7310. BELOW THE WATER LINE, pt. 46

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 46)

As a youngster  -  born to run, yeah, all that crap

too  - I sort of just stayed in place, to learn from,

observe, and catch what ran by me. Had me and my

friends too, for that matter, been raised anywhere 

else, everything for each one of us could have, would

have been different. Who knows how? Look at it this

way : we first-generation arrivers here, we'd all been

born somewhere else, and raised there too, until 4 or 5,

under whatever general influence that other place maybe 

had cast.  None of us was like the kids later, the brothers

and sisters who began being born, hatched, right there.

Not us; we were marked, for life, and we were going to

stay different too, because of it. I never knew what the

old 'planted' America was like  - I'd hear about it, it

was taught in Civics and History, again all that older,

Americana stuff; the big multi-generational house, with

the layers of family and groupings within. That wasn't

us, we were mixed, all, into something no one knew of

and into something 'new'. Gone away. Cast-outs. We

were  -  without even knowing it  -  each our own

Huck Finn  -  riding some slaggard river raft somewhere,

and each with our own raft-pal, our own 'Jim', and

trying always to elude, as well, that mean and 

smothering hand of Pap and Aunt Polly. Whatever.

-

I never really knew what to make of what I held  -  Avenel

Street, once you got there, was nothing at all really  -  unless

you wanted a Tootsie Roll or a Cherry Coke from old wooden-

leg, gimp-hipped Murray, over at Murray and Martha's, with

that metal Breyer's Ice Cream up above the corner, and 

perpendicular to the street.  I think it was Breyer's anyway.

There was a mess of them  -  everybody flew a different flag,

so to speak, at the various sweet shops and confectionery stores.

Breyer's, Sealtest, Dolly Madison : some vein-blood flow of

fake American commerce trying to entice and suck in yet

another raggy bunch of snotty sixth-graders to plunk down

their measly twenty cents and get lost  -  buying something

at least, some crap with which to stay afloat on that raft.

-

What did we know anyway? What kind of old word was

'confectionery' anyway? Nobody uses that now. It was a

candy store, and who cared? Go in there all grimey and

sweaty from playing two hours of stickball across the street,

get done with the gawking girls, plunk down 12 cents or 

whatever it was  -  some odd number like that  -  and drink a

cold, syrupy, sweet-ripe flavored soda until you burst. Watch

one of two of the local Dads come in for a 5-cent Daily News,

as they flipped over to the back-page banner headline to see

who the Yankees had beat up on the afternoon before  -  no

night games yet, then  -  flip back over, read some Castro or

Kruschev shit about Cuba, look at pictures of the Kennedys, 

and pretend, just for a moment, it was about them. Watch 

Murray and Martha  -  or at least hear  -  Murray and Martha

go into yet another steaming family battle and screaming

match about something, until a door slammed and one of

them would hunker off  -  the back door to the stairway which

took them up to their living quarters. One down, for this

half-hour at least; and then they'd fire it all up again, re-enter

the zone, and set to firworks again. All the same. it was great.

Living upstairs of the store like that  -  everyone thought that

must be great. I just stayed back, watched, and walked away.

-

I'd  just move on. Looking back now, 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, again come 

to mind  -  things dumbed down so as to be 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. Their 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 all 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 God, 

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 hold and

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 always figured that's where the Devil was,

and that was where Evil lived too.

-

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. But, then 

again, nothing was more streamlined than 

those two A-bombs we sent off, even though, 

for their peculiar trajectory downward and 

in free-fall, it really wouldn't have mattered. 

That was just 'Avenel stuff' again, talking). 

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 own 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, 

but 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 the 

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 one, but the very 

continuity of this page hinges on it, as early 

today I had some grand notions 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 wise

and sassy. Loose. 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 those 

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. 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.

-

On balance, as I look back, I can now realize 

a sort of fine equilibrium for the things which 

had affected me : a sort of parallel equilibrium 

between New York City and Avenel. It was often 

said that New York was like a small town, or a 

series of small towns, and everyone took care 

of everyone, etc., as in a small town. It was 

never, of course, like that, except maybe for 

the wealthy. It was dog eat dog, and it was, 

if anything, everyone else in your business 

just to snoop and to see what they could steal. 

A nasty mercantilism was rife. Speculative 

 frenzies came and went, with everyone 

wishing for quick and easy money while 

 doing nothing to earn it - except making 

profits off of what others produced and/or 

labored over. Like Avenel, it was speculative, 

fast-growth, and it had decimated the 

geography and naturalism of the 'place' 

of the place. Just longer, or out of reach of, 

people's memories, no one really knew or 

cared about what gone before. Like the old 

cities which, once their 'modernism' had 

arrived, tore out from their cores and centers 

anything which once made them livable - trolleys, 

surface rails, stables, wagons and horses - and 

replaced them with roadways, broad avenues 

for cars, systems of lighting and traffic, etc. and 

then 75 years later found themselves in a mess 

and tried returning to grace and livability by 

re-introducing all those things - retro-fitting so

to speak, to bring back the trolley and the surface 

rail - but admitting no mistake, so too Avenel 

made a complete mishmash of everything. But - 

instead of retro-fitting or admitting of mistake - 

it remained at a complete and utter loss as to 

what had occurred, never admitting anything, 

and instead,  kept expanding, inviting newcomers, 

wiping out woods to build still more homes and 

apartments, and taking a subservient role to 

roadways, highways, exchanges, gasoline stations, 

auto-marts, and auto-oriented sleaze-bag hot-sheet 

motels, one after another after another 

all up and down the highway. Progress.

As I drive back to places I knew then today - Avenel, 

yes, of course, but just as well my parts of NYC and 

Newark and environs, I realize how little is left, 

how little outside of memory I have left, and how 

truly I most rather inhabit a ghostly past that 

yet lingers. All it does is bring forth silence and 

awe. There's really nothing to say, because 

these places are now not what they once 

were; the old is now an alternate universe, a 

reality and place that - yes - still exists and 

which I can still inhabit though it has no 

'place' to enforce itself through any longer. 

Like a dead body, a cemetery remnant. All 

those people who once lived there, those 

whom I knew, and the others who just were 

there, Mr. Metro, Mrs. Kuzmiak, Mr. 

Cermyan and others, they may all be 

gone, dead and forgotten, yet, as in a 

cemetery, theirs is still a place, a 

scrolled marker of some sort that 

keeps them present for those who 

can imbibe that less-sweet and 

more-bitter juice. Places, like 

people perhaps, have ghosts that linger.

-

My upbringing diluted things, in fact 

everything after WWII diluted things, 

homogenized things. People who, in 

older pictures, look distinctly European 

and factional, ethnic, and showing their 

locales (Hungarians and Swedes, Jews 

and Italians) by 1960 had somehow shifted 

certainly their own looks and most certainly 

the looks of the generation they'd produced - 

which generation in turn again diluted the 

 looks of its own children - so that, by now, 

nothing any longer looks like anything. 

Tribe breeds with tribe, ethnic group and 

nationalities mix and mingle in that great 

swamp of sperm which produces today's 

human. We warred, killed, decimated and 

fought to preserve nations and places, only 

to somehow have it all taken away when it 

comes to 'here'. Ideology has made 

everything the same.