RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,237
(cap'n crunch, I'm glad I met 'ya)
I guess you can see - anyone can -
that I was never really a 'happy'
camper. It always seemed that no
matter what I did I stayed at one
remove from making peace with
the living. I always figured it came
from too much of that church and
propriety stuff too early. Maybe it
had to do with Italian-sentimental
upbringing, maybe not, but it sure
was flooded with loud emotion,
swooning over this or that, and -
mostly, people way over-the-top
about stupid, ordinary, stuff.
-
I never knew how others lived -
I mean, I had friends whose parents,
at home, only spoke Albanian. The
two sons and the daughter, I knew,
were a tad strange and a little slow
on the up-tick, but, except for a
mannered aspect of meanness
and a tendency for cruelty to
animals and such, they were very
much recessive and reticent kids.
Silent. In the background. Maybe,
in their homes, the streak of
'emotive' display was much less.
I couldn't ever tell. Other kids,
though, always did seem to come
from closer homes and families
than mine. I never knew why, but
a lot of the moments I'd see them
having, with parents, etc., were of
the sort that I never experienced.
Or maybe I just never noticed?
-
I guess it would be fair to say that
I spent half my life fighting with
myself - deciding what to keep
and what to throw out, of the
particular ways and habits of my
existence. It was never easy, and
it was often harrowing and tedious
too. The thing about girls, too,
didn't help. They were always
lurking about, whether friends
of my sister or just girls of the
neighborhood. I always 'knew'
what was going on, but was never
really comfortable with it - those
strange grumblings of early
adolescence, when girls' sweaters
suddenly began having bumps and
boys - all boys - adapted some
pose of swagger. I remember one
of my friends, while we were out
at the schoolyard on an off-day,
sneaking some smokes from a
purloined pack of Kents that I'd
taken from my aunt's house, going
up to a local Inman Ave. girl who
was cutting though the schoolyard
along the worn path leading to the
'portables' and saying, 'Hey, where
do you buy those sweaters with the
bumps in them? I like it.'
-
I mean, how stupid was any of that.
1960? Space shots, Sputnik, dogs
and John Glenn (separately) getting
heaved off into space to see what
happened....and, by contrast, the
ancient and age-old ritual of sex
and maturation being danced out
on schoolyard gravel. Punky kids,
baseball gloves, and probably
'nocturnal emissions' too. It was
all I could ever do to find a place
to turn, or hide. Man, I hated
everything!
-
Still none of it was anything that
could be avoided. Like hair on
one's balls, it was just something
that happened. Weird was how, for
that clutch of local boys I grew up
with, it all started about the same
time too - since we were all of
the same ages, pretty much - so
like some rabid mob of hounds,
we all became pack-animals
howling, as if one and the same.
Every form of diversion was
offered to us, from bowling
leagues to little leagues, baseball,
football, Boy Scouts and summer
camps, but nothing ever drove
away what it was we were
going through, and it probably
made it all worse too, because it
packed us all together, which is
when the worst of it all happened.
Boys sort of fed on each other
with their behavioral tendencies
and dares. Yes, there was a huge
State Prison near us, and the
field of the prison farm that all
went with it, but none of us were
criminals. Yet.
-
Except maybe in our own boastings.
Every so often someone would get
into deep trouble. 'He did WHAT
to her! She didn't say anything?' -
A parent, or a juvenile-squad cop
would get involved. There'd be
talk of Yardville or one of the
other 'reform' schools. (A weird
concept that - 'reform school' -
and one which, I guess has long
ago disappeared. Now, probably,
you'd just be applauded, and it
would be viewable on You-Tube,
and with 70,000 viewers too).
Probably all this was crap anyway,
and it got exaggerated in the round
of constant telling and re-telling,
but who knew, and those curious
sweaters always beckoned.
-
The point was - for me anyway -
the loud and the raucous natures of
the emotions. At home, with parents
swelling with outrage, having to
hear, 'Don't you ever! I better not
hear you're mixed up with that
crowd, there'll be hell to pay!' The
constant accusations and blame. It
was enough to drive one crazy, and
anyway, and by age 12/13, it had done
so for me. Yes. I took refuge - either
by some form of true and personal
radicalism, or an overt sense of
young conservatism - in cloistering
myself (seminary) away from the
roaming crowd of miscreants and
into, instead, an equally and often
just as bizarrely preoccupied, and
often perverse, closed society of
men and boys. Go figure the nature
of that 'attempted' transformation
and then wonder why I wasn't
totally screwed up, and forever.
To this day, I still sometimes
can't understand what happened.
-
I guess, before they had clinical
things like PTSD and the usual
ideas of shell-shock, trauma, and
complete withdrawal, people like
me were simply tolerated by their
excused absences from the normal
run of things. I was, truly, a walking
wounded, a victim of shock and
trauma, a train-wreck survivor, a
twaddling version of arrested
development; a sniper; a clown
in my own circus; a tramp, and
a cloistered, emotionless, loser
as well. Cap'n Crunch, I'm
glad I met ya'! (Or was that
Mr. Magoo?)
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