RUDIMENTS, pt. 58
Making Cars
Man Alone. I think that was the title
of a book I read, back whenever, about
1965. Alienation, the crisis of modern
man, all that crazy stuff. That one was
written (talk about alienation?) by a
husband and wife team, Josephson or
something. And another one was called
'Fontanamara,' by an Italian writer who
called himself Ignazio Silone (not his
real name). Both of these book took time
and I was probably, really, over my head
with them each. But, that never stopped
me - who cared. I never felt 'alienated'
in the sense of it being a clinical 'condition.'
The entire feeling and sequence of emotion
was something I just lived with. I guess it
was alienation, but I don't know. The people
who claim to know all that stuff and who
then diagnose for it - on themselves or
others - they're the crazy ones in my
view; having to be having every little
thing named and called something
and settled with and cured or found
to be wanting, an illness, whatever
else it may be. Like reading the
entrails of a cat or standing around
to smell your own fart. Who the heck
has the time or energy for that myopic
stuff? I'd rather eat leather. Especially
today, when everything is a syndrome
or a diagnostic condition and all these
bizarre pharmaceutical types have cures
and pills and things for it all and the what
to watch out for list of 'may cause' stuff
ends up being weirder than the illness
itself. You must know, by that point, that
something's way off. With them, not you.
'May cause drowsiness sleep-walking
singing driving your car backwards only
swerving into telephone poles drinking
swimming pool water by the gallon only
while standing in a charcoal fire and calling
your pets by personal family names of the
dead.' Yep. OK. So, even though I was
quickly a 'Man, Alone', I was not man-alone
alienated. It was more the drudgery and
anger of the idea of being mad at the world
for having me here. I was, besides that,
probably raging-crazed horny, liable to
slip the clothes off every girl I saw, and
at risk for stealing anything in my path
that I could see. I had a mean streak of
denial. I denied everything. It wasn't me.
I didn't do it. Heck yeah it was. I was as
vulnerable as hell and to blame for
everything. And culpable too.
-
What a concept, the whole 'man alone' thing.
In 1964 they'd still allow you to be alone; now
they jump all over a person to get with the
program and quit harboring secrets and secret
thoughts - let's get it right out there, talk it
through, we'll straighten you out. Yep, sure
swings my head around both left and right,
that stuff. There once was a different world,
and that's the one I came out of - this new
one, now, I just don't get, and I really can't
communicate anyway. It was funny for me,
because all around me, Greenwich Village,
Washington Square Park, all those wonderful
old enclaves of homes, buildings, lights and
brick walks, they were all deadened too by the
passing day. I'd read all about the things
around there - Henry James, Edith Wharton,
Hart Crane, Mark Twain, Tom Paine, and all
the rest - there were at least a hundred - and
realize that I was walking in their steps and
breathing their air - and it startled me sometimes,
having to take up that promise and rise to their
level of excitation and production. The excitation
and production, of course, of their own days
was of a totally different level and quality, one
which I only perhaps could dream of attaining.
First I had to want to. Mark Twain, for a while
in the period of his fame and high-personality
stuff, he lived right there over on 10th street.
He'd walk nightly, evenings, in his famed
white suit, big cigar, cane, slow amble, the
famous man out for a stroll - people would
approach, ask him great questions of the day,
and he'd opine. That rounding logic of his,
spouting forth with opinions and ideas; that
grand booming voice taking hold.
-
Very cool. I'd go over there now and then, to
just sit, on the steps, for as long as I pleased.
no one cared and not anybody made much
of it - now there's a plaque and some info,
but back then no one cared or gave a hoot,
even if they knew about it - and I never
saw anyone else come by either. I'd sit
there and no cameras, no gawkers, would
bother. I kept waiting for my own Becky
Thatcher too, but then I realized that was
Tom Sawyer's babe, not Huck's. Shucks.
-
'In the nineteenth century, the single person
was a problem. What do you do with a single
person? In cities (I think of this now), the
solution was the boarding house, often run
by a matron, who served meals family style
and might scold you if you got home too late.
In 1842, one resident, Walt Whitman, declared
that Americans, or at least New Yorkers, were
'a boarding people.' Married men, and single
men, old women and pretty girls, mariners
and masons, cobblers, colonels, and counter-
jumpers, tailors and teachers; lieutenants, loafers,
ladies, lackbrains, and lawyers; printers and
parsons....all go 'out to board.' Then, as a new,
mobile workforce flooded into cities, demanding
more freedom, boarding houses were largely
replaced by cheap hotels designed for the
long-term stay. As late as 1930, maybe one
housing unit in ten was some variation of
a residential hotel. The Barbizon, a
women's-only establishment at Lexington
Avenue and Sixty-third Street, opened in
1927, when large numbers of women
were beginning to work outside the home.
To its guests, the Barbizon offered closet-
sized rooms and lavish shared facilities: a
beauty parlor, a swimming pool, a sun deck,
Turkish baths, a coffee shop, squash and
badminton courts, a solarium, and a
roof garden. To their parents, it afforded
the assurance of respectability: chaperones
roamed the hallways, and men were not
allowed above the first floor. Sylvia Plath,
a resident in the nineteen-fifties, featured
the Barbizon in 'The Bell Jar,' where it
appears as the Amazon, a hotel for rich
young women who were all going to
posh secretarial schools.' If only. Anyone
I ever knew in NYC, for the most part,
lived and serviced in their hovel and
thought very little about it past its
serviceability. Amenities, indeed.
Man. Alone.
