7626. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 112)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 112)

You know, it's not so easy sometimes putting

all this together. I've got memories here like

eye-teeth but it's not always the sort of materials

I can just wrap around and put as story. Like life

itself, they have to be woven right, to beat back

being trite or boring, or meaningless to others. Most

of my own life, I've been reading a lot of those high-

flying philosophers and stuff, and I know that  -  very 

quickly  -  if you can't find the tune to that stuff the 

music just sounds dreadful. So to speak. Or, rather  -

So, to speak both sensibly and easily, I need to address

things to an almost imagined reader, who will or will

not grasp what I say by intention, based mostly on any

inherent quality the information may have. People seem

to love it when I can ferret out some local specific, in

Avenel, and tell about it  -  the storm-door squeak on

the church-rectory door, the even Dr. Chrobot's breath,

which some one or other has told me was always foul.

I gotta' say, I never noticed. One thing I did notice, 

always and, once again, have just recently broached 

with someone near to me in the broaching, was what

I called 'authenticity.' It's a factor of just being real,

with oneself, and not stretching the mark or over-reaching 

to be what you're not. Now, in my own life, I've spent lots 

of time, say, at Princeton  -  where the people there, they

don't 'over-reach', mostly because they don't have to : a

good percentage of them were rich kids, or legacy kids,

parents or family having already attended, thus easing the

opening for the next generation of the same family. They 

all stood around with some aplomb, high on themselves,

chattering their monied ways, while  -  around them  -  the

people such as me, in their opinion, which was nothing, 

were useful, perhaps, for mopping the floor they'd puked on, 

or maybe, and just perhaps if I could, being there to pull 

myself sort of nearer to their 'level' by my own bootstraps. 

But it never worked. Mainly because that boot was either

already stuck up their ass in a fit of pique, just ruining 

everything, or that pull-strap at the back of the boot had

just broken off in my hand. That's, I guess, one kind of a

rather blind 'authenticity.' The kind you just keep marrying

into to keep the moneyline and the bloodline going. You

know, all those Chauncey and Mortimer and Jane and

Estelle types. The other kind, and the kind I'm meaning, 
the false kind, the fake authenticity I can't abide. It's

the regular, ordinary person who pretends to be greater

then the zero-sum of his own humilities.  Grandiosity, 

babbling on about things that aren't really his or her 

concern, name-dropping or, again, over-reaching just by

an obvious bit. It only sometimes happened in Avenel. I

can, right off, think of a few. Authenticity is really all that

ever mattered to me  -  and I was a weird one, yeah, but

authentically weird. It all just came right through my soul.

I never fought or skewed it to fit anything. I was what I was,

and you took it, or you left. Sorta'. It was all about humble,

to me. There's a grand kind of humility that comes with the

accepted knowledge that you just ain't much. And anyway,

I'd always have rather to write like Mark Twain and talk like

Huck Finn, or even write like Jack Kerouac and talk like

Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarity, than like any of those 

starched-shirt, chalk-faced Bertrand Russell wannabees

up in the front of some room pretending. It's like, 'I didn't 

fall for your heart, necessarily, sweetheart, at first it was just

your sweet authenticity, and even if it's not like mine.' So, 

please, everybody, don't go running off if I sometimes 

lose the thread.

-

Sometime about 1978, or whenever it was, Richard Nixon

wrote his autobiography. The opening line was, 'I was born

in the house my father built.' No matter the rest of the context, 

and no matter the wretchedness sometimes of him, I always

thought that to be a massively great opening line. I know I

couldn't use it. I wondered how many people in Avenel, still

around then, could. There were any number of homes around

that seemed they could have been built by hand, put together by 

a family leader, a Dad with a hammer. I know my uncle did that,

way up in Butler NJ  -  way up in  the woods, just off Macopin 

Road, he had this wonderful little house he'd built. I know 

because I watched it go up as a young boy  -  my father and

uncles would sometimes take a weekend up there to help erect

various things, spackling, wallboard, insulation and the rest. It

took my uncle a good long time, maybe two seasons of good 

weather, to get it all done. I found out only way later, from my

aunt, that he'd ordered it all as a kit house from Sears  -  they

delivered the 'house' by dumping everything you needed right

there on your property  -  lumber, beams, arches, braces, the 

whole thing. Of course, you had to excavate and grade, and 

dig your cellar and set the foundation and all, but every bit 

of lumber in these 'kits', and there were many styles available,

was numbered and stamped for sequence, etc., with a full and 

complete construction manual. It was pretty neat. And it wasn't

that unique  -  there were tons of these homes everywhere. Either

by Sears, or by another, very big and successful company at 

this, called 'Honor-Bilt Homes.' They all came from pattern-

books, and each style had a name : The Patrician, The Excelsior,

The Tudor, The Beechwood. You can look it up, you'll be amazed

at how many of the house-styles will be quite familiar to you; 

all homes of a certain era and feel and look, perhaps through 

the 1920's, right out to the 60's. Even contractors would buy 

bunches of these and put up alternating styles and things in the

developments which were sprouting up. They can all still be seen.

Avenel too, from my visual reckoning, has any number of them.

Not, of course, Inman Avenue or any of the all-like, subdivision,

cookie-cutter homes-in-a-row we were accustomed to. Those were

post-war homes that the government went crazy promoting builders

to throw up. They were beside themselves in trying to accommodate 

the hundreds of thousands of newly-returned, family-starting, 

war vets. They drastically needed hundreds of thousands of homes,

and quickly. The mortgage tap and the GI Bill funds were flowing.

That's when any real care and quality and distinction went by the

boards  -  no one ever cared for that any more. I know, in my own

house at 116 Inman, I was always amazed that, inside the house,

all the doorframes and doorsills and moldings along the tops and

bottoms of the walls, were all white-painted metal. I know because

they were good for tapping on and drumming. And I did it. There

was no wood to be found in those little interior halls and doors.

In my house, even funnier, this little central core half-hallway

with the bathroom and bedroom doors in it, was referred to as

'the foyer'. A freaking joke, I hope that was. More like 'the alley.'

- 

But, I'm not complaining, nor making fun. My parents did what

they could do  - with the best of love and good intentions, and I

give it right back. I'm a soft touch, really. I can understand, through

their eyes, what they were experiencing. And I wish I could see 

them today, one more time maybe, just to be able to hold, and

say, 'I get it. I understand. It was all cool.' Too late for glory.

-

My getting to Avenel was a fluke of a story of a quandary. Maybe 

that 1958 train waiting to get me was at the ready back even in 1954,

just a'knowing I was soon to be coming through the rye. All things 

lie in wait for those who come, or however that would go. All things

come to those who lie in wait? Lay in wait? Beats me. You can't

escape fate, 'less it ain't yours. When I got to Avenel, I swear there

was a certain skin still on my eyes. You see, I was born beneath the

Bayonne Bridge, in 1949, in Bayonne Hospital, and we lived there

until I was almost five. I was reared in the Veteran's Projects on the

Kill Van Kull. In a little four-room apartment on the third floor. The

Kill van Kull ('Kill' is a Dutch word, used in early Manhattan 

geography, denoting a rushing or a flushing body of water, one that

turned with the tides, and flowed in or out accordingly  -  thus, harsh

currents, and changeable too. Deep shipping channels at the center,

large ships under the bridge, and tugs and work boats along the

channel edges, in shallower water. The harbors of New York City

are filled with these working 'Kills'. Right across the water from us

was Staten Island.  There was a constant flow of harbor traffic  -  tugs,

tankers, haulers, cargo ships, dredgers, boats, garbage scows. My

grandmother used to say she could remember the President, whoever

it was back then, in his tophat, riding in an open car on the inaugural

day of the Bayonne Bridge  -  all ceremonies and speeches. Of course,

she was wrong. It wasn't the President, and it wasn't even the

Governor or Woodrow Wilson. I checked. I forget now, but it was

like Grover Cleveland or somebody, and he did later become

Governor and then President too. But I'm not sure  -  though he 

was big and fat and used tophats. My mother had been reared in

Bayonne, as had my father, through foster parents. Both my 

grandfathers, neither of whom I ever met, died in prisons. 

Enough about that for now. Dannemora and Ossining, often

called Sing Sing, that one. As in, 'up the river' that old phrase

about going up the Hudson to serve time. On the waterfront, 

there was Uncle Milty's Amusement Park  -  it was right out front,

on the opposite sidewalk, along the water front. It ran for blocks 

and blocks. It was one of those cheap, old, wooden arcade places,

with skeet-shoot booths and ski-ball and wheels of fortune, and 

all that, and with kiddie rides, and food booths everywhere. Plenty

of lights and noise, all through the night hours. Pretty exciting for 

a runt-toddler-kid, like me. I can barely remember. It was like

living on a Coney Island street or something, smaller scale, yeah,

but the same. Cars, and people walking, lovers and broken heart

stories, balloons and tears. Post-war Fords and Plymouths, old

square cars, crooked and sagging heaps, everything running by

or parked at curbside  -  people, with doors open, half in and

half out of their shadowy cars, sometimes hugging or kissing,

or just smoking or hanging about. People and soldiers and 

sailors were all about  -  all that postwar stuff and de-mobilization

and uniforms and military meanings were still all around. 

Probably, just to think, old Europe was still smoldering.

The projects we lived in  were basically put up housing for

all those returning soldiers, their first stop on the way to

something  -  trade schools, cheesy colleges, GI Bill grants 

and tuitions and service/labor jobs. People with few real

'learned' or book skills, just the stuff you learned while 

serving, or on the job in warfare. No white-collar people 

around. I lived, by presentation, a dark and close early

life. My sister and me. We had to be careful not to jump

around or make noise, because then the lady in the apartment

below us would start banging on her ceiling with a broomstick

to let us know that she was annoyed, that our romping noises

were bothering her. We called her 'the witch'. No dealings 

with her, other than that. It happened all the time.

-

Then we moved to Avenel. I don't remember anyone telling

me, or, if they did, how they did it and what it meant to me.

In my hindsight now, of course, it seems like a terrible thing

that had been done to me, but, really, it turned out fine. 

Avenel was, in its contrast to this stretch of Bayonne, all 

daylight and sun and frogs. Besides, it's not for a little kid 

of four to be in on that stuff anyway, and they just roll with

it no matter. So, I guess one day we just ditched the place

and moved. I just don't recall  -  no packing, no boxes, no

moving. Probably, as time moved on, there was a wholesale

exodus out of that place anyway, as veterans finally began 

making their progresses  -  yes, to places just like Avenel,

everywhere. Garwood. Fanwood. Colonia. Keyport. When 

all these guys and their families lived there, they were just 

called the 'veterans projects'. After they emptied out, they 

were fixed over once or twice that I know off, probably more, 

and lots of blacks and Hispanics took over, and they got 

fancy signage and a new name  -  now called 'Isla Vista 

Apartments.' The only 'Isla' you could see there was Staten Isla, 

and at that its ass-end, but, whatever to that. So, as a result, I 

mean to say, the exodus-destination list was endless. My parents 

had no qualms about leaving the urban architecture of life. Same

 for my in-laws, they had wanted to move back up to Bergen 

County, from their apartment on High Street, in Newark, 

(it's now called Martin Luther King Blvd.) but they said

it all was just too expensive to do. So they ended up 

in Avenel as well, but in '47, not '54. It's sure a strange,

winding world we paint, with one crooked brush. Back

in Bayonne, along the Kill Van Kull, alongside the water, 

all things seem now as if they were in some other era, 

some grainy black black and white or a sepia tone, seen

without sound. Dark sad people, ladies with greatcoats

and hats and dark eyes. Men, severe and serious and

hunched, sucking down cigarettes like they were vital

adjuncts to a wider living : anxieties, urges, sex, the push

and the pull of having to make it. The weird sound and 

blow of boat horns, whistles, klaxons,, the whine of engines,

and  -  most important, over everything  -  the oily stench of 

work and the bizarre and seemingly impenetrable surface

of the water, running on, with all the reflected lights and

ripples and angles and eddies, the wakes of gliding boats

lapping the shore, the slap of small waves on the stones

and boulders along the waterfront. A dog is barking, it 

would seem, always. It was all mystery to me  -  taken for

a walk, or placed in the back of that big Plymouth, the

fabric made of gray felt, with that big looped grab rope

which went over the rear of the fronts seats for passengers 

in the back to grab. I used to love the texture and the feel

of that rope and those seats. Sitting for hours, just to watch.