7453. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 75)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 75)

My mind has a reaction to things. It freezes. 

It wants to say, 'Oh Jesus, not more Avenel 

stuff again.' Yeah, well. It was always kind of 

funny for me to realize how it goes with the 

'history' of places. Woodbridge and Avenel 

were peppered with these tiny ideas of itself as 

a 'place' that used to be  -  but only the small, 

historical types knew of it. Now it's different  -  

there are markers and historic posts about this 

and that. People put a glide on things, all puffed 

about,   -  pretending. None of it has any reality  -  

they make up all these stories from the most 

basic rudiments. Parker Press. Valentine Brick. 

Bitting's Brewery. There are kernels of truth, only 

kernels, to all of this  -  but they erect stories and 

edifices. When I was a kid no one gave a shit about

and of that stuff. When it did begin to trickle down,

I didn't know what to do about it because it was all 

being run by elitist and snarky town insiders. I just 

watched. There was a woman around town named 

Ruth Wolk  -  an annoying smidgeon of a woman, 

proud of herself and proud of her search for 'history'  

-  but it all had to be right, had to fit her design first, 

except for that it wasn't history. She wrote a few small, 

published, paper-back books with old photos and tales 

and stories of 'Woodbridge Township'  -  collections of 

old photos, small stories, tales and captions, and mostly 

ideas of the grand, older, days of a construct she 

named 'Woodbridge'. It was all of her own making  -  

and she was a complicit in it as anyone else. All tea 

and cosys, for the ladies. She'd write of fine old, 

secluded homes, farmland and grassy lanes. She'd 

write of wells and water-sources, small knots of people 

organizing to do something authentic and real. Yet, 

at the end of the same blurb, she'd boast of the now 

'grand' Woodbridge, how it was turned into parking 

lots, shopping, roadways and large organizations of 

political and civic  -  and school  -  groups. her 

impetus and focus, as is most usual for these sorts 

of people, was on organized schooling : grandiosity 

over Boards of Education, new, grand schoolhouses 

and collectivized districts and regionalized high 

schools and all that. Everything headed in the 

complete other direction of the tiny porridge she'd 

just been brewing  -  seeking instead consolidation, 

hugeness, organization, a centralized, authority-down 

sequence of limit and control. She could never answer  

to that stuff, mainly because she was a liar and made

her half of it all up to fit her lame narrative. I never 

figured any of that stuff out, the whys of it, nor did I 

understand where and and all of these 'town' people, 

with their bizarre attitudes and ideas, had come from : 

I knew the clutch of them, mostly  -  temple dwellers 

from the older, centralized yet small, Woodbridge. 

But they were just as intent on turning everything 

away, making it bad, tweaking it to their higher levels 

of regal and splendiferous (vain) authority and 

centralization. The world was turning and spinning 

fast  -  all things were being altered. There were two 

churches, catholic ones anyway, in Avenel. When we 

first moved there, the original church building was 

on Avenel street. It was a pretty simple, small and 

ordinary church sort of brick structure; very nice 

actually. It faced the main street of the simple town; 

it was a 'satellite' parish or mission/outreach of 

Woodbridge's St. James Church  -  an outpost for the 

burgeoning population of the developing swamplands 

which were Avenel. In about three years the parish 

had outgrown its church, and a larger, more modern 

'church-by-churchbook design book' structure was in 

place, destroying the woods behind the older church 

which still stood and was left standing for some 8 or 

so years  -  used as a gym, social center for kids, 

basketball hall, etc. A total mish-mash. Boy Scout 

 meetings in the basement, once a 'catholic' Troop 

73 had been established to debunk the nearby 

Presbyterian Troop 42, of longer-standing, and 

more manly, proportions (tougher kids). It wasn't 

really as if, in Boston or somewhere like that, the 

lines separating the religious parts of town meant 

anything. They meant nothing at all  -  it was mostly 

in the addled brains of parents and/or old-timers 

from other places; people who kept such scores, 

who marked these things down. All of us kids, 

we'd run together no matter who or what  -  most 

of it could be described as dastardly stuff from any 

angle so what matter is it in a religious context 

anyway. These are always adult concerns, not 

kid concerns. To predicate the separation of Boy 

Scout troops, neighboring, a block or two from 

each other, on the flimsy premise of religious 

affiliation is some totally bizarre and perverse 

premise, something only a perverted adult could 

think up. It was medieval and destructive to any 

sense of either proportion or reality. It's wasn't that 

much different  -  in its stupid, no-brain adult way  -  

than was the rather random of school grades into 

things like 5-6-7, etc. That whole thing was purely 

for the convenience of adults and their pecking-order 

mechanism dumb-ass brains. Everyone and 

everything overlapped, but they just wouldn't 

 consider that. Randomly proscribing this or that 

as a level, a break-point , was just another way of 

controlling kids and forcing them to think in teacher 

ways. Boards of Education, in reality, were nothing 

more than labor-agencies for pushing along teacher 

pay and segmenting the process of 'Education' 

(actually its very opposite) into the levels and 

paradigms needed to run business-like foils of 

learning and pay and station. Most teachers were 

more interested, anyway, in sleeping with each 

other  -  enticing the new, young ones, into place, 

becoming close to that new arrival with the nice 

breasts, or the handsome new dark, tall, and 

handsome teacher, still single. (Or not). Not a 

god-damned thing of any of it had to do with 

education. That was a form which was force-fit 

 over the entire enterprise. It was employment, 

it was labor, and it was socialization (and often 

eroticism) all rolled up into one. Something to 

keep adults occupied, and have peculiar ranks 

and status levels established. I would have 

gladly walked out on their 'education' bullshit 

the very first chance I got  -  but you cannot, 

and 'they' have all the enforcement tools 

arrayed to be used against you. No wonder 

there was so much misery. 

-

What things we did, as boys, as kids, even as 

'Catholic' Boy Scouts (go figure) was more along 

the likes of breaking into the here or there abandoned 

house (there were still a few hulking, huge, old 

mansions behind massive shrubberies and trees, 

left in Avenel; abandoned, for the most part, and 

untended), wrecking what we saw, destroying plates 

and dishes, flinging old 78's (hard, black, thick plastic 

that smashed like glass) into trees and walls, entering 

the rears of the varied junkyards just to outwit the 

mad, junkyard dogs and destroy windshields, 

smash lights, wreck otherwise already wrecked cars. 

We'd smash windows where we could, slingshot rocks 

and pebbles into things, use various firecrackers and 

other small means of explosive, as kids are wont to 

do, I guess, to blow things up, main or slaughter 

small animals, running through the woods with bows 

and arrows set for squirrels, birds, or any other small 

ground animal  - which as far as out kid-frenzy went, 

should be 'ground-up' animals anyway. It was crazy. 

It was bizarre and wrong, and sad too  -  as I think of 

it now I still shudder. What we were thinking, I'll 

never know. It certainly bore no semblance of either 

side of the stupid 'religious' divide which had been 

presented to us. Protestant dances, and Catholic 

dances. Protestant Boy Scouts and Catholic Boy 

Scouts? I mean, and still do, what the fuck? Whose 

strangely altered and medievalized thinking goes 

 like that? You read of these sorts of things in the 

year 1410 or something, but this was 1950's Avenel, 

a shit-hole suburban, low-priced, swamp-infested  

 construction project in which people were 

supposed to live  -  living new lives, highly-stylized 

new lives, in fact, of ease and splendor, of toothpaste 

in tubes and butter in tubs, lightly whipped. How

to defend this negative and backward-looking idea? 

How to (for us), in fact, live with it? It was child abuse,

 of a sort never mentioned. Never still is, and the 

same sort of undertakings are going on. It's a real 

child abuse  -  all those assumptions and methods 

and means; they're cruel, and they're nasty and they 

really do wreck children. Children never live our of 

it, they never really do grow through it. The wounds 

are ever-present. (First they pierce you and wound 

you for 18 years, beating the bejeezus out of you 

with crap, and then they expect you to willingly 

enough agree to a few years in the Military  -  where 

their same assumptions, masked deviltries, tortures 

and nasty proclivities will get you maimed, wounded, 

 crippled or destroyed for some of their own, bastard, 

adult ends. You really ought to stab your parents to 

death when you're like about ten. It would probably 

all work out the same. 

-

I never really wavered from my tasks. I would 

read the get-your-hands black (back then the ink u

sed to rub off) 1960's, thin-columned, endlessly 

wordy New York Times, nightly. Spread out on my 

hard-tiled floor in my room upstairs, I'd read page 

after page items about far-off places, the 

mechanizations of men, Congo, Asia, China, 

Soviets, space-competitions, Nazi-history 

investigations, auto-industry items. Until late at 

night  -  oftentimes my wearied mother would 

 climb the stairs, knock and open the door, and 

quizzically look at what I was doing, reading on the 

floor some stupidity like a scribe, shake her head, 

and tell me it was late and that I should get to sleep. 

There was an endless war or skirmish always 

underway somewhere  -  Brazzaville, all of Africa, 

Congo, Swaziland, Taiwan vs. mainland China, 

Appalachian poverty and problems right at home 

in the USA, civil rights troubles, school desegregation, 

slums, urban renewal, everything all a'twirl at the 

same moment. Something big was brewing; I could 

feel it, I could already understand it, but just wasn't 

sure of the approach. Life. Death. Little mattered. 

Occasionally things would pop up; my own ideas 

and interpretations : 'desegregation'  -  using such 

a word, I felt, was wrong  -  it somehow made valid 

the existence of 'segregation', assuming all one 

 had to do was correct it, as without changing it

 or re-formulating first the dumb way people 

thought. Thinking about what I read of those 

weird, odd southerners and all their 'separate' 

Woolworth's food counters, restaurants and 

 bathrooms and water fountains, I would just 

think  -  what's wrong with these asshole people? 

How stupid could a people be? What race of 

Neanderthals had they themselves descended 

from that they could still subsist in this manner  -  

their screaming diatribes, shouting at schoolbuses 

and children, protecting their own supposed 'rights' 

(which did not really exist anyway)? Pimply-faced 

fat southern goons. Adults? These were supposed 

adults  -  grown and mature people who were 

assumed ready to lead others. They turned out 

to all be liars and jerks. I found that money and 

corruption left its presence everywhere. 

 African-bound cargoes of foods and medicines, 

large sums of monies, all stolen, swept away 

by corrupt leaders of corrupt governments run 

by small mobs of corrupt people. Theft and 

malfeasance were everywhere. The dead and the 

dying loomed as a result. War was nothing. War 

had just become a cover, an excuse for cover  -  

to cover and obscure the thievery and corruption 

wherever it could be concealed. Nothing was 

straight, people were crooked bastards, mostly 

moreso the nearer to the top one got  -  this 

went for the USA too; no distinctions made.

-

When you're 12 years old I don't think you're 

supposed to have already reached the point of 

saying 'Oh, what the hell...' It seems way too early 

to find futility and the grassy island of doubt so 

soon and already sidelining you. It's a tough thing 

to get over : it affects how you can talk and honor 

and respond to things. I had to carry that around. 

I was ruined pretty early, and nothing more about

any of it really seemed to work for me. I wanted out.

Boyhood fades; the world intrudes. How was I 

supposed to observe or see or watch things in that 

condition? The stupidity of a symbolic thing, like 

the CBS Eye, as a for instance  -  something everyone 

else accepted and looked for. This little place I was 

in  -  a thin strip of street not even a commercial street 

any longer  -  barren, derelict, cut in two by roadways, 

a lumber yard, a train station seemingly now an 

afterthought (everyone had their flashy cars to ride 

in instead), two or three 'candy' stores, selling 

nothing more than leftover pennypacks  -  

it was really a non-entity, a no-connected 

nowheresville. I was ready to cash out. Had I been 

4 years older, I would have just jumped a train 

(not 'in front of', just jumped on), or hitch-hiked 

Route One and disappeared. As it were I worked 

hard on finding other ways to get out. 

Hello Blackwood, (seminary days), I suppose.

Again, I'll repeat : I've found most of life to be a 

symbolic reality  -  people placing space and the 

things they do into mental landscapes which  -  

while not real at all  -  reach the level of 'real' by 

fulfilling symbolic needs. This can be argued all 

day  -  and I'd probably be the first to do it  -  but 

I am certain I could argue it to a perfect clarity 

and win. As I was growing up, the street I lived 

on had, as well and for itself, attained that level 

of being  -  it was a line of houses to which was 

attached a serial decision-making for the 

placement of like and symbolic items by each 

family, random or not, along the way. A sameness 

in cars : boats, pools, lawns, driveways, furniture, 

decks and patios (New Jersey patios, I always 

thought, bring a certain 'patois'). Symbolic 

preferences for lives not really lived; references 

too, I suppose. Nothing on Inman Avenue bore 

any real substance, it all seemed image and symbol. 

The time of being  -  the 1950's, the 1960's  -  were in 

fact completely artificial and symbolic anyway : 

 everything managed to be, to exist, from nothing 

and completely artificial and meaningless. Yes, 

that still goes on today, of course, but all things 

are different and done differently. The essential 

basis 'within a reality  of' its own' Earthness and 

substance (that thing we, back then, were just 

leaving) is all gone - everything is ephemeral 

and virtual and ethereal, and yet today's 'folk' can 

make no distinction on that level at all. They just 

live it. Art and re-purposing buildings in a world 

that has so little to say but so many ways of saying 

it  -  (nothing). So many people live amidst a 

symbolic reality of their own into which and 

through which function very well and feel quite 

satisfied, though without knowing. Quite 

discursive, no matter. I was just, already, sad

and morose, and sorrowful, and broken.