7660. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 126)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 126)

I don't know how much the world has changed

since October 4, 1957. I know that I have changed

a lot, but even there I really can't say how or why. 

It's all just too personal and particular  - in its ways,

different for each of us. And so what. That was the

day of the first space shot, when 'Sputnik', was put

into orbit by the Soviet Union. It circled the Earth

once every hour and thirty-six minutes. I guess I

had just turned 9. It was a Friday, this launching,

and it was a v-e-r-y big deal. Probably too difficult

for me to get across to you now, but the world was

completely altered. Time was stopped. Time became

a countdown, to an event we'd missed, or lost. The only

thing which counted as time, for those hours, was time 

as only the idea of an hour and thirty-six minutes. An

hour and thirty-six minutes. As if it became eternal.

We looked up. We stood out on our lawns, with all our 

paddy-cake sisters and mothers and brothers, craning

our necks for the little, blinking, traveling white light

high up in the sky. The sky which was no longer ours.

The sky which they called another's now. Oh no!

You had to be there. It would be, perhaps in today's

world, as if Kenya had taken over the Internet, taken 

ownership on all cars and vehicles, claimed all ports 

and highways, and shut all tunnels. That's kind of

how bizarrely not-right, upside-down, and earth-

shattering it was. On our lawns, the talk was of death  -  

fire raining from the sky, weapons, atomic bombs;

everything 'wrong' a Russian could do. It was their

sky now and we were dead ducks. Doom and the

destruction that went with it was now wearing suits,

no longer sloppy Soviet clothes. All was new. If one 

was a teacher, from that night on the message of 

teaching had to be renewal. If one was a preacher, 

from that night on the preached message had to 

be one of salvation AND renewal, combined. 

Resuscitation. Survival. Anything opposite to

Death. We were cooked.

-

Of course, it probably wasn't like that at all, but that

was the feeling it all imparted. Mobilization. Panic.

Fear. Hiding under desks now, for TWO purposes :

the bomb, and its offshoot  -  the Russian mastery of 

the skies. There was suddenly no other way to live,

but in a blind terror, a doubled-up impetus to fight

back and again make things right. Everything was

illusion, and this turnabout proved it. To my mind, 

standing out there in the street, looking up, it was as

if The Twilight Zone itself had prophesied all of this

and then all of it had come to be. I was unsure of what

to make of anything. I don't remember talking to anyone

about this. My own world was twisted : space cadets

and Buck Rogers, gone mad. Men, no longer chained

to their tiny planet, apparently, had now to reinvent

everything. People began to believe everything  -  a 

public as crazed as it was gullible became an awful 

monster, and a screaming parody of itself. Nothing

was safe, not even a book, not pen, not paper. There

was no more common sense : believe me I tried. An

object, set into space  -  where there had never before

been any human experience (which is what common

sense, after all, is based upon)  -  faced conditions so

unlike anything we'd ever before been told. The world 

crumbled, and all its 'taught to us' facts and its told

vulnerabilities became suddenly meaningless. It was 

truly a national existential moment. It was the start 

of America's late madness. I ask you to just think 

of the thoughts that went spinning in my head : In 

space, there is no air to breathe or to sustain flight 

or prevent liquids from boiling away, objects have 

no weight, and things that are dropped do not fall. 

The forces of friction and slow-down are non-existent, 

it takes no effort to keep an object moving forever. 

Perpetual motion is natural. Nay, as it turned out, 

perpetual motion is necessary or else all objects 

would be pulled together into one, single conglomerate 

by the inexorable force of gravity. Too much of all 

this taxed me, sent me spiraling : 'if you wish to 

make an object go slower you must speed it up, 

and if you wish to make it go faster you must 

slow it down'? Yet, as it turned out, for an object 

in a free orbit around the Earth or any other 

attracting body, this is true. A push intended 

to speed up a satellite will only lift it to a higher 

orbit where it will rotate more slowly, yet at 

the same time a slowing force will pull it into 

a speedier orbit closer to the attracting center. 

As these weird objects, then, came back into 

the atmosphere and were 'retarded' by friction 

they did indeed speed up as they spiraled in

until they burned up from the frictional heating. 

This was all like a field-day for madness, to me.

I was a dumbstruck kid, on some pathetic Avenel 

lawn, being told now to stare high into the sky at 

the blinks we watched moving overhead (yes, yes, 

we really did see it), so as to prove the undoing of 

my nascent world. I found I had no one to turn to. 

Was lost. The vast speeds needed to throw things 

into orbit were too much to imagine. A jet-plane 

flying at 600 mph, that speed not even really yet 

attained then, was going 10 miles a minute, yet 

we were being asked to conceive of travel at 5 miles 

per second here. To then escape the gravitational 

pull of the earth, speeds of 7 miles per second were 

needed. And to escape from the pull of the Sun, 

26 miles per second were needed! But all that was 

nothing  -  space distances were mind-boggling

as well! At 26 miles per second  -  if that could 

somehow be maintained, it would take 23 days 

to reach Mars. 2 years to reach Neptune. And 

28,000 YEARS to reach the nearest star 

(Alpha Centauri). It takes a beam of light, at 

186,000 miles per second, 4 years to reach

that star, 150,000 years to cross the Milky 

Way, and 2 billion years to travel to the most 

distant nebula. I was short-circuited! I was 

dead-man-mad-crazed. They tell us one thing 

and give us a Milky Way as a candy bar?

They give us a stupid-ass portable 'classroom' 

with a desk to sit at so we can listen to drivel 

that would dissolve away a year later to pure 

nothingness, an error, a happenstance a no-truth 

non-reality made up of incontestable factoids of

made-up propaganda? I was fucking done, at that 

early stage, and I already knew it. There was no 

one around me with even a clue and behind 

everything was a lie. Pure and plain and simple. 

Nothing more than whipped cream, on a nipple 

'Human beings have the right to be excited'.

Yes, they actually said that. Yes.
-
It's all too easy now to say it meant nothing, but 
it was a big deal. I'd not yet kissed a girl. Never 
driven a car. Never gone anywhere special. I just 
wasn't ready to die and  -  to my knowledge  -  neither 
was any one of my friends. We may have played at it, 
but it was only play. The world had not been destined 
to come crashing down upon us like this  -  no manners, 
where we had all of them. I had to wonder what would
 happen now; on Friday nights, other times, my father 
would drive to the Chinese place in Rahway and come 
back with little white boxes with metal handles  -  odd,  
sloppy foods, Chow Meins and Egg Foo Youngs. Those too 
were things that weren't even real  -  not Chinese at all  - 
 more false and hysterical American drivel. They
even lied about their foods? In looking up at the sky,
what was I supposed to see? What was anyone supposed 
to see? And why? For what reason? What was this
purported 'Reality' everyone was so worked up about?
It wasn't as if there was a traffic-jam already lined up for
the skyward trip. Things were everywhere mixed up. For
all I cared, let them have the sky, what then did it matter?
Maybe there's no talking sense when you've got none.
-
Maybe if I had then known what 'surreal' was, I'd have had
a better grasp. As it were, so many parts of me truly wanted to
believe, to take part, to become. But the rest of it? The rest of
it baffled all my imaginings, took me far, far away, into my own
deeply unsettled, and strange, orbit. Slow as fast, fast as slow; 
heavy as light, light as heavy; immovable objects on the move.
I was broken, my world sundered. All was madness to me.

7659. SO

SO

So then what is this ? I am the hairy Esau of the

open fields, lost before I am started? Between the

two sides, where enmity's flag is unfurled, I will

stand  -  smooth urban man versus me. My hands

are both vestiges of older times : I can observe, and

I can hold. Fields and waters are tumbling by me, but

quiet as they go. I will be the rough one, the coarse.

I will hit back and strike with a rock. If you tell me

that now only the weak really survive, then I will 

have to kill. So, then, what is this, after all?

7658. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 125)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 125)

The other memorable trek has to do with a 

different bunch of kids entirely. Boy Scout

friends, which were never very much nor

near as meaningful. Troop 73, the 'Catholic'

pact from the Catholic church. Unlike Troop

42, over at the Presbyterian church  -  which

troop was seasoned, rough and tumble, bold

and powerful, we were tenderfoots, (using a

Boy Scout lingo), just getting started and 

under the tutelage of wimps, so to speak. The

St. Andrew's troop was a squad of misfits

anyway  -  none of us quite knew what we were 

doing there, but only knew that we were in this

Troop 73 thing because of its ideological

connection to Papist goals. Our parents had

not let us cross the divide to Protestantism,

even for recreation or a form of wilderness

training. It was all so foolish. Years later, as

I learned about the Irish troubles and all

those internecine wars and killings and the

skirmishing between the IRA and the Loyalists

and Irish Nationalists and all that  -  bombings,

shoot-outs, killings and military actions  -  I'd

almost chuckle to see the intensity of idiots

split by religious quarrels and supposed

separations and differences. Even today, of 

course, the same stupid blood flows through the

same idiot brains of Islamists and other, fighting,

killing, and maiming over quarrels over whether

their 'Prophet' was left-handed or right. It's the

new equivalent of holy ignorance. Like killing

for peace, like any war, like all. It's definitely a

parent thing  -  for it had nothing to do with us.

But  - we had to go along. The Protestant church

troop would master camping trips, erect grand

bonfires, play with knives and hang with ropes

and knots. They ate bark if they had to. We did

nothing of the sort. In fact, we had to pray! Open a

meeting with a prayer, and probably close it too.

The open orbit of reality had been closed and

pinched in until it only revolved, small and useless,

around a few guiding principles and nothing more.

Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous...

all that Boy Scout Code crap. Help an old lady

cross the street? Like the boys in Troop Forty Two,

I'd have rather thrown her to see and measure how 

she bounced. That was scouting. Ours wasn't.

-

As I said, this second memorable trek involved Boy

Scout friends. I had somehow gotten this small coterie

of kids around me who looked to me for start-up, things

to do, ways to do them. I can't really remember names

 and stuff. Let's say there were 7 kids and me. Hugelmeyer,

Larry Walker, whoever they were. There was another

'Inman Avenue,' after ours  -  which was the new-cut

extension, sort of, of this other Inamn Avenue that

ran down from the Plainfield area to intersect at St.

George Ave./Rt. 35, and cross over into Leesville 

and the junkyards, where it basically had ended in the

wooded swamps  -  until, that is, our houses had been

built on the other side of Route One and the name, 

somehow and I guess with a reason, had been taken 

up again. So we were Inman Avenue, Avenel, but in

point of fact we bore some thin connection to Inman

Avenue, Colonia  -  even if only on maps. I had an

aunt who lived way up towards the other end of Inman

(the aunt and uncle I'd written of earlier, with all the

war memorabilia and Jap guns and knives on the wall),

and I decided that my friends and I would take a 'hike'

there. A sort of suburban quest, for nothingness, or

somesuch. We gathered some walking supplies, and on

an early hour of a Saturday, we lit out. The arrangement 

was that my aunt would feed us, approximating maybe

1pm for arrival  -  sandwiches and soda and all that. Then

we had to walk back. It all worked out  -  we made the

trek, perhaps 7 miles, and back, had our lunch, looked at

all the guns and junk on the walls (the Boy Scout 

connection I needed  -  even if it didn't actually 'fit' the

supposed Troop 73 character, which would have been

filed under 'W' for weak). But anyway, we walked and

had fun, cavorted and jammed around. At the corner

of St. George Ave., and Inman, in those days (it's all

now a big jumble of gas station and snack store) there

was a place called Sun Motors  - a really cool used-car

lot that had plenty of neat models. Whenever we caught 

the light there, in my father's car when going to or leaving 

from my aunt's house, I'd spend the time just gazing at

all the cars on the lot. There were clean, mid 1950's used

vehicles, with occasional surprises among them  -  things like

a Sunbeam Alpine, or a Citroen or Renault. A Metropolitan

or such sort of really different vehicle. We spent then,

along this hike, a good bunch of time inspecting cars and

just checking everything out at this car lot before we crossed

over into the last-end section of Rahway and then up through

the junkyards and beneath the highway and back to home. It

was pretty grand stuff.

-

In those days, in my mind, that Colonia section of Inman Ave.,

unlike the new section we lived on, was by contrast a 'grand

boulevard'. A Champs Elysee of large trees, (gone now), more

stately homes with legacy and tradition, nice set-backs, none

of the bland uniformity of the box-cutter street I lived on. It

did seem to go one forever -  a long walk, but we made it. In

an awesome influence of majesty and exploration, at ground

level to us kids, it was grand. We talked and we gestured,

looking at driveways and garages and windows  -  all the 

things we really just didn't have in our row of undecorated, 

construction crew, tract homes. There was a Boy Scout 

moment there to be sure. The next step after Boy Scouts

is the 'Explorer' level  - a sort of Boy Scouts for really

precise, almost anal, kids in their late teens. Why anyone 

would want to be that or go there in their late teens was

beyond me, but that was it nonetheless. It involved

initiative and self-thinking, following rules and coming

up with ideas to work out  - and of course all the other

Boy Scout junk -  which was all just probably a cover

for the gay-crap the Baden-Powell, the guy who started

the 'Boy' Scouts (yeah,we know what that means) wanted:

wilderness boys, camping, all alone in a distant forest, kept

dim and settled around the campfire by adult-male guides.

I mean, is it clear? Do I need to spell this out more for you?

The inherent vice of Boy Scouting was the latent tinge of

homosexuality that went with it. Back then, the world

pretended. Now the world knows  - and the funniest and

most paradoxical thing is how the Scouting movement now

fights off the obvious  -  by banning gay leaders and gay 

scouts. Why? Because that takes the lid off the secret 

boiling of the most secret kettle. Please don't let anyone 

fool you  -  or you'll get knots in your head.

-

We made it home alright. Everyone had a grand old time.

We talked about it for a day or so....and then it was all and

forever forgotten. I wonder if kids still do that stuff? Does

anyone now cut a limb and carve their own walking stick?

7657. YOU OUGHT TO KNOW

YOU OUGHT TO KNOW

7th Street's not a real frontier, and I've

got a fixed-blade knife right here. Civil

War vintage too. There's a man wearing

dark pants nearby the table. He stands as

straight as can be. I am not him, and he 

is not me. Each setting has a lit candle.

Flickering lights now dot the room. 

People come in, and find a place to sit  - 

they are served by two girls in fine dress.

I do not know the meanings for this, yet

I enjoy here the spectacle; like a 

festival of night, or of flickering 

light. Whichever, I guess, 

you'd prefer.

7656. LOOK, JUST GO

LOOK, JUST GO

Just go straight for the heart, okay. Rip it

out, tear it up, chop it to pieces, spit it out.

Put the buzz saw to the grinder, let it all 

fly apart. Cut the evasions, go for the heart,

I get too easy to hurt, and right from the start. 

7655. I AM WAITING

I AM WAITING

In some tidal outpost of the neat and the natty,

I am waiting here for destruction. The western

wind is mindful of what I want : tiers of incidentals,

and all the lanes of the wired hallways. I will bow

to nothing, as the cotton fields roll by. I can hear

the Stephen Foster chumming in the 

back lanes of my mind. 

7654. THE PARASITE

THE PARASITE

Something remiss in me will not say. 

The parasite is standing on one leg; 

looking out to scan a horizon. 

Natives come by to look, but

no one will stay.

7653. ONLY NOW

ONLY NOW

Only now the Count of County Sedding

has mastered all the ways of waiting  - the space

of aptitude being filled at last by the volume of

goodness and grace. I will waste nothing; only 

take it all back to you. Across my eyes' sight,

the visions dance : of things uncollated, and

raw. Unrecognized and unknown. These are

the simple matters. Only now do the other

maters involve me with their complications.

Like a shed on a very old field, I may lean

and sag, yet I stand in place no less.

7652. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 124)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 124)

Avenel always had its fringe : I can remember a few

drunk fellows who'd be around. Nothing with trouble,

just moving about. These were also the years when

you'd still see the remnants of polio victims, oddly

enough. Kids from school earlier, entering their

twenties, growing broader and older but still

traipsing Avenel Street with their leg equipment

and crutches  - the kind that connected at the wrist,

metal  -  permanent disability crutches. These

people had survived, done their schooling, ridden

their little buses, and were always happy to smile

or wave. It was interesting  -  and now I don't know

a one of them, where they are or how they ended up.

Things were different. School had rooms for those

with twisted limbs, withered hands and legs, those

victims of thalidomide too : small stumps for arms,

etc. Things like that. Thalidomide had been some

sort of British fertility drug which had somehow

infiltrated the market and ruined and destroyed

any number of lives, These people were still about.

-

It's pretty easy to say that, when young, you're

just unconscious, unaware. But it's not really true. I

admit that a lot of things happened that I didn't even

know about  -  woods were gone, old trails finished

and turned to macadam roads with new homes. Things

were moved about, altered. I (we) didn't always know.

Too busy growing up, I guess. The deformed kids,

we'd see them in school, so we knew about all that;

their little school buses, special classes and walks.

But the other things  -  like all those woods behind

Avenel Park, all that stuff, it all just disappeared and

one by one all our childhood stuff was gone  -  turned

into rows of apartments filled with Merck chemists

from India. Thar was the very first exposure to real 

outsiders, for me anyway. You may remember, in my

early train-wreck chapter, I talked about the Filipino

male nurse I had turning my bed each day and causing

pain. I disliked him. It was easy to dislike him. But I

never took it to the next level, of just hating foreigners.

I figured any one of my Italian forebears could have

been like him  -  or at least like him in a prison ward.

(That's a personal joke).  Anyway, Avenel Park was

trimmed down to a lot of nothing, and it was suddenly

ringed by new things. Once when we used to play

baseball there, at the back baseball field, the possibilities

were endless. A home run really could go forever. 

Now it too had limits.

-

One time stands out in memory  -  actually, two different

episodes, but I'll start with one. It was a Saturday trek that

a small group of us Inman Avenue kids took. I can pretty 

fairly put down the names, I think, as I recall : Donald and

Richard Florio, Ray Szemborski, Barry Wynne, and Fred

Kellish. I remember being armed with like pen knives or

something  -  it was an 'archeological; trek, on our part,

along the freight tracks into Woodbridge proper  -  a crazy

trek for us, venturing out. There was just something about 

it  -  a delightful jaunt, on foot, by a crazy bunch of

Avenel kids. We had no idea what we'd find, what was 

there, or even if we'd reach Woodbridge. I can't remember

if we did. Somewhere along the way, to our astonishment,

we came across a pile of discarded, soft and hard rubber,

doll forms; cast-offs, maybe, as if from a doll factory

or something. About 8 or 10 inches each, in size. They 

were all stuffed in a ditch which ran along the side of 

the tracks  -  dismembered, unfinished, small-sized 

dolls-to-be. Some missing arms, others legs, heads, 

showing just the sockets for things, Fleshy. Pliable.

Very strange, and very weird. It stopped us dead. 

I sort of remember Donald and I, at least, taking a 

few specimens home with us. That's really all I

recall  -  I can't remember a 'reason' specific for 

the trip, or an ending to it, or if we just walked, 

or ate. Oddball, kid-stuff. But memorable, and 

wild and untended. Like Avenel. Like all 

things always should be. 

Again, like Paradise.

7651. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 123)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 123)

Because I didn't go there near as much, I didn't

know as much about Rahway. I always considered

Rahway, anyway, as more an adjunct of Avenel,

or vice-versa, since it was to there that we'd often

walk for fishing, scouting, or just following the

tracks or junkyards, which led there. So it was

always a different sort of place for me. Certainly

not an Avenel sort of place at all. It was old, and

lame, it seemed. The kind of people there, and

the people who labored there as shoemakers, or

show-repairers, clock stores and a camera shop,

even that Toy Store I'd mentioned, 'Schatzman's'

were run by old people. In Rahway, it was as

if nothing new had happened in 75 years. One

time, years later, about 1970, when a friend of

mine told me that his mother's church, on the

corner in Rahway by the post office, had begun

using, in their Sunday liturgy, the Simon and

Garfunkel song 'Bridge Over Troubled Water',

I was floored. It seemed preposterous. But, I

guess it was all part of the slowly changing

mores everywhere. Even the old-line churches

were now gobbling up what they could of the

sundered and fragmenting pieces of society left.

Each of my trips to Rahway had always concerned

the old, some storybook pose of gentle oldness,

like that represented by all those black people who

lived along the river as if this was all Alabama.

That was all exceptional to me : eventually the

Army Corps of Engineers came in, by about

1968, and channeled, banked, leveled, cut and

otherwise destroyed at least 2 miles of that river-

front of which the black sharecropper type homes

existed. All was lost. Now there' nothing but

sluice-piped and channeled, control-flow

water, and any homes left are abandoned wrecks

or, a few, used by P&A construction and others

for storage, truck parking, or piles of pipes and

metal. A shame. The rest of the town is a joke.

-

When stuff disappears, I guess kids worry about

it, for a second or two. They don't really think

past that point of what they've just seen. I don't

know what adults do  -  they seem always to be

in favor of everything, as positive, always as

'growth-is-good, tear down the old' sort of gung-ho

attitudes. I never knew how they made that thought

or got to those conclusions. Even to this day, I

never do. What's ever so good about more and

bigger baffles me. That big ugly car in your

driveway? You want another? That house that

looks like some Moghul emperor's stucco palace,

not large enough? People tear things down to make

decks and cabanas and pools and stuff as if they

owned the Earth. Doing willy-nilly that which they

please. I have news for them  -  one old, sagging

pale red barn dying in the old woods somewhere

is worth than any of them all combined. To begin

with, it's all that crazed and duping growth which

the makes necessary politics, and the dweebs and

control-freaks who go with it. All they ever want

to do  -  which is all adults ever do anyway  -  as

make laws, control, stop, outlaw or 'prevent'.

Life is life; you can't prevent a thing.

-

We didn't know anything about laws  - we always

just did what we wanted. Any trouble we might have

stretched never really bothered us. Now there are

laws for everything : just the other day someone told

me that when you pass a police car on the shoulder

of the road  -  the cop having pulled someone over

and issuing a ticket  -  you have to get out of the

slow lane as best as possible, and merge over into

middle. For the cop's safety. there's a new law

about  it. If you fail to do so, they can write you

up. Seems like there's a law now for everything.

I guess it's all true. But that's not a solution at all; it's

just an annoying way of making for trouble for all.

As kids, whenever we saw a cop, we just said hi. The

cops we knew were always presented to us as moral

superiors, imparting some message to us. The ones

who came to school to talk about things. We never

wondered or questioned  -  but neither did we ever

think it would have come to this.

-

It all starts seeming pretty useless after a while. No

one ever wants to hurt a cop, and when that stuff

happens it's bad. But all these laws, for every little

thing, they're just as bad. You get so you just can't

keep up, and don't want to either. No wonder the

criminal mind just starts becoming rampant. There's

too much pressure going otherwise to enforce

anything against it. Rahway represented more

of 'order' than did ever Perth Amboy, but it too 

was old line and staggering  -  it seemed, from the

point of the Avenel visual by which I viewed

things that the rest of the world was slowly finding

ways to run down while this one clump of Avenel

was at least resourceful and growing. I had friends,

 trains, the fields, and we had a 'new!' supermarket

too, along the road which led to a park. Everything,

for the moment, was seeming to represent growth 

and possibility.

7650. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt.122)

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 122)

The differences were legion. Besides place and time.

The very air itself held something different. In

Perth Amboy, for instance, there was still some

serious journalism going on. The Perth Amboy

Evening News had its own little building, shop

and distribution/truck center, right in the middle

of town. It was proud of itself and its place. The

political types who ran the area  -  all those names,

Yelenscis and Yablonsky and Otlowski, Jankowsky, 

Flynn, Patton, Fedor , Fedyak, and Wilson, a hundred

other old-line names, people from Edison and the 

Arsenal, they were still all in place and thy were

raking it in through redevlopment and re-zoning. It 

was a King's game, and a Kingmaker's game too. 

County offices, graft and corruption, shady pay-offs, 

zoning boards, bank boards, mortgage companies  - 

they all shielded each other, dodged each others's 

bullets as the same old names kept popping up.

In order to make money (for them), the downtown 

had to be killed off  -  everyone knew that. The money

was in the fields, where the weeds and trees were and

where the malls and strip-mall stores would soon be.

The little people downtown  -  abandoned. It was turned

over to the blacks and the indigents and then, soon,

the equally poor-but-aspiring Hispanics. 'Let them have

it all  - we've got the environs.' Millions upon millions

of dollars and government largesse went into the 

taking and the stealing  -  the contaminated lands of 

old Raritan Arsenel (one of the nations, later, largest

Superfund sites), became a billion-dollar office spread,

acre upon acre of land-use, turned over to shielded 

corporations into whose purses all these hands went.

That was only the beginning. Pert Amboy City was

left staggeringly dead : a few stories, a few tales left.

The once-vibrant 'Evening News', changing names a

few times, became but a rag  -  crossword puzzles, 

games, high school and sports coverage, crimes, 

births and deaths. No longer did 'journalism' 

challenge anybody. It was a game.

-

Meanwhile, over in Avenel  -  poised as it were between

both Rahway and Perth Amboy  -  not much was known 

about either operation. Mainly because the Avenel folk

were too settled in maintaining themselves, their new

places, and augmenting their desire for 'place' with what

they called their 'little town', which wasn't. When you

look, even today, on maps  -  new or old  -  which 

represent developments or tracts of housing just put 

in, the false and manufactured place names  -  things

like 'Emilyville' or 'Pleasanton'  -  they're labeled

'unincorporated subdivision', or 'incorported community'.

That sort of just means, 'made-up place that was swamp 

last year.' The Developer puts it all together, drops in 

a few roads, and, sooner or later, this new place gets

absorbed into the growing community around it. Like 

Avenel to Woodbridge, or Sewaren to Woodbridge,

whatever; it's all pretty much the same. Here we had

'Woodbridge, NJ', a place anyway since the 1640's,

slowly growing and absorbing everything around it.

Until it grew huge. Huge, but without much sense or

purpose. In some of the new places, actually at first

owned by corporation  -  you buy in and live under 

their rules. No special landscaping or trees  -  they do

all that. No junk or extra cars in your driveway, no

clutter, etc., etc. it's all controlled. Even to 'no kids' 

and to age limitations and all that. It's OK; you don't 

have to buy there if you don't like it, but what happens 

then is a pure and a total homogenization  -  everyone's

the mopey-same slowpoke, slowly winding down like

a snowman melting. At least Avenel was still raw and

pumping some nasty blood. Anger and hatred could 

be found. There weren't lynchings or hate-rallies, no,

but the sentiment wasn't too far off. What resulted was

the bottom-flow of those others to the now-decaying

parts of Perth Amboy and Rahway. On either side,

real dissent and real un-molding, festering just below.

Those poor immigrant types at least are (and always 

were) vibrant; working their asses off 16 hours a day,

multi-layers of families, together, working and living.

Piled into small apartments, hovels or old, decaying

rentals  -  deeds and mortgages all held by those

rapacious types mentioned who were draining the

inner-cities while they amassed bundles on the 

fringes. In Avenel  -  we kids had no way of knowing,

nor would we would have cared. I guess growth 

was always 'good'  -  a new store, more jobs for

mom and dad, whatever. The newspaper came each

evening  -  ours was delivered promptly  -  and it

was filled with the small-time surreal, the local 

nit-picking or just ordinary wire-services big news :

astronauts, movie-stars, deaths and killings, NY

shows, cowboy stuff, new car ads, and the rest.

On either side of us, people came and went  -  the

Rahway crowd, being a bit stronger and more

industrious, represented the grittier side of hanging

on, while Perth Amboy  -  once having lost its 

waterfront and most of its once-thriving dry-dock

industry and the ferry port which was once so busy,

languished, gave up, and just fell apart. There came a

certain point, after the malls and the rest, that 'normal'

suburban people  -  the Inman Avenue types, for sure  -

just no longer went there for trade, commerce, banking,

dining or dance. Weirdest thing was, by 1967, the

local County Draft Board still kept its Amboy-area

offices there (probably someone raking in a federal

bundle from that), and all these patch-headed sad 

and sorry registrants and inductees had to wade 

through there to get to their final destination, 

oops, I mean Vietnam.

-

Right on thorugh the 1970's to the 'oughts' as it was

called ('2000's), you couldn't even find a trace of Perth

Amboy's past. At least now there are plaques and

markers about things  -  colonial paths, Proprietary 

House stuff, trials and battles. They've even owned 

up now, with pictures and plaques along the waterfront,

to the fact of Perth Amboy once being the second largest

trade-slaving market on the east-coast, for the New York

Harbor slave trade crowd. Often, before reaching NYC,

the slave ships would come to the auction block and the

auction houses along the water front - now disguised as

a pleasantly shaded, but false, waterfront park  -  (In the 60's

it was called 'Sadowski Park', and we actually swam there,

my family and the neighboring Miranda family too)  -  for

the sorting and distribution of the slaves-for-auction by

body-type, build, brawn or sex and age too; sometimes 

they were bought by brokers, by lot, who then re-sold 

them at the NYCity slave-auction blocks. Families to be

broken up, sent south, or whatever. No one cared. Flesh

back then was 'sold' like land. Amboy prospered. There

are a few story-line plaques there, quickly fading now and

utterly un-read, to attest to this. I now figure how cool it

could have been, in fifth grade or whatever, to have been

given a 1957 bus-trip to neighboring Perth Amboy to see 

all this stuff, real-live History, as it were, the Truths :

the lingering ghosts at the Proprietary House, still a cool

place though it's pretty much sanitized and ruined now by

'Historic Commision' types, putting in ramps and storylines

by guides about quaint things that only really happened like

that in their commission fantasies. How cool would it have

been to be able to stand at seaside, staring out, while the

accounts and facts of the old slave-trading days were read

back to us. Alas, no. All that 'information' was owned by

others, the national keepers of the national myth-lie, and

only until recently brought out. Why is that? Partially

because of US. The same kids who were denied all that

information when young, they grew up, turned everything

at least half topsy-turvy, and, at least some, demanded the 

truth. Even the evasive, run and hide sort of truth given

by some succint waterfornt history plaque. But too bad.

Didn't happen that way. The US in USA just

never really had the power.

7649. AT THE ICE CREAM SHOPPE

AT THE ICE CREAM SHOPPE

'Make mine the bananaboat sundae,'

I said to the girl with jewell'd eyes,

'and make it to go but I'm staying 

just to see.' She smiled back, like

lethargy, and said 'We'll see what

we shall see.' There were rocks

under the table by then, and a 

tramp who'd walked in with his

engraved invitation. 'I'll have my

'real strawberry vanilla plenty,'

he said with delight. 'It's says 

here it's mine, and for free

too. I think. Isn't that the

r.s.v.p on the bottom?

-

She looked back at me

with eyes that could crawl.

I winked at her, saying,

'Now I've seen it all.'

7648. IRATE

IRATE

Shattering the palm tree record, that was no 

big deal. I rate far better than that. What made

me mad, however, was the rumor that I was a

swell guy. How that got started, I don't know.

I walked Beachcomber Haven, just looking for

work  -  me and my dog named Flynn. When

the waters rose over the jetty, I knew we were

in for some sort of trouble. 'Get ready,' 

to Flynn, I said, 'get ready.'