LEAVING IT ALL AGAIN : Book Four
86. When I first first realized that something was askew it must have been about 1956; I was six years old, wandering already and noticed an intriguing adjunct to this new existence in Avenel - the new community of just-built homes. I never thought of them, in this case, as large, or small, not even as new versus old. I don't know how other kids took to any of this, but to me these were just houses, the homes we all lived in, as alike as they were different. Up and down Inman Avenue, Clark Place, Madison Avenue and Monica Court (what an odd and motley collection of place names, by the way) these hundred or so homes were built in a repeating pattern of small sameness; the 'dormers' altered in a repeated patten of left or right or center, meaning nothing really different at all. I never could determine which I liked the best - they each had their certain quirks. We had a center dormer and so I was always partial to that, or told myself I was - a centered symmetry perhaps, a finer balance. Nothing grand or architectural about it at all - just a silly builder's quirky choice. Politically, later on, I fantasized about the subconscious and psychological leanings of the parents back then who'd made these selections - rock-ribbed, stern republican affiliates claiming right dormers; middling centrists, of course, the center dormers; and, yes, the crazed, wailing lefties seeking their matching dormers. Never worked out as good for anything at all, but it was a fun theory. Everyone eventually did something different to their entryways or fronts or other parts of the houses - but that was more about economics and money-success and maybe 'taste' as much as anything - some sought 'grander' front entrances and doorways, little porch-y overhangs, fancier doors and windows, even 'Bay Windows' which came here in vogue about 1958 too - not that there was anywhere a view or a bay to be seen or worth seeing, and if there was it would have been despoiled, ruined, cluttered or sealed off. It was all some cerebral and conceptual telepathy. Attics got built into fancified rooms or extra bedrooms, sitting rooms, even dens and reading rooms and lounges and things. Walls were taken down, grander arches built, kitchens extended, back rooms added. All over time. In the beginning, my own real 'youth' times were still tough and starting out and no one really had any extra money; so everything mattered, and everything stayed closed up. I don't know exactly how they all did it, what jobs or incomes people had, except for ours. A pittance. I remember my father back then coming home each Friday with a brown, cash-payroll envelope with what was left in it of the one hundred and twenty-five dollars before taxes that he made. I know they 'budgeted' that money, had to make it last, itemized and recorded things, kept a cash 'kitty', they called it - I think like extra or emergency money. Spending twenty-five dollars a week on groceries was considered outlandish, though it happened. They kept one car, and had to worry about everything else. Why they ever had five kids is beyond me; well, you know what I mean anyway.
All that being as it may, the particular item I wanted to get at here was something else entire - it was the 'Minstrel Show', as it was called, and then 'Minstrelsy' in particular. I'll try to sort all this out and put the particulars down in good order.
This was about 1956, as I mentioned, and that was the initial period, for myself anyway, of both really 'coming' to a consciousness of my own and a sorting together and coming together of this new 'place' to which all these people had moved - new homes and streets, a general enlarging everywhere of the area and the lands and geography involved. Outside of the 'us' of us, there existed all of the things that had previously been there before us - slim as they may have been. The roadways and the highways, Route One (sometime back re-named as it grew, from Route 25, I think it was), the trailer parks with their vague and varied itinerants and fringe characters (a sort of opposite image entirely of what was being fruitfully presented to 'us' as the right way of things being). Up the highway a little bit was NYC, and Newark, and Jersey City and all of that; urban stuff - some of which the very people here around me had just moved from, or were. That conglomerated chunk of the 'old' world was surely breaking down and falling apart, and some of those chinks and chunks from it were ending up right here in Avenel too, good as well. I was still young, but in a few years every time I heard something of the talk of the times' tempo and temper, beatniks, crazy iconoclasts, over-educated and radical city-folks, I felt always as if it was just some noise filtering in from some place way down the end of the hallway I was in and where I wanted to be; out of sight, but just as prevalent, even though no one else was paying it any mind. I was always spooked, I was always haunted. Why else would a ten-year old, in a few years be doing, thinking and reading the stuff I'd be.
As these new people coalesced - basic strangers, folks thrown together by purchase alone, in the midst of each of their own story lines and formulations and family histories - they had to at some level find a means of coming together, recognizing each other and bonding - finding something within each of themselves common enough for the group-bond and the sharing. Think of it - this happens at the same level when a single, 'NEW' family moves into a neighborhood or onto a block, but here it had been compounded by a hundred and more - all new : place, home, lands, yards and cluttered tree clearances, streams and runoffs diverted, the loss of wildlife and natural growth and place, the railroad, the need for new school rooms and teachers, the suddenly outmoded layout of ships and stores enough to meet demand. New demand, people who wanted things. These were weird folk; strapping men a few years back from war memories and still-vivid experiences, with young and still attractive wives, sexuality, families, child-bearing, growing. It was all and everywhere alike, yet different, and all new. Just plain and simple new. It was a, for to be sure, psychological wonderland and - believe you me - amongst these people there had not ever been very much schooling. Things could be tough, rough, and tragic - soon and quick.
I'm not here belittling anyone for lack of 'education' - 1950's college degrees (when they meant something), GI Bill educations and the rest. More to the point of what I meant and noticed was any lack of intellectual 'curiousity' among these people - heavy reading matter was the usual: National Geographic, Time and Life and Newsweek and Look. The local Perth Amboy newspaper, already undergoing changes of name and content, was meager at best. The Newark Star Ledger represented the rest of New Jersey back then, but I well-remember my father saying, 'I don't live in Newark, why would I want to know what's going on around there?' That very small and curious statement stayed with me always, as it seemed to willingly close out so, so many other things, and more to the point just seemed to represent an entire way of viewing things and the consciousness that went with that sort of approach. God forbid then, the New York Papers - of which at that time there were still quite a number. The Herald Tribune was still a big deal, but so daring. I don't recall ever really seeing a heavily-stocked bookcase or a referential 'library'section in anyone's homes - friends and locals. My friend down the street startled me, as it was, once day when I realized, during a visit, that his family received the TVGuide by mail subscription!
The group of people I grew amongst, me parents friends and new peers, I guess, all somehow had steered themselves to the local Catholic Church. Which was to be expected. I remember my parents taking me proudly to their local Bayonne catholic church, to show me where they'd been married, where I was baptized, etc. It was a point of honor to show that connection, then and there, as much as it was in this new place to get connected. St. Andrew's Church, the local history tells us, was once a 'mission' church-chapel outreach for St. James Church parish - larger and well-established in nearby Woodbridge. St. Andrews was a nice, small, brick church, when finally built, serving the small outlying farm (mostly) community of Avenel, its new name (named after someone's daughter) after 'Demorest-On-the-Hillsides' was retired as a name. Until that church was replaced, about 1957, latest, by the much larger, modern, and far more nondescript church building, that was where everything took place. I remember entering, on Sundays that old church, up the stone stairs from Avenel Street. It was small, had wonderful exposed beams along its humbler ceiling, and the loft in the rear for singing or choir or whatever. It was nice, countrified, a bit of real presence. The new church, by contrast, once built, was a monstrosity - awkward on its spot, replacing a woods behind the previous church, large, light-toned brick, generically Catholic in its look - simple 'stained-glass' window treatments of large windows, a big altar area, clerestory lighting, high loft, large pews, all the usual big-church stuff. it was unremarkable. The old church, for a few years, until about 1964, was left in place as a 'rec' hall - basketball flooring and hoops were put in placer and bleachers replaced where the altar had been. Downstairs became a game room, stage for small music concerts ('garage' bands were just beginning to proliferate, with tunes like 'Telstar' and stuff like that, with guitars). There was a pool table, and at the other end, the snack room, stove, soda, refrigerator, all that.
Once the new church got underway, and once all these newly arrived people began falling into place, coalescing, one of the parish priests had the idea of implementing, as a means of cohesion, a theater group, which produced small stage plays two or three times a year. I remember well how it brought people together, drew in the women who, still young, enjoyed singing, theater, and who most probably still were living on their fantasy and idea of talent - maybe once in high school they'd been stage stars. There were - two that I recollect - a version of 'Oklahoma' and a version of 'The Rainmaker'. Early on, my mother was involved with both and I recall well attending read-throughs, sing-throughs, rehearsals and various things - always enjoying the scene, the piano-played accompaniment, the ladies dancing and singing, as well as the funny bravado and bluster of the men. I didn't really know any of the adults - perhaps a few from the neighborhood - and it seemed everyone was enjoying themselves and getting along. My mother, in fact, showed an entire other side to herself from what I'd seen before - high-stepping and kicking in dances and such. She had bit parts, and I could see she enjoyed the costuming, the tights and the rest of the costuming which went with it all.
Anyway, after that, curiously - for me - the next established performance, once or twice yearly, in fact, was what they called a 'Minstrel' Show. Now, as a means of bringing people together - and I guess especially in a Catholic Church milieu - this was curious. Almost as if done unconsciously UNLESS, I thought, unless it was chosen deliberately. Scapegoating, at its basic level, is actually a grand way of unifying and bringing a group to one form of thinking. These were, recall, otherwise disparate people, from all sorts of different places, come together only because of their presence in a new set of some hundred or so newly-constructed, budget homes - built for them in a location previously wild, wooded, natural and essentially untamed, or at least raw. (Remember the local merchant-grocer, 'Metro' telling me how much he missed his best and favorite hunting grounds, related to you in an earlier chapter). Everything here was new - streets had just been cut in, roadways and small businesses expanded, the older part of town - which pre-existed all this - had to integrate these newcomers in and - voila! - what better way to do this than by engaging them in a version of old Minstrelsy which would have lost all its edge and sarcasm and secret references and meanings. Plain old whites in blackface, smooching and jumping, cracking and hooting, and making fun of others, especially as the others (real blacks) were nowhere to be found. There absence was their presence, and thus it allowed a wedge to be placed, just jarring open a strange 'other' door to a world that they could jab at, poke fun at, make fun of, and find a way then - by that means of ridicule and self-pleasure - to conjoin and come together as their own 'group'. It was (almost) miraculous. Yet, it wasn't.
The history of Minstrelsy is so strange - and so out of place for the use it was given here in Avenel - that I'll digress : In 1843 the Minstrel Show was a fairly new presentation (a full theatrical presentation, about two hours long, featuring ensemble, musical program, and comic skits) and was a national sensation. So to speak. (Yes, historically the word is 'Minstrelsy', not 'Minstrelry').
The earliest Minstrelsy was put on by slaves, with coded and significant nods of symbolic protest and ridicule. The initiate would know. It carried with it a long and complicated pre-history : in America, playing with race was a well-established tradition, with many contradictory political uses, from droll to subversive to exploitative and deadly - from the slaves who donned their masters clothing and talked 'white' in the Carolinas in the years before the Revolution, to the revolutionaries themselves, those Boston Tea Partiers dressed up as Native Americans, to the urban 'Callithumpians' - gangs who sooted their faces, banged on pots, and invaded the homes of adulterers or old men who married young women. Belsnickel, a proto-Santa, visited children with 'face of black', carrying candy in one hand and a whip in the other, he scared them out of their minds. Whites in Philadelphia, preached 'blackface on Black violence,' blacking up to attack African-American churches and Christmas celebrants. Around 1830, a white New Yorker (from Five Points), named Thomas Dartmouth Rice, introduced onto American stages a song and dance called 'Jump Jim Crow', creating a sensation. Such loose energies cohering around the idea of a 'face of black' became utterly radicalized in song, dance and humor. A lexicon of characters, dances, theatrical forms, and songs emerged, with borrowings, thefts, and amalgams - sometimes mocking blacks viciously, sometime paying them homage. At first, Minstrelsy was elastic, dangerous; in mixed race crowds in New York dives and elsewhere, it signaled an alliance of the low that might rock the nation. Black charisma was 'invented' or, at least, named. Jim Crow, the figure himself, (not yet the name for the national apartheid that governed race relations from the 1870's to the 1960's), was played by a young white man in makeup and costume who lamented the 'misfortune' of whites who would 'spend every dollar' to become 'gentlemen of color.' [Or, as actually put, 'gentlemen of color']. Liberation was contemplated from behind Jim Crow's mask : 'I am for freedom,' he sang in the 1830's, and 'de white is called my broder'. The amalgams herein themselves were indecipherable tributes to the richness and confusion of the American marketplace: the character of Jim Crow was of African origin, but the melody was distinctly Irish. The dance came from everywhere and nowhere : in different accounts, Louisville, Pittsburgh, New York, Baltimore, and elsewhere. The song was performed in parody by anti-Catholic crowds on their way to burn down convents, and it was even played for American diplomats by musicians in foreign countries who earnestly believed it was our national anthem. By the mid-1840's minstrelsy was a theatrical institution; troupes formed, plays were scripted. The politics of these rapidly grew more unilaterally racist but still maintained a certain anarchy and surprise - everything was sucked into this vortex - references to opera, music hall, each 'Nationalized' by being blacked up. Lines were quoted, things suggested, and a thousand other cues were uttered, now lost to time in their references. The racism was American, as was the promise of liberation - and the homage to the culture and labor of the disenfranchised. The appropriation became American. It had empathy; it had hate. yet it didn't really 'ask' you which side you stood upon. On the other hand, black leader Frederick Douglas said "the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by Nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their fellow white citizens."
Burnt cork was cheap. The Minstrel show had taken on a format : there was no curtain, as though the show was continuous with everyday life; the minstrels emerged from stage-side, instruments in hand, and greeted the audience like old friends; the two end-men sat at either end of the stage: Tambo and Bones, or maybe Banjo and Bones; they spoke in the deepest dialect, and did most of the clowning. In the middle sat the 'interlocuter', or middleman, who spoke something like formal English and usually wore some combination of clothing and makeup that made him seem 'white'. It was a parody of 'high and citified society' which fooled many 'innocent villagers'. Banjo and bones, as characters, as personalities, were hard to settle; the interlocutor was always telling them to be or keep seated - to a kind of fanfare of horns and drums played loud. They mock-argued on stage, supposedly in a 'happy imitation' of the way blacks actually argued. A 'delightful jangle' of assertion and contradiction which eventually rose to 'impressive threats.' They told toneless pun after toneless pun, jumping in hard on bad punch-lines. '(What plant is most fatal to mice? The cat-nip'). They told 'why did the chicken cross the road' jokes. They invented them. They dressed in drag : a pair of comically big feet poking out from underneath frilly petticoats signaled the reveal. They misspoke and muddied Shakespeare, they performed official-sounding stump speeches and mock orations that butchered the official political speech of the day. They carried on with a frightening physicality, the spectral air of zombie and horror, of the creepy feeling men and women feel when they are sensitive to clowns, and see one in full make up. (The modern clown's make up, like the white gloves on Mickey Mouse, are holdovers yet). The blackening up slowly grew - at first only light, but later along, as Minstrelsy grew more racist, the performers would use cork or grease or shoe polish so that everyone looked hauntingly alike, and so the whites of their eyes picked up the footlights and glittered eerily. Soon they painted their lips and mouths white too, sometimes broad and red - so that the very idea of 'mouth' took on a furtive, desperate life of its own. Motley, baggy clothing, covered in colorful patches; a kind of emblematic slave garment. a parody of what couldn't be parodied - huge buttons, oversized rags, extra long arms and legs. They struck overlong, anti-establishment postures. The minstrels couldn't keep still, even when sitting - moving in an endless, jerking motion, a restless teen dance. They played extraordinary instruments of low origin - bones and tambourine, fiddle and banjo. The bones, which contributed a 'horrible noise' were actual sawed-off horse ribs. The tambourine was not today's tambourine : it was, instead, a bigger, Irish drum that gave each song a bottom and still jangled. Nothing was well-tuned, the band scratched and wheezed and rang, craftily underplaying. They danced what has now become known as the 'wheel step' (singing while he spun on the axis of one foot placed behind himself. Michael Jackson, did it, M. C. Hammer, and Mick Jagger too).
I guess I stop sudden. If burnt cork then was cheap, how expensive was any of the rest of this? How much did it cost to bring forth these old stage-skits into a new present? How costly was the fakery of white banjo, white slave-song, and white second-guessing of the Master in the Big House? Did any of it have to do with Avenel? Bringing people together? Forging a Catholic mainstream? At whose expense? Where were they, the blacks? What historical references were these new whites making? What exactly, then, was this mix I was witnessing, watching as a 9 year old in sometimes open-mouthed awe and stupefaction, and pleasure, probably, just as much.
Everything, after a while, works hard to become a joke - concepts and ideals change, or are societally manipulated so as to change. There's always a shadow behind the curtain, doing something. In this case, old Harry Jones and his wife, Fran Jones, old Bill Evans and Irene Castle, and all the others from the older Avenel who'd integrated this new group of homeowners into their own, slightly older cast (they'd been doing these yearly church minstrel shows for some time now) in conjunction with whichever new, outreach-oriented priest had been imported from St. James - you get these priest guys, anyone of them with a 'flair' for the dramatic, hiding their swishiness behind a Roman Collar, and you're all set. The locals all came together. Something in their brains had clicked to tell them that - in a vain swoon of innocence - they could find their Avenel comfort in a bout of nigger-presence. They could be black! In being so, they could air and say themselves what was underneath some of their other words - caution be gone. As I remember these shows, they did pretty much fit the billed description of 'Minstrel' - guys in blackface, on either side of the stage, throwing running commentary out towards another black-faced buffoon at center stage, quick acts coming and going through, all commented on and/or joked over. Skits and song and dance. Local women coming out, unabashed suddenly, in gingham or frill, doing their act. Sex was never 'mentioned' per se, but I'd be sure to say it was there. As for myself, I admit, much of anything passed right by me, probably - I watched as spectacle, not content. Didn't know much. It - the Minstrel Show - somehow broke everything down, torched away the fences and fetters - people could talk their wise-ass, scat -ditto, home-made slang, and get away with it. People would laugh - audience members thinking of themselves as in on the joke. Getting it all. The fact that all of this always began and ended with a prayer and a short homily made no difference. Made no sense either, and no one cared. Like bringing home the negro bacon from the slave-boy's pig-yard, it was all wrapped in its own cloth carpet-bag of propriety and a thought of 'savage, burning wit', all a joke on 'de massah'. I never knew, frankly, if they meant the Master, or the Messiah. Dumb bastards, all.
87. Behind all this was a smattering of pride - but only a smattering. Think of it. These folks now finally had something, a place, of their own - a newly staked out perimeter, around which they could plant their hedges or build their fences. Why not then take the next, very American, step. Roosters crow don't they? Find someone else then to make fun of, to point at, to ridicule. Thus the fateful first step was taken - the church Minstrel show; self-referential, support-group ethics, a closed family of sinners gathered nightly to watch, chuckle, laugh and applaud. The genial black man won't mind. Hold the hand then that held the hand then that held the hand of a Jesus of Righteousness who had saved us all. Just as the sun rises in the east - perfectly poised and steady each day - and illumines our world, just as that figment of incorrect knowledge, a coming to terms of something which mysteriously happens daily only because the words by which we describe it 'make' it happen, by description occurs, we can rest assured that 'God' is in his Heaven and all's right with the world? It's pretty simple, and that's really all you need. All the rest, everything past that, is just fluff; church fluff, societal fluff, whatever. I look back on all this now and am still stunned, from each direction, by what I lived through : and these were adults, mind you, mortgaged adults, ready and happy to undertake these new ventures in support of their own new ventures - the redundancy of place and meaning. The kneeling to God and priest. The factual representation of cosmic Mother, cosmic Father, most luridly in fashion - hundreds of people lined up, Sunday or not, to fashionably take their places and do their obsequies to this churning, burning, undulating wall of God-Fire in His commandments and preachments. While, in the basement, 'let's go put on a Minstrel Show. We'll tidy up this mess for sure, and laugh it off.' Maybe Avenel was perfect for this, maybe it was alone. Maybe they did not do this in Elizabeth, or Linden, or Rumson and Asbury Park, or Great Neck or Paterson, Larchmont or Queens. I just did not know. The immediacy of the here and now for me was right there - 'Avenel', some queered and sainted place, thrown down like God's gauntlet on all that newly turned soil and muck. Every shovel turned rolled a Leni Lanape over in his or her grave. It was wordless and formless and seamless - yet, yet, here, these adults were trying, had attempted, to give it all a shape and a form of comfort and gain, for themselves and - supposedly - for us, their kids. (And, yes, fifteen years later, it would all probably come back to haunt and pain them, to bite them in the ass, as their very own children grew, grew loose, and turned on them and their rabidly-forming society of creeps).
The hubris of humankind knows no bounds. It seems to me, anyway. Everything gets mixed together, thrown in a rush, and then gets substantiated as 'Doctrine' for no other reason than that someone said so. Believers flock. The weak and the naive, not recognizing their own powers of convincing themselves of things, throw down their crutches and walkers, and proclaim 'Saved!' And by that, yes, are - it's all good enough, sanctified and acceptable. Yet, at the root of it all lies Mankind's own force, the trapping categorical imperative that brings him or her here - the place they Be. Religion makes me sick. It's a canard, the selfsame organized and regimented canard that makes armies, and schooling, and government and process. It's Hell and it's the Devil together, all taken as one and dressed up like He Who Comes, the Messiah, the Kris Kringle nightmare daddy of the neighborhood. Without chalice, really, and without benefit - except the age old benefit of passing time. The same reason we invent cars and planes, the same reason we work chemistry and mathematics, philosophy and warfare - all thrown together, passing time. What does anyone ever complain about? They complain about how this 'passing time' goes - 'I can't get any service, the waiter was rude, the lines are enormous, checking my baggage is a pain, I can't understand what they're saying, what does this mean, what do they want here, why is traffic stopped, how long will I be here?' - etc., etc., etc. All nothing. Yet you think you're aggrieved? You think you need Salvation? That your taint has to be cancelled, someone has to ransom your soul, break your sinful, fallen ways, redeem you? Everyone of no import talks about this, while anyone, on the other hand, of any 'supposed' societal import, never breaches the subject.
The basis of religion, as I see it, is a paucity of Faith. Paradoxical? Yes, I guess. But it is, after all, in a Blakean sense anyway, the turning away from the creative force and power and energy that aligns people - under their own false fabric of 'faith' and 'belief' to the anchors and shackles of control and passivity - with the dark forces which merely parade as Religion and Faith : the ageless dark powers of autocratic direction. People have fearfully put aside their own power of Creation and Formation - of building their own personal and working worlds with free and open approaches to the world around them. They join a straitjacket instead; they listen to dictates. They begin cutting lawns, still pretending they too are Kings.
One of the most tenuous and annoying things - to this day - are those roadside church signs with pithy religious sayings displayed on them. The mock their own approaches to religion while trying to uphold their presence in the world. 'Of the world' is more like it (see St. Paul, 'I am in the world but not of the world', more or less) as they are basically, anyway, collection baskets for once-a-week money buckets and supposedly 'sound' policies told in childish, impish or singsong fashion to their own faithful deaf, dumb, and blind, memberships. A few sick examples : 'Let's Meet At My House before the Big Game, signed, God'; 'It Cost God More To Save the World Than To Change It'; and, last here of three, '1 Cross, 3 nails, 4 You'. Yes, you read these right.
Not one iota of any of this will ever butter my bread - in fact, in light of everything, I find it abhorrent, more and more so. The big cities, over the years, have all had their 'Tenderloin' Districts - red-light districts, areas of brothels, etc. Dens of vice and corruption where the rich (and the poor) play and work alike. The power of being alive is, partially, the power of the flesh - and why not? Yet all of that has been supplanted in false pride, false modesty, hubris and effrontery, by any church on any streetcorner you may find. They claim to be 'holding things down', yet they don't have the first clue of the destructiveness of their power. Life is an outreach, an empowerment of the Human-Life-Source to Create - concept, light, idea, passion, emotion - and if we are to be judged by anything (and I say 'if') it is not be allegiance to the dirty, ecclesiastical strictures of false Devils, but rather by the alliance we make within ourselves, heart, soul, and being, to the Powers of our own existence. There is no Death better than the death unrecognized. We can live instead, and not dwell on the Darkness they preach. Our bodies really can heal themselves - without the limpid imposition of practitioners and false doctors who peddle despair - body heart and soul despair - in place of the Love and Light and Magic we should live by. It was William Blake, again, remember, who was arrested for throwing a badgering and hectoring police officer off of his property. By such fierce response I, in turn, protect my own soul and Devil be gone!
When I first got to New York City from Avenel, I was immediately lessened - if only because of 'new place, new times.' That sort of thing really cuts a young kid back some. The quality of brash adolescent certainty was quickly replaced instead by watchfulness and wariness - trying to figure everything out. It was no longer like Avenel - where the trees at the end of the block were the trees at the end of the block : the known, the expected. I knew what was in there, where the rivulets ran to, how the woods were sorted. In New York (not even New York, really, just a part, as it were, of lower Manhattan at first), everything was mystery. Confusion was outside of me, lurking, ready to cross me up, and I knew I couldn't let that happen. Walking the streets was the only way to learn. I needed, first, the true geography of knowing and realizing : feeling without touch, so to speak, exactly where I was at each moment. The old cemeteries by 1st Street, what Houston Street was, where it went and what it did, what sections it separated, what was St. Marks Place, where did it lead, and how did things meander from it, out of Astor Place, off Bowery - where did things go, what history behind them had pushed it so - Sullivan Street, Carmine, Bleecker, MacDougal. And these were only cross streets by comparison to the big avenues sluicing up and down; Broadway, Fifth, and all the rest. An amazing, generative conversation-with-self ensued. 'You've got a quarter in your pocket, mug-wart, try and make that work.' It did, most of the times - muffins and coffee, a roll, oatmeal, something easy. There were already things in my head, talking out to me - I had to listen. Words became salacious reminders that my 'person' was only part of me - the rest of me was not quite as fixed and stuck as my 'person' was. I had growth and possibility ahead of me, wads of it, and all yet a'borning. I had to learn how to nurture - nurture my Self, my Place, and all the things I did and whatever info I took in. You can believe me. I was the very first human computer, addending information, processing requests, clicking onto links, going to other places in the hop-skip-jump manner of an electrical mind-connection. No one ever talked to 'Me' because no one ever saw 'Me' specifically. They only saw something that registered to them as me, but it wasn't. I was still working on it.
Consider those Japanese Zen guys, even then, in the context of what I was living. Aphorisms and Koans abounded, and they each fit me well. 'In seeking to hit something, do not aim. Let your being find what you are seeking. If you aim for it, you'll miss; if you do hit it, it will just be luck.' Try telling that to someone back in Avenel.
87. When I was growing up, a man pretty much wouldn't use a phone; or if he did with was with aversion, under duress, under the impetus of 'business' work or job, getting paid to do so. It was a woman's thing. Still is a woman's thing - problem is now that most men have become women in their ways and approaches to things. Aptly seen they are hanging on cellphones, busy scanning and looking down every 300 seconds, it seems. No perplexity, no aversion - the subservience of carrying-fees, contracts, points and distances are all accepted. The onerous burdens of socialized citizenship make this to be of little consequence - as the rest of life resembles whatever crumbles of life the phone represents, men now willingly flaunt their accessibility. For nothing, and to nothing. numbered grunts, effete feminized reporters of time and place and emotion. It's a huge, useless and certainly emasculating operation. Not man's work at all. The 'pretend' factor now is everywhere - the idea is that one, at least, pretends the varied importance of everything is the same : where 'I' am, where 'I'm' going, what 'I'm' eating, who 'I'm' seeing. Face it, these are useless people and the people the useless world they've now constructed around themselves. We lived in a world not just 'simpler' but far more elementary - when you lifted up a telephone receiver, there was a person there, waiting for the number you sought. Think now if that happened to you - whether a mechanical voice or not, the presence of an intermediary would immediately tell you that there was a presence and a resolve between you and your intentions, which is anathema to today's world : instantly gratifying directly any intent or wish. The screen of the 'other' has been removed - yet in all other aspects Life and Society has been protectively socialized so that the 'other' is all that's supposed to be thought about. Honored in the breach goes that rule, as is said. I don't know rightly whether the people of my older society - long gone now, both the people and the society - would have been able to function or understand the mores and the means of today. It's just entirely different; a softer, a smoother surface - everything being less tactile, more comforting, to the touch. There is no dismay allowed. People using constant telephones, text or voice, are not 'dismayed' people; they are not communicating dismay - they are communicating blandness, comfort, happiness, ease, blather and insipidness.
When I was young, quite young, eight or nine years old, I can well remember my father's making of the point - more than once, for sure - of the pleasure and the importance to him (weirdly all, it now seems - meat itself even being foreign to me) of getting the marrow out of the bones - beef, I guess - that were left of the meat he was consuming. I don't know the entire procedure of this, well-cooked, boiled, or whatever - but he would take a great and a serious pleasure in telling me, as I watched ( and, I guess, tried) him extract and eat the marrow - that white, pulpy matter which fills the bones of beef-meat. It was curious, it was odd, but I thought little of it and just let him roll along - to my father the marrow was the most valued and important part of meat-eating. In any other respect he was seemingly unconscious of nutrition, , value, etc., so I don't rightly know what any of this was about. It meant something to him - perhaps Depression-era youth and a paucity of good food, nutrition or meals made this valuable in concept. Maybe someone had told him this is where nutrition lived - in the innards of the bones of the meat. Maybe it was a vast, symbolic undertaking to his to hoist the banner of this one, peculiar, little-thought-about awareness. Maybe he found a sense of his own power in consuming the heart of the bones, the meat, as he ate - taking from it some form of symbolic justification and a sense of rightness by which to combat and fight back the blemishes and wounds of the world around him - his world of needs and scarcities. Maybe somewhere he'd had to eat bones, the garbage-cast-offs of fancier meals, in order to survive. I never knew, and still don't, won't ever. It was obviously a psychological item he revered. The heart of the matter, the marrow of any argument, the essence of the beast. Strange enough, but I think it was all made up anyway. Nowadays, my dog eats marrow bones, and loves it.
Funny things always pop up in memory. As I read through constant reams of information, books, stories, tales, I always am struck by appearances of falsity, or non-appearances of consciousness. What I mean by that - I can again use my father here to exemplify - is I wind up wondering how it is that a person can go through a life caught up and responding to appearances and events - taking all the assumptions of this world - 'that coffee cup is real, this plate in my hand is real, the metal on this car door has its own reality to which 'I' must respond' - taking any of that (and most people do, nay all) as particular and real and existent. How and when does a person 'develop' the outside consciousness to stand back from things, to determine the sense of being, the self, that is NOT any of this, and carry that with him or her? I guess what I'm saying is what is the psychology of the Life we each lead that makes it steady and real for us to 'accept' a 'reality' we have personally determined to so be? Which sort of question always plops me right back into 'Avenel', into my parents and their ilk, into the people who brought to me the world I was given. How do I react to that, to take and/or accept or not? What was I meant to do in order to build around all that another world entire - I knew from the very start that mine was not ever to be theirs. I believed in nothing they did or said - all those strange family people peppered throughout Bayonne and Avenel and all other points. They were acting in subjective dramas, for roles and situations for which I'd long before given back the script, saying 'I do not accept this play, these premises are all incorrect, do not resonate, and represent nothing of Reality for me.' I knew that, and I knew that my own world was entirely different - messages, ideas, words and designs constantly streaming in from some other place not sharing this 'Earth' plane upon which we all seek to be pretending to be standing upon. Perplexing and a conundrum, but that was my life. And it still is - it still colors the justification for all of what I do. Which is not, in the 'worldly' sense, anything much at all. Having nothing, I amass nothing, but neither do I seek or want anything. Simple and essential only, I create. That's pretty much it - and because of that, yes, I deign to tell you ALL about where it is they I inhabit this space from. Curious recollections from the unsound, perhaps, yes, that's what it should be called. Except the word 'recollections' would be incorrect, because that means it's behind me, being recalled, but - in my actuality - it's all still ahead of me and I still refuse to engage it, creating instead another. There are tricks like this which make us go, make us function in place. The funny ones, the outlandish scenes, they all come from people caught in their traps, and babbling, screeching about it while within their profound unease - wrangling their jewelry and vaporous mouth about all the things which matter not. I leave all that to you, assuming you are not to be here for any of that from me. I hope your own trick works well for you.
When I was still in the motorcycle world, perhaps 1994 here, some midpoint of all that, I was about age 45. It was an odd time of nothing, a strange time to be out of place. The Biker world had me all caught up. There were motorcycle nights, I can recall being spent, in bizarre places - the Pik-a-Lilly, (a roadside biker bar halfway into the Jersey Pine Barrens), the Americana Diner, a dump of a place, big and busy (now all redone and fancified) on Route 130 somewhere headed down to Burlington, The Sandman Motor lodge - a tough-ass trucker joint at exit 7, I think , of the NJTurnpike. In the Sandman (named for a guy named Charles Sandman who was once a political force in southern NJ, and in fact came close once or twice to making it as Governor), all these overland southern truckers would pull in, big rigs, from Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, and the drivers would sit by the windows, at the little diner tables, and on each table, just like a jukebox, was a long-distance telephone. I guess it all went onto their tab or their bill, but there'd be all these crazy accents talking - calling home, calling dispatch, calling the office, the routing agent, whatever. It was pretty bizarre - to have all that going on, pretty little waitresses, or not, ferrying trays of food around, and - at the rear - was another room, dark-lit, way more mysterious, which was a bar and a go-go dance lounge, or whatever they're called. Truck-driving men, back and forth all evening. Bathrooms, and showers, were at the other side of the dining part, and - out back - an entire motel array of sleeping rooms , and living-quarters : overnight, a few days, a week, whatever. gas pumps out front, vans and trucks coming and going, and the occasional State Trooper or even local cop moseying around. For us, on motorcycles, doing 'night business' it was about an hour away, give or take. As the night wore on, it was all fueled more and more by alcohol. Funny thing was, we were tooling around like tough guys, doing 'motorcycle', Biker business - club stuff, territories, little meetings, arranging runs and events - but it was, truly, so fraught with danger that we'd be carrying guns; and often the conversation about these guns, as we entered a bar or a new place, or even the Sandman, was whether or not we should 'go in with them already loaded,' or be at the ready inside to 'load up' if we saw the situation was warranting it. We'd always be meeting people from outlaw clubs and things, and it was always, yes, somewhat unpredictable. South Jersey and Philadelphia always meant Pagans; nothing else. They were a mean-ass outlaw Biker club from Philadelphia, tied up with the Philly mob - they'd think nothing of throwing you in front of a truck, out of a speeding van, or just blowing your brains out or beating you to a pulp. Stabbing you. They were run, locally, (I already mentioned this in another chapter) by a house-arrest guy who went by the moniker 'Egyptian' - real name was John somebody. He lived in a regular, small strip-development house somewhere down there and - if not in jail - was at home with an ankle bracelet keeping him there. Others' did his work for him, and all his biddings and messages were brought to us. Real smooth. Didn't really want to mess with this bunch, in any way. It demanded precision - even if all looked good, on the way home, 20 minutes later, these guys were apt to catch up to us, riding, and from their van, run us down, shoot or mangle us. In fact, they probably had most of the cop departments. in their pocket anyway, or enough connections to work it that way. Philly mob was tough shit, really rugged. We always had to be careful. The Pik-A-Lilly was just a slob-joint off in the weeds somewhere. It pretended at being 'family' - hamburgers, tables, and all, but mostly it was just a really piss-ass nasty Biker bar - murders and beatings, and people dragged off into the nearby woods always. It was so bad, some nights you'd not even want to leave your motorcycle out front - one of us would need to keep watch, and be ready to die anyway. It little mattered, really, what side of the wall you were on - inside the joint or out, someone would get you. It was southern territory, and they knew we weren't them. Rough shit. New Jersey, down there and back then, was one weird, twisted kingdom of ghouls and ax-murderers running through the pines. Being a Biker just made it all worse. Up here - Linden, Elizabeth, Roselle, Union - what presence the Pagans had was just as mean as just as treacherous, though a lot smaller and more invisible. They were led by a mean demon referred as 'Landlord' - a tough guy with a hundred-yard stare that could burn death right through you. He wasn't a big guy or any of that, but he demanded fealty, was brutal, and got it. He ruled the Jersey area in Essex and Union counties, and probably lots more - had an air-conditioning and heating company, and was always seemingly one step ahead of trouble - they had a way, anyway, of wiggling out of problems, any problem they could pin on others, and did - so that they pretty much remained unscathed. But not always - there are plenty of 'Pagans' doing big-time incarceration. They had like a headquarters bar in portside Elizabeth that was a nasty den of thieves. I'd spent many nervous and long afternoons there. On Third Street, NYC, in an even more exaggerated vein, was the headquarters of the Hell's Angels. A veritable arsenal, which I've described previously here, under one Brandon Manning during most of the time I was there - with local friends who 'flew up' from farm-team clubs and later became Angels themselves. Now, these years later, and with me not involved in any way, much of that turf nervousness seems to have gone away, and - in fact - there's a chapter of Hell's Angels now locally right here in Edison. Whatever; they can have it all. I got away, and a person doesn't always get to do that, especially not one who has seen the inside of the citadel.
There's a town nearby called Union, NJ, that once had a club and a bar and a picnic grounds called Farcher's Grove. During the period up to and after WWII, it was the headquarters-home of a local German Bund Club, of which there were quite a few thereabouts. They were, under the rubric of German cultural organizations, Nazi sympathizer clubs as well. When I was running motorcycle events, we'd quite a few times make use of their acreage for gatherings and motorcycle events - Pagan territory, in that department. The guy named Landlord, previously mentioned, had this place within his turf. The old guys who ran it, and frequented it and were mostly just there constantly, as a drinking club, hangout, second-life, were old German guys and their younger underlings who had come up under them. Wives as well - always nicely put out, dressed in a peculiar, adult, German-high-style fashionableness, rather old-school in that department. We'd have to meet with them to organize these events. Anyway, these guys didn't know motorcycles from anything but they were always hospitable and willing, more than happy, to take the five or six hundreds bucks for grounds rental and some of the food and beer take - it was a fund-raiser for them as well. In these meetings, sitting around a table - like a mafia-gathering somehow in an Italian social club - they'd gather by rank and be seated, in deference to one another, and alongside of us. There would be banter, always side-points, other things to be talked about, issues brought up. We'd weave through all that with our business-at-hand, and get it done. The schnapps would be brought out - and the series of toasts would begin. Amazingly, Der Fuhrer was still alive! The jokes and the talk went on - asides about historical Nazism, exploits of war-times, fealty to Herr Kommandant, and all that. Once or twice - really special nights - a ring or two made of tightly wound human hair would be brought out, a medallion or a medal of some service to the Fatherland nature, really serious talk of the present day, the things happening, and always, always in the midst of it, the communal breakouts, among those gents, of laughter and their own brands of snickering. There was a huge back-scrim picture to all this of which I was not fully clear, yet curiously intrigued and surprised by. An intrepid spike of living, current 'History' that somehow still lived on in spite of all else, right there in Union, NJ. I later looked up what I could back then, and found histories a'plenty of the old German beer halls, drinking clubs, picnic grounds and - yes - the numerous bunds which had dotted the area. There was an complete back-story of German sympathizers and Nazi-era fellow-travelers which still lived on - dwindling yes, and falling off one by one, but still there. (Farcher's Grove closed about a decade later, maybe the late 90's or early 2000's, and is now some sort of large warehouse/professional park complex in the very same location. All the weird and oddball sheds and food pavilions and long swap-meet style old wooden tables and counters are gone, as is the large outdoor bar (or two) and the large covered dance floor with its benched walls all around. It was pretty splendid, and the 'real' flags only came out in these section late after hours, or at the delirious alcohol-fueled tail-ends of these numerous outdoor German-club events. It was something to see, almost splendid, in spite of what it was. I never knew what firepower or armaments were kept within, but I'm sure, just as well, there were many). Only in the most tangential way was this connected to the 'Biker' lifestyle, but it was not that far off. You can easily, today, look up the German-American Bund Clubs, Union, NJ, and read about it all, and a Senator Bettle as well (way back to 1871). When I lived, long before this, adjacent to Tompkins Square Park, I had already learned then (1967) of the German community once housed thereabouts, and the General Slocum Disaster - in the East River right nearby - in the early 1900's (June 15, 1904 exactly), which had dispersed and transplanted most all of this 'Little Germany' either up to the Yorkville area in the east 90's or elsewhere - much of elsewhere being the nearby Union County, NJ open farms and fields, thinly, then, connected by roadway, trail, path and rail to Manhattan and its ferry services. (The General Slocum was a day-cruise ship which fueled in and out of the east side, on that day filled to overflowing with happy, picnicking Germans on board for an outing somewhere upriver. It caught fire, and slowly and agonizingly sank, right there in the harbor, with its people still on board and at a great and deadly-to-the-community loss of life. The dead were washed ashore for days. In its profound and communal grief, most of the community eventually just slunk away. There's a nice little monument of this occurrence in Tompkins Square Park, NYC. All those sad German folk, who used to live there were greatly dispersed after that tragedy).
The most difficult thing about life is figuring things out - one knows as things happen the facts and figures of the situation, yes, but only later do the colorings and shadings of an occurrence come to be seen : the odd things, the quirks, the coincidences, the manners in which those involved got themselves there, or somehow didn't and by that were saved - you know, the guy who's taxi-ride got stuck in traffic so that he missed his flight, which flight later crashed in the ocean and everyone on it died. Those sorts of things - fortune-teller stuff maybe; card readers. But you can't really put any faith in that either, as just of late here fortune-tellers have been trading their stories for leniency in fraud cases and spilling the beans about how everything they did was false and calculated and unreal; how they'd 'read' a customer and determine the needs of what that person wanted to hear, and so tell that. How only sometimes they got lucky with a generalized name or trait that rang true. How gullible people never care anyway and are only looking to be comforted and by a very low-level of psychology the 'fortune-reader' can determine that and thus comfort in the manner being sought. It's a pretty cool shell-game, a mind-of three-card monte or something like that. these 'Gypsy' ladies - who mostly weren't that at all, gypsy, I mean - now telling all. I hope a good number of Germans, on that day, missed their date with the General Slocum.
Even though I approach things in this manner, trying to be serious about items of interest, none of it really matters any more to me. After so many years of distancing myself, I can pretty much see things, all, for the sham that they are. As I always say : when you really look at the world, there's a lie behind each and every thing we deal with. Nothing is what it's professed to be. All is false. Most people spend their times and the life dealing with the facade and the bulwark of the illusionary part of what's been constructed. Like money, for instance - to use a really poor example. You start out with ten thousand dollars that's been taxed. You put it in a savings bank, let's say in better-interest days, garnering three percent. That three percent, whatever it accumulates to, gets its own profits taxed - for no reason - because it's really non-existent. Then when you withdraw and do something with the money, the transaction is taxed again, and money is taken from the illusionary money that had been created. In the meantime, the bank has latched itself onto numbers of that money and extended them to someone else, where the same thing happens again - their use of that 'money' - which doesn't exist - gets taxed anew as a transaction occurs. A mortgage let's say through which they purchase a house, which then needs furniture and washer and dryer appliances. Those transactions are then taxed as well, against the illusionary factor of the 'promise' of money extended to you as mortgage holder. It goes gets deeper and deeper as it moves along. Charades, Shadow puppets. Illusion - and all the while people nod, 'yes, yes, I see that; yes' and make the agreements that they too acquiesce to the extension of the illusion. It goes on. The illusion of Government, at the same time, extends billions to send to other places, money non-existent yet agreed upon - propping up stupid little regimes, affording relief to victims of this or that. All with nothing real at all, while people at 'home' remain frozen, in poverty or in hunger but, unable to advance any 'ideological' cause, get nothing back. It gets pretty complicated, to the point that Alfred E, Newman, in his Mad Magazine manifestation in the old days, was more than correct with his motto ; 'What, Me Worry?'
posted by gary j. introne @ 6:34 PM
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