RUDIMENTS, pt. 160
Making Cars
As I first got settled in, after
swiftly arriving to New York,
(that initial bus-trip from Carteret
with the five-dollars my sister's
then boyfriend had slipped me
as he drove me to the bus stop),
so many things began happening
at once that I felt almost encircled.
I never really even got back to
reciprocate the feelings I had for
that five dollars in fact. The poor
fellow's dead now, and I can't.
But he was a meaningful chap.
Unlike other coasters who rise,
perhaps, only perhaps, to the
heights of being university campus
police (in Princeton they rode
Segways around campus, always
pretty funny, and were always
petitioning to carry sidearms but
were constantly turned down), he
was, with the State, an inspector
of games of chance. I always thought
of that as the greatest job title ever.
Mall cops vie for allegiance with
university cops, at a certain level,
and for that, hell, I salute anyone.
But an inspector of games of chance,
by God they stand alone and proud.
But, for myself, once I arrived it
was non-stop activity. And a few
months into it, and only then, did
I realize I could turn the notch
down a bit and slow it up. I made
friends with a 42nd street beat cop,
(doesn't mean a Jack Kerouac
character, it means that was his
cop-assigned-area. It could have been
cool to see a beat cop however, 'Hey,
ah, Daddio, like dig, what you doin'
with that loot, like, man, how about
that gun in your other hand? No, it's
cool, it's cool.'), and he'd sometimes
tell me the sorts of things he'd see,
and say they were the kinds of things
I'd never believe. Yeah, I guess so,
and, yes, he did happily retire, some
years later, having had the patrol beat
back when it was walked, patrolled,
with a billy club and on foot. Now
all that is 2-cops to a car and with so
much communications equipment and
cameras and intel that it can't be
anything but boring. For a single cop
guy to have survived 20 years or
whatever of that, unscathed and able
then to retire, that was a real feat.
-
Once I really got going, there was
little to stop me, except money. But
things were all so different then that
it was, by standards of now, looking
back, quite exceptional. Like a reed
in the sea (of reeds) - that's a biblical
reference for you too - I was just one
of many, and learned to merge. Using
invisibility as a cloak. One of the more
difficult things, and it was always
present, was the balance-scale that I
kept, in my mind, in order to weigh
everything I saw and did against the
equivalent heft of the same in the places
I'd grown. Avenel was a stumpy, weak
candle, and it often blew out. I'd re-light
it because the comparisons kept me
grounded. How and why my parents,
and others, ever wound up there, I
never found out - it was cheap housing,
they were flying up by the minute, and
land was being gobbled up everywhere.
Fate sometimes wears a pretty cloak.
As it was, again almost incredibly, the
girl I ended up marrying later on, as it
turned out, with a family line on both
sides from Bergen County, had, through
her mother, some strange connection with
Avenel that I never even knew about.
-
Her mother's father had been a regular
electrician and carpenter on movie
sets back when the pre-Hollywood
movie industry (in the nineteen-teens)
had been centered in Fort Lee, NJ;
the entire area now at and just above
the George Washington Bridge, Jersey
side. There are photos and histories
of all this online - carpenter's shacks
where they built sets and outdoor
locations. The high rock cliffs of the
palisades right there, imposing even
today, were used for location and
scenes. The 'Perils of Pauline' series,
(the young woman always tied to
the railroad tracks and the impending
doom of the approaching train, etc.),
that was all right there. That same
man was also part of the crew which
electrified the Statue of Liberty at
some other time. He then became an
itinerant carpenter, and the large
family would travel the state and stay
in encampments and lodges, or in
the car as well, for the duration of
jobs. As it turned out, sometime by
the early 1920's, they arrived to what
is now Avenel, and he was put to
work as 20 or 30 bungalow-type
homes were constructed - the
area now known as '5th Avenue'
and 'Park Avenue' of Avenel, sort
of behind and over from what once
was Murray and Martha's store. The
two oldest children, in fact, attended
School 4 during this period, it then
being a new or relatively new school.
(Before he died, the oldest boy of the
family, George (Crede) , in the 1980's
already 70 or so, tried to identify the
small house they lived at then, on
'Remsen' Ave - small, hut-like, set
back from the road. But we never
found it. I drove him there once or
twice when he visited, in his quest
to ring up some memories). And,
that quick, they left again, for the
next set of jobs somewhere; but
while they were in Avenel for that
period of time, my wife's mother
was born. She'd never realized it all
until much later, or at least to tell us
about. Strange occurrences indeed.
-
Well, that's personal memory stuff;
I share it for the moment and then
take it back in. We each have that.
A part of writing, the most difficult
part in a way (the fictional stuff is
easy, you're in control), is the pulling
on those 'chords' of real memory, the
things that still hang out there,
suspended in a sort of forever
mental-time that maybe only
occasionally lets lose a drip. The
drop that falls on your ear, when you
see something or get a feeling. That's
the material and the matter that a
'writer' has to be most mindful of -
careful to grab and relate properly.
If you miss them, they go away.
I know, I missed plenty, doing
something else, the thought comes,
I don't write it down, being sure I'll
recall it perfectly a few hours later,
and then it's gone. What a bad feeling!
Alas! All is not lost. I have found, yes,
if you keep the proper frame, and remain
to the task, it returns! It could be a month
a day, four months or a week, later, but
I have found they always return. Even
a campus cop, at that point, or, hell, a
Keystone Kop (early Fort Lee movie
comedy cops), couldn't keep me from
stealing it back.
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