Temporary Names : The Interview

82. I began writing at an early age, I mean early, like age 10. It took. But I never really became a writer until just recently  -  well, a decade or two, a few years back. That happened after a long while, and a long while after I became, as well, a 'reader'. You can't be a writer without being a reader. I don't mean one of those chumps or chumpettes who are all over the place with their poems and stories of the beleaguered broken heart, the self-centered and self-absorbed centurion of their own hurts and feelings, dealing with nothing but their angst and tears and pain. Loves lost. The result and struggle of fearsome hot sex, grim irony under the delicious covers, hurt, pain, loss,  abandonment, and all that. That's all bullshit; it's emotion recollected emotionally and with, as it were, all the pangs of a young girl's pining and broken heart. Men writing as girls would write. Girls being girls with wet eyes. Or writing about snows and bluebirds, slings and happiness, songs and the singing of songs. I mean, instead a 'writer' and a 'reader' of a centered and deepened intelligence  -  replete with referential whisperings and the allusion of other things of, oftentimes, far greater worth. A pulling from the past, of ideas and feelings and activities and happenings. Seen in reflection, newly put. This is  -  what I'm speaking of here  -  material that never stands alone, so to speak. Each word and sentence, every premise draws along with itself the referential broader picture, the endless, by which so many things are connected. You, in that sense, can't really just 'stake out' new territory and call it your own. ('That's not writing, that's typing', as Truman Capote once indecorously put it in a really negative reference to Kerouac). That's what makes a writer, and you cannot attain that without first being a reader. They both take a long time and a lot of reflection along the way. Reading, of course is one thing; real reading is another thing entire.

Most of  -  or much of anyway  -  the 'Reading' industry, the publishing field, has been turned to slander and pulp. Junk volumes, made up to sell  -  smarmy, artificial things, replete with all what's needed to titillate, entice, bring the reader in, and, alas, proclaim much of nothing. Hand in hand with the movie and entertainment industries, they move along. Again and again, and dangerously, I find myself saying this  -  but look over very carefully what you see, the names, the rankings of people and titles, the audacity of the very stink of the endeavor, and I truly believe, you'll see the root of the problem. And the root of the problem of much of our country, quite frankly, is the 'people' who make up this and other industries. Historically, and now. That's all I'm allowed to say, because   -  yes, they own the issue and control the narrative on that one.

'I like to look at people's faces when they are waiting. Things we used to wait for : the news, mercury in a thermometer to rise, letters from overseas, boats to come in from whaling expeditions,  the fifth act, the fifth course, a phone to ring, a tape to rewind. And if waiting is lost, then with it are all the unconscious processes that take place during waiting to get lost. And then we might see the death of the unconscious and the death of culture?' Yes! And I say, 'Luxury is nice, but creativity is nicer.' I'm not sure anymore who wrote that first quote, or the what or the who of what they were referring, but I always liked it  -  'the things we used to wait for.' Really nice.

When I was young, I used to read most anything I could  -  I mean everything: product brochures, box labels, can and soup labels, Boy Scout handbooks, church flyers, newspapers, magazines  -  whatever I could find around me. I loved it. I'd walk a supermarket aisle, as I recall, just gazing at text and product, words and signs and displays. I remember one year (I was 7, by the year), walking along some food aisle and seeing the product line of relishes or mustards or something, for Heinz. Back then it was called, the company name, 'Heinz 57'  -  that was the actual company name they used. I guess they had 57 products or something. But, anyway, in seeing this, at that time, which was as I said 1957, I thought they changed that each year, so that there had been a Heinz 56 and would be a Heinz 58. Turned out I was wrong. Heinz 57 was their name. I don't know if they actually still use that or not. Another time, I remember when Kellogg's Special K was introduced, something around the same time, maybe 1958 or so, and some guy was waking along with another person, next to me, down the cereal aisle, and his attention was caught by the new product  -  he said to his companion  -  'Hey, look at this, something new, Kellogg's Big K.' He called it Big K, and, yes, the 'K' was a large, red 'K' that did jump out at you, visually. But he ignored the scripted word, in black, 'Special' in front of it. Calling it 'Big K' instead. that struck me as really odd. It's stayed with me all these years, both of these instances I've mentioned, the Heinz 57 and the Big K. What does that mean? Is there some inscripted, internal equilibrium of 'Language' that has me caught up? Am I different in this respect from other people. Is that part of an ingrained 'writer's gift', the evidences of which have driven and directed me to this very (late) day?

79. There's something going on. I have realized that I've never been more alive. Even though I've always followed the dictate of Marcus Aurelius who said 'Live life as if you were already dead.' Or I thought. Maybe it was from the memoirs of Hadrian, I don't remember. Maybe The Consolations of Philosophy, by Boethius. Now when I look for it all I see is it cited as an ancient 'Samurai' saying. Perhaps I got it from Yukio Mishima back in 1967  -  all that library scribbling. I don't know, but however wrongly attributed it's been bringing me magic of late. I look at people and I can actually see their self-excitement. It's very difficult for me to proclaim, but when I see someone I can sense their humanity, their satisfaction at being alive  -  even if, in the midst of all their other problems, it seeps woefully, to them. I can sense that girl's happiness and self-satisfaction with her nails, and her shoes, that day  -  her finesse about her toilette, her happiness at possessing grace and beauty. Or that man, with his stance and bearing, the shine of his well-done hair, his perfect business mien. Acumen. A Strength. None of those mean anything to me, but from each of those I feel it surging. It possesses a certain 'quiet', internal. It's Dignity, for sure  -  the same sort of holy dignity with which a dog licks its paws or cleans itself with its won tongue; or a cat does its own solid hygeine. Self-possessed, solid, sound. A complete Human possession of all matters. Last night's sex, this morning shower, the application of eye makeup, the selection of coat and hat, the wearing of that pencil and that lapel pocket. In point of fact, it's pretty much the only thing that allows me to forgive them for their stupid lives. I think, through all the ages, that's what people have meant by Grace and by Goodness; perhaps even by their quaint term 'God.' It's simply the knowledge of that self-possession. And I realize now that I have no place else to go. It's a possession of Self by being 'outside of self'.

It was never my intention to go scooting away, running or leaving things. It just came to be that, as I seemed to 'grow', Avenel seemed to diminish. Everything became a lie; there was no foundation there, no clutch, no grab. Walking through town at some evening hour, watching the closing of the sunlight breaking down the light, tingeing the windows and glassways with diminished light, the entire scene seemed tired and sad and small. I realized that it was only other places, the large, the dynamic, the strength-of-cities with all their heritages and pasts, that made the definitions and the shape-forms of the lives we lived. Avenel was manipulated  -  it was periphery. It was not to be for me.

Weirdly enough, now, it's somewhat turned about  -  subdivisions and new, large homes are bringing people, once again, out to these places and draining still again the 'cities' nearby of their better inhabitants, as it's put, and leaving repeatedly behind the big churn and turmoil that's left in cities, Manhattan to be sure, but others too  -  either the well-to-do or old-monied, the very top strivers, or the reckless low-level dwellers, those who just skirt by or are stuck there. It's very difficult to find the middle; and it's too bad. My own life was always distorted by the infraction of the lens which twisted the light  -  to put it oddly  -  into a fashion of rainbow hues, none of which had any way for me to cling to or grab at, for they were just that  -  hues, chimeras, illusions.

Some things were just always outlandish to me. I remember reading, when young, about the medievalists, or people in the medieval era anyway, who in their piety would make it a point to follow around a king or a royal or whatever nature, the higher the better, whenever one was within or passing by their area, their village or locale. The idea present then, and pushed as religious dictum, was to not miss the opportunity of praying in the presence of that Royal, wherever it was this person stopped to pray  -  a wayside church or cathedral, then for sure, enter in the throng with him  -  for any prayers sent to Heaven then were for more surer of being answered. The feeble thought behind this, of course, was that God hears better the prayers and supplications of Royal stock, whatever it may be. Entire structures of religiosity were built around this. It flabbergasted me. Just to have to realize the dumb subservience of the poor and the meek in these situations  -  fawning and following the hem and stride of a Royal just so as to be able to pray with them, in their presence, even if unknown or unseen, because God better hears their prayers. What kind of thinking was this? How could people live like this? And then, as I looked around myself and saw the local activities, family, friends, neighbors, etc., I did realize and have to admit that here, in this new situation, it just wasn't that far afield from what I just described. The poor had transformed themselves, somehow, into this newer class of freshly-arrived people moving into Avenel - to their little homes and streets  -  and nearby, never far  -  was the church. In my case St. Andrew's  -  old building or new. Mothers fawned over the local priests, the old ones and the new, young ones. Kids flocked, entire families trudged off to Sunday Mass. Some sort of automatic accolade of prayer and supplication, en masse, and closer to God only by being closer to his minions  -  in this case the priests and ministers who did this stuff (and in  their 'Royal' vestments too). Without fail and without question, money was given weekly, approval sought, public display played up  -  all so as to be seen being 'closer' to the Lord by being among the minions who prayed with His representatives. I guess all of this is still going on. Now I see families of Filipinos and Hispanics of all stripes dutifully doing their Sunday walks to church  -  parking cars, walking haphazardly in clothing fit for but a street fair; and white families too, all doing the same. The French used to say the more things change the more they stay the same. I guess that still stands. It's nothing ever that I can figure out; the logic of any of this escapes me. I don't understand what these people seek  -  what ostensible fulfillment to them could come from church-going and attendance. One can balance rationality against faith and find them both sadly blemished; but these people don't even take it that far. It's just, rather, for them, another version of blind servitude, never knowing what they're really doing, but just doing it anon.

Anyway, what was destiny and who had it? The little old Bond Bread man, with his silly Divco truck, trudging from house to house and talking up all those mothers and kids. Never seeing dads at all  -  what did he know, really, of the places he serviced? It was a fantastical life, a visitation, and his always having to be on, talking and more, was probably enough to drive him, or anyone, crazy  -  yet, a lot in life is a lot in life; you are where you are and you are what you've made. Here all the streets were new, and wide and mostly straight. There were no dangerous twists or alleys and churns where danger or thugs lurked. Everything was above-board and there really were no old stories. They were custom made, these streets, for the straight-line logic which would drive a bread delivery man to become a local confessor, one to confide in. he probably knew more about the happinesses and unhappinesses of all those families he served than anyone else around. People become what they are, without title. They did then anyway. Mike Cohen, this crazy-serious, Jewish, dark-suited guy who would walk around the blocks with his thick, black, breviary-like payment book, filled with little tear-off payment stubs for each of the subscribing families  -  he'd walk the local streets monthly, quarterly, whatever it was, to pick-up the life-insurance policy payments due. To my mother, he was sacrosanct, and for whatever reason the need to continue paying him was sacrosanct. His actual name was 'I. Mike Cohen', a mysterious name, always, to me, which turned to be Irving, hidden instead by the simple initial. Much like the bread-man  -  though the complete flip-side, personality-wise  -  he'd achieved a particular status all of his own making  -  no deeds, no documents needed. All these people were knee-deep in a weird sort of secular parochialism. A religion all its own.

Somewhere a long time ago I ran into a quote by the poet Frank O'Hara which always stayed with me. I took a comfort in it as I hated my pale and suburban life. I sought the attraction, verve and vibrancy  -  nay, the intellectual and philosophical firecrackers  -  that it portrayed and I took it as my own. I wanted to flee, just be gone. The quote went : 'I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.' I loved that quote. As I probably noted previously, I'd often walk out to the highway at the end of the street  -  Route One  -  and just watch the cars and the traffic go by: all those headlights heading north, straight into the maw of the Holland Tunnel, 17 miles off, give or take. I'd see the cars in the other direction, whizzing south. In both cases I'd wonder and watch  -  who were they, where were they off to, where had they been, what were their lives about, what was going on? My questions seemed to all come from my own fact of being stalled, in-place, stuck, in servitude to a ratty, foul 'tradition', growing stir-crazy and mad-wild about release. It was always there, and always unsaid. This was pretty much at the same spot where my father and I had walked  -  me as a young boy  -  trudging through new footsteps through the fierce snowstorm's aftermath as he and I too looked out at the highway, white and slick and bare of traffic at that moment. I knew what Frank O'Hara was getting, for sure, even in 1960. Funny thing too  -  because the distance down that highway wasn't really any 'visible' distance; you couldn't 'see' anything special, just a mile or two of roadway and cars patterning by, and the rest was imagines. Much like Life itself, I always figured : you peer down something, look into somewhere, get your ideas and assumptions lined up, masked or unmasked, and pretty much all the rest is imagined or surmised, based upon the assumptions you make. had I ever assumed that the roadway ahead of me ran, instead, directly to Vermont or wherever, then THAT would have been the paramount issue, the fruition of my desire. As it was, my endings were all endings of smoke : a place, a weird masterland of goofballs, beatnikism, crazed performers and artists, singers and shiners, all doing their things. It was the precise opposite of this I. Mike Cohen thing, which was, by comparison, a miserable straitjacket into which parents and elders had allowed themselves gleeful entwinings. They simply didn't know any better.

The way it comes done is that none of it has to matter  -  I cannot be the one to get stuck; it's against all my preachment. I've always thought anyway that I've achieved my own sort of 'State', my perfection, in my way. It hasn't been money and fame, starlight and glitz, but even dearer to me has it become a way of life itself with some weird form of acclamation through others. It all amounts to some sort of other kingdom for sure. Not of this earth anyway. You can't take it with you, especially if you've never had it and it's never been in this place with you. That's OK. I review, I review, and I think, I draw conclusions and from those conclusions build a continuance of all that which I want. Not of this world  -  or have I said that already?

The main key, I always thought, is to not be linear. Linear thinking is a square box into which everything has to fit  -  the form of the box is fixed and closed, and though the box itself is open, it's being closed at the same time comes from the fact that there are no new options for that which can or will go into it. Funny stuff. Linear thought is like tracking  -  your nose just goes in one direction and only follows a scent which it recognizes. Here's an old example that's always stayed with me. Back in May/June '67, those long, dreary days at the very end of high school  -  as a finished, ready to graduate kid there's not much to do for those final two or three weeks. You end up as a high school senior just sitting around, unless you're in the social whirl stuff, the autographs and messages and dances and proms and all that crap, well you sit around wasting time. The long, warm afternoons. And in doing so, an enforced idleness sets in. You're stuck with someone, and you just start talking, endlessly sometimes, day after day. Back in this time of 1967, the Beatles had just finished with their releasing of Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane. I think each tune back the other on a 45, as I recall. Maybe not. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts...was about to break but hadn't yet. It was a time of psychedelic breakthrough, a changing of all meanings and mores, people were running, they were confused, everything was breaking down (it's hard for today's folk to really understand what I mean; like the Roaring 20's bullshit was to me, I guess). Anyway, in a fortuitous turn of events, Penny Lane was perfect in this time and place. I had a oft-time friend, name actually right now I do forget, and I never saw him again in all my life after this school day, but I'll call him John. He was cool enough, I liked him, I liked the way he approached things, his mind seemed open, he was ready to listen and learn, hard or not as it were. The thing that happened here was almost perfect for me to realize the great divide, the way people think and how the mass of people simply are not equipped for the leaps needed to think creatively. This guy, John, was totally caught up in his linearity. We compared notes one afternoon, the entire school day in fact, on Penny Lane. We butted heads, talked it through, used it to bring us to other places and subjects. The problem was, he could only accept the song in one way and one way precisely  -  it had to be, and was, in his own mind, a linear, straight, progression of 'story' As in 'a guy walks into a barber shop, in the small town he's from, storefront along the main street. he plunks himself down in the barber chair. They talk about small town things, the fireman polishing his truck, events that occur, and then the fireman they'd just spoken of, rushes in, because there's a fire, alerting them, in a hurry, rushing back out, the pandemonium of the event ensues, etc., etc.' That was his take on the tune and the words of the tune  -  a related episodic event where things happened in a progression, a straight line, nothing existing without reason for being, in this story, useful, everything in place. I simply could not accept, nor believe his take on the song. We went back and forth and I kept hitting home the idea of how wrong he was, how much he was missing. 'It's not a story, things aren't 'happening'. It doesn't 'go' anywhere; get over that. It's an assemblage, an abstract of the moments of the life we live, each moment. The portrait of the Queen, the barber shaving another customer, the pretty nurse, selling poppies from a tray, who feels she's in a play and she is anyway, the fireman, rushing in, liking to keep his fore engine clean, it's a clean machine... These are just momentary and instantaneous fragments, illuminated moments that accumulate and amass. They don't need to 'go' anywhere.' I tried to convince him to get over the line of things that his closed mind was demanding  -  the idea that very thing has to go to something else, that stories must build, that things have to happen, without reflection, move along, as if they all had a life force of their own needing to produce a dynamic moment. He couldn't et it  -  and I'd bet if I saw him today, whoever he was and wherever he is, he's still lost amidst that same conundrum of looking for achieved results, looking for all those connected moments to 'make' something, and not just be. That's the peacefulness of Life, the Zen sort of article that just goes by us, the stream we must inhabit, the way our souls and spirits  -  eternal and infinite  -  must exist. We, ourselves, are just bad bumps. momentary diversions, on the Being that is. Well, anyway, that's what I took from those last few days of high school. Not that anyone there would teach me that. School and education by the established machine is a big, creepy lie run by the vilest people you could imagine.

'A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man ends with a beginning'. I read that a long time ago, sort of when still stuck in Avenel. My addition to that (pretty obvious statement, I thought) was, so does 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' and so does 'On the Road'  -  all that stuff and probably a hundred more. That was too easy a statement to make, especially for someone (Seamus Dunne) who'd been paid by Penguin to write an Introduction. But, at the same time, I also knew that the industry of the publishing world was like that  -  academics, scholastic types, working hard all the time at pulling new rabbits from the same old hats  -  or maybe even the same old rabbits from new hats. It's difficult to say something new, especially when made more difficult by the rigid standards of the established academy which  -  though it claims new thinking really doesn't accept any until too long after. The author's usually dead and gone, hopelessly finished after a life of destitution and labor to his or her task, and some nitwit looking for a break or a new subject or another spin on something already spun, decides to stake out a new claim on an author's Being  -  what this or that means, how such and such was influenced by, the 'idea' of property in Dickens', the 'new outlook of Modern alienation in...whomever' The industry gobbles this up -   so that the resultant stuff comes out like 'Portrait ends with a beginning.' Yeah well then, so it does, bravo. It also begins with an ending, if you'd be so kind as to flip your stupid premise. I'm being facetious, perhaps, but no more so than any of them. Some great industrialists may have made iron and steel empires. Publishing-world industrialists often try to make empires of word-shit, endless run-on premises of sentence after sentence. Often called 'Blather'. It's a trip; just like the trap I was in and from which I knew I had to get out. Endlessly pacing the streets with my ticket book to collect monthly payments. No thanks  -  even though that's pretty much what most of life is like anyway. My better image was of people staking out new places and new lands, a proposition of oneness and singularity that I shared...with how many others I'd not ever know. I felt like a Destiny was descended upon me, something I had to do, some way I had to do it. Being where I was (Avenel) was like being sequestered and just out of reach  -  a few, mere highway miles from the vast, internal; city wherein all the real; stuff happened. People in clumps, odd people, beatniks, wisenheimers, doers, single-stakers, artists, lovers, drawers, people of no regard for the rest of this crummy, make-another-day world of business and commerce. I they were there, just out of reach, and I knew it and I wanted so much to be there instead. The bond breadman could have his role of Avenel's town-crier. I wanted to be THEIR town crier, from deep within my soul. Alas, now, from here, this vantage that I write from much later, not much of this ever really did occur. I eventually got to where I wished to be, ate up the place, savored it, reveled in it, but the big mark somehow eluded me. I stayed with it, realized the location of myself with in, and just kept lugging my baggage around. It ended up Okay; not what I'd really wanted or wished for, but okay enough. My body of work is valid and  strong, and it's the result of all that  -  so I'm fine with it.

'The switch from the neuter third-person narrator, commanding a discourse that is dominated by quotation, repetition and carefully constructed rhythmical effects, to a first-person whose discourse is by comparison disjointed, careening from petty local detail to the declaration of his solemn ambition, is dislocating for the reader. Yes, for all his self-absorption, Stephen recognizes himself to be a member of a community; it is in relation to the collective, the race, that he formulates his individual aspiration and the techniques of individuation, although it is by a process of inversion that he achieves his ambition to be self-born.' That's from the introduction I mentioned. It's pretty interesting 1. as an observation and a point of view, because  -  in fact  -  it does happen, and 2. because  -  outside of the interested grad student working on a tome, or an over-sized academic seeking power  -  it's really not interesting at all as a point of observation except to the fact that  -  in the writing 'industry' it's the sort of stuff non-writers dote on. Like the endless line of dweeby, non-athletic Jews selling sports memorabilia and baseball cards at any of a thousand sports expo's  -  seeking as is usual to make their filthy lucre from the 'outside' of anything (if you can't 'do it' then by all means make money by doing commerce about it from the outside). If you can't do it, then talk about it  -  baseball or writing; no difference in the pocketbook.

78. One good indication of the how the world has changed, in these parts anyway, is the old fact  -  now long done away with  -  that there used to be places where gasoline stations actually had signs out that said things like 'Last Gas before Parkway', or 'Last Gas before interstate' or whatever -  in order to goad people into gassing up before that (imaginary) long stretch of untended highway came upon them. That's all been done away with and most every large convenience-store or discount house now also sells its own cheap version of named gasoline  -  everywhere and most anywhere, and no one really goes anywhere anymore anyway. Nothing's uncharted, to be sure. The twist and glimmer of older days' travel has long since disappeared and been subsumed into a funny mass of miscellany  -  fast-foods kid-kingdoms, playgrounds and clowns and buffoons and the obese (and all the wondering why obese), bargain-shopper membership clubs and the endless array of the punk-cheap and the tawdry. Walmarts and the rest belittering the Walgreens and the rest which belitter the Burger Kings and the rest  -  all somehow interconnected by a wiry rope of corporate poisoning which goes into each item to make it more saleable cheaper and with better return. Fat is the fat of the land now, and we live off that fat of that land. Robinson Crusoe where are you? Part of the appeal, going back once more, to Alan Cabal for that free-on-Mom driving around vacation frolic that he took in that crazy K-car was in the idea of such passage  -  him, a city-boy, an isolator, all of a sudden free and at-loose with a car to do with everyone else in those 'hinterlands' always had done  -  wastefully scribble around in wheels taking from the land whatever it was offering at whatever cost  -  beer, food, utensils, places, adventures, highways, roads and streets. Doing in his way whatever he thought the rabble did. (I remember once greeting some people with the words 'Now I get to be with the hoi polloi'  -  thinking hoi polloi meant high people. It doesn't. I was corrected, but found a way to quickly elide off the problem of grammar and make good amends.Iit actually means the rabble, the regulars, the mob. Could'a got myself killed!). That's where Alan was  -  cruising through the mid-Jersey dumps but thinking he was experiencing the real Jersey shore  -  which even I never experienced. Keansburg, NJ, let me say, is Nowhere Man personified. It has a 'history' of sorts, but the same kind of dead, once-upon-a-time-way-back-when history that a lot of these places have. When there were small fishermen cooperatives, little rows of clammers' huts, fish factories, boat launches and docking, shacks and waterfront sheds. All that stuff was a century ago and it's all gone now; even the Raritan Bay, which Keansburg faces  -  not even the ocean  -  is a ghost of itself, a pale relic of a waterway long ago useful and well-used. Now it's more just a gas-pod of either indecency or tanning oils and debris. There was a time  -  and oddly enough now you can still walk the varied municipal bay-front beaches thereabouts and see the markers in place, as if put there by municipal officials with a guilty conscience  -  when this was a coastal beehive of high energy. Before the nation had really spread its vainglorious industrial tentacles everywhere, this very busy coastal area, both sides of NYHarbor, here and points south and north, were covered with operational maritime enterprises  -  clamming, oysters, shellfish, lumber, agricultural items, cartage, brick-making, iron and steel, and well as a huge fishing and vacation industry. It's all gone now. Here and there, by surprise, one occasionally can see pieces of old piers and pilings jutting out of the water, or, in the case of the section of Staten Island across from Perth Amboy and Sewaren, an old boat graveyard, where the old wooden ships and boats were towed to languish, list, rot and fall away. It's all mostly gone now  -  waterfront development, expensive homes, parkland walkways and all that have replaced it all, and wanted to, by design, obliterate even the memory. Yet, as a young boy I can well remember, with my father in his 6 horsepower motor on the rear of a rowboat, boating the few slow miles out to there, looking at the pilings and ruined things, sloshing up on the Staten Island beachfronts, just to explore and traipse around. Pieces of boat, things sticking up out of water, skeletal remains of hulks and keels and all of that, at rakish angles and dangerously hidden submersions. I never really wanted it to, but somehow that stuff got into my head, and stayed there  -  memories and fixations of maritime stuff, sad and silly and dead, stayed in place to this day. When we first moved to Inman Ave., and I try well to remember this, my father's head was still in the mode of a seafaring kid, a young turk who'd run off, set out to lie about his age and join the Navy, during wartime. He did so, took his training, went to California and was shipped out to the South Pacific for the years it took for that part of the war. He was a gunnery mate on a battleship tender  -  which meant supply ship for the larger battleships  -  bringing them food, provisions, clothing, medicine, tools, books, toys, whatever was needed to keep a ship at sea going. His ship, in addition, would take flak in the doing of its job  -  it was well-equipped with guns and battlements. In addition, they'd pick up dead bodies from the other ships, and one of his jobs was to sew the bodies into canvas bags for burial at sea. That's a joyful task, especially in the midst of wartime, but at any time as well. He was, by 1954, not that far removed from all that in his head, and  -  as I well recall  -  he carried around with him the envisioning overall of being a seafaring guy. Avenel was at the coast, Sewaren, Perth Amboy, Raritan Bay, not that distant from the Kill Van Kull, the Atlantic Ocean and the real first-class maritime stuff. We spent half our time going back and forth to the Jersey Shore  -  all those rabid sea-coast towns, small time fisheries, fishing boats, boat rentals, day trips to the offshore bluffs and islands, days at the beach, etc. It was always boat this or boat that. After a while, even I got tired of the rap, but it went on. Fishing and crabbing, fishing and crabbing. It was all engrained into him, and he never shook it. I could sense, always, that to him being at home or being idle was like being land-locked, stuck on dirt, far from the ocean. He hated, just as well, back then anyway, the mountains and any idea of the lakes or freshwater stuff.That was then anyway  -  later in life he got over all that, began visiting the Catskills, mountains and lakes, even places like Colorado and the Rockies. I guess time and money mellowed him out, on that count anyway.

I've always thought that there are so many dark secrets locked within the potential of each of  -  we either get them put of the way, ignore them deal with them, or crash-land. Much of it remains as taboos; one way or another, things we cannot do. Face it. We're totally constrained. We've had a Catholic President, and a black one. Next up is probably a woman president. At one point or another, each of those were big things, for whatever reason  -  people's heads, I suppose. It was simple to talk about that, mention each as specific issues, debate the items, talk about. But we've never had a Jewish President. Most near-recent one would have been Arthur Goldberg, back in the 1960's  -  NY political guy, eventually UN Ambassador  -  sort of a big power-broker in his own right. Back then. But he never moved really forward  -  he was a Jew, and everyone knew it, but no one could say it. It's very, very primitive. A Jew is a different story; sorry to stay. If I were to say to you that such and such was a person of a tribal, pagan cult, with beliefs in the powers of an unseen and mystifying, angry, nasty and powerful God, whose will must not be defied (and must be deified), who speaks through lightning and thunder, rules over the sky, rumbles deep space, descends upon  mountaintops, writes, dictates, and comments upon stone, burns but does not consume bushes, floods and kills at will, sends plagues, locusts, famines, tragedies and the like, seemingly at random, and whose name cannot be spoken but must be heeded, and, to boot, who has chosen  a select group, and that group only, for his own and his righteousness, at the expense of all others, etc., etc., you'd say that that person was a crazy person, a pure superstitionist, one not to be trusted. In addition, if for some reason I tried to explain to you that that person's beliefs, in spite of themselves, kept this person hard at work only to amass lucre, wealth, money, fame  -  all through means of falsity, misrepresentation, gossip, folly, slander and coarse manners  -  while this person's 'God' supposedly kept them above all that, you'd say that that person was insincere, a liar and duplicitous, all at the expense of others. Well, there you have it in a nutshell. A Jew. The superstitious, traditionalist, self-righteous, secretive Jew. Deal with it, live with it. No, not yet President (way too obvious) but everywhere else  -  finance, entertainment, banking, armaments, trading, money, federal reserve systems, etc. All hands on each lever, and manipulating, but just not at top, not the figurehead; leaving that supple maneuver to the stupid goy. I think that, in one way, that was what was shattered by Alan Cabal when he burst through the shield around Ed Siegel  -  the realization of which essentially just, on the spot, at the moment, destroyed him. So, OK, now we can argue all day, and you can hate me for bringing the proverbial cat out of the proverbial bag. Truth be told, no matter. You cannot deny any of this, or, anyway, I won't let you.

One of the total weirdnesses of this world is that  -  on the complete opposite extreme  -  we have all those Christian faiths with their own lock-hold on things - another form of 'secular' madness masquerading as deceitful control, prodding and lies. Their take on all this God stuff is, to flip the Jewish equation, is that somehow this disembodied God takes triplet form in the realization, after some destruction, of the mess his creations have made of things, and corporealizes once more in the guise of a human 'Son' of His own, a  savior who takes the human form, and then undergoes hazards, floggings, beatings and death by the very hand of those people and who then, after that death, arises from the dead again and Mankind is cleansed, clean, over, the slate is wiped. If you believe, and then  -    complicating matters   -  if you follow any of a thousand plus dictates about each little sub-prime aspect of Life itself. Compounding the Jewish defamation of being, this same defamation rotates and swirls over and upon itself to disguise millions of flaws and operational sleight-of-hands. Then they all go ahead, raw and raging, to scalp and maim and murder and kill each other over this  - you can pretty much get away with anything if you use the right words and formulas., It's all too easy. Wild-west medicine show patent medicine guy working out of a covered wagon to make the ladies swoon  -  I say. And then you get the even deeper aberrations  -  the 'voices' and the God-talk leading people on, pushing to do this or that, ascribing by fire the right ways of the world. I wanted no part of that, and every zany story I read of the past, all those saints and sufferers, just made me laugh. Theresa of Lascaux, Junipera Serra, popes and saints and misfits, every from Joan of Arc to Mother Theresa and Augustine of Hippo, every one of them as flawed as a mis-struck dime is flawed. Valued, obviously, but only because of the flaw. It's all really just too much for a regular mind, a regular person to handle, and no one needs to anyway. That's the objective basis of 'Freedom' and 'Choice'. Choosing not to.

I never wanted to live in a world run by superstition and fear. But, it seems I do and I must  -  power levers are in the hands of 'others'. Frightful and unseen others, just like their 'God' who rumbles thunder from behind the jealous bush. The only thing I've found myself able to say back to all this is : nothing.

I just move on. The ancient word 'Maya' describes it all best for me. 'Illusion'. That's the given  -  the real impetus is to find whether or not it's an illusion of any consequence. If it's not, just live through it and go on; you may as well remain invisible. If it is  -  or if you think or decide, anyway, that it is  -  that's when the heady problems come up. You then have to do something about yourself and about everything else, and get it started quickly and steadily. There's no slacking. That's what makes it all so crazy. That's what makes the things and the places  -  even those like 'Avenel' arise  -  someone's personal push for glory, for the scrutiny of others : wrecking woods and fields, planting small-scale, all-the-same houses, built cheaply and quickly and sold that way too. Streets named after children  -  Lisa Lane, Mark Place, Monica Court, Clark Place come to mind  -  things dumbed down so as to pleasant and cute and, if made quaint, only in the most ersatz and imitative fashion. I basically have always worked blindly, just pushing on. These others, however, I've noted, work by plan, one deliberate and crafty step at a time. Everything is orchestrated. The end-idea is to make money, whatever the cost. Nothing else matters  -  the quest for gain and profit and lucre takes precedence, takes over in fact, and carries with it, in lockstep, everything else. Everything can be sacrificed for that end. The larger the effort, the more corporate the effort, the fewer and fewer chances exist to convince someone of the errors of their ways  -  they're starry eyes and dumb and stupid, looking at figures, returns, amortizing this or that, cutting deals, figuring ways in and ways out, quickly and stealthily, so as to bring for themselves the most return for their own least effort  -  as if they'll live forever, take it with them, and have something that matters. Then  -  and only then  -  will they worship their G-d, while proclaiming that, all along, it had been their first concern anyway. It's all and everything a lie. There is no reality. It's all gibberish. In their endless confinement to a cosmic Timelessness, they end up, surprisingly and oddly, worshipping only the moment  -  which is constantly slipping away and never stops and thus is never really 'here' at all. It's all illusion, once again. Dumb bastards.

I used to like cars  -  even way back, when I was young, I'd look at them, learn the names, the forms, the engines, the way they worked, etc., and I'd watch too  -  who owned what, which person bought this or that, and try to find out why, or wonder why. Styling clues, sculptural clues, color clues, the push and the prod of design, the thrust of a fin or a rear-swoop, the barreling of headlamps, the bump of a grill. Everything, it seemed, was trying to say something : even with toasters and TV's, lamps and roller skates, bicycles and radios; everything portrayed something, was trying to get a point across, a point just slightly different and off-site from the 'use' of the same object  -  as if two voices were coming through everything. Had I been present, I figured, in the 1860's or whatever, I'd have had the same point of interest towards yoke collars, oxen plows, gate latches and lanterns and wagons and pails and shovels. Who knows? I certainly didn't. Other things had come along and completely taken people's minds off the essentials  -  sound had come in, emitting itself, or being emitted anyway, from those boxes and cabinets I was looking at; light and pictures came, same thing  -  from television sets. Planes and helicopters; bombs and bullets came from them. No one really 'made' anything anymore  -  which was immediately one distinction from the older days. I guess anyway. I don't really know who made shoes back in the 1400's, I guess people made them themselves? Or was a shoe-maker's guild already in control of that? No matter, the design concept is what I writing off, not the means of making it. I loved all that, and I questioned it all. And still do  -  for it seems to me basic and cosmic that we live with the shapes and forms that we do. It all has to come together and go right so as to unify the thinking by which we live. We have the concept 'streamlined'  -  no other reason except that we have it. By same, we then define the curve and the arc of anything made for motion, or in motion, or simulating motions, as 'streamlined' (which, in point of fact, once meant a lot more than it does now  -  streamlined is passe now, but once it was a cutting-edge parallel to the way mankind was about to be living). That idea, that 'concept' took precedence, defining itself and all other things by its meaning. A bullet, piercing the air, had to be streamlined. But, was a cannonball? Was that round, globular shape defining the same thing  -  without mankind's knowing it? How important was any of this? Where did 'art' enter  -  a Brancusi form, a gentle, un-gilded curve? What did that signify? I'd guess this form of thinking made me a bit more solitary than others. I'd sometimes find myself standing on a ball field somewhere, smelling the leather of the baseball glove on my hand, thinking about the cutting of those fingers and the webbing and the leather strap intertwined and closing on each of the four fingers off from the thumb  -  the feel, the passing, the lining, the label  -  lost in some crazy space between here and there, until the crack of a bat anyway would call me back in. What did others think about? I never knew, but I just went on, adequately covering my bases, and keeping my counsel. it was all a charade anyway  -  all that stupid banter and boyhood small-talk between bases and innings. I knew I really cared little for it. But I went along. Maybe, what else can one do at 10 years old or whatever? Cops and detectives, they pick up on clues and tics and evidences of things. They do that after training and after cop-school progress and education. I had that same observational context, early on, in everything I did, without being a cop or having a training. It was just how I lived, and how I learned to pick up on things, on the signals and things being sent my way by the world around me. I may have more than this wished to 'BE' on Mars or someplace else, but here I was  -  here, and stuck here, and thereby forced to continue my own experimentations and works.

All day long, even to this day, my head splits with quickly-passing ideas, phrases, words and concepts. If I don't just cease what I'm doing and jot them down  -  and I don't always  -  the gruesome truth is, ten minutes later, they're gone and most never recoverable. I try to associate the thought with something, as a memory aid, or recite it in some form of parody or rhyme, but I lose a lot, and it pains me. It's a bummer. I try and I try getting the idea back, re-creating the path of thought I was on, trying to reclaim the field, but cannot. I don't know what the word for this is, if there is on, but the very continuity of this page hinges on it, as early today I had some grand notion of how to extend this concept here, the episodes of this chapter, but they're gone. That can only show what a vast Whimper this entire idea of Life itself is  -  a thought, a passing puff of something, and then it too is gone. There's a certain flow that has to be maintained in order to make something like this work, and I have to stay hard at it doing its bidding, or lose it. When I was a kid I wasn't really aware, in these terms, of what loomed ahead of me  -  just instead I stayed watching. What's it called, I wonder too, when a person lives a life but stays out of it enough so that it both fails him later on and at the same time it allows him to hone and sharpen an incredible outsider status into a vast, long period of creative energy? And, between the two, which is worth more? I'll take the latter, thanks. And, anyway, I already did.

Even as I was growing up and seeing the other 'Dads' and 'Fathers' around me (that in itself was an important distinction), I never used the term Dad, always said 'Father' when relating to my own  -  as in 'my father says' or 'I have to call my father to pick me up.' Others in those sentences would have used 'dad'. I never did. There were distinctions between families, and I saw it much more in the fathers than in the mothers  -  the mothers always seemed more or less the same : clotheslines, washing, cleaning, dusting, having afternoon coffee so as to babble on with another other or whatever. Let's just say, on Inman Avenue Gloria Steinam and Betty Freidan were yet afar off.  Some of the mothers were, obviously, vastly better-sexed than others; in fact, even as a young boy I sensed one or two of the local mothers putting great, enormous, crazy streams of sexual energy everywhere, and probably having sex with a string of men and keeping it all steady and concealed, or just maybe dumping all of it on their own husbands, but I somehow doubted that. The Fathers were different  -  there seemed to be the 'Executive' sort of Father, and the 'Sporting' type  -  two different sorts. One was distant, removed, superior, pre-occupied. The other (sporting) were good old boys, throwing snowballs, playing ball, sitting on front stoops, monkeying around with the kids, remarking on things, getting sassy. One type was seen everywhere  -  Little League fields to backyard barbecues. The other type (Executive) never seen. Silly of me to make only two distinction like that, but that's it. I soon enough got out of all that anyway, since it didn't matter to me and none of those ideas stayed long with me. The seminary to which I was going had men being both Fathers and Mothers to teen-age boys  -  if you can imagine that, or a need or a reasoning for something like that. It was medieval right from the start, as if I'd gone from 1961 right back to 1451 in one fell swoop. All I needed was yoked oxen and grape fields on a hill somewhere. The weird thing about the seminary too  -  in light of the aforementioned guardianship and medieval atmospherics of it all  -  was that after all was said and done  -  all the rigor and routine and recitation and practice  -  a seminary kid could still steal off to the athletic section, where there was a gym and basketball courts, play fields, tennis, etc., and select from a bevy of vending machines any of the very normal shit one could want : M&M's, soda, pretzels, Mars bars, ice cream sandwiches, mints, gum, etc. It was pretty crazy, like light seeping in from somewhere else (or maybe it was darkness). And, in the most Portnoyish of behaviors, jerk off to any of the Sunday NYTimes Magazine underwear ads or models.

At the same time, you have to figure, we all have our own beginnings and our own references. Between the little triumvirate here I was writing of, myself, Al Cabal and Ed Siegel (we'll forget about Ruda), what really could there have been in common? Our life-stories were vastly different, so much so that it's a wonder we even understood each other's terms. What a weird confluence. Even weirder in thinking of little Ed Siegel, in some concentration camp somewhere, in the midst of a strange, downtrodden world of his own little-boy eyes, wondering and looking out to determine a world, to be seen in the mid 1990's having to face some sort of mental firing squad all over again by the likes of a crazy, urban, muddle-headed hipster intent on breaking down the world and coming through with some cheap, in-tune and parodyzing view of things, under the soft gauze of marijuana smoke, hemp, booze and beer. A hallucinogenic, all of that, all of its own. And for me, to think how did I get somehow in the middle of all that as well  -  coming from where and to what. I never even knew what hit me  -  was almost just reacting hard to stay atop the twirling barrel I was standing on.

During the 1990's, maybe '94 or '95, I got involved with a weekly NYC publication called The New York Press  -  like an alternate, snarkier maybe, Village Voice. A fellow I met there, Alan Cabal, for a while became a regular pal, sidekick, whatever. It used to be said, back about 1965, by Honda motorcycles, in an ad campaign - 'you meet the nicest people on a Honda'. There way of showing that those new, small-displacement Japanese motorcycles were fun and happy  -  no brutes or riding-rapists nor outlaw bikers need apply. Alan Cabal was a 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. They plop down, erect a tent or two, or not, and charge for their performances  -  high-wire, a few lions and tigers, elephants, monkeys, clowns, flame-eaters and all that. 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. Alan Cabal 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. His mother had died, and he got 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. Alan 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 thieves and things like that. He'd never had to do 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 government-supplied 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. 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 Alan 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 US of A. Parade grounds, bandshells, and  -  through there 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 Alan, in its ruinous state (and his). There were old buildings, things marked with cornerstones of 1914 and 1912. 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 the man's army and Fort HandCock and all that  -  but it couldn't work that way now. People never did realize (and Alan and his wonder-babe (I'll call Janine, 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 Alan 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-motive 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 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 '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. Alan 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 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 life at another realm, another level of 'things'  -  which is probably the worst word in the world but used here nonetheless.

I spent lots of time at the crumbling of those piers just mentioned  -  essentially it was where I lived, on foot or by bicycle, that entire first Winter  -  between things, but always returning. It's difficult for me now to try and recreate the ruination and decrepitude of what once was there  -  most especially now as how since it's all become fashionable and quaint  -  parkways, joggers, bicyclists, gar gymnasts with their weird clubs, stuff I just don't really understand, all done by people I understand less, and care to understand even less than that. Another world entirely has eclipsed any of that which I may have been or inhabited, and that's fine with me.  You can take your sensitivity stuff, your girl as boy and boy as girl crossovers and emotional bleeds, sob-story sentimentality, feeling for other and all that 'it takes a village' myopic bullshit and shove it. It's ruined a world already, and working on another, as soon as all today's nitwit kids grow up and get where they're (supposedly) going  -  eyefuls for brains, keyboards for teeth, and distraction as a nice, tight underwear beneath it all. You don't have to be an outlaw to be an outlaw, or, better put, you don't have to murder to be an outlaw, you can just be one by standing way off and watching and wondering about all the other puke you see. Some call it the shits of an old man, the foibles of passing on. That's fine. They can have it. What passes for the education of what they're now coming through with, alas, is the fault of these oldsters anyway  -  all that 'we pretend to teach, and they pretend to learn' dictum  -  meaningless, but true enough to be said, even if in some form of jest  -  by the self-satisfied and superior mouths of the minions who pretend to teach. In 1967, when I hit, the streets of NYC and these old dockworking piers  -  all of that stuff now of old calendars and sweet words about 'vanished' New York, all of that was run-away destroying itself and hated by the locals anyway; those doing it, the workers, the cops, the crime stoppers, the stevedores and longshoremen, the killers and thieves, the whores and bullwhip dick-lickers, transvestites and multi-sexual Martians. they were all there, and just laying about, doing their stuff, To call it back now, in retrospect, a 'golden age' of prime New York City is bizarre and unwonted. But, it's done. the waters were foul and stank. the sky was always a dismal scoff of brown or yellow; breathing was sometimes difficult, traffic was beastly, crowded, smoke and noisesome. So, that was it  -  think of a black and white movie of old, dark, smoky scenes, furtive glances and half-baked views and schemes. That will gets it to you.

I'm just getting going here, again, but it's necessary to point out the odd paradox that I'd constructed, or ran myself into anyway. I had somehow overlapped times  -  I had somehow let the switched allegiances of things reverse course with each other. it happens; it's easy to do, and to get all caught up in doing. One suddenly finds oneself in the midst of a crowd of people and operations that one has absolutely no confidence in nor commonality with, and all the while having a realization that these people are what they say in name only. they have no realization themselves that they do not represent what they think they do  -  and all their gibberish and mind-numbing undertakings are just sideshows and distractions. To keep them 'cool'. That's how it was, after not too long at all, with Alan Cabal and his Jew-gypsy friend. They were nuts, off the wall, Hedonists, in fact, and 'New York' in name only, by geography alone. Nothing else of them represented anything but the seepings and bleedthroughs of a miserable and foul modern day. I got out, and quickly.

75. Like the Copernican revolution, mankind itself will need to come to grips with itself not being the summit of creation : the center of the natural world. An optimistic, naive account of unlimited human potential based upon an ever-present and active God makes no sense, except as comfort food. And this view it pains me very much to have to proclaim and adopt. The best parts of me therefore fight it as theory, and seek proof of that activity, of a benign activity, stepping in, changing things as needed, interdicting, if you will, the stage of events through the mingling stronghold of a physical Deity. Which of course does not occur and for which the mind fights. Truly, there is little of logic here, nor within any of this quaint logic of thinking. My earliest days. in Avenel. had been placed in a location where no one thought thoughts such as that. It made me vulnerable, anxious and self-conscious. Part of the varied reasons, I am sure, why I got out, and so early on.

I was never able to properly separate what I was feeling from what I was living around myself. To me they always seemed as two, completely separate divergences  -  and my loyalty was not to the latter. Some will say that's a 'romantic' attraction to living, in the old vein of the grand Romantics of art, music, dance and writing. I wouldn't know any of that  -  as I see it those folks were all pretty one-dimensional in the way they thought of things  -  emotive, over-whelming, gung-ho. I'm not any of that  -  rather cold, removed, steely, aloof. So, that's another divergence I could never deal with  -  more to keep me apart, lone and solitary. I never understood, nor was I understood. Poor, poor pitiful me? No,  I don't think so. Poor, poor pitiful everybody else.

At 12th and 13th Streets, The New School  -  once 'The New School for Social Research', and, originally, in 1933, 'The University of Exiles', had a few buildings fronting the streets. Incongruously, in the 1960's and '70's, built in some 1940's style of a steel and glass modernity  -  faintly Bauhaus perhaps  -  but which never really fit the place nor made mark of what it was trying to do or say. Vietnam protest renegade and one time US Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, Ramsey Clark, kept an office on the 2nd or 3rd floor there during the time he taught. The office, with its books and papers, could be seen up there, behind the window glass. I never went in, nor visited, but during that time (times I did gaze up so wistfully from the street below), about 1972, I was much in contact with, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, a Philippine leader-in-exile named Raul Manglapus. He was about  -  as I've previously treated  -  20 miles away from Elmira, at Cornell, when I was living in Elmira during those years. Between the three of us (myself, Manglapus, and Ramsey Clark), in those erratic, waning years of the stupid and pathetic Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, we spent much time, by letter and phone mostly, planning or at least trying to 'figure' the means of overthrow and the toppling of Marcos and his replacement by Manglapus  -  who was at that time, having been exiled from the Philippines and picked up by Cornell for an exile-position as academic/university staff. He taught at Cornell. While he did so, he was a very active presence and spearheaded an exile government-in-waiting, and a rather strong subversive movement seeking to implement the overthrow of the Marcos regime  -  which regime was fully backed, secured, financed and bolstered in all effects by the US Government  - which Government wished to know no other manner nor means of governance for the Philippines, which it considered its own Christian, safe and secure foothold in South Asia against the onslaught of the sprawling communist tendrils fanning out from all those imagined and 'usual' suspect places  -  the Indonesian archipelago, the Soviet Union, and China too. This vast American underwriting became a joke, a parody of itself after a while, the fact being that it had all gone to their heads  -  Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were in no way representative of any form of Christian or Democratic ideals. They were insane. Their country had become a military and civilian pressure-cooker, operated as a police-state, repressive, materialistic, vain and corrupt. Corrupt would need a capital letter here, for sure. The entire operation, for the US and its contractors, and the police state behind it, was a huge pudding of money and graft. it was unstoppable, all through those years of the 1970's. Manglapus, as well as Ramsey Clark, nonetheless discussed operational, legal and alternate methods of overthrowing the regime. It was a difficult time, and many letter-writings and conversations with Manglapus went back and forth, mostly declaiming the perverse power held by Marcos, and the position of the USA power structure vis a vis the governance of the Philippines, to wit: "The Marcos regime is seen as representative figures of American democracy in action, and the 'values' which go with it, against the encroachments in south and southeast Asia of both Soviet Russia and Communist China  -  huge, feuding and lumbering societies of filth and disgust thought somehow to be of 'superpower' status." I always thought, in those years, that 'possession of the bomb' was really the one criteria that the world went by  -  but now I'm not so sure. The bomb's still contentious, though it's no longer called that; but there are other things now  -  torture and terrorism, media control, imprisoning dissident voices, killing opponents, that's pretty much also an equal part of the equation. Back then I'm not sure what Marcos did. Anyway, no one ever killed Manglapus. There was a relative sense of values back then  -  all things could be moved against each other, deals made, and the mouthpieces and liars would come to the fore and make it sound as they wanted it to sound. It never really suffices to just say 'you had to be there'  -  but in this case it's perhaps useful and right. Today's world just doesn't translate this well. Raul was trying to run a 'government-in-exile' from Ithaca, he himself having been exiled (expelled) a few years before, by the Marcos regime whereupon, after some time in NYC, Cornell University gave him a slot  -  I think in the History Dept. as I recall. Considered a leftist, he was also considered back then (not later on) as inimical to US interests in that it was all theoretical (his exile-government-in-waiting), had no currency (?), [I never knew what they anted, perhaps the printing of Manglapus notes in various denominations?], economic base, nor persons nor factuality. Running a government-in-exile (Movement For a Free Philippines was, ostensibly, the name of the movement, not the government to be) made moreso by, as he put it, having to be wary of Marcos (or US) henchmen always out to get him. I can't right now exactly remember how I ran across him other than that I did respond by note to an op-ed of some sort he'd written for the NYTimes, an then he responded to that. Seeing as how Elmira neighbored Ithaca, and I often visited Cornell University, where he was, once it got started it became easy. So, anyway, that's my Raul Manglapus story  -  a diffident and oddly beautiful time for me, in my later formative years. I enjoyed the contact and the names.

Cornell University was a pretty cool place  -  lot of crags and rocks, gorges and drop-offs. Kids jumping to their deaths often enough  -  romantic problems, pregnancies, bad exams,  insecurities and the rest. Now they've netted a lot of the gorges  -  you jump, you just get stuck farther down in a netting, looking like a fucking idiot. That'll teach you. Last time I was there (Fall/Thanksgiving, 2011) some guy bumming money from me took me instead on a tour, by his account anyway, with full narration, of the new nets and safeguards, with a history of the community's problems over the issue, the huge sums of monies involved, and the reactions and proceedings of the University itself on the issue. I gave him a buck for his troubles, and he still wouldn't leave. All that he said was either in good faith and real stuff, or complete bunkum  -  and I wouldn't know the difference anyway. It worked for me. There's a coffee shop, and a Starbucks across the street, right there, and I took him in, we had a cup of coffee, and just talked  -  he was an apparently local, homeless wreck. The funny thing was, he wasn't alone  -  there was another street-waif, much like him, who came in because of his absence, and discussed their 'shifts'. He wasn't due to come on for another 45 minutes, and there wasn't anyone 'there'  -  because the guy was inside here with me, for a dollar. They were losing money on this deal  -  so I said adios and let those two shamans get on with their work. Work? Better than jumping, I suppose, the telling about it instead.

In antiquity, humans sent plagues into cities by catapulting corpses over fortified walls. Now we have more cunning Trojan horses. Smallpox has been stashed in blankets, disguising disease as gifts of goodwill. How perverse is that? Still, these are crude and primitive attempts to set back time and harm the curve.  Now we have corporate sabotage, world hypnosis and ecological sabotage to deal with  -  biological defilement of forests, lakes, rivers and stream, to name just one plausible option. In 1960, I don't think any of this was current in idea or importance  -  the arc of things was upward, on and through any and all obstacles. Hanging around the basement bar, a drink or two into conversation  -  about the new car at the GM plant in Linden, or the 707 coming through Newark Airport  -  a polite and nicely curved argument for progress as a desirable, feminine attribute  -  all curves and hips and cleavage. Something men fall for, and still do. Now, in those same places, the older, decrepit and completely re-populated neighborhood is run over by Pakistanis, people from India and Sri Lanka and Russia, satellite dishes on the roof (my parents' old house, where I grew up, had three at one count in about 2011). Why? What to watch and to whose benefit? How distracted and other-oriented does one need to be? The world now is a colossal 'One'. Is that any better? I see no difference, which is baffling to me  -  the America arc has achieved itself and run out nits own course, and by achieving itself it has, as well, decimated itself, killed itself off. You can't complain, for fear of being labeled something. It's impossible to single out the Jews who run the provocative, vulgar and gross multi-layers of 'entertainment'  -  those who've polluted and ruined everything, making irony out of, even, defecating. You're simply labeled 'anti-Semitic' and you're, for all practical purposes, done. You can't clamor over the hordes of illegal little Mexicans overrunning every restaurant kitchen and back-service area, every landscape and tree-cutting operation, hanging like monkeys off trucks, defoliating and cutting every tree and shrub in the name of 'Landscape'  -  for which idiot people dole out big money  -  to make things as bleak as some desert plateau. Our old, American culture and ethos, for whatever reason and whatever it was, is completely foreign to them, and has been. We've given it all away  -  the taproot of subservience and submission has been allowed to grow. I rather think we still send plaques into cities, though by different means and  -  certainly  -  different sorts of plaques.

When I got to New York City and ended up on 11th Street, that street was a completely different street than it is now, or than anything you'd find there now on either side of it. The main component of the street was what was then called Puerto Rican. Back in those days, there were but a few strong and identifiable groups to contend with  -  Negroes (blacks, mostly of American descent, meaning descendants originally 17th and 18th-century African slaves, the sorts over whom the Civil war had occurred, who eventually migrated north, and to Chicago as well, to become 'ordinary' by today's standards American blacks. They lived in Negro ghettos, the places like Harlem and other spots, close-by, in tight-knit cultural groups  -  mostly downtrodden poor, beleaguered and sour. But the word used was Negro); Puerto Ricans, often just called Spics, who  -  in much the same way as blacks, populated parts of New York City with their own brash versions of poverty, culture, food and romance. Apart and separate, but OK too. It seemed all else, Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, and the rest, somehow simply fell under the rubric of 'White'  -  the engrained American type. American, red, what, and blue, and all the rest. The Jewish people, as now, kept themselves apart too, in their own places and ways.None of it made any sense. But, no matter, 11th street was totally 'Spic' territory. Into that, I moved  -  stairways of strange smells, people milling about, tight-fitting clothing, temptresses as sisters and girlfriends, an entire open and outdoor culture. One I'd not really seen before. It didn't bother or affect me. I took it all in stride  -  those first few weeks it seemed a zillion degrees, hot, hot Summer, people hanging out in an intense heat, almost half-clothed, kids screaming. The nearby schoolyard, empty then, as school was closed, by mid-September had become itself another roiling, crowded asphalt beach of period-timed groups of screaming, writhing kids. I never realized how often people propagated, though, judging from the looks of things, I should have known right off that sex had to be a mainstay of activity. Impulsive. Allowed. Cheap or free. And truly, within this culture then, without much in the way of 'responsibility.' You pick things up as you go along  -  and that's how it went for me; so that, before long, it all seemed quite natural, as if I'd lived among this my entire life. 11th Street itself had no panache at all, never had, except for Paradise Alley, adjacent to my building  -  which 'Alley' was legendary. Beatnik lore; stories of it abounded, references a'plenty in Beatnik memoirs and the lie. And there I was, right next to it, when it was all gone  -  a shitty hulk of itself, an empty passion of crumbling walls and some leftover brick, a motorcycle courtyard ravaged by punks and biker hoodlums. All the backstory was somehow gone. Funny how things like that happen. After a while, who knows what? No one knows but nothing. Just one over, 10th street, to the west, had been an artistic haven  -  all those 1940's people had painted and lived in their spaces and apartments, and made art galleries of the brownstone fronts and buildings  -  to the point where 10th street had become, for a while, its own little art district. Some of that still lingered, and I loved those old spaces  -  whitewashed walls, old steps and walkups, windows showing things  -  art and fixtures, bold and energetic references of things sculptural, strong and spiritual too. that world was gone away, over  -  as if all real Being and Presence had been drained, by 1966, from it and all that was left was some old ghost, lost amid a swirl of deals and money. Everyone by then was on the make. everything needed a name and a label, a perch upon which to be viewed. it had to 'be' something first, and then be 'owned' by someone 'special, second. Soon enough, the bastardization of labels like 'Pop' and 'Op' and 'Minimal' and then 'Conceptual', each one a term one more step way from the real and original idea of art, on a shape, maybe even framed, simply or not, and hanging on  a wall. Coy and ironic had to be the new watchwords. It was hurtful and false. I never went for it and I rued as well the day when places like Tenth Street began disappearing. Commercial districts and all the tarts involved in manipulating and people that milieu took over. The turds of Elaine's and Max's Kansas City and el Quixote had soon taken it all over  -  art as entertainment. Art as sex, and perversion. All a Queerdom of its own.

74. A few things always jumped out at me; deliberation was one of them. I used to look at those science photos that one would see back then and understand immediately the ploy underway. Anything appears odd or strange when seen in intense close up. It was really telling me, or anyone, nothing at all. It was a specious approach by Science, or whatever power was doing it, to baffle and amaze with a sort of majestic 'look at us' wonder. It's sort of the same thing that Authority has always done  -  ermine robes and tiaras and crowns and scepters, all of that which goes into the keeping of the dispossessed down, and in 'awe' of the magic of Authority. So much of everything starts from this. Bunkum everywhere. In my seminary years, far enough from Avenel so as to remain distinct to me, I can always remember that little chapel building : we'd assemble as a group, en masse, and enter at 6:30am, into a small, very plain and wooden chapel  -  sort of a connected bungalow style building, right into the freshman dorms at one end and the refectory, or eating hall, at the other. A few very basic attempts at stained glass windows, simple pews, views out to fields and trees. Some Winter mornings it would be downright freezing in there. But I remember things well : Chuck Waddell, that super serious and extremely pious boy from Delaware, always staying behind, always very hard at work, on his knees, at prayer  -  not just 'prayer' but the very singular prayer of his own extension all the while mouthing the words to himself, aloud but without sound. Always curious to me. What was this guy about? But even more than that I recall the very tall altar candles arrayed on each side of the otherwise plain altar (the entire thing had the character of some wood-lodge, summer-camp chapel actually). Each week a different seminarian would be selected to be the lighter, and the extinguisher, of these candles  -  which meant that a long-handled, gold metal implement made specifically for the long reach of church candles was used. It was a glorious thing :  walking in front of everyone before and after the mass, to light and then extinguish those tall and large candles in their stands. It was part of the mystique and mystery the entire operation somehow exuded. No wonder, perhaps, Chuck Waddell was always speechless and in awe. From Avenel to the seminary was a pretty simple reach  -  both places were somehow doing the same thing but in their own different ways. One's sacrament of wonder was the bulldozer and the crane; the other used candelabras and chapels.

It was always kind of funny for me to realize how it goes with the 'history' of places. Woodbridge and Avenel were peppered with these tiny ideas of itself as a 'place' that used to be  -  but only the small, historical types knew of it. Now it's different  -  there are markers and historic posts about this and that. People put a glide on things  -  pretending. None of it has any reality  -  they make up all these stories from the most basic rudiments. Parker Press. Valentine Brick. Bitting's Brewery. There are kernels of truth, only kernels, to all of this  -  but they erect stories and edifices. I didn't know what to do about it. I just watched. There was a woman around town named Ruth Wolk  -  an annoying smidgeon of a woman, proud of herself and proud of her search for 'history'  -  but it all had to be right, had to fit her design first, except for that it wasn't history. She wrote a few small, published, paper-back books with old photos and tales and stories of 'Woodbridge Township'  -  collections of old photos, small stories, tales and captions, and mostly ideas of the grand, older, days of a construct she named 'Woodbridge'. It was all of her own making  -  and she was a complicit in it as anyone else. She'd write of fine old, secluded homes, farmland and grassy lanes. She'd write of wells and water-sources, small knots of people organizing to do something authentic and real. yet, at the end of the same blurb, she'd boast of the now 'grand' Woodbridge, how it was turned into parking lots, shopping, roadways and large organizations of political and civic  -  and school  -  groups. her impetus and focus, as is most usual for these sorts of people, was on organized schooling : grandiosity over Boards of Education, new, grand schoolhouses and collectivized districts and regionalized high schools and all that. Everything headed in the complete other direction of the tiny porridge she'd just been brewing  -  seeking instead consolidation, hugeness, organization, a centralized, authority-down sequence of limit and control. I never figured any of that out, nor did I understand where all these people, with their bizarre attitudes and ideas, had come from : I knew the clutch of them., mostly  -  temple dwellers from the older, centralized yet small, Woodbridge. But they were just as intent on turning everything away, making it bad, tweaking it to their higher levels of regal and splendiferous (vain) authority and centralization. the world was turning and spinning fast  -  all things were being altered.

There were two churches, catholic ones anyway, in Avenel. When we first moved there, the original church building was on Avenel street. It was a pretty simple, small and ordinary church sort of brick structure; very nice actually. It faced the main street of the simple town; it was a 'satellite' parish or mission/outreach of Woodbridge's St. James Church  -  an outpost for the burgeoning population of the developing swamplands which were Avenel. In about three years the parish had outgrown its church, and a larger, more modern 'church-by-churchbook design book' structure was in place, destroying the woods behind the older church which still stood and was left standing for some 8 or so years  -  used as a gym, social center for kids, basketball hall, etc. A total mish-mash. Boy Scout meetings in the basement, once a 'catholic' troop 73 had been established to debunk the nearby Presbyterian troop 42, of longer-standing, and more manly, proportions (tougher kids). It wasn't really as if, in Boston or somewhere like that, the lines separating the religious parts of town meant anything. They meant nothing at all  -  it was mostly in the addled brains of parents and/or old-timers from other places; people who kept such scores, who marked these things down. All of us kids, we'd run together no matter who or what  -  most of it could be described as dastardly stuff anyway so what matter is it in a religious context anyway. Breaking into the here or there abandoned house, wrecking what we saw, destroying plates and dishes, flinging old 78's (hard, black, thick plastic that smashed like glass) into trees and walls, entering the rears of the varied junkyards just to outwit the mad, junkyard dogs and destroy windshields, smash lights, wreck otherwise already wrecked cars. We'd smash windows where we could, slingshot rocks and pebbles into things, use various firecrackers and other small means of explosive, as kids are wont to do, I guess, to blow things up, main or slaughter small animals, running through the woods with bows and arrows set for squirrels, birds, or any other small ground animal  - whish as far as out kid-frenzy went, should be 'ground-up' animals anyway. It was crazy. It was bizarre and wrong, and sad too  -  as I think of it now I still shudder. What we were thinking, I'll never know. It certainly bore no semblance of either side of the stupid 'religious' divide which had been presented to us. Protestant dances, and Catholic dances. Protestant Boy Scouts and Catholic Boy Scouts. I mean, and still do, what the fuck? Whose strangely altered and medievalized thinking goes like that? You read of these sorts of things in the year 1410 or something, but this was 1950's Avenel, a shit-hole suburban, low-priced, swamp-infested  construction project in which people were supposed to live  -  living new lives, highly-stylized new lives, in fact, of ease and splendor, of toothpaste in tubes and butter in tubs, lightly whipped.

I never really wavered from my tasks. I would read the get-your-hands black (back then the ink used to rub off) 1960's, thin-columned, endlessly wordy New York Times, nightly. Spread out on my hard-tiled floor in my room upstairs, I'd read page after page items about far-off places, the mechanizations of men, Congo, Asia, China, Soviets, space-competitions, Nazi-history investigations, auto-industry items. Until late at night  -  oftentimes my wearied mother would climb the stairs, knock and open the door, and quizzically look at what I was doing, reading on the floor some stupidity like a scribe, shake her head, and tell me it was late and that I should get to sleep. There was an endless war or skirmish always underway somewhere  -  Brazzaville, all of Africa, Congo, Swaziland, Taiwan vs. mainland China, Appalachian poverty and problems right at home in the USA, civil rights troubles, school desegregation, slums, urban renewal, everything all a -twirl at the same moment. Something big was brewing; I could feel it, I could already understand it, but just wasn't sure of the approach. Life. death. Little mattered. Occasionally things would pop up; my own ideas and interpretations : 'desegregation'  -  using such a word, I felt, was wrong  -  it somehow made valid the existence of 'segregation', assuming all one had to do was correct it, as without changing it or re-formulating first the dumb way people thought. Thinking about what I read of those weird, odd southerners and all their 'separate' Woolworth's food counters, restaurants and bathrooms and water fountains, I would just think  -  what's wrong with these asshole people? How stupid could a people be? What race of Neanderthals had they themselves descended from that they could still subsist in this manner  -  their screaming diatribes, shouting at schoolbuses and children, protecting their own supposed 'rights' (which did not really exist anyway). These were supposed adults  -  grown and mature people who were assumed ready to lead others. They turned out to all be liars and jerks. I found that money and corruption left its presence everywhere. African-bound cargoes of foods and medicines, large sums of monies, all stolen, swept away by corrupt leaders of corrupt governments run my small mobs of corrupt people. Theft and malfeasance were everywhere. The dead and the dying loomed as a result. War was nothing. War had just become a cover, an excuse for cover  -  to cover and obscure the thievery and corruption wherever it could be concealed. Nothing was straight, people were crooked bastards, mostly moreso the nearer to the top one got  -  this went for the USA too; no distinctions made.

When you're 12 years old I don't think you're supposed to have already reached the point of saying 'Oh, what the hell...' It seems way to early to find futility and the grassy island of doubt so soon and already sidelining you. It's a tough thing to get over : it affects how you can talk and honor and respond to things. I had to carry that around. Boyhood fades; the world intrudes. How was I supposed to observe or see or watch things in that condition? The stupidity of a symbolic thing, like the CBS Eye, as a for instance  -  something everyone else accepted and looked for. This little place I was in  -  a thin strip of street not even a commercial street any longer  -  barren, derelict, cut in two by roadways, a lumber yard, a train station seemingly now an afterthought (everyone had their flashy cars to ride in instead), two or three 'candy' stores, selling nothing more than leftover pennypacks  -  it was really a non-entity, a no-connected nowheresville. I was ready to cash out. Had I been 4 years older, I would have just jumped a train (not 'in front of', just jumped on), or hitch-hiked Route One and disappeared. As it were I worked hard on finding other ways to get out. Hello Blackwood, I suppose.

I've found most of life to be a symbolic reality  -  people placing space and the things they do into mental landscapes which  -  while not real at all  -  reach the level of 'real' by fulfilling symbolic needs. This can be argued all day  -  and I'd probably be the first to do it  -  but I am certain I could argue it to a perfect clarity and win. As I was growing up, the street I lived on had, as well and for itself, attained that level of being  -  it was a line of houses to which was attached a serial decision-making for the placement of like and symbolic items by each family, random or not, along the way. A sameness in cars : boats, pools, lawns, driveways, furniture, decks and patios (New Jersey patios, I always thought, bring a certain 'patois'). Symbolic preferences for lives not really lived; references too, I suppose. Nothing on Inman Avenue bore any real substance, it all seemed image and symbol. The time of being  -  the 1950's, the 1960's  -  were in fact completely artificial and symbolic anyway : everything managed to be, to exist, from nothing and completely artificial and meaningless. Yes, that still goes on today, of course, but all things are different and done differently. The essential basis 'within a reality of' its own' Earthness and substance (that thing we, back then, were just leaving) is all gone - everything is ephemeral and virtual and ethereal, and yet today's 'folk' can make no distinction on that level at all. They just live it. Art and re-purposing buildings in a world that has so little to say but so many ways of saying it  -  (nothing). So many people live amidst a symbolic reality of their own into which and through which function very well and feel quite satisfied, though without knowing. Quite discursive, no matter.

In looking back it's a little bit amazing to see how much of all my father/grandfather stuff, in a vaguely humorous way, has to do really with the vagaries of Robert Moses : grand enforcer and builder of highways, bridges and tunnels. My Aunt Mae told me she remembers  -  as a young girl  -  a burial of her father (that absent 'grandfather' of mine at 116th street) - one Giuseppe Entrona  -  was at ground level and next to a busy highway. years now have elapsed (1945 or so) and somewhere over that time the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway has been rebuilt, enlarged and elevated, high over this particular cemetery segment. The roadway once at ground level is now high in the sky. The trestles are above now the whines of the highway and the groans of the junkyards and scrapheaps below. The actual grave is now a mere smidge along the cramped, brick footing of the overpasses, a sort of center-alley walkway of dark, looming brick. It's all a very strange place, yet blighted and boring in its way too. In my mind I go back there, only in memory, trying to recall the old scenes gone by  -  perhaps when there were trees and shrubbery (there are none now, on this flat, treeless, ugly plain). Do dreams have memories too, or do memories dream? Whatever it is, this vague portion of the 'Introne' interdict lies here, still and rank, beneath a highway and lost in a place once bucolic and serene but now ravaged by the tempests of time and value and violence and ruin. Robert Moses be damned. Giuseppe Entrona too. Whatever any of it all is, it is for certain that nothing now exists at ground level and  -  yes  -  all things are elevated.

In my 1950's there was pretty much nothing. I was not so much held back by my inadequacies as just kept in place to the fullness of the little I had.  My father went through any number of automobiles, swapped engines, did brakes, etc., when he had to  -   he had rental car replacements for mechanic-repairs (I remember well an quaint old '53 Dodge he had for a week or two  -  faded green, ram's head in metal and chrome, soiled on the hood. It shook tremendously as it neared 50 mph, and all that was accepted  -  this great little clunk of a tough vehicle, hunkering down the slower highways and byways of that time. it was fun, and a good memory). My father had erected an engine hoist in the rear yard, at the end of the driveway  -  a few times entire engines were just switched, as a Saturday and a Sunday's task. Wonderment and awe sometimes, by me as I watched him at work. I don't know what people do now, but I know they don't do that. The modern day, by contrast, is a brittle and bright mirror  - composed of the reflection it is supposed to be reflecting. They call it, perhaps, ethereal, virtual, unreal. Maybe that's the case, and they can have it. If so, I want nothing of it. Quiet has to bespeak quiet; it needs a strength and a presence of its own. The 'life-as-a-pale-reflection-of-God' thing works far better than today's mastiff-mankind, king of all matter rap. Anyway, in today's world that's the entire white left speaking, and nothing else. No one knows; they just blather on. Mostly evil and cheesy (though one cannot say that), and mostly for money. Lucre is King. God and Mammon  -  are the same thing. The whole guilt and soft-doubt, whole-foods, artisan and craft debauchery are where modern anti-culture has amassed its goods. We now have to listen to the paradoxical dichotomy of a reasoned, half-crazy mind, of whatever nationality and color all melded, using patience, sentiment and logic to forestall any creative progress, make it stop or put it on hold anyway, while violence and vulgarity make sport of the entire mad, insane nuthouse  -  a governmental, medical and military and religious complex raring more and more to be on its way. Trying to thwart now a thundering global collapse of its own house of cards. A House of Panic instead. It seems now that people can only seek 'product', as it's now called, and their 'product' is a weird combination of waste and war unleashed, speed and restlessness, anger, sex, and mayhem. But that apparently now satisfies the world. This world is but a shadow, come to hide and conceal all other things  -  the nervous restlessness has no one settling in place, just constantly moving along some media-boosted continuum. It's so far unlike the 'old' days that I'm here writing of as to be insipid and sad at the same time, as if the shirt had no collar and no sleeves but was still to be called a 'shirt'. You'd better look up Confucius on that one; see his 'Rectification of Names' theory. If you call something, in error, that which it no longer is, you will, at the least, lose harmony. At worse, you will die.

Other cards are being drawn; the hands are held. In this moment, the cards and hands are being arranged on a table-top, whence all will see them  -  before the real fire of their burning begins. It cannot be held back. It is harsh and impossible to forestall. And if it was anyway, they would have that person's head. Whoever it was who was stopping it. Anti-Christ, Mammon, or ritualized 'God'; all the same. Sometimes Satan comes in the name of the Lord.