RUDIMENTS, pt. 57
Making Cars
Who remembers 'pusillanimous pussyfooters?
Who remembers, for that matter, Spiro Agnew,
Nixon's first Vice President, thrown out and
convicted for bribery and evasion as Mayor of
Baltimore or whatever in Maryland he was?
(I'm deliberately being imprecise and have so
little interest in him that I'm not going back to
check info and correct). The guy was crooked
hack. His being sacrificed was, in a way,
supposed to placate the haters and save Nixon's
butt - it didn't. Spiro Agnew. Chosen from
nowhere. To get the Greek vote? Nixon again;
there was a big, revolutionary crisis going
on at the time (1967) in Greece, and Richard
Nixon really was policy-mad enough to count
and try and garner every little packet of votes
he could. Thus, the unknown Greek. When things
began getting hot politically, Agnew was sent
out to begin challenging and making fun of the
leftist, anti-Vietnam, youth wing, and the press.
Making fun of them. 'Pusillanimous Pussyfooters.'
'Nattering Nabobs of Negativism.' That's only two
- there were more. Agnew just mouthed all that
stuff; he didn't write it. I don't think he was that
smart. It was all done by this other oddball
crank named William Safire, later, after
Nixon's downfall, a big-deal weekly, and
more, columnist for the NYTimes. Sort of
their token right-wing guy. It wasn't and he
wasn't, but it went on for years.
-
Around the time of Nixon in office, I remember
standing out in front of the old bank building on
Main Street, and each morning (I worked in the
building - not then a bank - where we did the
legal printing I mentioned and then took off for
places like Philadelphia, Camden and Trenton,
for my mad, crazy appellate deliveries, mentioned
a few chapters back). Each morning at about the
same time each day this chubby guy would pull
up in his '64 Pontiac, and he'd get out and go into
Driscoll's or whatever it was (can't remember now)
and buy a New York Times (it was one of those
newsstand, notions, and sundries stores), get back
in his car, and drive off. Some sort of office job
somewhere, apparently. That used to drive me
crazy, just watching his routine, looking at him
each day. I'd try to understand the workings of
such a person and attempt to figure how someone
could just appear to be so boring and regular
about everyday life. The guy just never had a
stick of anything out of place, or different. If
he lived alone and did it all himself, he was
surely robotic. If he had some over-riding
wife who both watched and guaranteed all
that, I guess he was better off. though I didn't
know. Looking back now, I can smile at
myself, of course, too - for being a rather
smug lunkhead, inasmuch as I myself wasn't
doing anything much different, except for the
career aspect. I was biding time screwing
around with a time-wasting job trying to
figure things out. It all lasted but a little while.
I was trying to make a buck or ten, to be able
to again high-tail it out of town, and soon.
For all I knew this guy was twenty times
better than me, and he probably was - with
some promise and real money to himself,
a regular outlook, friends and a job. No
contest; I had a few bad stories, smelling
mostly of sassafras and oil. I knew I'd get
started, I just didn't know when and how.
When I told my friend Bill, a guy I worked
with, that I was about to take off, split,
for Pennsylvania, he came to me the next
day and said, 'Watch out, the shit's gonn'a
hit the fan.' I had no clue what the phrase
meant, believe that, and hadn't really heard
it before. Turned out, all it meant was that
he'd been kind enough to spill the beans
about what I intended to do. Boom! in a
few days, I was on my way. The owner
there, Ron, he didn't know it, but there
was nothing at all haphazard about what
I'd done. I'd planned it for a while, even
had made two forays out to the far-deep of
Pennsylvania, withdrawn my dough, found
the wrecked old farmland and house and barn
I wanted, and had purchased some 12 acres
and a grand old house, with neglected barn,
outbuildings, streams, wells, and springs too.
The closing was about a week off, so I just
said my best sayonara, and was gone.
-
Little did Agnew, or Nixon for that matter,
know, but I was hiding out right under their
noses. Ever since before, still when LBJ
was pissing in the White house sinks, I had
snaked my way through the NY City morass
of war resistance. Stealing things, disrupting
things, blowing up an office here and there,
throwing animal blood around in one, and
then, of course the stupid out-of-control gang
and their bomb-factories and the rest took
over. Dead bodies, lower east-side hippies,
also dead. Crime infested wonderlands of
snout, snatch, and snooker. Everybody had
split up, and we'd all taken off, invisible. I've
never heard from anybody again. That giant
Mexican guy from Colorado, always bragging
about have pushed his wife out of a speeding
car on a steep Colorado mountain pass -
'Carlos the Idiot,' I'd named him. he was
gone. Andy Bonomo was - as they used to
say in the local bars - off like a new bride's
pajamas. The trail left behind was there, I
guess, but the gutters were cleaned and
emptied of trash. There was suddenly no
one around, including me. Most people used
to say, (all that Naked City stuff), that you
could be invisible nowhere better than right,
smack dab in the lost middle of New York
City. Maybe that was true, but I wasn't about
to test it, figuring the tall canyons of trees
and upchucked mountains could better hide
me. I ended up near an old Indian mountaintop
lookout called Mt. Pisgah.
-
There's nothing like uncertainty to make
certain the mind, to center it and focus it on the
task at hand. A perfect deliberation in every
act, trying to focus to be sure that nothing goes
amiss. Concentrated light like a laser beam. I
didn't know much about what I'd be doing, really,
but living rough and in the country quickly
becomes a pretty easy task, the mind and body
just know and settle in. I guess maybe, as a
Human, some of it's just tribal and genetic.
I found it all came pretty natural and before
long I was just another yokel in the forested
farmlands of Nowhereville, USA.
-
All this Nixon and Agnew stuff really
amounted to nothing any longer. I was
completely cut off from the contacts that
kept me up n that stuff - newspapers, radio,
TV. I lost most all touch. It wasn't until, one
afternoon, when I was way up in Hubbardton,
Vermont, in some field somewhere, that I
heard about Nixon's resignation. I sorta'
felt I'd resigned too.
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