7351. BELOW THE WATER LINE, pt. 56

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 56)

Back when we were chasing the Masons,

as just related, it little fell to us to know the

difference. What a world it all turned out to be.

As it is, Masons themselves, in that day anyway,

(I don't know, nor do I care, about Masonry today)

were segregated  - one had to be a 'free-borne' to be

admitted. Blacks were slaves; thus, no blacks. A

roundabout way to get  racism. Then this black

fellow in Massachusetts, 'Prince Hall' was his

name, he charted a lodge but had a very hard time.

The Mother Lodge, in England, of which there were

two, eventually took sides, one or the other, and

'African Lodge' Masonry came to be. 'A. M. E.' is

what it goes by, as title. We didn't know any of this,

and these people were the result of Prince Hall and

his early, groundbreaking work. Little known to us

what we were dealing with  -  essentially a breakaway

of a breakaway, through the lineage of 'ex-slave

freedmen.' So wonderfully interesting.

-

See, the thing here is you'd want to probably think,

'why is he getting so far afield?', but it's not. It's the real

kind of Americana that would never have been taught to

us in either School 4 OR School 5, and that was the

representation of Avenel by which we got our knowledge.

It's vitally sad, in  a way, to be so localized. But as kids,

we managed. I have no idea what kids in Kansas or Kentucky

do, but I'd bet it's about the same. One time my friend Kenny

Lackowicz and I, we'd go home to his empty house often for

lunch  -   whatever we had, we'd just gobble it down and get

back up the street, eventually. We'd found, through some sort

of 4th grade self-chemistry, that baking soda  - which his

mother kept in the kitchen  -  would fizz up big time if

set-to with water, in whatever concentration it was. Kenny

knew all this stuff, he'd worked it out. I wasn't that way, didn't

care for formulas and prescriptions  -  anyway, he'd set up

some weird thing whereby by letting a certain amount of

water drip into something he'd set up there, it would eventually

load up with water, tip itself over, and fall the water into the

baking soda, also set up, beneath it, at which point this

big (to us) fizzing, steaming oddball pile of baking soda

muck would smoke itself off, or something. He'd had it

figured to take about 4 minutes for the cup to fill and the

smoke-a-mania to begin. We treated the entire zany idea like

we were building an atomic bomb or something. We finished

up, he set it running, the water and all, and we took off

running, high-tailing it back to school, with the knowledge

that, in some four minutes, our little baking soda bomb thing

would have set itself off inside his house. Whatever. That

was our thrill  -  I never did get there to find out what the

damages were  -  but I figure there were none. Also, one

other thing with Kenny  -  in my Kindergarten class photo,

I'm the kid in the dumb little tie and the busted up and

scabbed lower and upper lips. A day or two before the

photo date, I got whacked in the face with the swing from

Kenny's swing set in the back yard, when he launched himself

off of it at high speed  -  sort of like broad-jumping, but

swing-propelled and flying through the air. We'd measure

our landing spots off against each other. Well this time the

loose flying swing went somehow awry and smashed me

big-time, right in the face, busting up my lips and face.

So, in the picture I look just like a pugilist; somebody's

bruised sparring partner, just like my Father was once,

in old Bayonne. Yep, the apple and the tree, falling

again, not too far from one another, like they say.

-

It's funny how the mind remembers things. Later on, 

far past the time, I suddenly find myself remembering 

things, of no real import, from youth. The stuff I did 

yesterday, still and quite vivid, is always there, but 

this other material seems to float up, through some 

chinks or cracks in the armor, and resurface all these 

years later without any real control by me over or upon 

it. I don't feel compromised by this, it just makes me 

quite curious - what's going on, what's underway. My 

own theory (unfortunately) is that while the mind slowly 

deconstructs itself, begins falling slowly apart, it 

fragments things, sets them loose, and they somehow 

filter up and out, or whatever directional imperative the

mind uses. One of the fine uses of being a writer, after 

many years and much intent practicing of the craft - prose, 

poetry, stories, memoirs, what have you, even drawing captions - 

is that these can be savored, examined, listened to and used 

and re-crafted. It's only the idiot who loses it altogether, the 

babbling old-timer with abstracted and loose memories swiftly 

blasting off into the ether. What is this life anyway, perhaps, 

but an unconscious mixing of all these blasted-off pieces of 

 other people's life re-made into the contortions we then find 

ourselves dealing with - the meanings and definitions of our 

everyday existences. I don't know. I actually don't think it is 

so, but so what? My own memories - a different category - I 

accept and deal with. Luis Aparicio, I believe of the Baltimore 

 Orioles, about 1958, and another Aparicio, a brother, maybe 

a Ken, somewhere else, playing. The two Boyer brothers; Ken, 

a third baseman of renown for the NY Yankees in that same 

period, right up to the 60's, early, and his brother too, Ken, 

playing somewhere else. Minnie Minosa, Moose Skowren, 

\Lew Burdette, of the Pittsurgh Pirates, I think. A vicious 

World Series sometime back about then too, Pirates and 

Yankees, '58, again I don't know, where many of these 

names clashed. Some sort of epic baseball battle. Red 

Shoendienst, Ted Klazewski and Don Clendenon. Like a 

baseball card hall of fame, or a gum-flat assortment 

of names and ideas, all this sticks around. I don't know 

why. Names linger. Not just baseball either. Bernard 

Baruch, Adlai Stevenson, dying on the street in London,

 I think; Robert Lowell, dying in a taxicab, I think. Hemingway, 

blowing his brains out. Christine Keeler, some British 

sex scandal, John Profumo. It's a riot. It's upon everything - 

my own life a wild, blown-out assortment of abstracted 

names and beings seen only by a child, but somehow 

absorbed. Marianne Moore at her endless Mets games. 

I could go on; but I'll simply stop myself right here. I'm 

sure you too have your own lists. It's like, as a youngster 

sick in my parent's bed and home from school for some 

days, I'd drag down the huge family bible, all those glossy 

and idealized pictures and stories, and get to portions of 

Genesis and other places which were nothing but lists 

and lists of names and begots and begats. I never 

understood that stuff; wanted to jump and run. But I 

can see the precise, infantilism involved just as much 

as not. A determination to make valid the claims and 

lineages of the people within the story the narrative of 

which you were trying to control. One has to show 

 complete and exact mastery of name and place and 

subject in order to make convincing twaddle instead 

of just twaddle. I read once where novelists, it was 

 said, go through old graveyards finding names for 

their characters. Maybe that's true, there are some 

good ones and some ordinary ones too - but mostly 

they are, in fact, pretty dated. I can't remember the 

last 'modern' book I read with a character named, 

say, Jedediah, though there is Jedediah Purdy to 

reckon with, even if he's not a 'character'. Maybe 

a run through old baseball rosters would work just 

as well. Except for the weird nicknames, things 

like Pee Wee and Speedy and Gopher and Lick.

-

I always sort of lived my life outside of definitions, 

 and I never knew why. It wasn't the sort of thing 

I could put my finger on. When people died, I never 

missed them. I could never get involved with people's 

 illnesses or sorrows. Just didn't matter to me, wasn't 

real, had no 'necessity'. As a youngster I could blow 

all that off, run right by it; but later on as I grew older 

I started wondering about it, why it as so. I may have 

mentioned already - I actually do forget - by one time 

I somehow managed to say something to my father 

like 'all the good people are dead', or something like 

that. He'd asked who it was that I had regard for, or 

something. He couldn't figure that out at all, but he 

too just let it go. What I meant to say was that it 

seemed to me that any people of real import - the 

ones with the 'ideas' and things by which we'd built 

society, had already all long ago died. He sort of took 

it as an affront to those living, as if I was beholden to 

them, I was duty-bound to respect and select someone 

from among the living with whom to gauge the bywords 

 of my time. He always took everything wrong, and got 

offended by everything, or so it seemed. And maybe, 

just as well, I always said everything wrong. Anyway, 

I hated the world and just wanted to run and hide - 

which is sort of how I ended up in the seminary.

-

When I got there, everything seemed different. 

It seemed sacred and holy, secretive and quiet, 

reserved and reclusive. It seemed, at the least, to 

be a place which allowed and expected an interior 

life and gave over long periods of time for which to 

have that happen. I'd never seen that anywhere else. 

All the other fictive stuff of which we were supposed 

to believe and fall all over ourselves with, that was 

okay, doing all that was easy enough and passable. 

It was a trade-off that never bothered me. I'd never 

seen anyplace else that didn't mind if you went inside, 

way inside, yourself - and they'd allow you to use any 

excuse of 'religious' purpose to get away with it. It was 

 like a philosophy book always open - no one knew what 

I was ever 'really' thinking; they all just figured I was 

within the program and thinking all that crap through. 

Fact was, I couldn't have cared less for all that rosary 

and Holy Mary and sacred heart and Jesus the Savior 

stuff. They were always going on about something - 

downright pitiful and stupid mostly - but I could just let 

it roll through me without too big a fuss. And it wasn't 

even that I was thinking of girls - that wasn't so difficult 

to forget about, even though I did think about them, in 

a simple way. What can you expect when this place was

way out in the sand-woods of a faraway pineland and 

there'd be girls' underwears and bras and stuff hanging 

from trees, as I did already mention, signifying some local 

boy's Saturday night car-conquest of some girl's virtue. 

The rules of the boy's clubs were that you hung her 

panties on a branch of the tree where you'd had her. 

Weird, frightful custom, but, whatever. I guess some 

girls just brought spares since they already knew this 

stuff was going to happen. We track-team runners and 

meditative walkers and wanderers through the woods, 

or at least me, had a hard enough time figuring out the 

'virgin' in Virgin Mary, and then that difficulty was 

compounded by these spectacles defaming all our 

ideas of what was really 'Life' and its Godly happenings. 

What a bungle it all was. And then, to make it worse, 

we'd have to learn about the 'Passion' of Christ and 

recite 'ejaculations' - what the hell? 

What was a kid to do?