RUDIMENTS, pt. 418
Making Cars
For a non-descript little
hustler from Avenel, in the
big bad city, I made out OK.
A good part of it, as I see now,
was because of the upbringing
I'd given myself, in spite of
the odds and in spite of the
opposition of most everyone
else. Avenel was a senseless
place out of which to grow;
the possibilities were hemmed
in by atrocious assault at every
turn. I knew I held the key only
to myself, and no one else did
and I held no key to anyone
else, and didn't want to, ever.
My solution was straight-line:
I never became an adult.
I think that may have been
one thing in my favor. A
physical adult anyway. I
was always a 'mental' adult.
Physical adults have lawns
and driveways, care about
paint schemes and decorations
and design. Worry about their
foods and keep lists of
restaurants where they've
eaten. They have eaves and
gutters and keep them free
of leaves. They buy new clothes
and watch their manners.
They shovel walks and repair
damages. Follow the rules.
Accumulate things and share
in the popular assumptions
of the day. That all keeps me
out - by contrast my circle
of being is the dark and the
foul. That sort of stuff takes
a lot of intestinal fortitude,
which is like the strength in
your guts to tell others to
to take a hike.
-
When I got my apartment at
e11th street, it was a big surprise
to me to notice then that right
next store was a motorcycle
clubhouse and hangout. Just
previous to that 1967 version
of itself, it had been a famous
Beatnik apartment complex,
complete with an arch'd gateway
to enter, a garden alley/walkway,
little places to hang out, etc. It
was, in the old Beatnik books
and all, called 'Paradise Alley.'
You can find it in most any
reference. In fact, Jack Kerouac
used it in his book 'Desolation
Angels,' as the scene and setting,
but, fearing lawsuits, his publisher
made him change it all to a San
Francisco location. I used to
watch it carefully (never then
realizing my own fate 20 years
off with all the biker stuff to
come). They had bikes and
motorcycles and choppers
all out in the courtyard and
some on the street, though
that wasn't first choice. They
patrolled their own area, so
for sure no local was about to
mess around with club stuff,
and live anyway. (Most of
these guys later became the
famed NYC club of note, over
on 3rd street. This was way
early on, when it was just
an idea). I used to watch down
too, see the courtyard some;
the people coming and going.
Rough stuff; girls and guys
making out against the building,
and all that. It was pretty cool,
sometimes noisy, but no one
bothered and I never saw any
violence. Just really left it
alone, because in 1967 it
wasn't really my scene at all.
-
All that changed later on, and
here's one example : During
the mid-1990's, maybe '96
or '97, I got involved with
a weekly NYC publication
called The New York Press
- like an alternate, snarkier
maybe, Village Voice. A reporter
fellow I met there, Mark Eneret,
for a while became a regular
pal, sidekick, whatever. It
used to be said, back about
1965, by Honda motorcycles,
in an ad campaign, that - 'you
meet the nicest people on
a Honda'. It was their way
of showing that those new,
small-displacement Japanese
motorcycles were fun and
happy - no brutes or
riding-rapists nor outlaw
bikers or thugs need apply.
Mark Eneret was a plain guy
from the Big Apple Circus -
where he got his NYC start
anyway. This was a much
smaller scale, but still
vital and strong, version
of the traveling Ringling
Brothers Circus which
used to travel with the
seasons from town to
town back in the old
days. Supplanted later
by big arena and sports
places, where they
could encamp and
perform indoors
whenever they chose.
The Big Apple Circus was
a NYC institution; setting
up on abandoned lots,
waterfront acreage, uncared
for parking lots - whatever
large enough locations they
could find. At first it was a
sort of guerrilla circus, an
urban phenomenon, taking
over spaces. No one knew
what to do about it, so nothing
was done. They'd plop down,
erect a tent or two, or not,
charge a little for their
performances - high-wire,
a few lions and tigers,
elephants, monkeys,
clowns, flame-eaters
and all that. It all used to
just materialize and take
over vacant places for a
while. Regular circus stuff,
traveling around all of
New York season in the
good seasonal weather.
Year after year, their
regularity became a
feature, and it helped
them grow and prosper.
Last I knew, they'd
been established in
some Lincoln Center
back-lots for long
Summer-duration
performances - but that
too was, by now, years ago.
Presently, I have no idea
of their whereabouts
though I know he's
easy enough to find
on the usual links and
clicks. Mark Eneret came
out of that - he may
have been a clown or
a hired hand, at first.
But then he grew into a
regular, stalwart; a traveler
and part of the team. We'd
gotten to know each other
a little, over time, here
and there - through NYC
stuff, the newspaper, a
few articles I'd written,
a couple of notes. One
day he contacted me -
this was back in the heady
heights of my motorcycle
gang days - and asked if
he could tool along with
us, riding hither and yon,
drinking and carousing,
so that he could do a story
on the Biker culture as he
saw it, or experienced it.
I said sure. I should have
known. There's always
more than what meets the
eye. He smoked pot like
most people drink water.
On again and off again
but always and whenever,
and this particular day
he'd been out in his
mother's convertible K-Car,
a bizarre, fake wood-grain
side of a car that looked like
a block, with a windshield
sticking up. It was actually
pretty funny - seeing a
crazed young, dynamically
bristling counter cultural
hipster type tooling around
in what was basically an
'aunt's' car by look. His
mother had died, and
he'd gotten the car - his
first set of honest-to-goodness
wheels. Being a NYC guy, he
kept it garaged elsewhere;
somewhere in Jersey,
Jersey City or something.
He'd gotten it out for the
weekend here, and brought
along with him an equally
strange, brazenly sexy,
black-haired and
black-featured Brooklyn
babe - tattoos, piercings,
attitude, all that. She was
quite the site (I mean sight).
In this real junker of a
crazy car they arrived.
Mark didn't really have a
license - he showed us,
pridefully, some weird
sort of military ID from
when he was in Kansas,
for use on base. But, whatever.
He didn't care, and certainly
neither did I. His story was
that he'd been some sort of
oddball military police guy
at Fort Leonard Wood and
never really left base except
to chase down AWOLs
and such other runaways,
petty crooks, sex fiends,
thieves, and things like that.
He'd never had to see any
real action or go overseas
or anything, and he said
the military-base boredom
was what drove him to
smoke almost lethal
amounts of marijuana,
pretty much provided for
and government-supplied
and, like any other contraband,
easily accessible on base -
booze, porno, pot, dope,
guns, whatever. Never no
mind to him. He'd made
mention, in fact, of how
marijuana was pretty nearly
almost a currency on base -
one of the mainstays; that
and wife-swapping. I guess
it certainly paid off to stay
stateside. As a 'currency'
pot was used about and
moved about like 'small
change in a pinball arcade',
just all over the place and
once the habit had gotten
him it never had left and
now he just liked it and
took it as natural, like
water or breathing, and
it took constant efforts
on his part to stay high
all the time and that
was all he wanted -
circus life, military life,
regular life and the rest
be damned.
-
They'd taken the car
out that day - the girl
and him - to smoke
with the top down all
the time as they drove,
see the Bikers, see the
famed Jersey shore and
its creepy attractions,
get drunk and stay in
one piece - all like that,
together. They figured
they'd end up in the worst
places and not really have
much to do except groove
on it all - nothing much
to do with the ocean
though they had already
seen it. So they dragged
along with us, about 12
motorcycles strong. Route
35, Route 36. First thing
was the Sandy Hook
Lighthouse and the old
officer's homes along
the bay side of the post.
It was a real hoot
finding myself in
some strange National
Park Service setting -
in an abandoned array
of battery emplacements,
bunkers, military bases
and homes - with a
renegade outsider high
on pot. The modern day
was a spinning wheel of
its own, and right then it
had come down out of
the sky and landed right
on me.
-
Having been part of a
traveling circus, and
having done circus
emplacements on the
Coney Island beachfront -
talk about weird and off-putting
- none of this should have
really meant anything to
Mark by contrast; but it
somehow did. There was
a time, perhaps early on,
perhaps right up to and
through the First World
War era, when the forts
and emplacements at Sandy
Hook were very important
parts of the defense systems
of the USA - the east coast,
always vulnerable, the entries
into NY Harbor, the sneaky
German subs and all that.
This place really did once
scream with activity -
maritime and military
emplacements, ships, guns,
cargo and tonnage - the
waterway was vital. Since
modernity arrived, it all
had changed - as had
that grand, old ethos of
the very way of life which
went with all this - the
slowness of time and rank,
duty and protocol, the polite
commands of officers and
commanders who'd live and
walk the waterside - bay on
one side, ocean on the other,
personifying the U. S of A.
Parade grounds, bandshells,
and - through the 1950's -
NIKE missile emplacements,
mechanized underground
launchers, huge cave-like
underground cuts leading
to sub-surface ammunition
batteries and storage units.
This was one crazy place -
even right then, with Mark,
in its ruinous state (and his).
END OF PART ONE.'PART TWO' POSTS TOMORROW
There were old buildings, things marked with cornerstones of 1904, 1912, and 1914. There was a grave marker for dead and washed up revolutionary-era British soldiers who'd washed up, tried to survive, and whose dead and hidden bodies were only found later, and rightfully buried no matter the cause or the side. These are things we live with, and mostly today all that is unknown; and no one really cares anyway. Too bad. What can a person do? It's all like living in a ghost town where no information is passed unless money first changes hands - someone is paid to tell you about it all but only in the most approved fashion - bad information and propaganda for truth. Sandy Hook was actually Fort Hancock. Yes, of course, there were endless jokes about 'this man's army' and Fort HandCock and all that - but it couldn't work that way now. People never did realize (and Mark and his wonder-babe (I'll call Oona, another circus 'sword' swallower, I bet) and myself, we discussed these points in depth, as I introduced all this 'historical' perspective of my own on them), that there was a time, really was a time, when things were simple; when immediate points of view demanded a different intensity and length, when the actual defining description of Life and Land was different. This spit of sand we were on - maybe three miles long and a mile or so wide, I really didn't know - was once a vital connection to the land. People lived and died on these sands. The local Navesink Indians called it home - seasonal or not, but home. Everything was different. The entryway to the harbor was vital - ocean, land, roadway, river. The geography was local and real - people walked about, watched the horizon, looked for sailships and harbingers of arrival. It was like talking to a blind man - a stoned one. He said they'd been able to get into a few of the empty gun emplacements and of course all they did was fuck and he said it was a few times anyway, even if he was usually gay and sought out guys. She was pretty cool, and, he stated, she 'enjoyed a good slamming' and they'd gotten high enough that nothing mattered anyway and it was all fun - she was just 'practicing' was how he'd put it. And to Mark anyway nothing ever much mattered. One time he told me how the true sign of a 'friend' was in how that purported 'friend' reacted when asked to 'go out back and have a smoke' and that's how he judged people - no matter what else the trust-factor of a good friendship or any friendship meant NOT saying no to such a request - however that did pretty much seal my fate with him as far as that went. Smoking pot was never my thing. I never did see him much for years after that - for the one time I did finally just say a simple 'no' to him was I suppose the one time he was standing judgment. Fact of the matter was that, after a time, I began to just find him annoying anyway and the less I was around him the better it was for me and my 'no' was more the result of simply not wishing his sole and undiluted company 'out back' for even a minute. He, of course, misconstrued it all as a refusal to smoke with him - which was a secondary matter to me for sure and, screw him anyway. What I did miss was his blazing, dark-featured Israeli beauty sidekick Oona or whatever her name was. She I could have smoked for sure - I was intrigued and exhilarated by her far-emotive bearing, from somewhere else, some ancient, strange foreign dark land, as smoky and distant to me as that Latakia tobacco used to be - a pipe blend, that was. About him, on the other hand, I just didn't really care; he somehow bugged me and I had found a lot of his interests and phrasing annoying - never shutting his trap and just running on about things when fueled with alcohol and the rest. The sort of character who demanded singular, one-on-one attention with a flippant character-quality which drove me nuts and it became like 'why don't you just once shut the fuck up because I simply cannot any longer hear you.' And he was all fake and stupid anyway - all caught up in those stupid cultural things-of-the-moment stuff I hated. As it turned out, it all ran down anyway : even, eventually, Ruda or Oona or whatever she too started getting on my nerves - her manners nasty and cloying and I don't think she ever laughed or didn't take things well - dead, stark serious like some foul black existential huff, sucking on cigarettes and the rest - funny how grace and quality can disappear so quickly. Here it happened. Funny how it was all business and serious and dour, a sort-of excuse for otherwise doing nothing at all except what nothing wanted doing. The weirdest thing is that they ended up in a 'beachfront' sports bar in a certain hell-hole known as Keansburg, NJ (which has neither a beachfront nor a view, but is rather a blank spot on a really bad map that just looks out on a poor-man's waterway of the Raritan Bay). The low-income people there make do with it as their beachway. The only wave that place ever sees is when boats distant go by and people wave, or when fat people jump into the bay for a swim, and I'd bet the fat people do a lot more jumping in that the boats do passing by - the place is rank and foul and infantile and disgusting, yet there they stayed an entire afternoon and into the late evening, drinking and smoking and staying high around some gross outdoor cabana-type thing with big TV screens blaring and bunched of knot-faced and probably inebriated locals from the town staggered stupidly along and by and in : the bar itself I forget the name but it's still there and seems as foul as ever - nothing ever changes when it comes to these things. My biggest gripe was how someone would 'cover' something, say, like his 'biker weekend' in Jersey, by doing it from the rank confines of a series of sleaze ball bars and encounters - all the while being high. No sense to me. I don't think either one of them has ever returned to follow up their coverage. Mark has just disappeared from my life - the article came out, it covered the things we, as bikers, had done with him and Oona or Ruda or whoever she was, portrayed me and us fairly enough, and seemed flip and hip about the NJ exploits, and was featured as first page, with an inside continuation. But, it all missed a lot too. He never was an insider. I guess my time with him was over by then - the Big Apple Circus, in those earlier days, was out on the old dunes and sand-holes at the bottom west-side of Manhattan - yes, hard to believe now - all that area having long ago disappeared. In the 70's it was a crumbling elevated highway, with old buildings and trucks stops and weigh-stations along the way; then in the 80's it was all falling apart and was dismantled and the area suddenly seemed to return to nothing : a wild-west of vacated old buildings, empty, sandy areas, and a long, open 'beachfront' where no one really went. By the late 80's it was a sunbathing and play-space for the locals, gays, yuppies and performers. The Hudson River went running by. Now, thirty years on again, it's all displaced by a long, riverside park and a thundering city - Battery Park City - million-dollar condos, restaurants, shops, schools, clubs and gyms. You'd never know it now, but it was once a desolate spot - and one, in fact, I loved. On those dunes the Big Apple Circus would set up, practice and play.
I can mostly keep my mind and stay civil, but there are things which set me off just now and then. I try to remain far enough off from things so as not to be packaged emotionally or set to explode. Don't get me wrong, situations drive me crazy, and often, but I do not register them to myself. I try to live at another realm, another level of 'things' - which is probably the worst word in the world but used here nonetheless.
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