RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,376
(where am I going? where have I been? pt. 7)
Close-quartered, trailer-like living.
After 3-plus years I began to think
that was a fair description of what
seminary living was like. A bunch
of maturing boys, who'd all come in
together at about age 13, and who had
resigned themselves to witnessing each
other as all that happened. Groups and
clumps; like minded-kids, who'd band
together to find their companions and
friends out of the bunch. I replaced, as
it went, Leo Benjamin with Kirk Hallet.
Kirk was from Harrisburg, actually
Camp Hill, Pa., and from an Irish
family with like a zillion children. He
and I mixed up, I guess from the Drama
Club, where he'd played a great Huck
Finn. Joe Vouglas, from Plainfield, NJ,
was 'N... Jim' in blackface, on the raft
down the fake Mississippi.
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It's funny to think back about how we
had no compunction (and neither did
the years around 1965), about the 'N'
word in this Mark Twain context, and
neither did the larger world around us.
Never thought twice about it - that's
how much simpler things were. Today?
Joe Vouglas would probably have been
driven out of town on a rail for his
blackface portrayal of an indentured,
runaway slave. First they'd probably
shut down the whole show and seminary
for even attempting the portrayal and the
N word, and then they, curiously and
paradoxically, berate Joe for inauthentically
portraying that Jim character. So, FIRST,
they wouldn't want him portrayed at all,
let alone by a whitey, and SECOND
they'd rant and rave about 'the inauthentic'
portrayal. So, what's it supposed to be,
mind-bender assholes? Authentic, or not
at all? What a bunch of twerps.
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Kirk was young, small, and really nearly
perfect for the role. We didn't spend
inordinate amounts of time together,
because he had other things going on,
but there was fused between us a good
alliance. He used to scoff and laugh at
the flatlands of the New Jersey area. He
was used to the hills and more active
landscape around Harrisburg, and pointed
out the much more boring features (none)
of New Jersey. I can't recall that we ever
did much of anything in particular, maybe
just ambled around. He was too small yet
for sports, and didn't seem to have in interest
anyway. I did some baseball, and enjoyed
that. I also did track. That mostly involved
long, solitary runs way out through the
sandy paths of the local barrens. Even if
the run started out with 6 or 8 guys, I'd
manage to get solitary before long.
I liked solo running, and by just lagging
back some I'd let the gap grow and have
it my way. Out in the deep-sticks, there
were occasional run-down cinder block
homes, shabby, and with cars that seemed
never to move, or had been there so long
that they's already settled in some number
of inches into the ground; with stuff cast
about, porches filled with junk, cats, a dog,
or a refrigerator. Only occasionally did I
see people, or a person. Everything seemed
frozen in time. Me being me, If I saw a girl,
any girl, along the way by one of the houses,
in the yard, or hanging laundry or whatever,
I'd etch it into my memory where I'd seen
that joyful sight, though mostly they were
never seen again. Believe me, I was filled
with longing for everything around me.
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I wasn't much of a runner, but I got by. I
didn't have the long legs a runner should
have, I winded quickly, but all in all I
managed to withstand, and I could do
an easy three-miler with little effort. In
Boy Scouts, a few years earlier, at Camp
Cowaw, I'd earned a 'Track' merit badge,
so I knew the running ropes a bit. Our track
coach there would have has run milers along
the shoulder-less side of paved Old Mine
Road. There'd be no cars to didge, or if so it
was only 2 or 3 in a half our. Also at Camp
Cowaw, I got an Archery merit badge. I
can't remember much of that, but the
seminary too had an archery club or
something, and I tried my hand at that,
but it didn't last.
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In the seminary there with me, same year,
same class, was another Avenel guy, James
Cruise. Turned out we saw very little of each
other once we got settled in. He had his group,
and I was, like him, much of a loner. Jimmy
was a wicked sports guy - killer fastball when
pitching hardball, and a pretty massive batsman
too. He did a lot of sports. Also, I used to like
to pole vault, something I'd never undertaken
before. Mike Bartholemew, an older guy than
me, an 'upperclassman', used to be great at it,
with his 6-foor height, etc., and I watch him
often in his pole-vaulting exhibitions. He
could really flip the heights good. I then tried
it, to see that it was like - amazingly cool.
You get a vaulting pole (this was all in the
pole-vault pits, sandy and soft, hold it like
waist-high, run the dirt path with it, maybe
40-50 feet to get up some stead, and then
calculate just when to bring the pole down,
still on the run, and catch the bracket thing
in the ground. That would hold the pole, which
then would flex and rebound - with you still
hanging on. You'd reach vertical extreme,
(calculated while moving upward) and let
go of the pole, so as to complete your great
arc of momentum, soar over the bar, which
had been set to what height you wanted, and
go willfully flying high and then into comedown
to the soft sandy pit at the other side. I forget
the heights we'd reach, (15 feet? 18 feet, can't
recall), but for me it was the most exhilarating
soaring moments of my airborne life...Not
much else to tell, but it was joyful.
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Way out in the back there, amidst the sandy
pine trails and the few houses, there was,
eventually, a town's, (Blackwood, I guess),
a town's municipal trash dump. A few
garbage trucks were parked, and one or two
would occasionally come by, to dump, I
guess. It was pretty isolated by that point,
and no lights around, but the paths and
little roads did all eventually connect. One
curious tradition, I found out about, out
in those piney sticks, went as follows: If
you went 'all the way' - as used to be said -
with your girlfriend or whatever, out in
these dark parking areas, if you 'got lucky'
tradition had it that you'd hang her 'panties'
from a tree branch. This is true, believe me.
There must have been a goodly number of
girls coming home at night with nothing on,
underneath, with their knickers 'missing' -
or they brought spares along - because 20
or so panties were always seen hanging
about from limbs and branches.
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As I think back now, all this sand and
piney life was still pretty primitive, but
no one ever was cluing us in about the
future. I think the whole idea about religion
is to dwell in the past and be happy with
that. They have a God who created Time
and the universe - the vast sequence of
things - but no account is ever given of
a future. Methuselah dies pretty late
in his game, no - but even he never had
a future. The entire history of civilization,
for us, revolves around that past and how,
only, from it the ONE God's church came to
predominate and even make up secular life
for hundreds and hundreds of years. We
are nothing but the offshoot of that, and
have never been given another chance.
-
'I would like to die thinking Humanity has a
bright future, and if we can solve sustainable
energy and be well on our way to becoming a
multi-planetary species with a self-sustaining
civilization on another planet - to cope
with the worst-case scenario happening and
extinguishing human consciousness, then I
think that would be really good?' Church talk?
No fucking way. They haven't a clue for a
future, and demand unchanging and stupid
ways.
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Eddie Adams, my age, was the first kid I
ever met who talked about Ayn Rand. I'd
never heard of her before, and he startled
me that day in class with a prepared soliliquoy
about her and her science of 'Selfishness',
as he put it. Eddie didn't stay much past a
year or two, but he was cool and I liked
him. He was a veteran thinker, and at
an early age. I'm not at all sure where he
stood on the religious angle we all were
there for or partaking of, but he never
mentioned that, and got slammed but good
for his Ayn Rand stuff. There was just no
tolerance for that crap. Before that too,
I guess it was Freshman year, I remember
Eddie standing up at his desk (first row
in the classroom, first seat at the right,
right by the entry doorway) and giving
some oral report about something or other.
It was pretty good, and credible stuff...until
he got to citing his sources. One of them,
cited a few times, was 'Reader's Digest' -
which of course NEVER held any
intellectual panache or prestige. It, like
Eddie, was laughed at and called out for
using it as a reference. Snob bastards.
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For Eddie, the book he talked to me with
had just come out. 'The Virtue of Selfishness'
It had a cool cover photo that I immediately
liked, and even the colors and type-format
of the cover was good. She'd written other
things, and was fairly well-known, and even
had one of her books, The Fountainhead
made into a film. There's lots about here,
and it's all worth a look. But she'll bust up
a few sacred icons, so be warned. I lost
track with Eddie pretty quickly once he
was gone. I swore, some years later, that
I saw him on the Princeton campus, about
1979 or so, but I never chased him down to
find out if it was really him. That's just
the way things go. Good memory.
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Back to the church stuff - the thing about
what we were being presented was mostly
bogus stuff. Either it was a form of Christianity
somehow distilled into its most childish form, and
we were to be expected to present that same stupid
form of religion to whatever people became our
parishioners in whatever parish we'd be sent, or
it was a completely vapid and mostly just made up
pile of horse-dung parading as Roman Religion
that you'd ever dream up. Nothing was too
fantastic for the spiel. I don't know how
people did it, or still do it, if they do.
