RUDIMENTS, pt. 66
Making Cars
Deliberation has always seemed a
funny thing to contend with. First off.
it's got to be real and not affected. It
always seemed to me that most people
just lived their lives wildly out of control,
at the mercy of their own whims and
habits and impulses. Nothing worse than
that, for sure. To think of any of these
people taking the reins and pulling in,
changing their lives utterly, in an instant,
sure always seemed folly to me. When I
made it out to the rural areas of Pennsylvania,
it took all I could do to begin to learn, and
quickly, what the lower realms of life were
like. Animal instinct stuff. Out there, people
still had it, and lived that way. Profaning the
world is easy - but what becomes difficult
and yet must be done is to perfect the life
you've been given, realizing that each
mark and motion you make leaves a
consequence, and that nothing goes for
folly. There was one time I dealt with a
country lawyer in town - property-title
and closing stuff. He himself came across
as if time had stopped. His person and
being was a complete simulacrum of
something from the 1940's. A regular
B-movie guy, the thin, wan, nervous legal
type you'd see. He had a single-occupancy
office in a small building of the same along
the Main Street of Troy, PA, across from
the Ben Franklin store . 'Ben Franklin' was
a low-budget chain of Woolworth variants
strung out across parts of rural Pennsylvania.
Just about the same to Woolworth's for variety
and volume, but cheaper and a tad less 'quality'
oriented. The thing they had going for them out
there, and so did Woolworth's actually, was
that they maintained and upheld a certain form
of honesty to the small towns they were in.
Small street-side stores with none of that
parking-lot stretch of macadam and all that
strip-mall ruination. These were authentic
small-town stores, right vivid and along the
roadway on the walking end of Main Street,
with regular, small-town parking spaces out
front. It was all just reflective of another
time and way of life. The sort of post-card
stuff people still try to sometimes pretend
exists and that they live, right while the
bulldozers and town-guys, Mayors and
Council-dwarfs are on their heels ready
to tear all that goodness to shreds for their
own dirty-dollar. Usually a thirty, with an
image of Judas Iscariot on it. (You can yet
keep your Andrew Jackson twenties and
Ben Franklin hundreds; I'd rather - if
anything had to change - those thirties
would be changed and right quickly too.
Those varmints have ruined our lands
and besmirched our very commerce).
-
That lawyer fellow's ample suit seemed a
bit over-sized for his meager frame, nor,
it seemed to me, had he yet learned the
rudiments of cracking a smile, laughing
about, well, something, anything. His sole
artistry - in a very isolated, closed, and
rural way - looked to be in carrying out
orders, duties and details. The legal points
of dotted i's and crossed t's, so to speak. All
those points and cross of legal writ and paper.
I guess the perfection of a lawyer's day, and
job, consists precisely of that sort of thing;
all those property detail and legal fine-points
having been done battle with. He went over
everything - this struck me, caught my vivid
attention - every line, word and paragraph
with the leading tip of a fine-pointed pencil,
a cup of which was on the desktop, five or
six, already sharpened and set for use. The guy
was meticulous in this manner of reading and
detail. I was struck by, here again, the idea of
deliberation - a poised and perfectly-controlled
order of fact. There was no apparent falsehood,
neither in his manner or his presentation. It really
threw me. I was sure I'd not seen it before - too
old-worldly for where I'd come from. There, all
deals were dirty slipshod, and done on the run.
By contrast, here was the dutiful living of a
dutiful life, personified for me by someone
whose very being and presence was, in fact
the personification of that personification.
-
So be it, thought I, for him. He had not even
a clerk or a secretary/receptionist to do things
for him, that I saw anyway. Perhaps a wife
clerked for him. His perfectly wicked attire
attested, in its turn to his perfectly wicked
get-up as country lawyer serving country
needs. I doubted a Clarence Darrow here.
There was no one even to bring him
his apparently well-needed cup of vitriol.
So I watched him well and carefully. I
marked his actions as carefully as he did
those pages - wondering all the time of
this man and his ways. I wondered if there
was some rugged, Pennsylvania story in
his past - baling hay, throwing stacks,
swinging hammers and pick-axes, tending
to fencing and cows, working tractors, silage
and manure? Through all the rest, oh I
wondered. Was he a once-tough farmboy?
Someone's long-ago hero? No answers
were forthcoming, nor would they be.
'His arms were too skinny and his legs
not strong' - to paraphrase.
-
It was all pretty funny: This was still bacon
and egg country; people eating huge breakfasts,
and having 'dinner' at one pm. It was the
mid-early 1970's - weird things like the Attica
uprising, the Nixon-Kissinger stuff with incursions,
into Cambodia, lying and bombing the crap out
of people, defoliating with napalm, killing,
romping through Laos and Vietnam, army guys
going crazy killing their superiors, blissed-out
on pot and drugs while holding M-16's and
hand-grenades in combat zones. Returning
home dead, or crazy. I knew a guy in Troy,
just back from Vietnam and immediately
hired by the local police department, maybe
all three or four of them. Nothing ever much to
do but watch the highway, pull people over, for
fun, I was told, and I'd have to listen to his exploits
and stories of all that time in Vietnam. (He did
two tours. - Man, I used to love the way they
just nonchalantly called all that shit 'tours.') -
and the stories he'd just glibly retell, of killings,
not just the wartime process of killing, but
HOW he killed, whenever and wherever he
wanted, in the villages and along the roadways,
under the cover of 'gooks are everywhere.' His
point was they were ordinary, hidden people,
and to prevent betrayal or sabotage, they all
died. To me, the unbelievableness was almost
too much - having to watch the perfect and
precises ordinariness of the lawyer fellow
and put that up against the taut beauty of the
country and the land around me while having
to listen to the nagging voice of some creep
in a uniform blissfully telling me of his
exploits. Oh give me a home, where the buffalo
roam. Deliberateness, all-righty, deliberateness.
Where were we going? Where had we been?
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