7485. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 103)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 103) section a:

I was ready to move on. I'd begun painting in my

parent's basement, that would be Summer '66 I guess.

I was crazed and partially demented about everything.

I'd just left the seminary, nearing what seemed like an

eternity there, they'd finally gotten fed up with me and

simply asked me to go home for a while, reconsider things,

and perhaps not return. OK, fine. You were just a bet I

lost anyway. Oh dear 'Spiritual Advisor', I'll never

forget you (except that now I can't remember his

name. Father Somebody works as well as anything).

So, from all angles, no one was real happy with me.

In that basement, I'd started painting - crazy, wild-looking

canvases which I'd hang from the rafters on string in the

far corners of the basement area. It was as if I had a

suspended art gallery of my very own junk  -  color

paintings in a style I'd called 'organic'; everything had

the curved and swirly shapes and forms and dimensions

of body parts, kidneys, lungs, swirls and circles  -  like

bacteria or mold as it grows on rocks and trees. It was a

style all my own, it didn't last, and I guess it was all

tryout anyway. It was the 'style' however that I presented

to the Studio School for my entry-admissions-interviews,

and it got me in  -  six or seven of those dragged into the

conference room, with my perfunctory, off-the-spur

explanatory comments and art theory. Enough of anything

anyway to keep people jumpy, interested, and listening.

They loved me, and invited me in; my father out front in

his 1960 Chevy wagon  -  which we'd enlisted to transport

the canvases in (about 2ft X 3ft each)  -  steaming over a

 75 dollar parking ticket. I don't know if Avenel had ever

produced any artists, but that day I felt that it had. This

stuff had been accepted by these people  -  real art folk  -

as some form of a derivative outgrowth idea of NY School

Abstract-Expressionism from the 1950's for a bizarre

amalgam of 1930's through 1960's Hans Hoffman color

and form theory real, true, product. Think somehow of

an art deco mixed with a crank modernism, 1960's style.

Hip enough, like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy

Davis Junior painting with their hipness and attitude, without

regard for anything else, while smoking themselves to death.

That was it. In pop terms anyway.  I could'a made a million.

Except a few months later one of my sisters, back at home

in Avenel, throw all this shit out in a total 'Gary's gone'

clean-up, in which I lost all my art, as well as my voluminous

collection of Village Voices, from initiation  -  earliest issues  -

on. It all ended up on the bastard curb. Garbage-heaved and

forgotten. Oh well. Oh well. Oh well Avenel. I can still

close my eyes and dream about some of them.

-

Here's a funny note about my anger. For a long time I stayed

steamed about losing all that stuff. Earliest-year issues of the

Village Voice, the ones with Norman Mailer and all the start-up

guys from the masthead. I'd traded a bicycle and an old camera,

a Mamiya camera with a light leak, for about 50 of them. I had

treasured books, and all those paintings. It meant nothing in a

household raised on I Love Lucy, Green Acres, and Mr. Ed, I

guess (more like Twilight Zone). Looking back now, I laugh,

remembering how angry I was, but by the mid-eighties all that

anger was gone. It was just a cruel joke. The Avenel Jack-off-

in-a-box, I called it. And, amid all the Poland-labor crisis

movement stuff then, with Lech Walesa, I also called it,

laughingly with a reference to St. Andrew's, 'Soldality to

Solidarity', in one fell swoop. Or one swell foop. However

that goes.

 -

I had to face it. No one cared, certainly not 'Avenel'. Which could

never be embodied, which was without mirth, which was a raft on

a lost, running sea. God made man, and God made fate too. I

got it from both ends. Man AND fate, screwing me both. These

people, I suddenly understood, had no pipeline into anything,

(even though they were family, and I admit the dear connection),

Avenel was just expected to pleasantly grow us up and pass us

along, like a simple lateral in football, to proceed to the next 'level'

of something, the 'same' just larger. There was a stunning lack of

content and context and clarity to be found anywhere there, from

my perspective. The 'product' produced was just supposed to creep

along to the next level of consumerism, buying up the next excess

product made  -  job, car, house, baby carriage, crib, food, and all

the rest. What I was doing, by those standards, was lethal. No

support was due, thank you. The 60's now were creeping along.

Vietnam started to stink; I could smell the smoke as it entered

the mass consciousness, I could see it wafting along, sure as hell

as anywhere else to hit Avenel. The new idea of death and carnage

was readying itself for entry -  just about the same time they took

away, by force, the prison farm  -  all those rich lands and acres

and animals torn to shreds, blasted and cut, torn apart like bad teeth.

The same way they'd rip apart the lands and rice paddies and people

of Vietnam, based on a tricked ideology of their own foul suspicions

and crap-politics. Killing boys and men. Killing my friends. Next thing

I knew, in fact, Ray Szemborski had joined the Army. Gotten married,

shipped to Germany, all in whatever order, I don't remember. Jack

Manick, Richard Florio  -  just a few names, people who went.

Richard came back one time showing 8mm film of his encampment.

We watched it on his basement wall, as he explained everything we

were seeing  -  how, here, this was one of our clotheslines, and that

lady there, hanging clothes, was  a matron or camp-help who did

those things for us. And then, a few minutes later, we're back to

viewing that same spot  -  she was gone, as were the clotheslines

and yard area  -  blown to smithereens somehow in an instant,

and her with it. Lesson One. Don't hang clothes. Jack Manick

came home a year or so later, and missed it all so much he

re-upped for another go-round; he so wanted to be back with

his friends the Montagnards, who made the little bracelets and

jewelry he so treasured, out of war wreckage.

-

People used to talk about how each 'generation' ended up better

and richer and happier than the generation before it, kids always

outdoing parents. As if some endless progression of 'upward' was

America's birthright. Not so fast, Sally Jane. You'll see. This

ever-ascending threshold of happiness, ever-increasing, was

paraded as the American way, the end-product of a blissful

consumerism which was supposed to only and continually carry

us along, ever upward and onward, to improve all lifestyles,

fortunes, destinies, and happinesses  -  better and bigger

weddings and cars, more blissful sex, bigger homes and gardens,

wilder pleasures, more healthy endings. It was, of course, total

bullshit, and today's world bears no relation to the world of 1967

dreamed over and again. It was sham, manufactured, fake promise

and bad advertising. A lie of utterly-deep dimensions. No one ever

barked back, few even said a word; the'Silent Generation' of the

1950's (they should see now, whimpering kids offended by words,

shaking the Gameboy in their hands), though occasionally criticized

for passivity, slowly acceded into becoming the crazed whip-masters

of the death and carnage beginning to fall. Gotta' love those beatniks,

at least, for blowing the whistle early on, or attempting too. And,

anyway, as I stated way earlier, I'd already become enamored of the

work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his ilk, who seemed to love and

write and 'execute' life exactly as I'd want it done.

-

Sitting at home one day, I was watching LBJ on the TV, going

on about the Gulf of Tonkin. I knew, even then, it was all lies. 
The Congress, in turn, then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 
which unleashed the floodwaters For Johnson and McNamara 
and McGeorge Bundy and all those guys to begin their wholesale 
destruction of American youth  -  load after load of young boys sent 
into the growing churnhole of their manufactured war. It's all, and 
I mean ALL, now been proven and shown to be false, lies, made up. 
A huge effort to  -  at one level, bolster the economy by changing its 
footing  -  just like today  - all those sick cats in the military needing 
food and clothing and everything else  -  gigantic defense contracts  
help all industry : vehicles, wheels and tires, armaments and 
ammunition (someone should tell those assholes about gun

control), food, packaging, transportation, medicine. The War 
Machine. Things get developed from the wartime pace : we get
 super glue,  we even get the Internet, and the Gross National 
Product (emphasis on Gross) continues, unabated, 
on the backs of its wartime carriers.

-

The enlarging of the Vietnam War was pretty much the last straw

for me, even from just a seat in Avenel. My kind of Avenel boys 
weren't made for this crap : lies, distortions, death and murder. 
For nothing. It's all the same, here it's just called 'war', 'defense', 
'patriotism', 'service'. And I knew I wouldn't stand for it. They'd 
sealed  -  at that point  -  my outlaw status for me. It was the final 
nail driven into that proverbial coffin which was 'life as it was 
supposed  to be' for me. I was d-o-n-e. From this point on, 
the handwriting on the  wall was going to be my own handwriting 
and no one else's, all my friends  be damned, if it meant that. I would 
NOT be traveling on their road. My handwritten wall was not to 
be the scarred, marred, chicken-scratch  of anyone else. Even if 
it meant inventing a new language. 1967 was going  to be my year
 zero. No more bullshit local high school drama, no more 
small minds. When the yearbook came out, I wasn't even me. 
My  photo had been switched with someone else's, someone 
had added a weird nickname to my little bio, one I'd never even 
heard, and that was that. Good riddance  to bad rubbish. Incognito 
all the way, I was dead. As dead as Mike Kantor, poor sap, my 
homeroom seatmate by  alphabet, who'd been killed in a 
surfboarding accident a few months back  -  an out of control 
surfboard clonked him on the head but good. The 'yearbook' 
had been dedicated to him. I went out as Tom Iremonger, and 
he as me. Sadly, he too (Tom) is now dead. 
You can look it all up.

-

I was determined to flee, to step out, to walk log-floes in raging or

patchy water, whatever it took. I'd do it, hell or high water. From

then on my path was going to be, I swore, cut from new ground,

slanted through a new forest, cut with a bold machete of steel, a

glinting metal not yet even invented or forged. Over-the-top 

allegiance to intellectual dreams, outlandish adherence to the

self-sustaining outlooks I'd make, my own beliefs, those things

alone were to be mine. It's still like that to this day. I was all done

with father-talk, school-talk, and church-talk too. Avenel was my

tattoo, but I was gone. All those gung-go, 'go-get-em' types were

beginning to make me sick. Those guys rushing off to join the Army,

get their chops in killing gooks, having to sell their hot-dick GTO's

or putting their hot-rods or motorcycles into deep storage for the

duration, 'serving' their country, they could all drop dead around

me and I'd step over their dead bodies. They'd accommodated to, 

and made, their choices. It was all theirs. I saw the mothers as they 

talked among themselves  -  about their sons and their fears, about

the military and how a nice, finished product came out of the service,

just like their fathers and their fathers before them. Men regaling

others with their tales and exploits, derring-do and grand wartime 

experiences. It was all blather. Junk with which to kill others.

Garbage to the ears. you either are a peacemaker and you make 

a decision for that alone, or you're not. I'd seen through the mirror

and realized its backing was chipped, flaking, false, and  -  in 

addition  -  no longer reflecting back anything real at all.