7457. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 76)

BELOW THE WATER LINE 

(pt. 76)

I never had a Grandfather. Other kids did. 

My two Grandfathers, believe it or not, were 

both long-term prisoners, Dannemora and 

Sing Sing, where they each died. There's a 

 long story attached, separately, to each of 

them, and I'm not going into any of it now  -  

just say mob stuff, Italian hoodlum bullshit, 

old neighborhoods of NYC, murders, betrayals, 

and all sorts of petty crap that's pretty usual 

for immigrants with little for brains except 

promise and thuggery. It never became my 

burden because I never stared it down. If I 

had ever met either of them, based on what I 

knew, I'd have probably laughed in their faces 

and called them ignorant, stupid goons. My 

father was destroyed by his burden. Probably, 

in her own way, my mother too by hers. Fear 

and repression, to begin with. It's a sad life all 

around us, pity and bloodlust and danger and 

dirt. And then we die, each in our own way, 

and each slowly, over a long period of small, 

slow deaths  -  of feeling, of intensity, of wonder, 

and of awe. They go first. In looking back it's a 

little bit amazing to see how much of all my 

father/grandfather stuff, in a vaguely humorous 

way, has to do really with the vagaries of Robert 

 Moses : grand enforcer and builder of highways, 

bridges and tunnels. My Aunt Mae told me she 

remembered  -  as a younger woman  -  that the 

burial of her father, from prison, (that absent 

'grandfather' of mine at 116th street) - one Giuseppe 

 Entrona  -  was at ground level and next to a busy 

highway. Years now have elapsed (1945 or so) and 

somewhere over that time the Brooklyn-Queens 

Expressway has been rebuilt, enlarged and 

elevated, high over this particular cemetery 

 segment. The roadway once at ground level is 

now high in the sky. The trestles are above now 

the whines of the highway and the groans of the 

junkyards and scrapheaps below. The actual grave 

is now a mere smidge along the cramped, brick 

footing of the overpasses, a sort of center-alley 

walkway of dark, looming brick. It's all a very 

strange place, yet blighted and boring in its way 

too. She also said she was angry that he died the 

day before Mussolini got hung by his own people  -  

she said he'd been a big 'fan' of Mussolini's and it

would have served him right to see his idol killed.

In my mind I go back there, only in memory, 

trying to recall the old scenes gone by  -  perhaps 

when there were trees and shrubbery (there are 

none now, on this flat, treeless, ugly plain). Do 

dreams have memories too, or do memories 

dream? Whatever it is, this vague portion of the 

'Introne' interdict lies here, still and rank, beneath 

a highway and lost in a place once bucolic and 

serene but now ravaged by the tempests of time 

and value and violence and ruin. I went there once 

or twice -  it took three hours to find the damn grave.

 There's millions. Robert Moses be damned. Giuseppe 

Entrona too. Whatever any of it all is, it is for certain

that nothing now exists at ground level 

and  -  yes  -  all things are elevated.

-

In my 1950's there was pretty much nothing. I was 

not so much held back by my inadequacies as just 

 kept in place to the fullness of the little I had.  

My father went through any number of automobiles, 

swapped engines, did brakes, etc., when he had to  -   

he had rental car replacements for mechanic-repairs

 (I remember well a quaint old '53 Dodge he had 

for a week or two  -  faded green, ram's head in 

metal and chrome, soiled on the hood. It shook 

tremendously as it neared 50 mph, and all that 

was accepted  -  this great little clunk of a tough 

vehicle, hunkering down the slower highways and 

byways of that time. It was fun, and a good memory). 

My father, again,  had erected an engine hoist in the 

rear yard, at the end of the driveway  -  a few times 

entire engines were just switched, as a Saturday and 

a Sunday's task. Wonderment and awe sometimes, 

by me as I watched him at work. I don't know what 

people do now, but I know they don't do that. The 

modern day, by contrast, is a brittle and bright 

mirror  - composed of the reflection it is supposed 

to be reflecting. They call it, perhaps, ethereal,

virtual, unreal. Maybe that's the case, and they 

can have it. If so, I want nothing of it. Quiet has to 

bespeak quiet; it needs a strength and a presence 

of its own. The 'life-as-a-pale-reflection-of-God' 

thing works far better than today's mastiff-mankind, 

king of all matter rap. Anyway, in today's world that's 

the entire white left speaking, and nothing else. No 

one knows; they just blather on. Mostly evil and 

cheesy (though one cannot say that), and mostly 

for money. Lucre is King. God and Mammon  -  

are the same thing. The whole guilt and soft-doubt, 

whole-foods, artisan and craft debauchery are 

where modern anti-culture has amassed its goods. 

We now have to listen to the paradoxical dichotomy 

of a reasoned, half-crazy mind, of whatever 

nationality and color all melded, using patience, 

sentiment and logic to forestall any creative 

progress, make it stop or put it on hold anyway, 

while violence and vulgarity make sport of the 

entire mad, insane nuthouse  -  a governmental, 

medical and military and religious complex 

raring more and more to be on its way. Trying 

to thwart now a thundering global collapse of its 

own house of cards. A House of Panic instead. 

 It seems now that people can only seek 'product', 

as it's now called, and their 'product' is a weird 

combination of waste and war unleashed, speed 

and restlessness, anger, sex, and mayhem. But that 

apparently now satisfies the world. This world is 

but a shadow, come to hide and conceal all other 

things  -  the nervous restlessness has no one settling 

in place, just constantly moving along some 

media-boosted continuum. It's so far unlike the 

'old' days that I'm here writing of as to be insipid 

and sad at the same time, as if the shirt had no 

collar and no sleeves but was still to be called a 

'shirt'. You'd better look up Confucius on that

 one; see his 'Rectification of Names' theory. 

If you call something, in error, that which it 

no longer is, you will, at the least, lose harmony. 

At worse, you will die.

-

Other cards are being drawn; the hands are held. 

In this moment, the cards and hands are being 

 arranged on a table-top, whence all will see them  

-  before the real fire of their burning begins. 

It cannot be held back. It is harsh and impossible 

to forestall. And if it was anyway, they would have 

that person's head. Whoever it was who was stopping 

it. Anti-Christ, Mammon, or ritualized 'God'; all 

the same. Sometimes Satan comes in the name of 

the Lord. (I never tried out any of this kind of 

preachment on my friends or anyone 

around the street yards).

-

I had one Grandmother, and I've made mention 

of her here before  -  all those train trips she took, 

she always arrived with a bag of stuff from 'John's 

Bargain Store' in Bayonne. I twas great  -  like today's 

equivalent of the Dollar Store or something : cast-off, 

discontinued, toys and games and things  -  all enough 

to send a kid away to Paradise for a week. She'd come 

stumbling down Inman Avenue, if we hadn't picked 

her up at the Rahway or Avenel station. She never 

mingled much. I don't think I ever rightly introduced 

her to anyone  -  none of my friends. She kept to herself, 

never went to Sunday church with us, stayed home 

cooking the big Sunday meal. She come in on Friday 

nights, and on Saturday she'd be our baby-sitter. 

She'd have the television on   - any of her variety 

show favorites  -  all those crazy singers and crooners 

and Ella Fitzgeralds and Mahalia Jacksons and all 

that. She knew a lot of stuff, but I'm not so sure how 

she could read or anything. Maybe she couldn't; I 

never pried. She always begged off anything social, 

with others  -  like church, which I mentioned. She 

certainly never read to us, read story of books or 

anything. Maybe she was afraid of being caught out  

-  reading a hymnal or church song words. Who knew. 

She was a broad, pleasant and simple lady.

-

I had other friends along the block  -  they sometimes 

had grandmothers who'd live with them. I remember 

one family, about 5 houses off, for a period of some 

two years, at least, in the upstairs right-side dormer 

window, their grandmother was always, I mean 

always, sitting there, white-haired, un-moving, 

looking down at the street. It was as if she saw or 

was watching everything, but nothing too. It was 

a little spooky, and I never knew what she saw or 

watched or thought. Only in the beginning, when 

she first arrived, I'd see her walking back and forth 

to one or another house nearby  -  but soon enough 

that too stopped and the only other presence she 

ever had was that 'white-haired lady in the upstairs 

window.' In those days, a grandparent was in their 60's. 

Like me now, but it all seemed different  -  they seemed 

old and ancient, grizzled beyond their years. Getting 

old has always spooked me, but now I'm knee-deep 

in it myself and I can't figure out what ratio or 

proportion of me compares now to the way they 

were then. I don't know; it just seems like one 

hundred percent different, to me. Grandparents 

anyway were 'older world'. They still came from the 

places all these people had left in order to get to 

Inman Avenue  -  so their entire worldview and 

being was skewed and they just simply came from, 

and represented, something else. As if they were still 

'stuck' in Newark and Irvington, Roselle and Elizabeth, 

Union City and Brooklyn and all that. The places all 

these other people, my friends' parents, had all 

cast-off. The world was funny and weird like that  -  

all sorts of new stuff, things we kids just took too 

as normal  -  that was all still smarting and distrusted 

by these oldsters  -  TV's, cars, automatic things, a 

million strange little items we'd never think of. Like 

Amos McCoy or something, on 'The Real McCoys', 

they were a perfect portrayal of some old cadger 

out-of-element and left to boil in the middle of 

all this new stuff. Misunderstanding and grumbling, 

sometimes  -  other times just silent. My other 

grandmother, for myself, I never saw her either. 

She was locked away in a nuthouse somewhere  -  

and I only saw her maybe a few times, and then 

she died. Nothing anywhere was too much fun 

-  if I started to be thinking about it too much.