RUDIMENTS, pt. 103
Making Cars
It always seemed to me that everything
had repercussions. I was often wary of
that fact as I went about and did my
life-events, but in the end I only later
realized that, for much of the time, as
humans, we're allowed, really, to just
float, and get by. For the most part,
things do NOT have repercussions -
by our meaning anyway. If I were to
shoot someone in the head, yes, of
course, that has immediate repercussions,
for the person shot, and, as well, later,
for me. I don't mean that sort of
repercussion. Perhaps, if I were to,
say, pour oil and gas into a stream
somewhere - one of the small trickly
things often left over at the far ends
of a backyard or empty lot. A person
dumps the fluid, and walks on. The
water, as it may, disperses the fluids,
and trickles on. The next day, or two
days later, to the eye no one would
know what had gone on; no difference
seen. Hunters, killing bear or deer,
they shoot and kill, and move along.
They don't wake up that night in a
screaming terror over what they've
done, no crazy bear comes back to
their door demanding restitution or
revenge. If you kill a butterfly or
successfully steal 30 dollars somewhere,
nothing comes of it. Life lets a person
get away with a lot. Upon reflection,
a large part of being a child stems
from that fear, which is drummed in,
of every faulty act on your part having
a repercussion. And, for all practical
purposes, it does - which is what
'parenting' is about, I suppose. But
after a while, that fades, and you grow
into the sensibility that much of that
was overwrought fear-mongering.
Growing up is about knowing that
difference.
-
It would surely have been a different
world had it been created with a factor
of what I'll here call 'Instant Smite,' by
which an errant act causes you immediate
punishment - the sky or something opening
up on you, taking a finger, or inflicting a
blow, or in some other way punishing you
in instant and physical ways. Had it been
an option considered, the world would have
been a funny place - and hell to drive in,
for sure. But I guess it could have solved
the problem of people lying to their spouse
about where they've been, or embezzlers
sneaking around, etc. When I was growing
up, I was often in awe of wrongdoing. It
was sort of an opposite reaction : for
instance, on Inman Avenue, during the
beginning years we lived there, my
parents had a neighborhood friend
woman who worked at one of the
nearby town's new supermarkets (they
were all new in 1957, it still being a
'new' concept, this whole 'supermarket'
operation - which essentially killed
every small-town local grocer's business
by the time they got established). But,
this lady got hired for cash-register
checkout duty, like you always see at
supermarkets though now it's entry-level
job stuff for crazy high-schoolers and
new-job first-timers with tattoos (joke).
There was a time (yes, I'm told now
she eventually was fired, and it wasn't
just my parents for whom she was
doing this), when each week, Friday
night after Friday night, she'd skate
my parents order through, with the
end result being perhaps a ten dollar
order-amount instead of a seventy-dollar
order. I'm can't recall how she did it,
but it was essentially about only
registering every tenth or twelfth
item and pushing the others along.
Nor can I recall how I first got wind
of this, if by observation or if I was
told about it and told too to keep
quiet - I simply don't remember and
that's not the issue anyway. What
struck me, at that young, observational,
age, was what it all meant for the world
around me - how people professed one
thing yet did another; how supposedly
ordinary and 'good' people were able to
do 'bad' things and get away with it. Not
that this was 'sinister' per se, nothing like
stealing pets or children, but how it did
represent a darker underside to what I
had been told that things were about.
I wondered, if it was done for a good
purpose, (in this case, aiding my parents)
was it no longer a bad thing - did life
actually subjectivity everything in that
manner? Were there, then, no rules in
force to control such items - this life was
an open field for any sort of end-run a
person chose to make? My own parents,
were they compromised now? Was that
woman? How far did it go like this? I used
to think I had to live the rest of my life
this way, and I'd just shudder. And, oh,
the neighbor lady who was caught, she
and her husband and two sons, they
moved away after a court date,
punishment and some restitution;
but I guess she never had to finger
recipients. (Hey? What's a two-fingered
recipient anyway?)...
-
So, you see, the major jumble that I
was a part of, by an early age, had
already messed pretty good with my
head, confusing and unsettling me; but
all it did was drive me into myself. I
just found ways to keep OUT of the
ways of all these other things. Baseball,
piano lessons, model cars and plans,
bicycle riding, the junkyards at the end
of the block, and, of course, those good
old prison-farm fields out my back door
and just across the tracks. I treated, we
all treated, those tracks as our own, all us
kids living right there. Never was there a
train that scared us or that wasn't ripe for
some sort of prank - coins on the tracks,
pebbles and rocks, and then pieces of
metal we'd find. It was crazy, and I don't
know how nothing horrible didn't ever
happen - I guess the trains were pretty
much able to gobble up or kick out any
obstruction we'd put on the tracks. I'm
not talking of anything ever larger than
maybe a brick - nothing like a refrigerator
or something big. Whatever we'd out there
was for the effect of having it flattened,
or if not then just pushed out sideways as
the train wheels contacted it. No one ever
got hurt, we handled the train pretty well,
lead-times, getting out of the way, plenty
of space on ether side of the tracks to dive
or roam. Plus, they were never going too
fast anyway, maybe 25 or 30 mph, because
the station itself was but a 1/2 mile off.
Once or twice I can remember putting, for
instance, an old bicycle chain, flat out on
the tracks, and the train just galloping over
it and the end result being this rigid, flat
length of chain. One long stretch of 'thing.'
But it was cool, getting coins flattened into
a spread, unrecognizable condition. All sorts
of things. I guess it was all harmless, but
the repercussions thing always loomed too.
What if we really screwed up someday, what
would happen? I think we could have made
the answer to that be, also, 'nothing.'
-
We were always in fear of what we called -
I don't know where we got the name or if it
was even real - 'train dicks.' The name for
railroad detectives, who, we were told,
would come around and patrol the tracks
to catch us in some evil-doing. Maybe that
was planted, as idea, as a 'repercussion,' but
it never occurred. Life's a grand myth when
you're kid. Out behind my house, on one of
the poles, was a railroad call-box, for emergencies,
etc. You'd lift up the receiver after opening the
wooden flip door on the wood-box hanging
on the pole, and there'd be a telephone, with
a live operator, railroad emergency person
or whatever, at the other end. We'd yell all
sorts of nasty prankish crap in on that phone -
it's really a wonder they never just sent someone
out to shoot us. Boy, that would have been a
repercussion! I kept my own reserve though,
and sense of limits. I never was one of those
kids who'd fling rocks at the train windows
going by. That just seemed coarse and dangerous
to me. People could get hurt, train windows
back then actually DID have top-halves that
rolled down. A person could really ride with
an open window. Head shots galore. No way,
man; that commuter guy was somebody's
father.
-
For me, anyway it was more about beauty, not
all this sluggish garbage we were always doing.
On those chilled darkened Fall and Winter nights,
even if I was alone because it was colder out and
no one else came out or was around, I'd revel in
the beauty I saw - those commuter trains rolling
by, in the dark, all those back-lit heads in all the
windows. People reading, heads half-down, or
others just staring straight ahead, or off or out to
the passing scenery, or, even, those sleeping heads.
It was all reverie to me, a very beautiful sight -
that passing stream of light, all those people;
people passing, people in motion, an active
busy world running by, in a slipstream metal
container of 'train.' Just nothing to it at all,
except Life, and a really beautiful scene of all
Mankind just running pat me. No repercussions,
nothing like that at all.
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