BELOW THE WATER LINE
(pt. 48)
A surprising number of my friends from these childhood
days and episodes are dead now. I could list names and
things, but I won't. It wouldn't mean much to anyone else
- heart attacks, industrial cancers, all that. I don't think
anyone's been killed or maimed. One or two suicides,
yeah. I could go on with more, but I won't - right here.
It's just sad - especially for me to think that - though
the memories are still here, and I can re-visit, they're
out of reach. Like a solid wall of dream, but - as IN a
dream - my hands are in that wall but stuck, retrieving
nothing, and allowing me neither entry nor exit. Tough
deal. For me? For them? I can't figure - whoever knows
anyway where whoever wants to be? The thing about life
is that it's a closed door, but it's always open. Go figure.
Nobody on that other side to hear me either, I guess. It
isn't as if there's any distinguishing character to the dead,
and I am sure that the same number of deaths by ratio
would be seen most anywhere. What does seem sad is
the young age of those cut down by 'death' because at
the very same time, during the most formative and 'best'
of their years they were under death assault as well by
the voracious, meddling appetites of a vast war machine,
which sucked up anything it could. One of my first real 'jobs',
when I needed one, I got because I was able to fill the
space of a guy who'd just been shipped off to Vietnam,
leaving a vacancy where his workplace had been. I took
it. It didn't last, but I took it. I'll get back to that later. A lot
of these dead friends have kids - grown now. That's even
more weird. if I bumped into any one of those kids,
adults, anywhere, they wouldn't know a thing about me,
nor who I was - yet I'd know more about their dads
than they could ever imagine. Line's gone dead.
Phone's off.
-
At the end of our street, at first, there was woods;
a beautiful woods, with, deep within, a small pond, a
few trails, and lots of nice places. I spent my good
share of time there, learning all sorts of Daniel Boone
ways. One memory that stays with me, as I've
mentioned before, is the early Saturday mornings
of getting up and out quickly, and reaching the woods
by early light, to be able to see, suspended upside
down from the limbs of a big oak tree long ago cut
and destroyed, opossums. There was, I guess, a
family or two of possums living within the woods
and we'd often find them sunning or sleeping or
whatever it is they did while suspended, hanging,
from a limb, upside down. Sometime about
1961, '62, the woods came down and a small
development of still more homes, about 20 or 25,
went up. Eventually that brought more friends and
more people, but that's about it. At one point, while
the construction was underway, we used to play on
and within these partially built homes (and wreck
things too) and one day I fell into the cellar opening
of one, and gashed open my knee on an oil tank,
requiring, later, 8 stitches just above my knee cap.
There was no or very little blood, just a weird,
whitish, pulpy jagged opening where my skin had
separated and one could look deep in. No fun.
Mr. Zellner, the local bus driver, drove me to the
hospital. His son, Billy, with whom I'd been playing,
got me to his house and got his father involved. No
further complications ensued. About this time, too,
my Scoutmaster (for the time I was in Boy Scouts),
an Armenian guy named Mr. Arjemi, had moved into
these homes also, with his family. Right where
our best woods had been.
-
The end of our street, from early on, took one to Route
One North, a simple turnoff, or, if headed south, an
underpass and curve. To get there, one passed a few,
one or two, truck terminals (Teufel Bothers was one,
which I always loved since it meant Devil in German),
the junkyard I already mentioned, and the 'Hiram's Trailer
Park spoken of (Haystack Calhoun). One morning, about,
I guess, 1959, after a huge overnight snowstorm, my
father walked with me, in deep, new snow, with no
footprints or tracks in it yet - fresh snow - all the way
out to Route One right there, just to see the snowstorm's
results, visit the landscape and understand the quiet.
It was a curiously touching and bonding moment, one I
remember always, and one that was otherwise totally
out of character. I was struck simply by the peculiarity
of the father/son moment, the quiet walk, the simple
understanding of things and, upon reaching the
destination, the simple ceasing of progress just to
stand and watch - piles of new snow, whitened trees,
the distant roadway where a few cars tried navigating,
the distant sound of road-plows and the rest. We
walked back in pretty much the same fashion, this
time amidst our own, still solitary, footprints; the
selfsame footprints which had brought us there. All
the years later, it was never mentioned again, nor,
I believe, was that moment ever surpassed. It was
by far the most heartfelt stretch of time I'd ever spent
with my father - outside of all the usual commands
and concerns. Almost without words, walking together,
we shared a massive snowstorm, and it piled up within
each of us, together, too. I really shared very little with
my parents, and frankly never quite understood our
whole connection - why I was there, amidst them, and
how and what was expected of me. There just always
seemed to be far too many blocks and barriers to our
ever getting anywhere. I often envied other kids, families
with, it seemed, a little more money and promise
(I'm not being materialistic in that sense), who seemed
to be far better grounded, with some sort of dialogue
and understanding with their parents - almost a family
'tradition' of some sort, a wellspring to draw from. I never
had that; everything was fast, haphazard, of the moment,
slipshod and loud. Sad, in a way. I had a friend, Alex,
who used to comment upon my family by saying that all
he ever saw there was tons of fiery energy,
everywhere, but with absolutely
nothing ever coming from it.
-
One morning, about 1959, I awoke - my sister and I had
stayed overnight at the house of Joanne and Johnny
Wolchansky, the last house at the end of the block by
those woods, while my parents attended a wedding
somewhere. They had gotten home late at night. As I
looked out in the morning light, looking down the street
about 16 houses where ours was, I could just determine
by peering, that something was not right. The car in front
of the house (another '53 Ford Station Wagon) was bent
or mis-shapen or something. Turns out, on the way home
from the wedding my father, driving, had been involved in
a car crash of some sort, and the car, though drivable,
was pretty mangled. I never found out any more on this
story - the car was fixed eventually, and nothing really
more was ever said. Another childhood mystery. Another
car point, previously mentioned : when I was about or 6,
my father used to take great pride in the fact that, as we
drove along, I was able to identify perfectly pretty nearly
every car going past us - '51 Buick, '56 Chevy, etc. It
seemed to mean a lot to him that I could do that. For me
it was just fun, and easy because I'd always had an eye,
even that young, for design study and shape identification,
etc. Cars were fun, gas was 19.9 cents a gallon too.
-
After I got hit by that train, in '58 or what it was, I spent a long
time in the hospital, some of it in a coma - long time enough.
My Aunt Mae always told me that, until I re-entered the world
after that accident and its resultant coma, I had been the happiest,
sweetest, most comical little boy she'd ever known, but that
subsequent to that experience my whole being changed. She
said I was always dark and serious, distant and a little odd after
that. Probably very correctly surmised. I don't know if that's
exactly the sort of thing you should be telling or saying to a
young nephew, but I kind of knew what she meant, right off.
Except that I wanted to tell her I was still pretty funny, with
hopes of a comedy career too. My aunt and uncle always had,
on the wall in their hallway in Rutherford, on Delafield Avenue,
a painting of some Tunisian or Arab guy, a Nomad I guess, or
Taureg, or something, in his native garb, standing upright on
desert sand, portrayed up-close, and he was standing on one
leg, with the other up his other leg's knee, forming a triangle
of sorts, at the bottom half of his figure. He bore a slightly wild,
rough-hewn expression on a very rugged face, strange and
black-stained teeth, a few whiskers. He seemed to be peering
right into the viewer, quizzically, from another world or someplace
else, faraway, distant. I was always fixated by that picture, and
spent long spells just staring at it. Aunt Mae noticed, and it
became a shared something between us. Ever since that
hospitalization and coma and all that rest, I'd noticed that
certain things, this among them, had a predilection somehow
to ring bells in my head, awaken lights or memories or
something, transport me and take me away from where
I (was told I) was. I'd somehow lost all Earth-bearings and
felt myself living and being somewhere else. Maybe
echoes and voices and words yet ringing in my head -
alarms or guidances, other places and people. Suffice
to say, I was no longer so specifically 'grounded' here,
not that much any longer 'of this world'. There had somehow
been made, for me, a blood and mind connection to
something greater, broader, more current and more real.
I admit to that now, and probably did, at least to myself,
then. It flowed through me, deepened my understanding
of things, and yet at the same time made it more and more
difficult for me to get these ideas across. It didn't take
long before I'd turned myself completely around - through
reading, and writing. I began to read anything and
everything I could, even at the young age of, say, 10,
I was trying to plod through books I didn't always fully
grasp - poetry, essays, certain non-fiction things, like
Vance Packard and such. My mother and father got,
not surprisingly, Reader's Digest, Life Magazine,
Reader's Digest Condensed Books - all that suburban
household crud, but I ate it up. Photo essays, famed
photographers, by-lined little caption-stories, things
that took me all around the world (Around the World
in Eighty Days, as a piano song, was what had won
me that crazy talent contest; it was also a book, and
I feel into place with Phileas Fogg). Seven Days in May
(Fletcher Knebel), Advise and Consent, and many other
things. And, to top it all off, my much wiser and far
more worldly and world-wise Aunt Mae had a
subscription to Paris Match, which I adored. It
was, somehow, like a French 'Life Magazine',
but better, more urban, more chic. At home, I
actually had a subscription, in my name, to an
oversized and always startling magazine from Moscow,
called 'Soviet Life'. A communist propaganda prize for
sure, but I loved it, and it took me to such odd places
as Kiev, St. Basil's Cathedral, the streets and shops
of Moscow, and more. It was, I guess, in 7th grade
that I did this massive report, a school-project for
History or something, on St. Basil's Cathedral, in
Moscow - all those wildly colored turrets and towers,
in a place (church) present in a land where it was
supposedly outlawed. Caught my imagination
immediately. No one else knew what the heck I
was talking about. For a seventh grade Science
Fair, in contrast, by which I was totally bored,
I took one of my mother's spaghetti colanders,
covered it in form-fitted aluminum-foil, stuck a
few large toothpicks in it, and called it a
'solar-power collector' - all completely bogus,
made up and exhibited and explained in my
own pure gibberish, but sounding somehow
right, and I got away with it all. No prize, but
respectable enough. Stupid jerks, they'd fall
for anything, I found, if you played it right.
-
It seemed always to be like that : nothing really
bore any reality. My sensation of living was grander
and broader now, connected to other things - material
and images, ideas and words, which spoke to me,
rather silently, and which I understood. I didn't really
understand anything else spoken at me. I'd connected
to something grander and more faraway and distant -
I sensed messages in shapes and forms and colors,
sensations in things, forms within shapelessness,
and carrying meaning. I was long gone. That was
a tough sensation, for it meant I had to re-learn
and acknowledge my distance, and realize that -
almost sadly - nothing around me could hold my
attention, certainly nothing which would fill up
time or give sense to a certain, specific and
personal Reality that I could not share. I
understood where I was, to where I was
going, the distances and worlds of space
and time, stars, travel, clouds, planets.
I'd look up and read dark-night skies, even
by the waning number of stars left for me
to see. I'd been away. I'd been somewhere,
and now (it seemed) I was back, maybe
with a different jacket, a different skin;
something recognizable but not me. They'd
sent me to school. I had to listen to the endless
stupidities of the things that made sense to
parents and teachers and doctors and lawyers.
I had to look at pictures and words, dead on the
page, carrying stupid and heavy meanings that
were all wrong. I knew that directions had been
altered and that the world had been taken over,
taken over by those others who would mis-direct
it, run it into the ground, and twist and force
everything into fake meanings and destinations
that they'd get others to believe. For their own
gain. Devils and evil princes. Snakes.
Temptations. Everyone had fallen, everyone
had bitten the same dumb apple and the fallen
world just went on. In my little attic room, with
my father's innocent help I'd built that crystal-set
radio, a sort of short-wave contraption by which
I could get the world. Distant earth places. It
took me everywhere. My favorite book was
'Around the World In 1000 Pictures'. I still have
a copy. I tried reading 'Profiles In Courage' (Kennedy),
but it bored me. My Six Crises (Nixon). Bored me.
These normal people had no magic, no tact or
understanding of the world at all - they were just
using words, dead words, to bring forth horrible and
stupid and equally dead results. Just like school, or
church, or any of that. My mind was with that desert
nomad, standing sentinel, on one foot, waiting and
staring out. At our tiny, small public library, a little later,
I'd get endless books of poetry, new things, stuff that
captivated me : 77 Dream Songs, Berryman, Dickey,
Plath. Reflections In a Convex Mirror, John Ashbery,
and many others. My very favorite was A Coney Island
Of the Mind', by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His NY to San
Francisco odyssey fascinated me (He'd been a N. Y. Jew,
Lawrence Ferlin, eventually got to San Francisco and
the nascent beat scene, began living in a beat-hip Italian
neighborhood and, to better fit in, decided to become
'Ferlinghetti', like spaghetti. Amazing stuff. Something
like a Richard Brautigan story, but fifteen years earlier).
It was brash, colloquial, in your face, snide, ironic, hip
and forceful, all together. I memorized some, and pieces
of others. I'd sit around and just go over things like 'I Am
Waiting'. By the end of high school that purloined poem
of mine which they stole from me and put in the literary
magazine against my wishes, was in a perfect Ferlinghetti
style, and was called, I think, 'My Friend
Frank, the Telephone Pole.'
Anyway, I only slowly got back into things, into this life.
And I never really wanted to. 1958, '59' and even '60, are
a vague blur. I remember cars getting dual headlights,
I remember cars losing their fins and, by 1961, suddenly
all having flat back-ends where fins used to be. I remember
the demise of Packard and most of Studebaker and Hudson,
much like, in our day, Oldsmobile and Pontiac and Plymouth
have disappeared as brands. Most people were
unconscious of this having any meaning. I found
it all pretty cosmic. My friend Donald, across the
street, and his brother Richard, had an attic-full of
comic books. They were strewn everywhere, and there
had to be, constantly growing, a collection of four hundred.
We'd pore over them, mostly meaninglessly and without
any import. On the back pages, 1000 toy soldiers for a
quarter, or plastic ships and boats, a hundred for a dollar,
body-building ads, flyer and glider balsa-wood places,
magic kits, all the usual crap of childhood and comics.
My other friend, Raymond, on the other hand, had a
very neatly-kept and pristine attic all set up with a train
set - HO size (small) - with bridges and tunnels, grass,
service stations and trees; all that meticulous railroad
stuff. His little family dog was named Pepper. Very cool,
small bull-type or something. When I was about 6, my
father took his own great pleasure in setting up, in the
basement, an enormous train set-up of his own devise -
L-shaped, trestles, tunnels, straightaways and, instead
of smaller HO size, he'd had the big guys put in place;
full-scale Lionels, with a double transformer and
smokestacks that puffed smoke when you put a
smoke pellet in them. Me and my sister had striped
engineer hats, and even big trainman's gloves. She
never much cared for it, and I cared only a bit more -
but my father was in his glory lording over that scene.
Later, in Pennsylvania, he'd loaded it all up, dismantled,
in his station wagon and brought it up there for me -
ostensibly to use for my own son's pleasure, as he
had for mine. I propped the entire apparatus up
alongside a shed, and there it stayed. I never
touched it again. Or the trains, which I later gave
away to my friend Donald, and which giveaway,
once he found out about it, my father demanded
back, and, I think, got back, from Donald, still in
NJ, across the street on Inman Ave. Way too
much attachment for me. Things
I couldn't understand.
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