7838. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 171)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 171)

Words have always fascinated me. In my

own house, as a kid, there were a few things

I always noticed : how my mother and father,

each, would say 'aksed', for 'asked'. Just a

weird, quirky thing. The use of  a'scared for

when you mean to say you are scared. That

was mostly a kid's thing. And a few times I'd

heard one adult or another, I don't remember

who, say really funny things, of their own

initiation, I'd guess. They were like mis-applied

word endings or something  - you'd get the idea

but notice the mis-use. One example is 'realistical'.

That one comes to mind, like say 'Oh, yeah, he

did it, but he didn't do it in a very realistical way.'

You get the idea  -  a combination of word-ending,

adverb vs. adjective, whatever, just being mixed up

through carelessness or maybe simple ignorance too.

I don't know, but they were very Avenel things. I

always managed to catch such things - and it was

always funny to me when TV reporters and such,

at the scene of some tragedy or car-crash or

something, would stick a microphone in a local

person's face, for a reaction to whatever had

occurred, and you'd hear all these very strange

localisms come spewing out of the person's

mouth. That was always like Avenel too.

Dese, and dem, and dose - that's three ordinary

examples. They would, I always thought, have

been way more self-conscious about their tongue

and voice, about how they came across, if they

had an education. We never had much to go by,

in my house anyway. My mother, I guess, had

made it through high school, and my father always

bragged about how he quit school at 16 to lie his

way into the Navy. Wartime never made much of

an issue out of underage stuff. They'd seemingly

take anybody  -  which always struck me a really

dishonest on their part, but to my father it was

always a point of pride. All I knew, really, was

that after the war he eventually ended up in a

trade school of some sort for learning upholstery,

after stints at Bayonne Barrel Company, and

American Can Company and Ryerson Steel Mill,

all on the fringes of Bayonne. He and a friend,

at some point too, pooled some money and got

themselves a Cities Service Gas Station, and a

mechanic-garage with it. They were making a

go of sorts of that but the New Jersey Turnpike

Authority, he said, took it away from them when

they had to make the right-of-way for Exit 14 in

Bayonne, or 14A, or whatever it is at the end of

that ramp on like 54th Street. I guess they all

talked funny there too, and it moved

with them to Avenel.

-

I guess when you're poor and basic, you really

don't need much in the way of words to carry on

with your life. That idea became one of my own

obstacles. I never felt I wished to 'overstep' or

begin being what I was not, but in reality how

does one advance past a station in life when

your own basic' human impulse starts just

bringing you to someplace else? I was always

swimming in words; sometimes I'd be lying

in bed, I can recall, and in that half-sleep thing

before you really nod off, that period of time

when things begin fading away and some sort

review of the day or something instead begins to

take precedence. I can remember being pummeled

awake, over and over, by these images of huge

'words' bundling up and rolling at me. Yeah, it

was very weird, but so what  -  other people get

themselves to sleep with images of cars or

donkeys or something. I had somehow settled

on words. And sometimes it was funny too  -

I'd always wanted to be a comic, a really

funny character, and that's what words were

too. Comedy was really just words. Words

wrapped around a situation. I'd awake some 

days the next morning with a joke or two 

in my head  - from out of nowhere, real 

quirky humor that had to do with words 

and had somehow gotten set up in my head 

while I slept. It was all very odd. I had no 

word input from the outside world  :  for sure.

Howdy Doody, Broken Arrow, Wagon Train,

Paladin, any and all of that TV crud, it offered

nothing like that. Nor did school. It all comes

from reading, and I'd read anything. By age

seven I'd read the entire Kama Sutra backwards

and forwards. No, not really. That was a joke.

A really 'contorted' joke. Ha.

-

That's what's cool about writing too  - see how I

just did that 'Ha' thing, to reiterate the jokiness of

the words before it? That really breaks all writing

conventions, but it's a means of getting to the

needed end-point of the idea just presented. To

me, that was what words were about. Even 

Avenel words, the shaming ones, like 'asshole', 

and the uplifting ones, like 'nice going, asshole.' 

I'd always  -  later on  -  say that no one had 

ever really achieved the equivalent of art's

Abstract-Expressionist painting with words. 

But this was a way to do it  - and actually, they 

had, others had. That was the whole point of 

Poetry, as I saw it  -  not all that genteel

and emotional stuff, sadness, a glut of broken

hearts, longing and absence. No, that was all

the easy stuff, and it had all been done to death.

It was, rather the cooler guys, Ashbery, Lowell,

maybe even Eliot and Pound, who'd at least 

pulled the hair on the dead head of that old 

corpse and lifted it up to some semblance of 

coming back to life. Just like the New York

painters at the Cedar Bar, or up and down 10th 

Street. You just rip and tear, get your markers 

in line, and have a go. Forget the niceties and 

the other stuff. Hell, it was like an old Avenel

football game  -  shins all rubbed up, blood flying

everywhere, people furious and cursing. But

some shithead always scores. Art never had to

answer to anyone. that's what I liked about it; and

neither did writing. I made it that way for myself.

All those teachers and crud-memo people taking

umbrage at this or at that, I always figured they

could squat right where they wanted and take their

own shit wherever they chose. I'd never bother them,

and they had no reason to bother me. I was aloft. I

was ten stories above Avenel, floating like a word

balloon. For every brittle Mrs. Kuzmiak or anyone

else, I hoped there was a justice custom-made for

them. But it would never be mine.  That's what it

all was for me.

- 

As kids, we'd rip-tear up anything we chose. This 

was all long before other things began : the idea 

of music, let's say. We'd never heard of things, at 

age 10, like garage-bands or jazz hipsters or any 

of that, guys living a life on the edge with their 

be-bop music and their illicit drugs and speeds and 

cocaine and all that. And thank God for that too  -  

none of that had ever infiltrated Avenel. Not that 

we'd have known, but someone would have.

There would have been evidences. I get the biggest

kick in the world now, in Avenel, when all these

municipal type geeks start their spouting about the

new construction, an 'Arts Village' by the train

station, inviting all these edgy, artistic New York

types to come in and live and create here, and 

make a scene. Worst idea in the world  - these

local geek-muni types have no clue what dangers

they're courting. Do they actually think these 

newcomers are going to sit around in the evenings, 

have a cocktail and watch TV? Not bloody likely,

to use an advanced British-ism. Creative people are

killers; brash, unsightly levelers of every pre-existing

concept around. It'll be Avenel's first sorry day in 

Hell when they get 50 acres of newcomers huddled 

around the idea of free-reign Art. The permissiveness

of the open prairie. If you don't believe me, Avenel

folks, go read up on the history of Westbeth, or the

Chelsea Hotel or the Marlton, to name three places

I'm familiar with. 
-
In Avenel, I always found, it just was really possible 
to walk around dumb, dumb as a kite, and no one 
would ever probably find out 'lest you told them. Those 
years of the late 1950's were when everything 'normal' was 
beginning to wind down, a slow sort of 'dis-assembly' was
beginning. It wouldn't be long before all those other
places would start to be lost as well  -  the little industrial
cities all around us, beaten down, abandoned, and left
to newcomers. In 1958, say, if your were really dumb
in Perth Amboy, walking around dumb, people would
notice. They still wore ties and tophats, for pity's sake,
and business and all the rest still had protocol. We kids,
in Avenel, we just were what we were, frolicsome, 
happy pests at home in our own little insularity. But 
Perth Amboy, and the other places like that, for them it 
was a long, disastrous fall, one that resulted in streets 
being abandoned, the small-business people leaving  - and 
with them the jobs of any worth  and merit, and the relapse 
was taken up by newcomers from other lands, here mostly 
Hispanics of whatever stripe. All called Puerto Ricans no 
matter. They took over the city in its ruination, and drove it 
down, one notch after another, until  - yes - it lost all its 
American vitality, fell and crumbled, and was theirs. The 
void filled by another void. Even lower. That was all the 
unseen world around us, back then, all lining up and
getting ready to fall. We really knew, at that point,
nothing about it at all, nor about what was about to
befall us, our futures, and out little town.
But neither were we a'feared of anything.
Yet.