9721. RUDIMENTS, pt. 8

RUDIMENTS, pt. 8
Making Cars

I never made too much of anything except

in the ways that it all drove me towards an

end. I just kind of 'noticed' things and would

take it all on from there. One item that always

confused me was the idea of my Grandmother  -

who lived alone, my mother's mother, in

Bayonne, and worked as a seamstress in the

Bayonne Hospital  -  working and living a

separate life like that. By itself, that was

no big deal, in that 'everyone' does it. Yet,

this was my grandmother and somehow I

just sort of thought that she should be no

more than that. Certainly not have a separate

life, and by herself, and working daily. I

never got right with that  -  I'd hear her talking,

on visits, about her 'lady-friends' and others

at work, doing this or that, and I'd get this

weird image that it just wasn't right. In a

utopian society sort of way, in my head I

was thinking that 'old' ladies should be

taken care off, given stipends, allowed

to just be grandmothers and all that. The

idea of her working away, like any other

schmuck, and without much of anything

to show for it, struck me as wrong. Of course,

I never knew her situations  -  of money and

bank accounts and things, but she did seem

to just be getting by in variations of apartments

and living quarters, and then until my aunts

began taking her in, different periods of time

and all. During the times she had her own

place, she'd move, every so often, maybe

three times I recall. They were always

likeable enough places and  -  in that

same vein  -  they always surprised me

by being kept well, and ordered nicely

by her  -  in my mind I somehow thought

that a small urban situation like that should

have thrown he for a loop, instead of being

easy and manageable.

-

No mistake about it, Bayonne was in no way 

a large 'city,' and I use the term only loosely. 

Back then (it's much worse now, by the way) 

it was a worker community : Navy Yard leftovers, 

guys with machine shops, tool and die makers, 

auto repair bays, and all that usual small-hand 

level of industrial work by which row after row 

of streets and four-story houses, multi-family, 

were stretched out in neat, ethnic rows, each 

nationality sort of having its own little burgh, 

so to speak. Like anywhere, through the 1940's 

anyway. Soon after that, it all began to fall apart. 

In a type of 'Mike of the Planets' way (I used 

to call it) things just began crumbling, and then  

-  making it worse - just being given away. LBJ's 

Great Society stuff really was the icing on the 

cake, and by that time everyone wanted her out 

of there anyway  -  it was getting too dangerous, 

and, as she aged, no one liked that isolation for 

her any more. As one of my other aunts once 

put it to me (also Bayonne-based), to paraphrase, 

the place was nice because the 'element' had always 

been kept out. Once the 'element' got a foothold, 

and was allowed in, the whole place began to fall

apart. Now, I was a mere 12 or 13, and hearing

this at first confused me but in time I realized it 

was really, if and if not fully true, just code for 

racism and exclusion. A person didn't have to 

be a genius to understand what was going on  

-  these rotten sorts of small urban places had 

become their own incendiary flashpoints. Jersey 

City and Bayonne abutted each other, and with 

a completely porous border  -  because they 

looked so exactly the same, there were spots 

where you weren't sure which one you were 

actually in. Jersey City and Newark did

eventually, by the late 60's, catch the fireball

spirit of riots, breakouts and fires. I'm not sure 

how much of that actually hit over into Bayonne. 

I don't think much. Not because of niceness or 

right-thinking, mind you. It was more to do 

with just a complete isolation. Peninsular 

head-in-the-sand stuff, and the very dullness

of its still overwhelming Euro-white ethnic 

enclave pride stuff. I really don't think any 

great thinkers every came out of that town; 

three sides water, one side turnpike exit.

-

Not that my aunt was alone in her thinking

either. Lots of people spoke those same local

sentiments; but the federally mandated new

housing and assistance codes and the rest

made it imperative that these sorts of changes

be implemented in order for municipalities

to receive their funds, etc. And of course the

local politicians, in-place and ready for their

hand-outs, were only too happy to oblige. Local

populace be damned. Large percentages of these

distributed monies never got to where they were

meant to go, and were distributed instead, under

variations of business names and building-trades

companies, etc., right into the pockets of the very

eager-to-oblige local politicos. All perfectly legal

in that perfectly illegal way of local politics, with

properly dotted i's and crossed t's. It was from this

point that the inner-cities really began to fester.

Angry slum-dwellers, left behind to left in the 

rubble no longer cared for, turned on themselves,

as it were, and destroyed what was left around

them. Turmoil and rot. I never figured it for

anything good; except a a lesson to show how

a government will undertake the destruction

of its very own people.

-

I had another Bayonne aunt too  -  she was stuffed

into a real project type apartment, first one then

another, for the longest time. These places were

cramped, walk-ups, one or two windows, and

small; but she prospered in her way and survived

for years in that manner. My mother and others 

would speak of 'missing' Bayonne, wishing in

some ways that they'd never left. Walking those

streets, if you needed something you could always

find it  - grocers, hardware stores, thread and 

sewing shops, floor and tiling, pets, pizza

and the rest. Today's equivalent of course is

the same streets, but now with 40 variations of

dollar-stores and donut shops, with agglomerations,

as well, of Hispanic stores an Middle Eastern, Asian

or Islamic dress and food stores. Go figure.