7339. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 54)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 54)

We hung around roadways a lot  -  down towards

the end of the street there was a bridge that

ran underneath Route One  -  still does, but

it's all different now, and we'd always be doing

something down that way  -  there was a small,

shallow field quite near, but below, the highway

which basically had become our favorite killing

field, by which I mean when we'd gotten tired

of 'touch' football on the macadam street in

front of our houses, and when we had enough

players and the stamina to really go at it  -  like

Saturday mornings  -  we'd gather there to play

the most God-awful, slaughter-house violent

football, boys could ever imagine to play. Carnage.

There were two brothers, twins, or half-twins, or

whatever that is when they don't look at all alike

but are, Richie and Ronnie Squillace, who made

a career out of, like, ripping people's arms off and

going home with them for trophies, and then to

top it all off something would inevitably happen

to set them off on each other, and another fiery,

rip-roaring interruption would ensue, usually with

these two brothers tearing into each other good.

We'd be, yes, oblivious to the highway up above

our heads and over by our shoulders, but God

only knows what crazed scene our neighborhood

'play' must have looked like to a passing motorist.

'Organized' football stuff, on the other hand, probably

having gotten wind of our vile antics running under

the name of 'football' came up with the most-lame

version of all  -  'flag' football. Which of course we

immediately scoffed at and referred ever-after to as

'fag-football'. The team-league play, at the same 

fields as the Spring and Summer baseball league

fields, and others, and with pretty often the same 

coaches, figured this 'no-bodily-contact' version of

football would somehow satiate raging monsters like

us. Good luck, there. They'd supply some stupid plastic

belt, you'd have to put it around your waste and snap

it into place and it had, left and right, a plastic strip,

or 'flag' on either side. It was a simple snap-away flag,

and instead of tackle or sandblasting the kid with the

ball, or any other kid, you go for the flag and pull it off.

Just a gentle tug, and it would come off in your hand.

No blood-letting, no grim tackle, no twisting and 

forcefully bending anyone's knee or neck. Flag 

football never quite made it to Avenel. It somehow 

got stopped at the border.

-

One good indication of the how the world 

has changed, in these parts anyway, is the 

odd fact  -  now mostly long done away with 

 -  that there used to be places where gasoline 

stations actually had signs out that said things 

like 'Last Gas before Parkway', or 'Last Gas before 

 interstate' or whatever -  in order to goad people 

into gassing up before that (imaginary long) 

stretch of untended highway came upon them. 

That's all been done away with and most every 

large convenience-store or discount house now 

also sells its own cheap version of named gasoline  

-  everywhere and most anywhere, and no one 

really goes anywhere anymore anyway. Nothing's 

uncharted, to be sure. The twist and glimmer of 

older days' travel has long since disappeared and 

been subsumed into a funny mass of miscellany  -  

fast-foods, kid-kingdoms, playgrounds and clowns 

and buffoons and the obese (and all the wondering 

why obese), bargain-shopper membership clubs 

and the endless array of the punk-cheap and the 

tawdry. Walmarts and the rest belittering the 

Walgreens and the rest which belitter the Burger 

Kings and the rest  -  all somehow interconnected 

by a wiry rope of corporate poisoning which goes 

into each item to make it more sale-able, cheaper 

and with better return. Fat is the fat of the land 

now, and we live off that fat of that land. Robinson 

Crusoe where are you?  (I remember once greeting 

some people with the words 'Now I get to be with the 

hoi polloi'  -  thinking hoi polloi meant high people. 

(See how Avenel people shouldn't mess with big or

fancy-sounding names)? It doesn't. I was corrected, 

but found a way to quickly elide off the problem of 

grammar and make good amends. It actually 

means the rabble, the regulars, the mob. (Could'a 

got myself killed!). I always liked to think that's

where a lot of people were, those adventure- seekers,

gunning around in their cars, cruising through the 

mid-Jersey dumps but thinking he was experiencing 

the real Jersey shore  -  which even I never experienced. 

Keansburg, NJ, let me add as example, is Nowhere Man 

personified. But even knowing that, you miss a lot if you

blow through it, with your 'I'm better' attitude. That 

wasn't ever, we were taught in the portables, wasn't 

ever the idea behind which old George Washington and 

his gang fought. Keansburg has a 'history' of sorts, but

you have to know where to look, and then get off your

high-horse too. The same kind of dead, once-upon-a-

time-way-back-when history that a lot of these places 

have. When there were small fishermen cooperatives, 

little rows of clammers' huts, fish factories, boat 

launches and docking, shacks and waterfront sheds. 

All that stuff was a century plus ago and it's all gone 

now; even the Raritan Bay, which Keansburg faces  -  

not even the ocean  -  is a ghost of itself, a pale relic 

of a waterway long ago useful and well-used. Now 

it's more just a gas-pod of either indecency or tanning 

oils and debris. There was a time  -  and oddly 

enough now you can still walk the varied municipal

bay-front beaches thereabouts and see the markers 

in place, as if put there by municipal officials with 

a guilty conscience  -  when this was a coastal 

beehive of high energy. Before the nation had 

really spread its vainglorious industrial tentacles 

everywhere, this very busy coastal area, both 

sides of NYHarbor, here and points south and 

north, were covered with operational maritime 

enterprises  -  clamming, oysters, shellfish, 

lumber, agricultural items, cartage, brick-making, 

ship-building, iron and steel, and well as a 

huge fishing and vacation industry. It's all 

gone now. All the junk they tried teaching

us in school there, and none of this really

cool stuff was ever even mentioned. How's a

boy supposed to learn? Here and there, by 

surprise, one occasionally can yet see pieces 

of old piers and pilings jutting out of the 

water, or, in the case of the  section of Staten 

Island across from Perth Amboy and Sewaren, 

an old boat graveyard, where the old wooden 

ships and boats were towed to languish, list, 

rot and fall away. It's all mostly gone now  -  

waterfront development, expensive homes, 

parkland walkways and all that have replaced 

it all, and wanted to, by design, obliterate even 

the memory. Yet, as a young boy I can well 

remember, with my father in his 6 horsepower 

motor on the rear of a rowboat, boating the few 

slow miles out to there, looking at the pilings 

and ruined things, sloshing up on the Staten Island 

beachfronts, just to explore and traipse around. 

Pieces of boat, things sticking up out of water, 

skeletal remains of hulks and keels and all of that, 

at rakish angles and dangerously hidden submersions. 

I never really wanted it to, but somehow that stuff 

got into my head, and stayed there  -  memories 

and fixations of maritime stuff, sad and silly and 

dead, stayed in place to this day. When we first 

moved to Inman Ave., and I try well to remember 

this, my father's head was still in the mode of a 

seafaring kid, a young turk who'd run off, set out 

to lie about his age, quit from school,  and join the 

Navy, during wartime. He did so, took his training, 

went to California and was shipped out to the South 

Pacific for the years it took for that part of the war. 

He was a gunnery guy on a battleship tenderm as I

mentioned  -  which meant supply ship for the larger 

battleships  -  bringing them food, provisions, 

 clothing, medicine, tools, books, toys, whatever 

was needed to keep a ship at sea going. His ship, 

in addition, would take flak in the doing of its job  - 

 it was well-equipped with guns and battlements. 

In addition, they'd pick up dead bodies from the 

other ships, and one of his jobs was to sew the 

bodies into canvas bags for burial at sea. That's a 

joyful task I'm sure, especially in the midst of 

wartime, but at any time as well. He was, by 

1954, not that far removed from all that in his 

head, and  -  as I well recall  -  he carried around 

with him the envisioning overall of being a seafaring 

guy. Avenel was at the coast, Sewaren, Perth Amboy, 

Raritan Bay, not that distant from the Kill Van Kull, 

the Atlantic Ocean and the real first-class maritime 

stuff. We spent half our time going back and forth 

to the Jersey Shore  -  all those rabid sea-coast towns, 

 small time fisheries, fishing boats, boat rentals, day t

rips to the offshore bluffs and islands, days at the beach, 

etc. It was always boat this or boat that. After a while, 

even I got tired of the crap, but it went on. Fishing and 

crabbing, fishing and crabbing. It was all engrained 

into him, and he never shook it. I could sense, always, 

that to him being at home or being idle was like being 

land-locked, stuck on dirt, far from the ocean. He 

hated, just as well, back then anyway, the mountains 

and any idea of the lakes or freshwater stuff.That was 

then anyway  -  later in life he got over all that, began 

visiting the Catskills, mountains and lakes, even 

places like Colorado and the Rockies. I guess time 

and money mellowed him out, on that count anyway.

-

That old part of Staten Island was curious. I'm 

talking 1958 now  -  right across from Perth Amboy, 

which had a waterfront of its own, of sorts, and an 

active ferry service back and forth to Tottenville 

(a town, across, at Staten Island). We took it 

often enough, as I recall. But, adjacent to that, 

and over a little from it was this boat graveyard 

I've just written of. Like the Kill Van Kull at 

Bayonne (my father's other, more original 

haunt) where the waterway faced tugboat 

repair yards and tugboat junkyards  -  also 

with submerged hulks and odd-looking wrecks 

in and out of the water  -  this area was a quieter 

sluice of old activity, and everything was old, 

wooden boats and ships. It was very curious. 

These watercraft, of whatever vintage, must 

have been sitting in the water since the 1920's

(this was in 1961, say) and 30's. Old boats, put 

out of service, waterlogged and listing, just left 

there to finish their rot. At shallow tide you'd 

see the stuff and be able to walk among the 

 hulks  -  careful not to get pinched or splintered 

or cut by any of the pieces of this or that now 

exposed by the wood-rot. I used to just sit there  -  

not much interested in anything else  -  and just 

stare into the wrecks. The water, the island behind 

me and the expanse of Perth Amboy and all those 

oil tanks and refinery things around me little 

mattered. The boats still carried some of their 

own arsenal of other days' sense and sight and 

sound. Smell. Scents. Of this and of that  -  I knew 

I was part alive in another realm, another place, 

doctoring somehow to an in-between land that 

owned me more than the land I was on had claim

to. Wood is fanciful in its own way as it gets 

darkened and moss-covered or seaweed-covered 

or whatever. It takes on another appearance -  

startling, deep-sea stuff, back from the depths 

of some watery subconscious which is somehow 

still alive in each of us. You know how they say 

the body is this or that percent water, a big number, 

I forget  -  well whatever that watery current is 

which yet flows within each of us can still resound 

a telling bell  -  like a lighthouse keeper pinging 

his gong for the passing, lonesome ships outside. 

 That's what it felt like to me.

-

I get the feel, from life, now, after all these years, 

that it's but a half-measure to our consciousness, 

and that all we are placed here to do is get through 

the necessities of the everyday  -  all that shit we 

make up about Society and the way it works and 

getting along and getting ahead and thinking 

forward and riches and achievement and fame 

and all that crud, yes, get through all that WHILE 

at the very same time progressing and putting 

together the ancient formulas of our inner Beings  

-  the ghosts of all other previous lives and histories,

 the manners and the ways of thought by which we 

each ourselves now have patterned THIS existence

 - to which we really are meant to have little 

allegiance; fast, fleeting, and spurious as it is.

I want to be sure not to get stuck on this point,

but 'Leisure' is the key. It's a killer, an ease and a 

dreaded dead-end which we seem all to want to 

careen into. But. Not. Evil lurks, and it lurks in 

Leisure. That's why there's so much emphasis, on 

this stupid, flat society, put on it. It's how people 

make money, and lots of it  -  if individuals can 

be suckered into the web of distraction and 

addiction by which entertainment, play, 

acceptance and accumulation, fantasy, 

distraction and all the rest, and in turn be 

coaxed out of some money, each, for doing so, 

there's a golden money-rainbow waiting for 

whichever schmuck wishes to throw his or 

her Life away chasing it and piling it up  -  

the stock market (a true, illusionary 

gambling-whore's paradise, just using 

larger words and concepts). It's how we 

are slowly killed, and there are 

many murderers.

-

In my father's mind, and then in mine too, 

in those days, around 1960, these old waterways 

represented a presence and a reality of a world 

 that he sensed was passing, and a passing I 

was only witnessing. All things were gone, 

falling away. The old wooden hulks of those 

watercraft sunk beneath the Kill, left there 

to die and rot as piers and fish-attractants 

(but they forgot all about the pollution), 

they were still present as ghosts  - I knew 

my father was seeing things I couldn't see 

when he looked out over the water. We 

somehow inhabited two different realms  -  

overlapping, perhaps, in their ways  -  but 

different nonetheless. It was a deep and dense 

divide we needed to step over or fall into. 

Whichever way we went, it was there. My 

father and I, in those (early) years, never 

came to any real agreements  -  and all his

and my later lives, together or not, were 

pretty miserable with and towards each other  

-   but for us they were at last a period of shared 

golden years, of a shared glory in the knowing 

that the two of us were watching a film together 

on a completely different screen than was the 

rest of the world. In a sense, we both were 

watching an over-and-over replay of a 

figurative  'Titanic' going down. To our 

 satisfaction we were part of the script, and 

we were writing some of it too. There were 

never happier, yet lonelier, moments between 

two people, ever. If I ever had to say 'when' I 

knew my father best  -  it was then.

-

Going back to that section of Staten Island today, 

and even from the Perth Amboy side, everything 

has been changed. In the 1950's it was still possible 

to find shacks and cottages, small, ramshackle 

homes  -  of eccentrics and loners, but not solely  -  

facing the old waterways. Aging sea men, home 

on land and waiting out there time (not that far 

away, into Staten Island, around the coastal rim 

was Sailor's Snug Harbor (of which more later) a 

 vast and quirky rest home for retirement sailors). 

The coastline still was peppered with maritime 

atmosphere  -  ship berths and ship repair yards,

 tugboat yards, all sorts of tank repair and service

 facilities, oilmen, trucks, a sort of Fulton Street 

NYC in reverse  -  the tack and sail shops of Staten 

Island itself, instead of lower Manhattan. The 

houses they've built now  -  and the endless 

rows of condo units  -  have taken control of 

the area. It's as if the  developers wished for 

no trace of the old but instead only the idea 

of the sea and the water  -  no reality, just the 

plume of image. These are ultra-modern, 

sprawling and up-to-date places, on old, old 

ground. No one speaks any longer of what's 

underneath it all  -  myriad layers of coastal 

Indian lore, dead colonials, dead seafarers, 

dead boats and ships. Too bad; at least when 

he could, my father brought me there, reaching 

blindly for the idea or theme of whatever it was 

he couldn't articulate. I think he was trying, in 

his way, to share or impart to me the deep feelings 

that came through him for stuff like this, for his 

displacement, his awkwardness in the more modern 

world of 'things'. My father was an emoter, a fiery, 

impulsive person who didn't quite understand why 

that had to be given up  -  almost blunt and tribal 

in his ways, he still possessed many of the attributes 

of older 'Man' on the move, stumbling across plains 

and oceans, man on the move, pushing forward in

a blind energy  -  without words, or the craft of 

words. It all sounds strange, but to this day I 

understand his need. I understand, as well, what 

things he was trying to get across to me, in his 

wordless way. I listened, I nodded, accepted. 

That's why we'd return there, many more than 

once, in his ridiculous rowboat and 

small-displacement crazy-man's Evinrude 

outboard motor, precariously strapped onto 

the rowboat and madly dipping through ship 

lanes to get to these strange places. The 'open' 

sea these trips weren't (though we'd had them too), 

but riding the ship-lanes in a 6-horsepower 

rowboat was always a bit crazy.