authors and ethchers and such - graphics, comics, entertainments, vaudevilles, ribald skits, schticks, blackface minstrelry and all the rest of that - it all just went on and one with that strange Freudian initiation, the dark, secret motivations of tightly wound, bundled outcasts, people in self-rages about things never rectified; the same sorts sitting around on all these post-war benches, still festering in their shock and fear. It had to come out somehow; some form of weirdly twisted thought which always had to bring to the fore some audacious version of covering-over reality and is grimness with a new-found strength and power which conquered, but always conquered shyly. It was a covering-shield for Reality and it seemed to keep people one or more steps away from facing reality and the 'real essence' of things - life, philosophy, religion, understanding, and the graceful happiness that really comes form within. These were, after all, God's chosen, or so their fiction went; all the while being as much repressed, cheap, whimsical, nasty, brutish and short too - to paraphrase Adam Smith. And all that sort of stuff played on my mind as I pranced around, wondering and watching, in a meek semblance of finding order from chaos and seeking exploration too - here and there between streets and places : the low lights, the caverns, the all-night bars, the places where people met furtively and stayed, the criminal sides in their little, walk-in social clubs with barred doors and screen-over windows, the winos, the bums, and those rtunning from whatever it was people ran from then, the 'only the dead know Brooklyn' types. And outside of all that it was maybe another beautiful and cloudless blue, bright day, the kind that sometimes happens in early Winter, when you can almost sense the space, 'the deep and the distant' between planets and stars, the sort of things which give 'SPACE' its real meaning, which day was drawing down now to its close and darkening and filling with night with its own usual spectres and shadows of image and hauntings and form. And the eye eventually adjusts to, most especially, the gray, smoky haze which became New York City back then after a harried workday of drayage, cars and trucks, lifting, hauling, packing, making, steam, fire, and heat too and everything else which occurs : babies born, old folk dying, chances crumbling, pain pounding, grief and hurt spreading, and all of that very limited sinecure by which so many bide their time and even here run it out.
Everything interested me, and very much. I walked around, especially in the evenings, starting out at perhaps 4pm, in that time of year when the strange descending of shadows presages the beginning of a long, slow, and then all-of-a-sudden sudden sunset into gray, chalkboard black black as all throughout the twinkling lights of commerce event the far stars, though there, are invisible. It's a turned out world, as if through a membrane's clear but wrong side. Things are all there, but there are too many of them and (curiously) the mind cannot decide if they should be closer, or farther away. I thought about what I saw doing, and I kept thinking about ART, and its place in the modern day. Thoughts ran fast, piling up, jumbled : 'Portraiture has become conceptualized. There's nothing 'real' any longer to precisely portray. All art has become psychological, in so many ways now the same battleground as money, status and reputation. Distorted art has become the norm. The 'norm' is no longer normal. Everything is seeking meaning, but all meaning eludes things. We are absurd, and so then is our art. Pretty much, everything now has been done, and the end-summation of anything about art is merely that which has already been done. Definitions are now contrived. Artists have had themselves shot or injured, for art; have done massive landworks, 'Earthworks' as a concept, things to be seen only from aloft or afar, as new vistas - of money, but so what, that was their new value. Helicoptors are now rented to see 'Art' which has to be flown over to be seen. Ancient astronauts there? Art has been made from dead things and from Death itself. Art as Death? The exact, complete opposite as the enlivening, creative art I'd always been after? Most every attribute of whatever one wishes to call anything has by now been allowed, to be called and named, to be transformed to art so that no longer do any of the labels or meanings or descriptions or categories fit and everything is exactly (first) what it is, and (second) what it is called - thus we have underscored and perhaps made vital the common duplicity of Life, ALL Life, life as we see it (to be). My walking joke was 'would you rather have more 'tality' (Mortality) or less 'tality' - as I'd call this new Art, which I mostly refused to accept. I needed TOTALITY. There were plenty of things that had to be worked on.
I knew a guy, a horse-holder, he took care of the chestnut cart horses over in the west 20's as they were brought in - other cart-horses too, but mostly the chestnut guys - there were plenty of them in the Winter : bluish metal-chrome steel carts, a few panes of glass and baskets, and an ever-present charcoal fire or two, running beneath the top counter, over which the chestnuts roasted. They were put into sales baskets on the sides, still hot, for sale. Everything gradually cooled off, yes, but mostly they were sold before that, or the newer ones put on top would re-warm then. it was a big operation, 20-30 carts allover midtown at any one time - into the late sixties they were still dragged around by work-horses, from all the stables and things along the mid-westside. this guy was an attendant there, a big deal - knowledge of horses, these kind of horses anyway, their traits and behaviors, needs and wants. Every so often Inspectors would come by, so he had to stay on top of everything fopr that too. I'd work there, four bucks a night, sometimes, sweeping, dumping ashes, wiping down a horse or two, straightening things up, heaving or opening chestnut sacks, etc. it was fun - all night work, mostly until whenever I wanted - coffee and food around, little grocers nearby, beer, bars, floozies and women sometimes hanging around. This guy was called Frontini; that was all I ever knew. He liked picture books. He listened to a record player, some lady named Ella Speed, he'd say. I don't know. Robert Johnson. Sun House, I think. He said weird things, like - if he was talking about someone he didn't like - 'He looked so bad I started looking around for eyes.' Whatever stuff like that meant to him. I guess maybe he was touched, a bit. He called everything 'thirteenth grade', everything - like 'that's so thirteenth grade, fuck it', meaning, I think, it's not worth the doing. To him everything in life after high school (the mandatory stuff) was thirteenth grade - 'You move forward, you go on' After all them years of learning the shit they teach you and feeling the cold, steely knife-hand of their controls over you, you finish with it, you go on, you move to thirteenth grade, see.' He'd say, 'Hey, the heart is a muscle, boy, work it.' He say things like: 'The sandwich shop at the edge of time.' 'Nothing kills faster than mis-placed faith, and it's the slowest quick ever.' The half-life of a scientist is about ten minutes.' He was stern, and hard, and fixed on things all the time. That's what I wanted to be. Focused, maybe incorrectly, but mad with a determination on all the wrong things, but all RIGHT for me.