9/11: Songs That Got "Us" Through

Back when large CDs stores existed, there was a certain kind of “various artists” CD I’d always notice in the Jazz section. Who knows, maybe this held true when vinyl albums ruled, but I just never noticed (because I never bought any records that were even remotely associated with jazz). This type of music was related more to Big Band, which most stores recognized as a subset of Jazz.

But I’d notice, and eventually buy a few of, these CDs that were entitled something like Songs that Got Us Through World War II. Or World War I. Sometimes even The Korean War. The concept was to note Big Band songs that pertained specifically to the war: “White Cliffs of Dover,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” “G.I. Jive,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company C,” etc. And there would be songs that weren’t specifcally about the war, but had a connotation of linking the song to the experience: “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” come to mind. Millions of people were away from home, thus a lot of songs got written about what that felt like, with the very real understanding that they may never come home again.

I noticed in the Pop/Rock section, the few CDs I saw about the Vietnam War weren’t positioned that way – the title would usually include reference to Vietnam, but no mention of “getting us through.” That war wasn’t viewed sentimentally. Glen Miller and The Andrew Sisters, or their 60s equivalents (were there any?) did not write songs specifically about the war experience. Songs that were specifically written about the war experience back then were generally by younger artists, who clearly were not feeling sentimental over friends and family sent overseas, but whose main message seemed to be: “Let’s get the fuck out of there.”

Now, most large stores have very small CD sections, and behemoths like Tower and HMV, where I’d find these CDs in their huge aisles, are long gone. I haven’t been in an indie CD store in eons either, although a handful still exist in NYC. But it got me thinking, forget about Vietnam, there were no Songs That Got Us Through 9/11 collections either.

And that was for a number of reasons. Personally, my biggest one was simple: no songs got me through 9/11. I was emotionally numb on 9/11 as I walked home over the 59th Street Bridge and watched hours of the horrible TV footage like the rest of the world did, even though I saw everything but the first plane go in from the 35th floor of an office building about six miles north of there that morning. Fucking numb. Followed shortly by enraged … a feeling that has surely let up since then, but that’s the one that still sticks with me the most.

No, a few days later, as I’d ride the subway with my MP3 player (pre-iPod, using the sturdy Creative Nomad 30 GB Zen Jukebox, I could feel certain songs cutting through the haze. You have to realize, it wasn’t a situation of everything snapping back to normal once we could all go back to work later that week. It took months for the lower part of Manhattan to open up again. The smell of what happened, burning debris of all sorts, hung over the city like a pall for weeks afterwards. People were constantly on edge, expecting a second wave of attacks at any time, particularly on the subway. Everywhere you walked in Manhattan, there were mimeographed and color-copied photos of the missing. Less than two months later, a plane crashed in the Far Rockaways, on its way to Puerto Rico, killing dozens, and I recall the sickly feeling of “here we go again” that morning. (That was determined an accident, but I still have my doubts.)

Once music started making sense to me again, probably by about 9/18 or so, it really helped me along. I’d like to note a few of those songs here now, and figure out why they worked. There are no “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” type songs here. There are no songs that were even remotely traditional hits of any sort. I was heavily into the indie scene at the time, thus was listening to that music the most, and that music was and is like a secret handshake. And I’ve never warmed up to the secret handshake method of music appreciation, i.e., I’m no hipster. I was raised with huge bands playing arenas and everyone knowing the hits. But there came a point in the late 80s into the 90s where the kind of music I liked was only happening with indie bands, and I was getting older, thus found myself truly repulsed by Top 40, which makes sense. I’ve listened to a lot of great indie music over the years, but it’s not the music of grand gestures. These people are not rock stars. They don’t shape generations. Which is good and bad. But most of the time, most people won’t know who in the hell I’m writing about! Nevertheless, these songs got me through that horrible time period when very little else could reach me.

(And for the record, at the time, I was extremely leery of any talk of “the new sincerity” and “how this has changed us” – leery to the point of derision. And I was right. Nothing changed after that, that much I can see clearly almost a decade later. If anything, New Yorkers tend to be even more vacuous, empty and insincere. It’s just the way a lot of people are here, which was true long before 9/11 and will be true long after. Skyrocketing real estate values since then, too, have done wonders in terms of injecting the city with new waves of greedy vampires totally lacking in any senses of soul or empathy. You need to live around people like this to understand how genuinely unappealing a lot of these folks are.)

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“Under the Western Freeway” by Grandaddy. This was the first piece of music that got through to me after 9/11; in my mind, it sounded exactly like 9/11. Or at least touched on that feeling I had of that stark footage of the streets down there just after the second building collapse, where all was silence, save for the gentle beeping of firefighter’s emergency signal devices. That gray cloud of dust covering everything. Unnatural silence for a city– it only gets that quiet with snow falling late at night. In the song, you can hear a metallic grinding in the background. That’s pretty much how I felt for days afterwards.

“Protected from the Rain” by Grandaddy. Grandaddy made a lot of sense to me that fall. I had liked them before, but so much of the band’s feel was geared directly towards that feeling of mild suffering most people were going through. (I’ve since realized these sort of enormous cultural events are just that, unless you know/knew someone directly involved. Took it much harder at the time, but it was mild compared to my Dad passing on three years later.) Lyrics sound absolutely senseless, but again, that rolling, electronic sound these guys had was perfect, like a lullaby for adults.

“Don’t Be Crushed” by Hawksley Workman. If there’s one theme that I can see with most of the songs that registered with me then, it was that quiet, healing quality. Which is odd, because I was about as angry as I’ve ever been in my life: a low, steady rage that I felt for months afterwards. I had to find a way to counter-balance that with something, so music seemed to be it. Beautiful song by Hawksley Workman. Lyrics get a bit disingenuous in places, and a little too close to home with the airplane imagery, but the message driven home in the title was something I could relate to at the time. Most older rock fans will point to a song like this as a reason for not liking indie music. The music is there – it sounds expansive, the work of a talented artist. But the lyrics are so idiosyncratic, and the singer not fitting into that traditional “rock star” voice, that they can’t help but reject it. They rightly recognize a song like this could never be a hit, despite having the potential to be one. And that’s probably why I like indie music. You lose that huge generational appeal kids were raised with in the 60s and 70s, but you still gain something worthwhile.

“I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy” by Antony & the Johnsons. Antony is one strange guy – looks like an alien, assume he’s gay, and wrapped in a cloak of gentility akin to Bryan Ferry’s bigger ballads. It’s a bit of a shtick, but it works because the guy is a genuinely talented singer and songwriter. “Dead Boy” is one of his better songs, and touched on that theme of constant death floating around the city at the time. I saw Antony perform at a local PS on the Lower East Side that December, and this song brought the house down, as he sang with these odd images on a large screen behind him that looked like a city in foggy ruins … which is exactly how NYC felt at the time. (My audience experience was greatly decreased by the gay couple openly making out in front of me. Audience was mostly gay, which was fine by me, but these guys were going at it like two virgins pulling their moves from an Idiots Guide to Gross Public Displays of Affection. Don’t think that scenario is an issue many places in the world! Besides, what kind of people would make out to a song like this ... vampires?)

“Cybercar” by East River Pipe. East River Pipe is really a one-man band named Fred Cornog who’s put out album after album of home-made recordings heavy on keyboards and synthesizers. As noted in an interview I did with him for Leisuresuit.net in 1999, the guy had been through a lot and had found a way to make his life work through music. “Cybercar” had that sound of emptiness and hurt following 9/11. I’m noticing with all these songs, they’re not just simple rock ballads in that traditional Carpenters/Bread way, but close. In this case, there’s that flurry of electric guitar that works through the song. These are more like disjointed ballads where something has been knocked off its axis … again, this is how the world felt for a few months the fall and winter of 2001.

“Mellow (Part 1)” by Mellow. Mellow was (is?) a French pop band with a real yen for 60s style Britpop. I lost track of them after this album, save to note they did the soundtrack for the indie flick, CQ. I must have been coming out of the funk when this track hit me because it’s a fairly happy sounding song. I didn’t have much need for happy-sounding music in the immediate aftermath … wasn’t exactly walking on sunshine.

“Suffering” by Satchel. Painful to admit I was turned onto this song from the awful movie, Beautiful Girls, featuring a barely teenage Natalie Portman and a bunch of then twentysomething name actors stumbling through a bad script. I take it “Suffering” is about suffering, but really can’t tell from the lyrics, which sound mostly nonsensical. But what a melody and singer, like something from the Stones late 60s heyday. When you can put out a song that gets into the vibe of "You Can't Always Get What You Want," you're in a good place. It surely felt right in that dark time.

“Last Night on Earth” by The Mekons. One of my favorite bands, The Mekons, have always struck me as a bunch of well-meaning assholes. I recall Jon Langford, the band’s leader, making some truly stupid statements about the state of America as the Iraq War started. (He called it the worst time ever in American history … he wasn’t an American … has lived in the Chicago area for roughly a decade … and seemed to have no knowledge of little things like slavery, numerous plagues, a fucking Civil War, radical mistreatment and genocide of Indians, working conditions before unions and child labor laws, two World Wars that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, centuries under British rule, but never mind all that.)

I forgave Langford because he has a great band, and “Last Night on Earth” was archetypal Mekons: “Life is a debt/That must someday be paid/Born when we were born/Left us helpless and self obsessed.” Amen to that. The song had nothing to do with 9/11 directly, but seemed to address that more real sense of people getting back to the less dramatic emptiness of their lives as compared to what had just passed. This was also a “life is getting better” song from that time, although better in that Mekons “world is fucked” sort of way. You have to love The Mekons for grasping humor from the darkness of life.

Seanchai – Gates of Hell. This was the only song specifically written about 9/11 that I can handle. I took a lot of heat at the time for noting in print what an awful song “Let’s Roll” by Neil Young was. It still is! His heart was in the right place … but, dear Lord, what an awful song. The small handful of those big-name artist songs related to 9/11 were. (“Into the Fire” by Springsteen does work, give him credit.) Seanchai was a NYC celtic band led by a former member of Black 47, and also, I gather, a former NYC policeman. Thus, he had insight to what was going on in the weeks after 9/11 in terms of endless funerals for cops and firemen featuring empty coffins, as there was often no body left to bury. I’d wager anyone living near a cemetery in the tristate area must have been hearing “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes a few times a week through early November. This song captures it all beautifully, particularly noting how many Americans of Irish lineage died that day, just by doing their jobs. If there’s one song you pull out of this piece, make it this one.

These Are the Days

Well, the Philadelphia Phillies came a long way this year, all the way to the World Series, only to be out-played by the New York Yankees. Never going to be a Yankees fan, nor a Mets fan, nor a fan of any New York sports team. I firmly believe the teams you follow as a kid are the ones you stick with as an adult. (I really tried being a Yankess fan when I lived in the Bronx, but these were the Deion Sanders years of the early 90s, i.e., they were pretty bad, and my heart just wasn't in it, although there was plenty of leg room in the upper decks of Yankee Stadium back then.)

They had a ticker-tape parade for the Yankees on Friday in the Canyon of Heroes down by City Hall. For one day, it became the Canyon of Guidos. I could see them on NY1 when I woke up in the morning, already tipsy at seven in the morning, grown men wearing baseball jerseys and gold chains, Yankees hats set slightly askew in that dickhead style made popular by hiphop artists in the 90s, baying into the camera like senseless hounds at a full moon. I saw them on the subway train, too, going to and from work. Butch-looking guys in Yankees jerseys and sweatshirts. A lot of mustaches. Surprisingly, a lot of teenage kids, many with that surly “Uncle Vinny has a union job lined up for me when I flunk out of high school” look: a real strange, unfriendly vibe. People who normally don’t ride a subway train. You could tell by their pose.

But who am I kidding? If they were to throw a parade in downtown Philadelphia, I’m convinced the participants would be exactly the same, save the South Philly contingent of guys whose lives appear to be unironic glorification of Italian-American stereotypes. All that would change would be the team jerseys. Yankees fans strike me as being no more or less boorish than any grown man who would go around in a team jersey carrying on like a mental patient in the streets when his team wins. Fun, to a point, but, buddy, it gets strange and tired after awhile.

There used to be a white kid who lived in the apartment house across the street from me here, actually the kid and his mother: Fat Johnny and his White Trash Mother. At least that’s how I referred to them. Astoria used to be much more gritty; we’re talking less than a decade ago. That building now houses nearly all affluent white folks paying what I’d guess are outrageous rents – the only things that remain the same are the Mexican super and his gigantic family living in the ground-floor apartment, and the decrepit state of the building.

Johnny was a chunky little white kid with blonde hair, a real loudmouth, too, you could always hear him in the street. I note his skin color because he was caught in that unfortunate wave of 90s kids who were convinced they were ghetto gangstas, when they were just creepy white kids with no identity and a repulsively moronic view of what it meant to black. I don’t like using words like “white trash” (because I don’t call downtrodden black folks “niggers”), but, boy, his Mom had it written all over her. She was permanently stuck in the second-floor window of one of those apartments, calling down to Johnny to tell him to shut up. You could often hear her phone conversations from the street, most of which concerned her hassling with the Duane Read pharmacy to have welfare cover payments for various medications. She never seemed to move from that spot – you could see her bulbous face, hovering behind the screen, like a priest in a confessional booth.

She seemed like a nice person in general, but then again, she gave the world Fat Johnny. Fat Johnny’s Dad would come around once or twice a year – please see above references to Italian-American stereotypes. Just this roly-poly loudmouth of a guy, you could tell he was no good, yelling at his ex-wife while he picked Johnny up and dropped him off. And he’d always yell when he left in that thick Queens accent: “Yo, Johnny, hang tough! Hang tough, Johnny! Yo, Johhhnnnyyyy! Hang tough, Johnny!” This would go on for a good five minutes. And he’d finally leave. Not every weekend like a good father with visitation rights would demand. I can recall that guy showing up maybe a handful times in the roughly five years they lived over there. Thus, Johnny’s anger with the world, or at least the roots of it.

What’s notable about all this? Every time the Yankees would play, and they won, Fat Johnny would hang his gigantic head out their second-floor apartment window and bay out the “Let’s go, Yankees!” chant, for minutes on end. Every single time. If you recall, the Yankees were pretty damn good in the late 90s, thus Johnny had many opportunities to serenade the neighborhood. It was like the “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” scene in Network … replaced with an angry 11-year-old kid with a voice like a braying jackass.

Have you already read between the lines that I couldn’t stand Fat Johnny? I’ve always had a hard time with trashy white folks: I take it personally. Come from roughly the same socio-economic class. Feel a radical difference between working class white folks raised in rural and urban areas … notice a much worse edge on the urban variety. Or maybe it’s just New York and the 718 vibe … although I suspect I’d be catching the same vibe in Philly, or Baltimore, or Boston. Then again, these days, I go home, and it seems like the bar keeps dropping lower on the white working class and how they carry themselves, all those 90s kids raised on grunge and Limp Bizkit coming into their 20s, and man, they’re not changing or growing one iota, just like all those hair metal assholes from the late 80s who still seem to be hair-metal assholes in their early 40s now. People have just developed this innate, sickly desire to go through life with their teenage predilections and tastes, which seems like a radical error to me.

Don’t know when it happened, but one day, Fat Johnny and his White Trash Mother simply weren’t there anymore. I imagine their lease rolled over, and they got the “make way for the enlightened white folks with college degrees and money to burn” bumrush that so many people have gotten over the past decade. (Hell, I’ve got a college degree, and I’ll get this, sooner or later, too!) Johnny did seem to blossoming into a more normal teenager. He grew a few inches and seemed a lot less brash the last few months they were over there, so who knows, maybe that kindness I could sense fleetingly in his mother was starting to shine through on him.

Your average Yankees fan? Hardly. Most fans of a team, you don’t see them in the stadiums. Think about it. It costs a fortune to see any pro sport on a regular basis these days. You will find working-class guys, especially in construction, getting season tickets and such to their favorite football teams. But most people in those stadiums are burning serious money to be there routinely. Obviously, the crowd grows more gritty the farther away you get from the playing field, but even those nosebleed seats don’t come cheap.

No. Most sports fans, you never seem them on TV. They’re on the other end, watching the TV. A stadium at its largest for, say, college football, will hold just over 100,000 people. There are millions of people watching those games. Frankly, I would never pay to see a pro football or baseball game. Every now and then, I luck into a free ticket to a baseball game, but never football, nor basketball or hockey, which seem even more expensive. It just aint worth it, and if I’m really watching the game, you can’t beat the TV at home, not in a bar or restaurant.

Guys like Fat Johnny, or those vaguely creepy guys I was seeing on the subway and streets all day Friday during that parade, while I wouldn’t call them the “real fans” they do represent a sort of silent majority of sports fans, the guys who either can’t afford to go to too many games, if any, and spend all their spare time in bars and family rooms tying one on while their team hopefully does them proud. The Yankees make them feel like winners by extension … and I can’t fault them for seeking out that sort of positive emotional identification in their lives.

I guess I’m one of them, too, although you’d have to pay me to wear a team jersey. (That seems like such a fucking childish thing to me … honestly, kids wear that sort of shit, not grown men.) I’m just as informed as any slightly above average fan and have a sense of team history going back to the early 70s (which was much stronger then thanks to baseball cards and the tons of information noted on the back of each card). I’m not one of these Ken Burns/George Will baseball fans … waiting for Morgan Freeman’s melodious voice to say something profound about Babe Ruth over a George Winston piano solo while the camera slow pans a stock black-and-white photo … fuck that shit. Guys who feel that way about baseball tend to have never played the game at all. I’m not a historian or uber-fan. I just enjoy watching the games and feel some sense of connection in my life to trace this minor passion back to my childhood.

And one thing I realized, even watching the Phillies lose this past week: these are the days for Phillies fans. Think about it. When I was a kid, the Phils truly sucked in the early part of the 70s, they got Steve Carlton, guys like Mike Schmidt, Greg "The Bull" Luzinski and Larry Bowa came up through the farm system, and they slowly changed, so that by 1976, they were a very good team. Went all the way in 1980. Lost in the World Series like they did this year in 1983. And that stretch from 1976 to 1983, in my mind, are The Golden Years (of my life) for the Phillies, filled with legendary players, back when life was good, things were easier, made more sense, etc.

But I was a kid in a small town, and it was the 70s. The Phils have been playing on a playoff-quality level since 2007, and if all goes well, should do the same next year, and a few more years to come if they can keep their core group of good players (Utley, Howard, Rollins, Victorino, Werth) intact and pick up some good pitching. They apparently have a pretty good farm system with some new names that will probably be on the team next year to hopefully add to the long list of solid regulars. It feels pretty good to be a Phillies fan right now.

And, in my mind, these are the days, now, just like they were back then. Save the players are now almost half my age. I don’t look up to them – in fact, a lot of them seem a bit weird. Jayson Werth looks like he should be wearing a sheepskin vest and screwing a girl on a rock in some heathen ceremony in the woods. Shane Victorino, the Flyin’ Hawaiian, looks like he’s about to jump out of his skin every second of the game. Cole Hamels, last year’s ace and this year’s goat, has a permanent southern Cal surfer dude smirk on his face that works real well when he’s winning, but turned sour this year. I don't know what Chase Utley has in his hair each game, but it looks like a handful of Crisco.

But they’re not the bunch of miscreants who stumbled through a losing effort in the 1993 World Series. That team seemed like a 75 Pinto shot into space like a freak comet. Guys like John Kruk at first, who hit well, but looked like he should have been playing the field with a can of Pabst in his throwing hand. And Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams on the mound, working a serious mullet, as many of the guys on that team did. From Wikipedia, a great quote from John Kruk about that team: “The previous year, noting the presence of the clean-cut Dale Murphy, Kruk himself described the team as ‘24 morons and one Mormon.’” They were in last place in 1992 and would sink back into a long malaise after that season -- which was nothing new for long-time Phillies fans.

No, right now, things are pretty good, and it’s worthwhile for me to note that. The “good old days” are never the good old days when you’re living them.

Real Fear

At least once a year, usually around this time, I’ll watch The Exorcist. Along with Jaws, this movie was responsible for many childhood nightmares and fears. Jaws scared me out of the ocean the summer I saw it, when our family made its annual trip to Point Pleasant, NJ. With The Exorcist, I made the mistake of staying up late one night and watching it by myself on HBO. (Yes, HBO was around back then, in a radically different format. Showing hit movies like that, but also a lot of 70s dross, repeatedly, most of which I now own on DVD because the movies are so burned into my mind.)

I watch now not just for the scare tactics, but the actual stories that go along with the movie. I love the side story of Father Damien Karras, who has his own shit going on besides dealing with this demon. He’s a trained psychiatrist, who went into the priesthood and finds himself middle-aged, burned-out at his job (counseling other priests), questioning his own faith and racked with guilt because he’s living away from his aging/ailing mother, who lives alone in a rundown New York City neighborhood. (It looks like Hells Kitchen when he goes to visit her … brilliant, gritty display of how far New York had slipped in the 1970s). She falls deathly ill, he goes to visit, she rebuffs him because he wasn’t there to help her in any sense, his uncle makes him feel like an asshole because he didn’t use his psychiatric background to make more money and ensure his mother wouldn’t wind up in a grubby city hospital ward …

This is great stuff! Father Damien is one of my favorite 70s movies characters, someone I take inspiration from, a role model of sorts. I love the scene where he confesses his lack of faith to a fellow priest … in a Georgetown bar, over beers and cigarettes, listening to the Allman Brothers on the jukebox! (Once on a messageboard, I noted how cool I though this was, only to have some Catholic nut jump on me for degrading the church. Bullshit. If anything, showing priests in that light only makes them more human and easier to understand. I had enough of that “priests are sacrosanct” nonsense from my grandmother … and we both went to a parish where our priest in the mid-late 70s was later nailed for pedophilia. Horrifying to think that if my grandmother had her way and pushed us down the altar-boy path that we would have been more open to an attack from this monster.)

But being older, something occurs to me about The Exorcist that hadn’t before. So, this demon comes along and takes over the body of this little girl. What’s the logic? Why? Let’s say this happens, everyone knows it’s happened, and everyone in her life just throws up their hands and says, “OK, let’s accept the demon, life goes on.” No locking him up in a bedroom to rattle off a vast array of special effects. Talking backwards in latin? That’s cool. Nice trick. Let’s put him on The Dinah Shore Show.

Let the demon to school. Ride the bus. Go bowling. Interact with other people. Go to McDonalds. Demon’s got to eat, too! Have a birthday party for the demon. Cake, ice cream, projectile vomiting and head spinning. Hooray!

I’d say the demon in the movie suffers from poor social skills because he’s locked up in a dark bedroom in a little girl’s body. Let him circulate. Let evil walk among us. The demon’s not such a bad guy. He just felt the need to pop into a little girl’s body for a few days to remind us all that the devil is real, as opposed to us sensing true evil exists in various “world gone wrong” scenarios that are very real, but not self evident that they are the work of a dark spiritual force. Sooner or later, the demon will get bored and go away. If a demon can do something wild like that, inhabit a person’s body, why not shoot big and go after heads of state, thus causing real evil with some surely horrific decisions? Why some powerless little girl? People are people. There is no “demon shield” around presidents and generals. It’s always struck me that true evil is ambitious, wants everyone to know how truly awful and terrifying it is. Not something we have to shake our heads about and wonder if it really exists.

The axis of fear that movie creates is based on that sense of isolation and claustrophobia, being stuck in a small, dark room with this awful thing. Let it out. Isn’t evil all around us? It would blow my mind to be on a subway train, and a little girl with yellow cat eyes would turn her head completely around and start telling me weird family secrets in my dead grandmother’s voice. Why not? Why reserve that sort of mind-bending shit for a dark bedroom?

I remember as a kid, my main fear with The Exorcist was going to bed at night (because the story took place in a child’s bedroom), rolling over, and seeing that horrible demon face inches from mine. Or raising myself up and looking out the window over my bed to see that face. I was immobile many nights because of that fear. But sooner or later, I realized, a greater fear would be to roll over and see a real person there, someone breaking into the house, you know, real shit that happens all the time, as opposed to something from a movie screen. A home intruder is a very real fear … so now I have to worry about this other-worldly shit, too, that never seems to happen to anyone I know?

Lately, I’ve been catching the show Ghost Adventurers on the Travel Channel (seems to be the same show as Ghost Hunters on Scy Fy Channel). (Edit: I've looked it up, and both shows have different teams, but it's hard to tell them apart as they're so physically similar.) It’s about a paranormal research group from Rhode Island who go around “testing” various sites infamous for paranormal activity. You know, abandoned asylums, old prisons, mansions, Indian burial grounds that are now more traditional suburban sprawl, etc.

I got no problems with the guys themselves, despite their “we’re serious, man!” demeanor that comes off like unironic Ghostbusters. Some of the shows I’ve watched, genuinely weird shit happens – unexplained noises, doors shutting by themselves, what could be voices … a few even had members of the team being visibly scratched by unseen forces.

Or at least it looked that way. At two in the morning. Filming each other in pitch blackness with final product that was clearly edited to include numerous camera shots.

And THAT’S my problem with the show. From what I understand, all the equipment these guys use – the normal video cameras, infrared cameras, heat-sensitive cameras (to pickup any type of physical warmth that an apparition might leave behind), the audio recording equipment, the electro-magnetic field sensors (to sense what could be unseen presences) – probably WORKS BETTER in broad daylight, with lots of lighting for the cameras.

They’re wandering around abandoned insane asylums at two in the morning, filming each other in less than optimal circumstances to capture any image that may appear to them, much less an other-worldly apparition. I don’t think ghosts, demons, poltergeists, or whatever, would subscribe to the concept that they can only come out and scare people at two in the morning. You hear a strange sound in that kind of environment, it might just be rats scurrying around the next empty room over. Or some stray sound that carries from a few miles away. Most of what they film and claim to be paranormal seems like questionable bullshit – whether it’s staged, or just something I’d much rather see filmed in broad daylight with real lighting so there’s no mistaking it. If they seriously wanted to film this stuff as evidence, they wouldn’t be going about it this way. Fucking high-school kids work this way – like Scoobie Doo! These guys should be riding around in a '75 Chevy Van with a talking dog.

Of course you’re going to be on-edge wandering around places like that in the middle of night. If you were a genuine scientist looking to validate or invalidate paranormal activity, you wouldn’t be going about it in such a half-assed, purposely vague manner. (I know … they’re playing up the fear factor for TV.) Try walking down a stone staircase you’ve never seen before in the middle of the night with 20 lbs. of equipment on your back and only a small camera light to guide your way … you are not going to be in a relaxed, lucid state of mind. You’re going to panic at every sound, every glint of light, every cold draft of air, etc. Regardless of whether that was a staircase where a fiend raped and strangled a five-year-old girl in 1898, or just some staircase.

And I’m having a hard time figuring why abandoned insane asylums are such horrible places, aside from kids and horror movies romanticizing their plight. I thought the gist of this whole paranormal thing was people dying/leaving the earth violently, and their troubled spirits hanging around afterwards. Of course, if this was true, lower Manhattan, after 9/11, would be wall-to-wall ghosts, day and night, thousands of them … but have there been any reported sightings down there? I’ve read of a few incidents of construction crews in Manhattans uncovering slave graveyards in their excavations … shouldn’t the spirits of those same slaves have been wandering around those apartments and office buildings scaring people for centuries afterwards, since their resting place was defiled, as we’ve seen in so many horror movies?

People have surely been abused horribly at insane asylums, but there’s a huge difference between electro-shock therapy and lobotomies, and violent death. I guess the image of crazy people in straightjackets plays on another irrational fear with people (especially younger people, at whom most of this stuff seems aimed) – loss of sanity – thus when one of these places closes down and becomes abandoned industrial zone decades later, ooga-booga, here comes the crazy ice-pick killer ghost at two in the morning, making sure to dodge the stray gangs of kids having beer bashes in the basement because it’s so fucking cool, man. An abandoned insane asylum, dude!

Whatever. You know what real horror is? Watching a loved one waste away and die. Learning someone you know has died violently. Being diagnosed with a debilitating disease. Losing huge sums of money. Child abuse. Violent crime. War. You know … real things that happen to real people every day. We have enough bad shit to ponder without silly shit like ghosts, demons and vampires entering the picture after darkness falls. If those things are real? I sure as hell haven’t seen them – then again, I’m not looking for them either. And the guys who are seem like a bunch of manipulative ass clowns, at least based on what’s shown on TV. It would seem to me evil spirits would have bigger fish to fry than making a chair move to mess with some paranormal activity expert’s head. Maniacs are stockpiling automatic weapons and ammunition to take out innocent people in schools and shopping malls … yet we still need to pump ourselves full of rollercoaster-ride fear to convince us that true evil exists?

The McDonald’s Syndrome

I drink a lot of water at work. It’s a health thing, on top of which my body heat is way up when I rush to the office every morning. A cup of hot tea? I don’t know how people do it. Even on the coldest days of winter, I feel my body running hot when I get into work. Need water. Will drink two or three 20-oz. cups at work, along with a can of soda after lunch.

I like ice with my water. Not a lot, a cube or two. Some places I’ve worked have had ice machines, the one I’m at now doesn’t. We depend on ice trays in the freezer, and the mercy of fellow coworkers filling them up when necessary. I care about the issue enough that I went out to Bed, Bath and Beyond one weekend and bought two solid Rubbermaid ice trays, as the ones we had at work were cracked and leaking. I like ice!

It’s recently come to my attention, via the ice-tray issue, that I have to deal with another crackpot coworker. Every place I’ve ever worked has had crackpot coworkers. People who aren’t necessarily bad or evil; they’re just crazy. No other way to put it. Something wrong with them. Those graceless peasants in the Transylvania night, the ones with pitchforks and torches chasing down a werewolf or Frankenstein monster? They’ve been my coworkers in so many NYC offices. Not very intelligent, easily misled, fearful … but ultimately not evil people. Wandering around the woods at two in the morning in lederhosen and straw hats, under a full moon, with faces as blank as the orb they gaze up at.

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but New York City has some of the best tap water in the world. I can vouch for this. One of the few under-rated and genuine things about living here. This is obviously because the water flows down an intricate pipeline system from much more pure reservoirs 100 miles upstate. It’s clean and tastes great. Read this report if you need any convincing.

I’m a good guy with filling up ice trays – obviously, I use a lot of ice, therefore it’s only fair that I should fill the trays when I see them empty. I’ll do this in the morning if I see a tray running low, and at night before I leave, I’ll go to the lunch room and fill up trays on my way out of the office to ensure that there’ll be fresh ice when I get in the next morning.

But lately, something weird has been happening. I’ll go into the lunch room in the morning, and the trays will be relatively full. Fine. After lunch, when I go back with my water cup, looking to get a few cubes for my daily can of soda, each of the three trays will be filled with water and nowhere near frozen: not once ice cube to be had for anyone for the rest of the work day. (Sidenote: let’s not get into the nutcases who leave bags of food in the refrigerator for weeks, sometimes to the point where the rotting stink of whatever they have in there permeates the taste of the ice cubes. Sometimes it seems like they’re leaving rotten, maggot-ridden goat’s heads in brown paper bags.)

For weeks, I was perplexed: were people really using this much ice? How could they … 36 ice cubes, gone in two hours? It didn’t make any sense. From what I’ve seen, only a handful of people use the ice trays in this place – and the state of the two trays they had was awful before I went out and bought two new ones.

This was a mystery until earlier this week. There’s a group of women who sit at the main table in the lunch room every day around 1:00 in the afternoon. Like clockwork: they’re always there, all from the same department (not mine, thankfully), usually carping and gossiping about coworkers in a way I find depressingly familiar. The vibe they put out is like head bulls in a maximum security women’s prison. It’s THEIR table and they’re going to SIT THERE and TALK SHIT on their LUNCH HOUR. All that’s missing are orange jumpsuits and a big butch girl with a mullet and spider web tattoo on her neck.

Well, the other day, I went back in shortly after 1:00 to get ice for my soda. When I did, I noticed something odd. One of the women from that group had two ice trays out on the counter. One was in the freezer, and it was full, so I cracked out two cubes, dropped them in my cup, got my soda and left. As I was leaving, I noticed this woman was cracking out the ice cubes into the sink, and then walking over to the drinking fountain on the other side of the lunch room to refill the tray with that water.

I didn’t confront her, but mystery solved. This crackpot was/is under the impression that the water from the drinking fountain is somehow better than the water coming from the tap. (Again, refer to that handy PDF file I provided above re: NYC tap water. There are actually people selling this stuff for $1.50 a bottle!) I’m wondering how she could even tell the difference! (Of course, she can’t: she’s insane.) I have noticed one difference, because I’ve had to re-fill the trays a few times from the drinking fountain when the sink was clogged. The water from the fountain tends to make for more brittle/crackable ice cubes, possibly because of whatever filter is installed on it? I don’t know, but it really makes no difference to me. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the ice cubes created from the tap. (I’ll use water from the fountain to drink only because it comes out so cold – tap never gets near as cold. They even have a water cooler next to the fountain – I guess to assuage the next level of neurotic nutcases who can’t drink from a public fountain.)

Such a minor thing, but when you’re having a ragged day at work, is it too much to ask that some mental patient doesn’t spend her time cracking out trays of perfectly good ice cubes into a sink, thus fucking over her coworkers for the rest of the day (and when it’s 90 degrees and humid in NYC …), thus ensuring that no one has ice because she has some weird, unfounded and completely idiotic phobia about NYC tap water? Lord help me if this woman ever sees me using tap water for ice cubes and makes an issue out of it – I’ll try to be civil. Some conversations in New York, the best way to end them would be to slam a butterfly net down over the other person’s head and break out the straight jacket: this is such a case.

The kicker to all this: this is an employee of the month! That’s another oddity about the work place that a few of us have noticed. The committee that chooses the employee of the month, who is honored in the monthly email newsletter, almost always chooses the most prickly, annoying, pompous, hard-to-deal-with workers as the winner. Not just that … the motherfuckers often choose themselves! Nearly each person on that committee has been employee of the month at one time or another. They nominate each other, slap each other on the back, and their strange little world spins on its crooked axis.

I’ve never had to deal with this woman directly, but the few times I have indirectly, I’ve caught vague whiffs of self importance and bad manners (both of which run rampant in my work place). The people I’ve noticed winning employee of the month the past few months, dear lord, getting help from them, in my experience, has been like pulling teeth. Granted, a lot of them have awful jobs (Accounting Dept. staff, legal assistants, I.T. drones, etc.), and they’re suffering from what I call The McDonald’s Syndrome. Simply stated, the McDonald’s Syndrome, named after the fast-food chain and its teenage employees, is when a worker who deals with awful and abusive people all day then becomes awful and abusive himself. I’d never thought of it, but the Stockholm Syndrome referred to with terrorists and their kidnapped prisoners often comes into play at work, too. Many people I’ve worked with suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome, substituting upper management for terrorists and themselves for the prisoners. Sooner or later, they start thinking the same warped way, even though it in no way benefits them and they are, in fact, wage slaves afraid to leave a given position, lest they never find another. They're like Patty Hearst packing a machine gun in a bank.

But I think I need to be more concerned with McDonald’s Syndrome because, truth be told, I can see that I, too, will be suffering from it if I keep letting people like the queen of the ice-cube trays get under my skin. There are a lot of bad workers where I work. Newsflash: there always have been wherever I’ve worked! There must be some well-run, fair-minded companies out there, but I gather they must also be very small and not advertising their enlightened state of being. As with terrorist cells, you’d need numerous federal agencies working in tandem to track down these companies. Or, you could just fall into them by chance. But I’m convinced it’s virtually impossible to have a sane, well-run, fair company with anything more than 20 employees, and even then, you’re more than likely to have a few bad eggs throw in the mix to keep things interesting. This is what happens with money. When there are opportunities to make it, and lots of it, you will always attract unsavory characters, in whatever role they’re cast. It’s a given, and simple common sense to recognize as much.

You know what they didn’t tell you in high school? And surely didn’t tell you in college? That the rest of your adult work life will be exactly like high school! You don’t like high school? Bad news … most companies I’ve worked for have been just like high school. Cliques, big men on campus, weirdoes, people who pick on and humiliate others for no clear reason, geeks, jocks, cheerleaders, counterfeit authority figures … motherfucker, they’re in every place I work! College was like an oasis in comparison, and not indicative of how adult life would go in terms of working for any company. That was a highly idealized view of the world, that cost money to visualize, and I strongly suspect actually working at a college would represent an endless sea of red tape, bullshit politics and head games just as bad as you’d find in any major corporation. Still, it was nice to be pampered like that for a few years, on our little Mount Olympuses, thinking the world would spin around our philosophical musings and whimsical delights of the mind.

That shit doesn’t work in the real world. I wish it did. But just like high school, you have to figure out how you’re going to deal with ice-cube tray queens. They’re not responsible for your sense of well being, and you know if they were, they’d be pissing on it like a cow on a flat rock.

The Gayest Song Freddie Mercury Ever Wrote

For teenagers, there are certain bands that are “theirs” completely. By this, I mean the kids are following a current band that is at its creative peak, and there’s just something about that age, that time in life, where an unbreakable bond is made between lifestyle, taste, memory, etc. Years later, the adult will play that music, and it will still make the same kind of sense. Inside, the adult will feel like he’s 15 again, or at least relate back to that sense he had of the world at that time. I wouldn’t even call this nostalgia, as it’s not longing for a return of those days. It’s basic memory.

I’m not ashamed to say that Queen and the Electric Light Orchestra were surely my bands in that category circa the mid-to-late 70s. Sure, I was into 60s gods like The Kinks (especially), Beatles, Stones and Who, and just getting over my first big rock star, Elton John, but those two bands came right along just as I was becoming a teenager and rode out their best years into my young adulthood. They were cheesy in many ways – critics looked down on both bands at the time. (I would, too, as I grew into more new wave/alternative music a few years later, but I eventually came back to them. Damn few of those 80s bands I favored at the time hold up to my 70s favorites.)

But I can listen to both bands today and, especially compared to what’s followed over the years, recognize a great pop sense (with classical leanings) and production values that both bands had, and the critics were misguided. I think a lot of the negativity rock critics had in the 70s towards successful rock acts was based on the fact that they had no control over bands like Queen and ELO, i.e., their bad reviews didn’t mean shit to the fans. Thus, if you were to rely solely on critics’ reviews and not have any experience with the music, you’d get a very lopsided, dishonest view of the pop music culture at the time. (Hey, I just described your average VH-1 documentary: the losers rewrite history!)

The one thing I often come back to with Queen is the fact that none of us, as teenage fans, seemed to grasp that Freddie Mercury was flamingly, way out-of-the-closet gay. It’s painfully obvious to me now, has been for decades. But at the time, either none of us knew, or we were so used to British rock stars being so effeminate and purposely blasé about their sexuality (see David Bowie, another 70s hero of mine), that it just didn’t matter to us. Compare and contrast to today, where you have artists either marketed as openly gay, or dominant popular genres so intolerant of gay culture (hiphop, metal, country) that they somehow seemed to have burrowed farther back in the time than the 70s to values a thousand times more closed than the “whatever” attitude so many of us were raised with back then. It’s a strange environment of progression and regression at the same time.

But, man, Freddie Mercury was flaming as a tailpipe on a 76 Nova, no two ways about that. And I mean that as a compliment, because it was so clearly part of his character and who he was. Queen wouldn’t have been Queen without a real “Queen” running the show. I wrote about this phenomenon close to a decade ago for Leisuresuit.net, recalling one of the tougher guys in our high school having an extremely gay Circus magazine centerfold poster of Freddie in a silver lame leotard and ballet slippers on the inside of his locker. That’s how it was. You sort of understood that even if the guy was gay, man, he knew how to rock hard, and that’s all that mattered to most kids.


But lately I’ve been thinking of those “warning signs” in Queen’s music that were present all along the way – nearly all their albums had Freddie Mercury-penned songs that, in retrospect, are flaming. At the time, I would sort of just shake my head and think, “There goes Freddie again!” Not quite getting that this was just a talented gay man slipping into the more vaudevillian, song-and-dance man vibe of his being. The big tip-off should have been when he changed his look from long-haired rock god to mustachioed leather tough guy. I recall seeing the Al Pacino movie Cruising (watch this youtube clip for one of the funniest dance scenes you’ll ever see) around that time, populated with guys in leather bars who looked just like Freddie Mercury, yet, even then, it didn’t fully click that the guy was gay.

It was also the times. You had Elton John admitting he was bisexual circa 1976, which was a huge thing at the time, despite, again, it seeming fairly obvious that this was the case. And even he went on to marry a woman in the 80s to somehow “talk” himself out of being gay, whereas he simply made peace with himself when the marriage floundered and accepted who he was. When someone living the relatively sheltered “do anything you want to do” life of a superstar goes through those kinds of head games, you can grasp that society in general wasn’t exactly rolling out the red carpet for gay folks.

What was the gayest song Freddie Mercury ever wrote? I’m a big Queen fan, so for me it’s easy to go back through the catalog and figure this out, at least with my interpretations. There are obvious songs, like “Killer Queen” and “Play the Game.” And really odd/hard possibilities like “Get Down, Make Love” that I’d rather not think about. (And for the record, the gayest-sounding song Queen ever recorded, the theme from the movie Flash Gordon, was written by lead guitarist Brian May.) But there are certain songs that I recall playing at the time, and some internal “gadar” going off although I didn’t fully grasp what it meant at the time. I can only wonder what my Dad thought as he passed by bedroom and heard some song that sounded like drag queens doing an old vaudeville number. Then again, he was so disgusted with rock and roll in general that it all sounded awful to him, so he probably didn’t discriminate.

Without further adieu (a phrase Freddie probably loved), my top five of the gayest songs Freddie Mercury ever wrote:

5. Seaside Rendezvous. Sample lyrics:

I feel like dancing - in the rain
Can I have a volunteer ?
Just keep right on dancing
What a damn jolly good idea
It's such a jollification - as a matter of fact
So tres charmant my dear

Queen had a nasty habit of recording these cheesy vaudeville numbers that were totally out of place on their albums (but made sense with their “anything goes” image). Brian May had one with “Good Company” on their landmark A Night at the Opera album, on which “Seaside Rendezvous" also appears. The rest are all Freddie’s doing. In retrospect, this should have been b-side material – it just wasn’t their image! Granted, you could tell, Freddie got a perverse kick out of prancing through numbers like this, but your average 70s rock fan … try to imagine a parking lot full of 70s teenage metal heads jamming to “Seaside Rendezvous.” You can’t, because they didn’t. What a damn jolly good idea? Who the fuck talked like that? No one … save Freddie Mercury!

4. Bring Back That Leroy Brown. Sample lyrics:

And unless I be mistaken
This is what she said
"Big bad, big boy, big bad Leroy Brown
I'm gonna get that cutie pie"

This may be the worst song Queen recorded. As far as I’m concerned, Freddie wrote the best songs of all of them. (Each member wrote songs, and they all had hits, too.) “Bohemian Rhapsody” was a life-changing song for me. Every album is packed with great ballads. “March of the Black Queen” from Queen II is a lost masterpiece of hard rock. “Death on Two Legs,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “Somebody to Love” … the guy wrote hits.

But “Bring Back That Leroy Brown” … man, it’s gay. Just listen to it. I have to wonder what the other guys in the band did when Freddie brought this song around to the studio. Did they look at each other, shake their heads and mutter, “Dude, what the fuck?” But I guess every great band operates on compromise. Imagine how The Beatles felt when McCartney rolled out “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” or “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” It must have been like eating a shit sandwich. But, bigger picture, they knew he’d also bring in a handful of songs that were sure hits and the kind of music they loved to play. Who knows, maybe they enjoyed the respite of tossing off a “Leroy Brown” style ditty every album to lighten up the studio?

3. Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy. Sample lyrics:

Ooh let me feel your heartbeat (grow faster, faster)
Ooh ooh can you feel my love heat
Come on and sit on my hot-seat of love
And tell me how do you feel right after-all
I'd like for you and I to go romancing
Say the word - your wish is my command

Come on and sit on my hot seat of love? What is that? His lap? Actually, I’m picturing a red, heart-shaped cushion, a big one that two grown men can frolic on. There’s something about the way the band harmonizes on the line “I’d like for you and I to go romancing” that sounds over-poweringly, “just listening to this might turn me gay” sort of gay. A much better song than “Bring Back That Leroy Brown,” but still not the song I’d select to have blasting from the 8-track tape deck while driving through the high-school parking lot.

This was from A Day at the Races, then and still my favorite Queen album. Not as flamboyant as the previous A Night at the Opera, but it seemed like the songs were a notch better, even if there wasn’t a monster hit like “Bohemian Rhapsody.” This is the one song on the album I could do without! Literally every other song on that album is good. I think they were contractually obligated to have the one song on the album of Freddie fucking around.

2. Don’t Stop Me Now. Sample lyrics:

I'm a shooting star leaping through the sky
Like a tiger defying the laws of gravity
I'm a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva
I'm gonna go go go
There's no stopping me
I'm burnin' through the sky yeah
Two hundred degrees
That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit
I'm trav'ling at the speed of light
I wanna make a supersonic man out of you

Mr. Fahrenheit? Yow. I don’t call anyone Mr. Fahrenheit! Or Mr. Celsius, for that matter. (I once called someone Mr. Kelvin, but he hit me in the face with a frozen banana for doing so.) This song sounds like it was meant for the glee club, that one number where the guys loosen their clip-on ties and do something more “contemporary.” The music teacher/pianist gathers the boys 'round the piano for a leisurely singalong that erupts into a synchronized dance routine with canes and the female members of the club shimmying feather boas.

I actually like this song but recognize someone like Peter Allen or Liza Minnelli really would have done it more justice. When I hear this song, I picture guys in gold and silver leotards jumping through the air while fireworks go off in the background. Then Freddie coming through a bank of fog, riding a gigantic penis with sparks shooting out the head. (I think I missed my calling as a video director.)

1. The Millionaire Waltz. Sample lyrics:

Bring out the charge of the love brigade
There is spring in the air once again ...

My fine friend - take me wiz you unt love me forever
My fine friend - forever – forever

He wasn’t joking when he called it a waltz – this song is done in waltz time. Again, the image is just incongruous with your average 70s rock fan. How many metal bands do you know who do waltzes? Especially with the rejoinder “Bring out the charge of the love brigade”! What is the love brigade? (Cue the guys in silver and gold leotards … only give them Napoleon Bonaparte hats and plastic sabres!)

But “The Millionaire Waltz” is one of those Mercury multi-tiered songs, with soft and hard sections, so you can simultaneously rock out and flounce. I give the song a break because Brian May clearly had a blast doing his “guitar orchestra” thing with the arrangement. And the lyrics above are accurate: “take me wiz you unt love me forever.” That’s exactly what he sang. And I’m sure he meant every word! Was probably wearing a monocle and top hat for effect while he crooned the line in the studio.

Always something to keep in mind with Freddie: the guy started as Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, a British colony, son of a Zoroaster family, went to private school near Mumbar in India, a kid with a tremendous, debilitating overbite, found his calling at a talent show at that private school when he slayed the audience doing Little Richard songs (imagine him rocking out in his school blazer!), family moved to London after political strife in Zanzibar, got more into music, changed his name to Mercury, and Freddie took it from there. To come from that sort of improbable background and do what he did was amazing. Like a tiger defying the laws of gravity!

The Brawling Bickleys

I came across anothe "short story" style piece that's been sitting around -- think I was going for a Winesburg, Ohio style pastiche of stories with this one. That was one book in college that really hit me the right way. I think a lot of us are haunted by the concept of that book because it presents such a romantic view of small-town life, and we know it isn't like that (but want it to be). Maybe it was at that time, in the earlier part of the last century, but so much homogenization has occurred since then, so much becoming depressingly similar. Still, one of the sections was about a pair of brothers who fought constantly, based on a few key people I've known in my life, but not about any one person directly. Nasty kid stuff: enjoy.

***

Ted and Frank Bickley co-owned the Black Hills Creamery, a small drive-in ice-cream shop that the near-by Dairy Queen just couldn’t kill off. Their father had been the town milkman, driving from house-to-house in his van, wearing a white uniform with matching cap, dropping off bottles of milk in small wire holders and picking up the empties left by his customers. As time went on and chain supermarkets moved into the area, he realized that there was no way he could compete. As he was near retirement age and both his sons were in their 20s and at loose ends, he encouraged them to take over his small dairy farm and turn it into an ice cream shop. He passed on five years later, but in that time, he had managed to build the roadside shop, with the farm out back, so that customers could sit out front eating their ice cream at wooden picnic tables, and then wander out back for their kids to feed hay to the cows in the field. Ted and Frank had been unwilling participants in all this, but when their father died, some sense of obligation kicked in, and both rose to the occasion, going so far as to buy the next open lot to their farm and turning it into a miniature golf course. While they didn’t get rich doing this, they lived comfortably and worked hard to ensure that the locals had a better time at their creamery than at the Dairy Queen.

They lived in adjacent houses down the road from the creamery. Both were married, Frank with a small daughter, and to all the world, they appeared to be the perfect picture of loving brothers. They were, but the kids in Black Hill who grew up with Ted and Frank, now adults themselves, knew that this happy ending had seemed highly improbable for years. It was the nature of so many brothers in town that the older one, usually bigger, loved to beat the shit out of the younger one. And they could be vicious with each other. Verbally abusing each other at the drop of a hat. Searching for any weakness to exploit. A boy’s life – inflict scabs to have something to pick on.

Frank was four years younger than Ted, and they were known as the Brawling Bickleys. Their fights came about during the games the kids played. Ted was a great athlete, the kind of kid who could try any sport and immediately be the best at it. What Frank lacked in skill, he made up for in size. Although most of the kids were older than Frank, he was bigger than they were. Frank was one of those strange kids who didn’t follow the unspoken rule that older kids somehow had to be dominant. No one dominated Frank, except Ted, who was smaller than Frank but much more agile. Every time the kids played whatever sport was in season, Frank and Ted had to be on different sides. Ted was always the team captain, and one of the older boys was the other team captain, which was already an unspoken sign of resentment to Frank. It was understood that Ted would never choose Frank for his team. The point was moot, though -- invariably, because of his size and brute force, Frank would be the first kid picked on the other team.
The games were harsh enough to begin with. Kids doing splits, having their noses broken, being gouged in the eyes. Once, a kid named Troy Boychick broke his neck playing football. The general rule was no blood, no foul, and if there was blood, have a debate on whether or not to penalize. Anything went.

A few minutes into each game, Ted and Frank would start going at each other. If it was baseball, Ted would throw fastballs inside on Frank, and Frank would return the favor by blocking the plate when Ted came around to score from third, even if the play wasn’t close. Football was the worst because they could physically attack each other and get away with it. Ted went on to become the high-school’s starting quarterback, while Frank quit the team in his sophomore year because he considered high-school football too civilized. In the neighborhood games, every kid feared being hit by Frank. The unsuspecting victim would feel a hard wind blow against his back, and then Frank would drive his body into the ground. The last thing the kid would see was the ball rolling away on the green grass. He’d lay there shaking and whimpering like a dreaming dog. All he would remember was being too hurt to cry, wondering if he’d ever walk again. He’d taste grass and dirt in my mouth but not have the power to spit it out. After a few moments, his teeth would start tingling, and then he’d feel a pain in his sides as if he had laughed too hard. Everyone would stand around staring at him. Frank would ask him if he was all right, and he would nod. But the rest of that game, maybe even the rest of that season, the kid would be a non-entity on the field, unless he was on Frank’s side.

Ted and Frank antagonized each other with looks at first, and then words. Trash talking was unusual in Black Hill -- you only did it if you were going to fight someone. Frank would start calling Ted stuff like “hot-dogging faggot.” But Ted got the best of Frank by insinuating that Ted jerked off in the bathroom with their mother’s Ladies Home Journal. The way he said it, not even as a taunt, more as a fact, insinuated that there must have been some truth in it. Frank was also famous for sticking his hand into the butt of his pants then smelling his fingers. It was strange stuff, but most boys did the same thing, only not in public. This gave Ted plenty of ammunition when the taunting started.

The taunting went on until a play came along that gave them chance to go at each other, usually a potential quarterback sack on Ted. Sometimes it was so obvious that Ted would throw the ball directly at Frank as a way of getting the first shot in. Frank would tackle Ted, and they’d start a vicious fight the likes of which no one else in the neighborhood had ever been in. Full swinging, face biting, scratching -- they were worse than women. Both of them would start crying as they fought, sobbing openly as they grunted and cursed. The other kids were so used to these outbreaks that they would gather around and mentally take notes on what to do if they ever got into a real fight. That feeling of a fight -- pure tension and fear -- was never there when Ted and Frank went at it. It seemed natural, like it wouldn’t be a complete game unless Ted and Frank had it out at least once.

After a few minutes, they’d be wrapped around each other throwing painless rabbit punches. At this point, one or the other would start laughing, and the other would join in. Soon, they’d be rolling on the grass or macadam, arm in arm, laughing at each other. They’d get up with their bruises and bloody noses, slapping each other on the back and wiping their tears.

This strange ritual went on for years, until one fateful Saturday in the winter when Ted and Frank went to confession at St. Joseph’s, Black Hill’s Catholic church. The brothers were in the habit of going the first Saturday of every month, just enough time to compile enough sins to make it all worthwhile for the priest. They never knew who was on the other side of the screen. The priests in the surrounding parishes had a way of trading off with each other so that a certain priest wouldn't hear the sins from his own parish.

Most of the parishioners knew enough to whisper their sins. The church was deathly quiet on those Saturday afternoons, with only a few people in the pews whispering their penances, and the rest waiting in line by the confessional booths.

That Saturday, Ted had copped to stealing a bunch of nickels and dimes he had found buried between the sofa pillows after his father had taken a nap there. And, of course, using the Lord's name in vain, which seemed to be every kid's ace in the hole.

As Ted whispered his penance with the other parishioners, he heard Frank reciting the act of contrition in the booth. It was winter, and the church was unusually quiet, with a blanketing snow falling outside. There was Ted, a few other kids and a dozen old ladies in the church.
"Bless me father, for I have sinned ..." Frank started. In the portions where the priest would speak, Ted heard only indecipherable whispers and thought for sure that Frank would be reprimanded for talking too loud. But he went through his contrition and started listing his sins, all of which Ted heard as if Frank were sitting next to him. Ted glanced around, and he could tell that everyone else was hearing this, too, as they tried to hide their faces in their praying hands.
"I stole $20.00 from my father's wallet. I knew stealing $1.00 would have made him suspect me, and I wanted him to blame my mother instead. Which he did, and they had a big fight. I called my brother a bad word. I punched one of my friends in school on the jaw and hurt him. And forgive me, father, but I touched myself every night this week."

There were a few more whispers.

"In the bathroom before I went to bed."

More whispers.

"My older brother's Playboy magazine and two tissues."

Those gentle whispers.

"Forgive me, father. It won't happen again."

Ted was in tears, as were the other kids praying or waiting in line. The old ladies had pretended not to hear and fixed their eyes on the floor, realizing that they would have been out of line to raise their voices over a confession no one but the priest was supposed to hear. Frank came out of the booth, blushing over his sins, not realizing everyone else knew them.

When they got out in the parking lot, Ted cut into him.

“Asshole, that’s Dad’s Playboy you were jerking off to! I stole it from him. I found it hidden under one of the milk crates in the back of the truck. I guess he was too embarrassed to ask around about it.”

“What are you talking about?” Frank asked.

The other kids were gathering around, certain that another Bickley brawl was about to happen.

“Don’t you know everybody heard you in the confession booth? What, did you think I was Jesus or somehow reading your mind? And how dare you take a $20 from dad’s wallet. Forget about God … wait until Dad hears about this!”

Frank’s face turned beet red. He looked around at the other kids, all of whom were too embarrassed, and afraid, to return his gaze. Ted had his chin up. It was as though he were a lawyer who knew all the answers and only asked questions that proved this.

Instead of attacking Ted, Frank started to cry. Not a sobbing cry, but more his eyes watering too hard to stop. He just kept staring at Ted, whom it dawned on that this was no longer funny. The truth was, Ted already knew Frank’s sin of masturbation. Most nights, he would have a dream that he was surrounded by white doves, which after a certain peaceful time, would start flapping their wings and flying away. Ted would wake up, realizing that the sound of wings flapping was really Frank jerking off. He never let on to Frank that he was awake. It just seemed too embarrassing, and he did the same thing, although not nearly as much as Frank did and never with him in the same room.

The other kids started walking away, leaving only the brothers in the snowy parking lot. Eventually, they walked home together, not looking at or speaking to each other.

Ted never did tell his father about the $20, and no one ever gave Frank a hard time about his confession, lest he beat them to death. Besides, it would be hard to hold Frank accountable for something they were all doing like monkeys in a zoo. But after that day at Confession, Frank and Ted never fought. On the other hand, they didn’t seem as close, moving in different social circles. This went on for years, until their father died, at which time, something broke, and they became friends again. Whatever compelled them to beat the shit out of each other as kids no longer mattered, or even existed. It became a distant memory for those kids who grew up with Ted and Frank as they licked ice-cream cones in the cool of the evening while their kids fed hay to the cows.

One Big Suburb

I’ve never lived in the suburbs, so I can’t truly explain why I don’t like them. The closest I came was living two years in State College, PA, which is not a suburb in any traditional sense, but most of the town, once outside the downtown/campus area, does seem like a suburb. Not quite rural, not quite urban. Higher income level among most people. Chain stores geared towards the upper side of the middle class. Folks acutely aware of property values (and what it quietly takes to maintain them).

No, when it comes to my disdain for suburbs, I’m usually referring to a suburban mentality: the concept of spoiled people living under the mistaken impression that they have the best of both worlds (rural and urban life) when the truth is they’re in some strange, expensive netherworld that didn’t exist until the 1950s. Traffic is often as bad as in the city, as is the feeling of being crammed in. But you can have your little green space, and occasionally be reminded that driving half an hour could deposit you in a truly rural area (where you wouldn’t want to live because you consider yourself somehow superior to those folks).

What alarms me most these days is the realization that New York City, in its white neighborhoods, has become a suburb … of itself. I’m talking that mentality more than anything, but I know when I’m around it. Here’s an instance that happened yesterday on my way to the gym. Sunday morning, hustling, as I always do, to get there early so I can set up the heavy bags. This is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan: very pricey, residential area, I’d guess your average studio goes for around $2K a month? I wouldn’t know. All I know is you need to make truckloads of money and/or be totally nuts to live there. Because the quality of your life will not be equivalent to the amount of money spent on rent or mortgage.

So, I’m hustling along Lexington Avenue, walking briskly. I pass by a bike shop and notice a little kid rolling his bike with training wheels out of the shop. He’s happy, really enjoying himself, has a little helmet on, I feel good seeing him. I walk past him as he’s having a hard time getting his foot/pedal coordination together. After I pass, I can see a middle-aged guy near the end of the block – obviously the kid’s father. The usual prickly-looking, WASP-y Manhattan twat: running shorts, goony bar shades, knit shirt, reeking of self importance, kind of guy who prints out daily agendas for his vacations and gets mad as a hornet when they’re not adhered to. I can hear him berating/encouraging his son: “Come on, Dylan, we’re running late, left foot, right foot, how hard can it be.”

He sounds exasperated, and I can sense the kid’s mood has darkened, now mentally shitting his pants because he’s “making Dad angry.” He eventually finds the pedals and starts picking up speed – I’m hearing all this, not seeing it, listening to the kid whimper “sorry, Dad” and such. I come up on the corner, and the walk light is clearly on – has been for a few seconds, is not flashing. In my peripheral vision, I can see a cab slow down and ease to a halt a few feet from the cross walk. I don’t break stride. No need to.

As I’m going through the cross walk, I hear Dad blurt out in an angry voice, “Look, Dylan! That’s how NOT to cross a street! That guy didn’t even look to see if anyone was coming! Don’t ever cross a street that way! Always look, and look twice, when you cross a street!”

This prick knows I can hear him; I’m only about 12 feet away. He’s barking at his kid loud enough that I could have heard him halfway down the block. And I don’t think this guy is smart enough to realize he’s exposing his kid to a much more dangerous behavior than anything to do with traffic lights. And that is: don’t humiliate strangers, because they might hurt you. Never mind that there was no need for me to do some hokey complete head turn to look at a cab that I could clearly see in my side vision was coming to a halt (and I’d have surely seen a speeding cyclist or runner, too).

What should I have done? Stopped, explained to this putz the wonders of peripheral vision (mine isn’t anything special … we all have it)? Would that have mattered to a guy like this? Run over and deck him? That would be great – possible assault charge, and this poor kid crying while Daddy watches small birds circle his head as he lays cross-eyed on the sidewalk. Indulge in Dad’s assholery and mutter “go fuck yourself” as I pass?

No. I just kept walking. That’s what you do in the city, unless there’s a real need to set someone straight. Nothing would be gained by engaging a douchebag like that in a conversation. There are no conversations with people like that – only monologues. His kid will figure out, sooner or later, that Dad’s a dick. Of course, I’d also wager he’ll be just like him one day, despite many passionate teenage assertions that this will never happen.

It occurred to me afterwards: that whole incident was suburban, not urban. You had a guy in his affluent neighborhood, thinking the world is spinning around him, living a life that is the exact antithesis of the city, i.e., a place where you should innately grasp that danger is always present. A cab stopping at a red light is not dangerous. Saying something derogatory to a passing stranger could be. It speaks to that sort of bullshit “safeness” one moves to the suburbs for that this guy didn’t grasp the possibilities of the situation, that I could have: a. been some nutcase; and b. been some nutcase who went off his nut and rained hell on his life in the next few moments.

I run into this sort of smugness all the time in Manhattan. If I took a time machine back to, say, 1950, or 1978, I would rarely encounter that attitude. (The attitude I’d encounter might be just as offensive, but not this smarmy sort of suburban privilege.) What’s worse, I can surely feel it creeping it into my neighborhood in Astoria. As noted, anywhere you find white folks living en masse in New York City, rest assured, sooner or later, real-estate vultures will start circling, and these suburban vampires will creep in over time and suck the life from any given neighborhood.

I wouldn’t even say “suck the life from” as that’s not what happens. What happens is that slow gentrification osmosis, the renters slowly becoming the property owners, the kids morphing from street toughs into private-school kids in blazers. That takes decades to occur. Right now in Astoria, we’re seeing the ascension of the renting class, the neighborhood swarming with deeply inexperienced white twenty- and sometimes even thirtysomethings who think it’s normal to spend $1K a month on a studio apartment in what’s still a fairly predominate working-class neighborhood. I’d say at first most of these people were made acutely aware of this, and a lot of them moved straight out, recognizing they were in the wrong place. But enough stayed. And then more stayed. Articles got written in all the right places. I’m convinced the Beer Garden just north of Astoria Boulevard has served as a magnet to so many of these people, drawing in that bozo contingent of Manhattanites yearning for their frat-party days at school, and instead finding quiet neighborhood streets for them to piss on at two in the morning after a hard night of beer pong. Like dogs marking their territory, they moved here.

The wrong people moved here. Plenty of white folks moved here before me in 1997, and I can assure you, they got a full dose of Astoria as-is … with the beautiful proposition that since they were living in a gritty working-class neighborhood, they were going to pay sane rent and not have their asses kissed by the locals.

And that’s the crucial difference between “intelligent” folks who moved here back then and in the past few years. We expected to move to a gritty neighborhood and acclimate ourselves to it, become part of it, somehow fit in with the lay of the land. These people expect to move into a place that acclimates to them, which it hadn’t for years, but you can see plenty of retail signs of that slow bending to their will. Their sense of expectation is revolting, like something you’d see in a small, spoiled child. This is upbringing. Values. In short, the suburbs.

What changed? Virtually nothing. The neighborhood is roughly the same. Just more of those wondrous white, college-educated white folks, of which I’m one, although I should point out I’d have never moved here had the rents back then been anywhere near what they have been since 2000 or so. I’ve never been caught up in a gentrifying neighborhood and had no idea how genuinely inhumane this process is, the inherent, putrid racism and classism that’s part of it. The quality of life these folks bring to this neighborhood, to me, is no better than what was already here. It surely isn’t twice as good, thus rents and property values being twice as high.

These people are not desirable: they’re careless, the quality I dislike about them most. They just don’t genuinely give a shit about anything. Not in a dangerous way. In a way that suggests they come from some sterile environment where money to burn is a given with them and everyone they know. And they have no empathy for anyone not functioning on that financial level. (It’s not so much that they don’t empathize – it’s just that poor people, you know, they’re not, like, fun.) Their lives make no sense without monetary value attached to everything, thus the concept of paying far too much for a shithole apartment in an oddly unfriendly neighborhood makes sense to them. (And Astoria can be unfriendly in a strange way – not in a horrifying way, more in an annoying, 718 way – it’s the first thing I felt when I moved here and still have issues with, but I’ve honestly felt that as more of a “Queens” thing I’ve sense in other neighborhoods, too, in the borough.)

Their values, so closely tied in with money, eventually steamroll everything in their path. It’s class warfare of the worst kind (the kind you can’t fight), like a quiet neutron bomb slowly going off over the course of years. The landscape stays the same, but the people who were once there are gone. I don’t think the Greeks here grasp that cold fact and what’s going on. In a few years, they won’t want to live here. The Greek restaurants, diners and social clubs will slowly disperse and fade. The people they’ve known all their lives will slowly pass on or move out. Sure, those lucky enough to own their properties will make a small fortunes selling their over-valued homes, but where do they go? They’re basically going to sell their neighborhood, and their heritage, out from underneath themselves … to a bunch of people who don’t give a fuck about anything but status.

You can see this happening with local businesses. There are empty storefronts all along Steinway, the main shopping drag in Astoria, not because of “the economy” or what have you, but because the chiseling bastards who own these properties are waiting for big-name chains to roll in and pay extortionate retail rents. They don’t want Mom-and-Pop restaurants or delis; they want Bed Bath and Beyond, or Trader Joe’s. You know, shit-ass chain stores for spoiled suburbanites … who want their home transferred straight into the heart of the city so they don’t have to do their real shopping at generic malls when they visit Mom and Step Pop. (Places like Trader Joe’s are just as revolting as Walmart – they’re just smaller, slower on the draw and geared towards an audience that’s essentially dumber than the Walmart crowd because they’re college-educated, but can’t grasp they’re being played the same way. I tip my cap to that chain’s founders for their ingenuity.)

Recently, a longstanding produce stand called Top Tomato closed down on Ditmars Boulevard. It was pretty shocking – the place had been there for years, a long store taking up half the block, open 24 hours, sort of a neighborhood staple. (I didn't like shopping there -- the female [not American] Indian cashiers were oddly indifferent and sometimes flat-out rude.) Why did it close? Their decades-long lease came due, and you know the landlord, these days, isn’t going to say how about a 6% raise? No, I’m guessing their rent would have doubled or tripled. That strip of retail now sits barren, odd-looking in the heart of a neighborhood. But, I’m sure there’s an over-priced coffee shop or suburban chain on the horizon, and you’ll have dozens of people gushing over its arrival, happy that the same sort of bland, pricey junk they bought in college and at home is now just around the corner.

One of the few places I drink in the neighborhood, O’Hanlon’s Bar, just underneath the Ditmars train station, now has a new neighbor in a retail spot that’s changed hands a few times in the past two years. Was originally a small Greek restaurant that made great gyros. Can’t recall what it was after that. But a shiny new bar has opened up, numerous widescreen TVs hanging over the bar, bright lights, wide open doors, booths, glitzy wall hangings, shining taps.

It’s one of those “fuck you” openings, purposely next to O’Hanlon’s, which has been there for decades, and I mean before World War II. Some folks think O’Hanlon’s is a dive, and I’m glad they feel that way, because they don’t know shit about bars. It does attract a more working-class crowd in the late afternoon, guys getting off work, having beers, watching Jeopardy and such. And it shifts slightly at night to a younger crowd, but real people for the most part, not frat-boy goons or flip-flop hipsters. You can walk in there, get a drink, sit back, and no one’s going to fuck with or look down on you. It has a good jukebox. I’ve never had a problem there. (Although admittedly, they’re cheap on the drink specials, so I generally find myself having drinks with friends at various Lower East Side bars that have happy-hour specials ensuring $3.00 pints up to 8:00 pm, which is a great price anywhere for imported beer on tap. And I’m always in the bag by eight.)

Most people who drink at O’Hanlon’s will shun this new place like the plague. I doubt I’ll ever set foot in there either. But I checked a neighborhood website and have already seen folks gushing over it … for no obvious, stated reason … other than that it’s open and it’s geared towards moneyed gentry. The kind of people who would shun O’Hanlon’s like the plague. Not recognizing that bar has more to do with the neighborhood, the heart of where they live, than they ever will. If this new place had drink specials like $3.00 pints and such, hell, yes, I would give it a shot. But it won’t. These places never do in Astoria. I’m guessing the big-screen TVs mean a sports-bar crowd, but who knows. It’s way too flashy and out-of-place for the old neighborhood … but probably just right for people who don’t mind dropping $8.00 on a pint.

Hell, even the older gay bars in Queens have been traditionally neighborhood places. Every Saturday on my way back from the gym, I pass by The Albatross, a gay bar just north of Astoria Boulevard, more than likely a one-stop shop for all the closeted gay corporate gents on their way home on the Long Island Expressway to pop in and remind themselves who they really are. It’s a pretty typical neighborhood bar, no frills, save it has a gay clientele – frankly, if I was gay, I’d be there all the time, just seems like a perfect kick-back place for folks to go to and feel like they belong, without getting gouged or overly stylized.

This goes a lot deeper for me than bars and stores and apartments. The gentrification I’ve seen going on, and have actually been caught up in for once (after years of living in a Bronx neighborhood that doesn’t appear to be in any danger of this happening) just goes against my grain, which is not working class, no matter what you think, but just the simple realization that people with money are no better than people without money. You don’t have to be working-class to see that. If that sounds like simple common sense to you, I can tell you it isn't. Surely not in New York.