9876. RUDIMENTS, pt. 55

RUDIMENTS, pt 55

Making Cars

One thing I remember well from

those years  -  still a pretty vivid

memory and one that carries a lot

of weight in today's world, a much

different, world. Nothing's just that

'vivid' any longer, and people have

a whole different connection  -  or

actually, detachment  -  to and from

things. I'll try and explain. If you,

back then especially, headed uptown

along the upper west side, as far up

as you wished, into the low hundreds

or whatever, from the w80's up, you'd

run into definite Hispanic areas. All

along those sections, there'd be guys,

all sorts of men, out front of the little

stores, corner grocers, bodegas,

botanicas, etc., on lawn chairs,

benches, whatever, listening to NY

baseball games, broadcast live, on

their small radios, boom boxes,

transistors, whatever. Yankees or

Mets. One or the other, depending.

They were always, in rapt attention,

listening avidly, with occasional fist

pumps or cheers or catcalls. This involved

regular season games, yes, and then as the

season-end games, play-offs or whatever,

and of course the inimitable World Series

broadcasts, those too. Banner days indeed

when one of those local teams was in the

'big game.' It was pretty amazing, 99%

always Hispanic men, and involved so

much enthusiasm and near- frenzy that I

was myself equally engaged in just the

watching. As I perused the various rosters

of teams and all, I realized soon enough that

that growing contingent of new players

was, in fact, skewed heavily Hispanic  -

so I found a root for all that cheering and

hooting. Which in turn opened my eyes

to the prevalence of a really sweet and

wide-spread  Hispanic culture city-wide.

I'd known, of course, about West Side Story,

but mostly considered it a steal  - the usual

Jewish raftload of entertainment and music

people running a million-dollar hit off of

their own monetary take on a culture not

theirs. That was typical, and that's how those

guys made their millions anyway  - the

Leonard Bernstein music-score from the

stage and film hits made him an essential

high-society millionaire overnight. I had

known of the old Hispanic section which

had been plowed under for Lincoln Center  -

white man's cultural paradise, once called

'San Juan Hill' in New Yorkese, because of

all the Hispanic culture there. (I once had

a friend who had grown up there and told

me all about the destruction, the displacement,

and the destruction  -  Juanita Elefante).

In fact, repugnant as it may seem, the early

1960 filming of the movie version of West

Side Story used those very ruined and

coming-down streets and buildings as the

set; that's real-life ruination there you

sometimes glimpse. To be destroyed so

Whitey could attend Aida.

-

All those radio-listeners and ball-game

aficionados used to amaze me ; what a

simple and ordinary life could appear as.

There was certain glee  -  and a certain

curbside fatalism involved. As if they maybe

knew, but would never let on, that the fate of

all games was to end, and probably end in a

loss as well. Maybe it was just tragi-comic.

I knew (and noticed) for one thing  -  they

often produced some amazing daughters,

and in those days and places that was

often signified by tight, white pants, or

slacks, (anything but, or butt), and shirts

or blouses which always seemed to have

the equivalents, hidden somewhere beneath

them, of those bumper-bullet types of frontal

protrusions by which so many cars of the

mid-fifties had been recognizable.

Ah, so much for baseball.

-

I didn't much know then about people like

Diego Rivera, a Mexican muralist of sorts,

and of renown, and his wife, Frieda Kahlo.

But I soon learned and delved freely, educating

myself on each. It wasn't only just them either

-  I had bouts of time with Frederico Garcia-Lorca,

a writer, and the South American guys producing

then as well  -  Gabriel Garcia Marquez and

Jorge Luis Borges, to cite but two. It used 

to baffle me how an American education, of

whatever preliminary and base value, could 

produce complete ignorance on matters of

anything outside of the borders of Wonder-Bread

land and its comedic heroes, the entertainment

world, and still try to call education 'finished'.

A regular raft of morons, once again. Now I

was living amidst it all  -  an entire, far realer,

excess culture with heroes and famed personages

all of its own, and of whom Dad, Mom, and the

kids down in Wildwood didn't know crap about.

Heroes of the Ski-Ball and Miniature Golf ramps,

perhaps, but that was about it. Glad to have made

your acquaintance, but even gladder to be gone.

-

One time after one of those smoldering August 

riots, uptown somewhere, I stayed at a friend's 

apartment and we set out the next morning to see

what had transpired. Much was still smoldering.

Broken glass and spilled foods and things were

everywhere. We figured looters on the run had

dropped lots of junk. Some here and there 

fire-hoses were still wetting things down, 

cops prowled, pointed, moving people along. 

It seemed as if many of those ball-game cheerers,

still in their same tee shirts, were outside gawking, 

stumbling over the very idea of their game being 

called and the 'action' halted. A silent hiatus, 

a catching of breath. True to New York form, and

no matter, the wheezing buses still ran and the

yellow cabs surged, jumping from light-to-light

like hot fire-embers themselves. In the hot tar

of streets and corners, ten-thousand bottle caps,

lost and forgotten pennies, and glass shards were

embedded in the black melt. A man could get 

lunch-money, just picking at the street.

-

Well this was the sort of wonderland I was in.

Short of nothing, I intended to stay right there,

meaning to make it all my own, find the hidden

symbols, and signals, which could only be ferreted

out by experiencing, by doing. The cerebral side

of things would have to wait. Reality called.