7537. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 91)

BELOW THE WATER LINE 

(pt. 91)

You can learn a lot from dirt. When we first moved

to Inman Avenue, I can still recall perfectly my 

mother's constant complaint about the soil  - 'nothing 

but clay, how's anything supposed to grow here.

Anything I plant just dies...' etc. She was always 

upset that the hard red soil  -  and she was right  - 

was not amenable to something growing in it. It

dried hard, dried out by July and  -  when we

dug it or anything  -  was solid, like a red mass

of concrete or stone. It was funny stuff, I guess.

My father used to try to instruct me about the soil

being that way because 'once, long ago, this was the

ocean, everything here was under water, for miles

around.' What a kingdom! Ante-diluvial, post-diluvial.

I always loved that stuff -   ante meaning before, and 

not 'anti', like against. The same went with the Civil 

War, what they referred to as 'ante-bellum' was the

slave period before the Civil War, when people were

trying, maybe to work it out and the plantation culture

supposedly was underway with its high, golden age  -  

happy slaves, family life and all that. Ante-bellum.

Post-bellum. Nice distinction. For the red-clay dirt here,

I guess it was all post-flood stuff, ('diluvial' meaning

flood waters). The biblical flood stuff doesn't exactly

cover the dirt in my back yard, but, whatever. The

funny thing, as I saw it, was in my mother's idea that

this was all final  -  yet, the soil was a fixable problem, 

if you had a mind and a will to do something about it. 

People everywhere were buying or having delivered

these 50-lb bags of rich, black topsoil, mulch, potting

soils, you name it. It even had a name! It was called

'amending' the soil  -  what gardeners do  -  adding the

needed nutrients, peat, decayed matter, all that. So,

the soil was only as much of a problem as you made it.

I learned that early -   and it went for everything else 

too. Most everything can be fixed, all those petty 

unnecessaries that keep people bitching and moaning

about something all the time -   that's behavioral stuff, not

a real-issue-problem. I found that some people smoothly

went about solving problems, and others  -  in this case 

like my mother  -  just vented about it; bile, ill-will. I

think it was all that Italian stuff. It always seemed like

a crazed, Mediterranean-style over-emoting, and no 

'solutioning', was always present. My mother would 

rant and rave over things, like  -  literally  -  the spilling

of milk. I used to think - it was already spilled, you can't

unspill it, to go nutso over something that had just now

entered the very-immediate-action-past is about solving

nothing at all. I used to swear to myself that I'd never

react to anything in that fashion. Not that I was Mr. Cool

about things; don't get me wrong. My friend Joe  -  he's

dead now  -  used to say 'don't lose your cool'. I never 

knew what he meant, or what that meant, for a long time.

Once I learned it, it made sense and fit my form perfectly.

-

Oddly enough, there was a goodly number of Italian lineage

people on and around Inman Avenue  -  others too, but there

were enough Italian families so that I'd get to see the various

levels of tension and emotion. It was funny; just sometimes it's

like that, I guess. Yes, not everyone was the same -  there

seemed to be some fairly mellow Italian men, as fathers, around.

Or what I could see anyway  - a lot of life was behind closed

doors back then, so how many abusive, angry wife-beaters

there were around, I never knew. I never saw any black-eyes,

limps, or broken arms anyway. It was, I'd have to say, my father

who kept all that ethnic stuff to the front-burner all the time.

He was always going on about this person or that person  -  

every stereotype you can think of, they all passed his lips once.

I just used to chuck it all  -  never giving a rat's ass about who

was what. I just didn't care, it seemed useless and a huge waste

of psychic energy  -  most especially when mostly you were

just implicating yourself as stupid by doing it. Who cared?

Also, a lot of my friends had parents who were each of a

different nationality from each other  -  so who could split 

hairs over some Hitlerian genetics stuff when everybody was

on their way to being a mish-mash anyway? My father just

never got it, I think sometimes to this day. Too bad. I never

knew what a 'son' was supposed to do  -  I have to say, there

were times I'd have liked to sit my father down, get his attention,

and swat him on the side of the head with a plank, and then

slowly begin explaining to him the problems about him as I

saw them  -  since they basically affected my entire area and

the people around me. He would have probably killed me,

but  -  you never know. By the end of his life he was an 

absolute wreck, a psychological basket case in some deep 

trouble, and if I could have maybe gotten through to him

(maybe there were even signs he was asking me for help, and 

I never saw them) I'd bet just as much, we might have broken 

through with each other and had a good and happy cry together.

Who knows, just another bent and broken twig on my tree.

-

Maybe other kids were closer to their parents, or fathers. I

didn't know for sure, but  -  yeah  -  I saw a lot of different 

situations than mine. I was just 'around.' I remember one of 

first things I watched my father do  -  this was still back, 1955,

when he was a strong, brawn of a man, able to lift a car and

walk with it. Body- built by deluxe - long before all that

muscle-bound fitness of today's world had been started. His

was, he'd say, the punch and power of a sparring-partner boxer,

which he had been, and a steel-mill worker, which too ha had 

been. Bayonne had like Ryerson Steel, and Bayonne Barrel

Works, to name but two places which fabricated and worked 

with heavy steel. He'd worked in both, plus National Steel

Company, at the Skyway, and he said they were all 105 degrees 

constantly and required heavy, constant, and hot lifting. Anyway,

the first thing I remember is he dug out, by hand, with a shovel,

completely something like maybe a 10'X'10'X 8' square ditch

in the rear of the house, and then sledge-hammered through the

rear foundation, then poured and formed his own concrete, 

then lined it with the enclosed steel walls and angled gate AND

wooden stairway, for an outside, rear cellar entrance. For the

furniture that he'd later be carting in and out all the time for his

basement upholstery side-job business doing over people's chairs

and couches. (I've written about that here in an early chapter).

I stood around as he did all this digging, helped when needed,

whatever little junk I could do as a 7-year old, and basically 

just stayed out to watch this crazy-man Dad at work, in a sort

of stupefied wonder. I think there's a point when everyone, or

every boy anyway, maybe idolizes his father, for whatever 

reason. I guess that was mine : power, strength, force, brawn,

intent, task, completion, all that stuff and all on one's own. The

problem was, mainly though, that the reason he did it all on his 

own  -  for good or bad  -  was that he never got along with

anyone else for any length of time, or project. Just strange 

and somewhat legendary stuff, it always seemed to me

-

I can remember being six years old and, when my father would 

come home from work (he wore the same daily-issue workman's 

clothes outfits, like some East-European downtrodden serf, each

day), after he took off his jacket and stuff, hat, shoes, after supper

I'd step into them  -  his gigando shoes for my little feet, and his

short-enough light jacket, which was like twenty sizes too big for

me. My arms would be lost in it. I'd plod around the house like that

for some ten minutes or so. Too everyone's pleasure. Never knew

(now) why I did that, it was just some dumb-ass kid's thing I got

started with. Probably some Dr. Freud type somewhere would 

a ground-breaking field day with me now if I ever sat down and 

started explaining all this stuff to him. It's weird; remember the

word 'analysis' has its roots in 'anal'  -  when witch doctors and

such would root through people's shit, literally, to read the omens

and indications. How we got from there to here is  -  most 

certainly  -  beyond anything I know. Reading tea leaves was

bad enough, I always thought.

-

I never knew how many of my friends were nuts. If they were. 

or if they were anyway half as crazy as me, in my ways. We 

never talked about the cool stuff  -  too much comic-book, 

power-packed dynamic stuff had been put in front of us, to 

become boys, and then to become men  -  which basically 

meant getting a job, slaving, having a house and a family, 

and sitting tight, until death does you part. So to speak.

When I studied psychology, in the early 70's, R. D. Laing

used to propound theories, and write books, about how

everyone is crazy  -  we just all accept the accepted craziness

and assumptions of same together, and think nothing of it, and

then we ostracize those who veer off from the craziness path

that we've turned into our acceptable societal modes. It was a

pretty good theory back then  -  crazy-men in the White House,

Nixon and Kissinger gone nuts, insane on their Christmas 

bombing campaign and incursions into and over Laos and 

Cambodia, let alone decimating every tree, river and 

wetland in Vietnam, napalm and the rest making Monsanto 

and all the rest of those 'defense' guys ('defense?') rich. Plus

wiping out 58,000 of my streetside good-buddies and fucking

the lives of ten times that amount who came home dazed and

bewildered and disillusioned, and with a cigarette habit and more

to begin with. Yeah, old R. D. might'a been onto something.

-

Well so be it  -  back in grade school they never told us any of that

stuff. They just played the hand they were told to play, give us the

rights and the wrongs of the ABC's and the XYZ's and keep us all

moving along. 'Sometimes a great notion', as Ken Kesey put it in 

1954, and as Paul Newman (directed by), Henry Fonda, and Lee

Remick, as a movie in 1970. And that was all before 'One Flew 

Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Which was also a movie. Goddamn me!

What am I doing, I hate movies!

7536. KEEP ME DOWN, UNCLE HORACE

KEEP ME DOWN, 

UNCLE HORACE

There's ice in my shoes, where both soles are

broken. Uncle Horace, can you marry a stepsister?

Is that allowed? It's so cold this afternoon I want

to blanche an egg, or at least the white of. Don't

ever say I don't know my French. There's

nothing I don't know. (Now, if Uncle

Horace was sharp, he'd know I

just had asked him a question

before that). 

7535. LESSER OUTAGE REQUIRED

LESSER OUTAGE REQUIRED

The old guy said he couldn't see good anymore;

and he just kept wandering around. I'd see him

on 8th, then I'd see him on 12th two hours later.

Streets were good to an elder like him. Cart man,

he said, gave him something to eat now and then.

Coffee. Some black stew from something left.

Those days, there were still some horse guys

walking the downtown streets  -  the clomp, 

clomp, of a chestnut cart, the good smell of 

that old fire. I knew direction by the scent 

I followed. Outside the armory, whatever 

that is, 25th. 26th. That's where they said

he finally keeled over, muttering some

ancient names of something. I was sad,

but since I was only 18, little cared.

Things go like that, sometimes,

Less and less required.

7534. ARROWROOT

ARROWROOT

Why do I stand here in a desert of slime, 

the wandering eye in the dung-heap of 

time? My entrenched form of thinking 

brings me nothing but but woe. Yes I 

cannot change that, and so it will go.

-

That will stand as my refrain, and I'll use 

it here over and over. You may join in as 

we recite  -  of, like the cat, you can stay 

aloof and just rub your back along 

the living room wall.

-

Why do I stand here in a desert of slime, 

the wandering eye in the dung-heap of 

time? My entrenched form of thinking 

brings me nothing but woe. Yet, I 

cannot change that, and so it will go.

-

The carnage I keep reading about now only 

makes me wonder more : why is this creeping

'Mankind' such a lugubrious race? Picking

up the dead from every street corner, amid

pizza and pastry debris in a haste.

-

Why do I stand here in a desert of slime, 

the wandering eye in the dung-heap of 

time? My entrenched form of thinking 

brings me nothing but woe. Yes, I 

cannot change that, and so it will go.

- 

Several have been the servants of time - we 

read of them biblically, intoning their words

in some classical rhyme. A scheme of nothing,

really. No matter their claims, they all died

just as well : Jeremiah and Ezekiel too?

-

Why do I stand here in a desert of slime, 

the wandering eye in the dung-heap of 

time? My entrenched form of thinking 

brings me nothing but  woe. Yet, I 

cannot change that, and so it will go.

7533. SURE TO CERTAIN

SURE TO CERTAIN

It's of more than passing note, this lethal

change of season : all things come and

and things go. You look up one day, and

all the trees, in the misty rain, are wet and 

empty. Brown leaves to the fallen ground.

Sure to certain : brown leaves to the

fallen ground.

7532. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 90)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 90)

To have me get back to this Catcher In the Rye thing

for a moment seems right to me  -  I worked at being a

'writer' for years. Even all through those dismal Avenel

days, some better than others, but all pretty dismal by

both their parochialism - which was always threatening

to engulf me as it had so many others, and its insularity,

or maybe I mean to say, its isolation from anything that

really mattered. WOR broadcast towers, in Carteret, just

across the swamp, and the occasional visits by radio

personality Jean Shepherd to the studio there, never

meant much to me. My friend Alex, another story.

He'd regale me with Shepherd tales  -  in fact he'd tell

me that the signal was so strong, it being from Carteret,

that when you picked up the telephone receiver at his

house, on Chase Avenue, you'd pick up Jean Shepherd,

or maybe it was you'd pick up WOR. It's funny because

by using the word 'pick-up' when speaking of a telephone,

I was never sure if it meant you'd called them, or you 'pick

up' the receiver (which you obviously did), or if it just meant

you get the shows in, as if the telephone was a radio.  Now

that was compelling and conflicting information all around

for me. I had a friend once, in Fords, he was a student at

the RCA Institute, David Sarnoff School, whatever it was

called, right in midtown, like 34th street or close (I'd drive

him in to school every so often), and he took a bunch of junk

telephones, in his basement, and hooked them up to his record

player, so that when you went downstairs in his house there'd

be a number of chairs lined up, like phone desks or something,

they were, and he'd play a record and you'd sit there listening

on a telephone. It was crazy shit; meaning to say it certainly

couldn't have been about sound quality. Telephone amplifier,

in ONE ear? Thank God none of the guys who ever made the

music ever found out we were listening to their stuff that

way. I guess it was just supposed to be a cool 'electronic

wizard' kind of show-off trick.  But, I digress : you see,

back to Catcher In the Rye and me. I practiced for years

to be a writer. That doesn't just happen. I filled notebooks

and reams of paper with drivel  -  little tiny text. Library

hours spent slammed up against a wall at a large writing

desk, alone, near no one, and making sure no one sat near

me. I wanted my private space to work. Reading things,

writing. One thing for sure, you can't write on an empty

head. You've got to read first, a zillion things; you've got

to fill your head and mind with every literary and historical

literary reference you can until all that comes second-nature.

All these people now, they think they can write on an empty

head. But it just comes out tinny : lost hearts, broken hearts,

lost loves, squandered emotion, all that Nature and clouds and

rainstorms stuff -  pure drivel. Nothing behind it at all. It's

like 'hey, just because you're hurting and your heart smarts,

it's not my problem and I don't want to hear about it.' You can

tell junk writers immediately  -  ten words in. Trash. Not one

bit of magic with words, or phrases, or allusions and referential

stuff. Just pure crap, in an endless array, a spewed stream. This

entire Catcher In the Rye thing, however  -  as little as it was  -

seemed to properly capture the spirit right, for me. I was, of

course, small potatoes in upbringing to this Park Avenue and

prep school expedient portrayed, but I caught it all nonetheless.

The whole thing was about 'digression'. That was a writerly 

concept, right off, that I saw and built upon. It can take you

anywhere, and you can say, through it, pretty much whatever

you want to say  -  and then return to the old gleaning field

you started out with. It's a pose. A writer needs a pose. Just as,

when one is drawing, you don't 'draw' every dot and line. Instead

you learn how to use pencil mark and thrust to just 'suggest' other

things. Letting the viewer do most of the work after you. Like in

writing : I'm never the one to start out explaining everything I

wrote and what it's supposed to mean. Sometimes I don't know

either. Beat that! The suggestion is a soulful thing, from 

body heat to body-heart, as I put it. Holden Caulfield is all

about digression. But he uses the awareness of his hating each

item being digressed about to bring you there. He hates movies, 

but he's always writing himself into imaginary movie settings

and referencing movies.  He hates the prep school stuff he lives,

but he's living it while going off about it. Same with fakery and

the inauthentic. Love and girls, and so much else. That little book

carried me up and down Avenel Street plenty of times. Maybe

each town should have its own Bible, and each person in that 

town, of course, their own Bible. A formative, little dumb-ass

starter book they can live by. I guess that would, or could, be 

mine. It was all to excess. It was Huck Finn in a hunter's cap.

It was the voice that brought me to my own voice -  just as did

Blake and Eliot and Camus and some others too. That was only

the start for me -  since then there's been hundreds.

-

I don't know who else in Avenel had a literary bent, a knowledge 

of any of it at all. I'm sure there was, but I never found one. Most

everyone else just lived by rote. The methodical and orthodox 

means of representing reality, and then accepting it and playing 

its roles. Being what you were. Another thing it brought me to

was the realization that there's never a 'straight' line. Everything

veers, ends up off the paper, goes somewhere else. Like today,

now, in Woodbridge. There's a little brook/park thing off Amboy 

Avenue by the Board of Ed building, an original early schoolhouse

though you've never know it now (everything paved and cut away),

and in that walkway through the park they've erected, every 50 feet

or so, these pedestal displays of a historic photo and explanation 

about stuff in town. Now, that was always there -   all that stuff  -  

and it was all built over a million bones of native Leni Lenapes 

who's gotten in the way of the disgusting waves of settlement that

hammered and broke the land. The very land they'd worked and

died upon. These markers only tell you what they want you to

know. All the years I lived and worked right around there, none 

of that was present. I mean the history was, yes, of course, but

the historical presence, the 'lie', the digression, in fact, of all the

fake truths of the matter, they were never on display. Now  -  

with the power of the state and township, and government 

monies and bogus historic commissions and all that, they come

up with the 'approved' narrative they wish you to know. Only.

That. And nothing more. What's the result? A ten-year spate of

historic markers with story-lines. Ten years from now they'll 

all be gone too -  weathered and faded away, as will the dead 

people who, alive now, weave these tales. Live is an illusion. 

Winners (killers) write history. Live it with, and shut-up.

-

All through my grade school I forced myself to play it right. I

never really did know what was up  - Mr. Cigatura, some midget

Italian guy janitor with a '51 Plymouth station wagon, he used to

hang around everywhere in School 4&5, cleaning and sweeping

and, in the beginning, tending to the coal furnaces. The parking 

areas, instead of being macadam-paved, back in the fifties, they

were covered with the coarse, hard ash of the coal-burnings. It

was good traction, and it all stayed in place and got scrunched

down pretty good by cars. There was an incinerator thing out 

back, a big brick box, slightly elevated, with a furnace door and

a tall smokestack. Everything just got thrown in there and 

burned. It was like a crematoria for school stuff -   all those 

tests and papers you never wanted to hear about again, that's 

where they all ended up. Burned as trash  -  most of the time 

that's where the stuff should have started out anyway. School 

was just order and crud, in that order maybe too. Nothing I 

ever really needed, I guess, once after I'd learned to write 

anyway. I often wondered how that was : how natural was it

to learn all that language and basic communication stuff, and

then learn to print, and then learn to write cursive, as a slow

progression of things. I always liked printing  - a nice, fine,

Gothic hand. When it came to cursive, to 'writing'  -  all that

Palmer method stuff, I never was a big fan. All those loops and

squiggles, too easy turning into a girl's hand  -  yeah, I know

that's no longer supposed to matter, but go tell someone else.

School never taught me that stuff either  -  all this switching

between boy and girl bullshit, and vice-versa and back and forth.

Gay people. Straight people. Halfway people. Switched people.

What the fuck? If you can't figure your own stuff out, man, please

don't go bothering me with any of it. Stuff it up whichever hole

you finally decide is yours to use. Got it? It's like back to those

cheesy start-up writers again  -  filled with nothing, emoting and

whining about their feelings. Do me a favor  -  take your feelings

go parade them around Avenel for a while. I guarantee, someone 

will straighten you out quick enough. The only queer people I ever

knew were the priests and nuns I had to deal with, and they weren't

fooling no one at all. Only later, at the end of high school, when that

stuff all started breaking out, did I begin to see some confirmed

suspicions being proved. Mostly a few 'art' guys, who went big-time

gay and disappeared. See ya.

7531. NOMENCLATURE

NOMENCLATURE

The sergeant-at-arms is a

pestilence spreader. He

 reeks of bugs and bacteria. 

Let him shuffle himself 

home. I'll not sit in this 

room with him here.

7530. I'LL HAVE TO WRITE HOME ABOUT YOU

I'LL HAVE TO WRITE 

HOME ABOUT YOU

Now we've gone and done it. I know I can see the

future  - I'm going to have to write home about you.

We were supposed to last a minute -  the same

amount of time it takes the drain to flush. Water

trickling, to nothing at all. Now the drain pipe 

becomes my lovelorn heart.

7529. BELOW THE WATER LINE (PT 89)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 89)

There never were any guideposts along the way.

We all just did what we were supposed to, or so

it seemed. I talked earlier about burning leaves in 

that old guy's yard, and him showing us the 

Depression potato roasting trick. We also used

to grab a snow shovel at the first ending trickle 

of any big snowstorm and go around almost

house-to-house knocking on doors to ask to

shovel walkways and stuff for a quarter or

fifty cents, or whatever. We knew where the 

lonely old ladies lived, we knew who needed 

help, and we knew which houses wouldn't really 

mind us asking. It wasn't like now, when everyone

has snow-blowers, power-plows, leaf-blowers and

just about every type of modern Home-Depot tool.

They probably by now have snow shovels with

apps on them and a viewing screen that runs down 

the block where you're stand and Google-hi-lights

every unshoveled walkway with some stupid voice

that tells you how to get there. Yeah, it's all that crazy.

Frankly, if we had all that crap that people have today

back then, as a kid, I don't know what we'd have ever

gotten done. Kids seem to do nothing these days. I'd

bet any number of our oddball junkyard hide-outs and

gatherings would have never occurred or just turned 

into other things. Except for the ease of pornography

and looking at 'pictures', I can't really think of what

else would have most prevalent while we hid out in

the bowels of some abandoned tanker-truck. But,

anyway, people seemed just genuinely nicer about 

things  -  we get hot chocolate or soda, or sandwiches

and stuff. People were always feeding us  -  in addition

to a snow-shovel quarter or sometimes more. I guess

it was just more of the 'community' idea  -  a more 

wholesome upbringing where people sort of realized

'these' were our boys, or kids, and they needed nurturing

and some caring  -  not to be ignored and scoffed at.

Some of my favorite houses were the houses wherein

I knew some of my 'favorite' girls from school lived.

It was just coy to be seen hanging around, with a task

to do, and maybe catch a glimpse of any Jane or Mary

or swaddled up deep in a Winter coat and hat, snow 

tumbling down around in some accidental destiny.

-

My own design school was Nature. Period. I'd wander

about just looking at things  -  the bark of the various trees

always fascinated me. The little clusters of saplings and the

way they'd seed themselves and more would grow. It seemed

like really the only 'beauty' that I ever found was in places

where stuff had just been left to grow  -  the way vines and

branches grew high to the sunlight, wrapped around things,

the way birds made nests in the clusters of tight branches,

and I was especially fascinated by the manner in which, on

the little rivulets and streams in the woods at the end of the

street, the way ice formed  -  layers, thin crust, translucent, 

thicker ice, flaky, really thin white ice, visible water still

running beneath it. All that stuff. I never was any Druid or

anything, but I'd set markers for myself, day after day - 

spots where the sun would be setting and which branches 

it would drop down through, where it would 'land' as a

solid, orange, ball on the landscape, setting. I almost had

my own equivalent Stonehenge things as I'd watch Nature

go by. Back then too there were actually, well at least some,

stars in the sky  -  real stars, with clusters. At the top end

of my driveway, looking out and up, I'd know just where

and how the Dippers would be clustered, the North Star, 

and other things  -  using oak tree limbs from out back 

along the tracks as my visual guides. A quirky little form,

for me, of local geophysics on the ground and a local 

astronomy in the sky. It didn't take much of a tune to

ever get my song going.

-

Every so often my mother would begin pestering me to

take some goofy local job, long about Summer '66 and

then Winter '67. It seemed invalid to her to live a simple

day-to-day existence without some two or three hours

a day at least being labored away at some drudgery so

that another person or company could be making money

off you. My Aunt Millie, in Colonia, she was a local

Democrat Committeewoman or something and she had

all these dumb connections to get kids Parks Dept. jobs

and such  -  teaching little brats how to weave doilies or

punch leather holes into beaded moccasins, or whatever.

All the little parks had Summer programs and they needed

teen-age types to guide the kids along. I stayed away from

that trap like the plague. It just all seemed wrong to me  - 

first off, the kids taking the jobs seemed like weasels, and 

they were all the same. Cookie-cutter ingenues, or lechers.

Take your pick because each side was well-represented. 

There was a certain type of well-rounded, white-pants 

wearing 'Summer' boy characters who were around then -

unknowingly suave, always on the make, pretending at

'wisdom' and on their way to some squid school or another

as soon as September arrived. Boy did I ever wish to pound

those guys with a hammer. And the girls too  -  they were

sort of the same, but at least they were doing cool things, like

growing breast and staying sweet. I didn't know then how far

all that went, but I was taking care of business in my own way.

My aunt never quit though  -  she was always pushing along

to get the 'local' kids involved in these Summer programs. It

all seemed like some Socialist Summer camp crap to me, where

the little Stalinists who kissed ass the best would get to propound 

their rotten theories about life into the heads of others, younger 

kids. Who, of course, didn't know the difference and would fall

for anything as long as ice cream and a sliding board were 

involved. It was like all that 'vacation bible school' stuff they

peddle every year about June 29th  -  Jeez, you just finally get

out of school after a too-long, boring year, and they're throwing 

you right back into it to learn some fantasy crap about angels and

lambs, and calling it Vacation School no less. Who the hell

came up with that one?

-

There weren't any 'weirdos' on Inman Avenue, but it was

fairly easy to get that tag attached to your name back then. I

don't know, really, what it took, but there came to be a few

around the rest of town. People just walking around all the

time, preoccupied with their own weird things. It was a time

when strangers and oddballs were just considered corrupt or

suspicious, or even dangerous. Again, like some sort of

Twilight Zone episodic pattern  -  the person no one wants

to go near, or have around, the one hoarding some secret that

was too hideous to disclose. It wasn't like now when people

are basically one-dimensional enough and care only to watch

out for the bomb-makers and the bomb-throwers and terrorists

and all that stuff. In fact, suspicion and hatred now have just 

turned into 'business' and you can be sure that, once people

have found a way to make money off something, it never ends,

just grows. This wasn't that. The kid-times I'm talking about, 

even through Avenel, were darker and deeper - 'psychological' 

time, though people would not ever have known that or owned 

up to it. There was guy on our block, Fred Herman  -  a regular, 

nice guy, a father, had a wife, two kids, nothing out of the 

ordinary in any crazy sense  -  had cars, went to work each 

day, came home. But the guy was considered deep and dangerous 

and mysterious. You know why? Because instead of having a

crazy-man, well-maintained and constantly-mowed lawn, this

guy planted about thirty trees inside his fence instead  -  no lawn,

just a veritable forest growing up to shield the house from the 

street. I thought it was great, and it just kept growing up, year 

after year. He had something of a lean-to, car-port extension 

thing built out off one side of the house, covering the 

driveway back, and there were apparently lots of cool things

kept outside there. He and his son would be working on cars

there, seen often. His daughter, she too kept to herself, and had 

some weird and crazy 1950's, early '60's, high, swoopy hair-style

that she somehow kept until it was way past stylish. Like the

sort of thing you sometimes see in old yearbooks, of kids with 

the pasty, 1960 expression of frozen verve and anger under 

frosted hair and too much eye make-up. Girls anyway. At least

then. (Whenever I used to see those kinds of yearbook photos,

I'd just go ahead thinking of this crazy, boiling cauldron of

sexuality that must have been bubbling up within these kids.

Poor repressed bastards. I think the later 60's took care of all

that. By then there was cum flying every which way in the air).

-

There was a real easy read out in paperback, already, by the 

early 60's  -  not much of a book, certainly not a 'tome;, but a

really nice and generally affirmative adolescent read that took

me nicely along. It had a great back-story, the guy who wrote it

was way-cool, deep and dark and mysterious himself, filled with

secrets of wartime stuff, psychological damage, and all the stormy, 

rich-kid, go see the shrink kind of narrative that I loved. I don't 

know how many people actually 'read' it, but everyone talked

about it  -  what's so weird now is how it was considered salacious 

and deviant at the time. Total crazy shit. People were generally

nuts about anything that wasn't in the envelope and sealed up.

All that A-bomb, Nazi extermination, missile-warfare, space-race

indoctrination and propaganda (propaganda, remember, just comes

from 'propagate', which is what people do when they spread lies

and make evil babies out of things) stuff had everyone totally 

twisted and always on edge. Weird people, like Cameron Swayze, 

and even Walter Cronkite, always spinning tales of danger and war

(and making millions too, doing it). It was called 'Catcher In the

Rye', and has since basically become a cliche, an overly taught,

book-list, reading course type of thing that's just become wasted 

now. It had its precise moment, and that's come and gone. But when

it caught the zeitgeist just right, it gathered everything up rightly,

and strung it in a great and ironic haze of psuedo-enlightenment for 

a kid. I know I loved it. Holden Caulfield, all those little weaves

 and stories, and even each of J. D. Salinger's other small books, 

they were all great. Everything he wrote about was all around me -

the fakery, the cheap-ass religio-political stuff, the girls, the small

desire, the wanderings, the family  -  everything. You could have

bet me a million bucks that I'd never have given that book up, and

you'd have won. But I wouldn't have bet you. Because I still read it

every year, and think of it as my seasonal 'polar-opposite of Avenel'

light read.

7528. SENTIMENTAL LOADER

SENTIMENTAL LOADER

Every encyclopedia used to have to start somewhere,

so they mostly agreed on 'A'. I never took issue with 

that, figuring there's 25 more chances of something

behind. It wasn't like those Dictionary kids, the ones

who claimed to read a page a day; learning all those

silly words but really having nothing to say. Why

bother? That was my estimation you know. Dictionary.

Encyclopedia  -  big difference between them. Neither

one really tells you anything: they just pretend. The

real good stuff you go out and learn on your own.

-

I've got a friend in Edinburgh, Scotland, and another

in California too. Seems like a really big stretch, but

then I've got another in Australia, and Tasmania too.

Oh Heavens, what to do about that little old girl in

my own home town. Now that's the one to shiver

my timbers and turn up my frown. I think I should

like the world better if it came without reasons and

endings. I just want everything to go on and on.

-

Just think of the difference between infinity and now.

We stipulate the 26 letters to make sure things end.

I just said I want everything to go on forever.

7527. IF I CAN KEEP THIS GOING

IF I CAN KEEP THIS GOING 

If I can keep this going until morning 

I might yet see the light of day. Swimming

this Miracle Mile in the late Autumn cold

isn't easy you know. We keep one hundred

paces behind the cavalrymen, and that's just

here on land. When I was a young boy, first

grade, it beckoned  -  like a calling, where

all the big girls were. I couldn't wait.

-

I just looked down and could swear there's a

fish in my coffee.  I've always had that eerie

image, since I was twenty-five : the coffee cup,

drawn up to my mouth and there's the slimy

squish of a fish at my lips. Makes no sense

now; never did then. The way things just are.

-

You know I'm a serious man because all I do

is joke. Everything else is so painful and serious

I try to keep it away unless I'm alone. Then the

dues I pay are monumental; just too much to

comprehend. Let's build that cabin tomorrow
and just run and hide away.

7526. I STOLE MY LOVE A DIAMOND

I STOLE MY LOVE A DIAMOND

Like the old boat, that original head of lettuce

that sank - painful thing - my titular boss of the

castle keep is leaving. I shan't be at home without.

-

Here is the chumfest we shall dine at. Charcoal-broiled

freeze-outs and the ghost of Mrs. Muir shall all be there

for sure. Raise high the roofbeams, carpenter.

-

I'm going plural now.