Got caught short-handed at the end of a short month -- trying to maintain that "three a month" pace for this thing. I have a few ideas for pieces, but I'd rather let them incubate in that writerly way, because they don't feel right just yet.
In the meantime, I've gone back to that doomed novel from my late 20s that I've excerpted once before (a short piece about a guy obssessed with his lawn) and came up with a few other passages that hit me right. This whole thing was a mess. Just little tidbits and recollections, shaded over and "fictionalized" from my life, applied to a canned story about a guy burying his father ... years before I actually participated in the actual event. In short, I had no idea what I was writing about. And even at the age of 28 or 29, surely didn't have the emotional depth to pull it off, or grasp the "big picture" element of death in our lives.
But people I grew up with will surely recognize elements of our reality in the mix. Especially the reality of growing up in the 70s in rural America. That's how the "first novel" often works. The writer plays fast-and-loose with his own life, changes a few names, a few situations, and tries to get that down on paper. In my case, I was simply lacking that "big picture" sense. Plenty of little flashes, but it never added up to a convincing story. Don't think I'm novelist. I tried, but my writing mind just doesn't seem to work that way. It works this way. Enjoy!
***
I may not mention it too much, but our television set was on day and night. Our father came up during the Depression, at which time there was only radio, and the old people in his life used to lecture him on the evils of listening too much. These were the kind of people who rode to church on horses and wiped their asses in the outhouse with tree leaves. So our father learned to resent their pious lectures and dove straight into radio, and the music on it.
Naturally, when television came along, that was like jets replacing biplanes. By the time George and I came along, the TV set became some strange mix between talking furniture and an altar. Our father would get up around six and turn it on. We would get up around seven for school and sit with him to watch the end of Sunrise Semester and the morning news. Our mother would be up by eight to send us all off. After we left, she would watch morning game shows as she cleaned the house and afternoon soap operas between laundry loads. George and I would get home around four to catch all the sitcom reruns we had stamped on our psyches. After dinner, which we would eat in the dining room with the television still on the living room, our father would sit down for the evening news. Sometimes there’d be a brief respite before prime time, but usually the television stayed on until eight, when all the shows came on, which would take us up to eleven. The day would end with the nightly news, and television generally went off around eleven-thirty. After he retired, the set stayed on until at least midnight, although it was turned on around eight in the morning.
Long before any drug-induced paranoia, George thought Big Brother was watching us through the TV set. It made sense to him -- the damn thing was always on, and it wasn’t only our house. Every house we had ever been in as kids had a blaring TV set. Sometimes you had to shout to be heard. And the set itself seemed unnatural. George would watch the tubes glowing in the back as the TV set turned on, and the fading of the screen at night to a single white dot unnerved him. He had me convinced that someone was in there watching us. Once in the junkyard, we found an old shell from a burned-out floor model Zenith, and George crawled inside to where the screen used to be. He started pretending he was a cheesy weatherman, but then he stared at me like he was Dracula. He scared me so much I ran away.
Our father used to lecture us about how much we watched, but in the long run, he watched far more than we did. I think “watch” is a relative term when it comes to television. Sometimes it held our interest, but most times it was left on. Once, to see what would happen, George turned off Hee Haw while my father was reading over his tax forms. He seemed engrossed in his paper work. We sat there and stared at the wall for a few moments until our father asked George to turn the set back on.
“But you weren’t even watching, Dad,” George said.
“Sure, I was.”
“If you were watching,” George went on, “what did Buck Owens say after Minnie Pearl stuck him in the can with a pitch fork?”
I knew it was “I got the point, darlin’, I got the point,” but our father looked at the blank screen.
“I don’t know, George. All right. So my attention’s divided here. I am watching it here and there. Roy Clark did the “Pickin’ and A Grinnin’” bit a few minutes ago. Right?”
“Right,” George said.
“So turn it back on. If you want to change the channel, say so.”
Our father went back to his taxes. George turned on a rerun of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, with special guests Deep Purple, because he knew Lawrence Welk was right around the corner.
I thought about burying the TV set with our father, but it wouldn’t have fit into the coffin. He liked it big, floor model, sitting on the far side of the living room wall. He warned us not to sit too close, that we’d get radiation poisoning and our eyes would go bad, but it didn’t seem like a few feet would make that much of a difference. When our father wasn’t around, George liked to get right up on it, so all he could see was the colored dots. He said he could feel the warmth from the tubes and the electricity on his cheeks. And it brought him face to face with the man inside the set. George said he knew he was in there, and that people acknowledged it all the time by talking to the set, as if it were a family member. It scared me, but it filled George with apprehension.
I remember in the summers, we’d walk home in the night after playing hide and seek with the gang, and in every home, through the open windows we could see blue lights glowing on the living room walls. We could hear the canned laughter and amplified commercials. Sometimes, if it was a popular show, like All in the Family, we could hear the same sound coming from different houses, leaking a strange, distant echo into the quiet streets. George wouldn’t let me talk, and we’d walk around for a long time, listening and looking. With the summer heat and the wind blowing through the trees, it was enough to scare me more than the basement and attic rolled into one. Once, George found some empty Coke cans behind a bush, and he crushed them onto the bottoms of his sneakers, as did I, and they gave our steps a slow, metallic sound. We went around all night pretending we were robots roaming the streets of our town after the A bomb had dropped. George liked that feeling.
***
Last Saturday, I passed by one of those huge front loaders digging dirt out of the ground. I barely caught it from the corner of my eye, the enormous shovel plunging into the hillside, its long arm straining then pulling back a load of black soil. I could barely see it because at least twenty men had pulled their cars and pick-up trucks over to watch. At first, I thought it was an accident, then I realized that a tribal right was going on, the viewing of working men, by other working men, as they operated heavy machinery.
It made me wistful, because I knew my father, especially after he retired, would have been one of those men pulled over. It took me even further back, and I pictured George and I as kids standing next to our father as he watched. I looked bored but tolerant. George looked like he was willing the shovel to burst into flames, all to the tune of some hideous Black Sabbath dirge.
***
George and I could attest to that, because for years we were his unwilling Saturday morning servants. And like a pool table where all the balls roll to one end, our house and cars gave testament to the fact that he didn't know what the hell he was doing. Showers that leaked, doors that swung open with a ghostly whine, toilets that had to be flushed three times, cars installed with manual chokes that popped out and shot flames from the tail pipe -- it was like we lived in a funhouse. Every turn of a handle was an adventure. The more he worked on things, the more he seemed to screw them up. Sometimes I think he did it on purpose so he could portray himself as a Mr. Fix-It when they broke down for real. Most of the men who worked for him were mechanical geniuses, if nothing else, the kind of men who'd turn on a car, listen to it, and tell you exactly what was wrong. Being around machinery, our father had to pick up a little mechanical ability, but he wasn't a natural.
And it chagrined George and me to have him nail us some time on Saturday morning, usually right after one of us sat down with a bowl of cereal or maybe a book. Both of us read a lot, and our father used to say, "How about leaving that book for awhile and helping me with the car."
It wasn't really a question, more of a healthy suggestion. This was a year-round thing, and it could be a huge pain in the ass to trudge out in the snow to hold a screwdriver in the carburetor while our father fiddled endlessly with the intake valve. I hated it, but at least I kept an open mind and picked up a few things as we went along.
George profoundly resented it, mainly because he didn't feel comfortable rebelling in this situation. Our father would often drop a comment on how lazy kids were these days, and every time, George would argue back that every generation said that about kids. So when our father came looking for help on Saturday, he reluctantly went along instead of losing face.
George was a great fan of paperback celebrity biographies, especially for rock stars. Invariably, he'd be laid out on the sofa, nice and cozy, reading a book about The Beatles or The Stones, maybe a blanket or a comforter wrapped around him, when our father would trudge in, shake the snow from his boots and make George an offer he couldn't refuse. Neither of us would ever answer. Our father assumed our silence meant "no problem, Dad" and walked right out, sure that one or both of us would be out in a few minutes. And we would, calling him names like "asshole" and "motherfucker" in our heads, but never to his face. George would say the same thing to me every time.
"Asshole, doesn't he know I'm getting to the best part of the book?"
"What part is that?" I'd ask, acknowledging one of his pet names for me.
"That part in the middle right before the picture section, where they're starting to get famous and turn into jaded creeps."
"I guess if you get famous, you can skip right to the middle and make that page one of your story," I'd answer. I had to give him reason for then farting on my head, otherwise he'd do it for no reason at all. The funny part was I knew exactly what he was talking about -- every book I ever read growing up George had read first. Those damn books were all the same, with the celebrities at the same point in their careers near the picture section. Mick and Keith’s first big drug bust. John crying out for attention in songs like “I’m a Loser” and “Help.” Dylan all strung out and drifting, mere months before the near-fatal motorcycle crash. Despite the constant similarities, we read them cover to cover every time.
So George would throw on his clothes to go out and hold a monkey wrench or keep his foot on the gas pedal for half an hour. It wasn’t so much the work itself as the idea that we had no say in the matter. Through this involuntary labor, George grew to despise anything mechanical. He associated it with a thug redneck mentality, that you had to be a man to fix things, and you were a sissy if you couldn’t. The experience itself could have been a lot worse. Our father simply did what he had to do and excused us, whereas some fathers would berate their sons when things didn’t go right, as they rarely do in these matters.
***
The best of those places was the junkyard. There was something to be said for field after desolate field of briar patches, junked cars and hornet’s nests, sliced through with craggy dirt roads leading nowhere. We would have loved to go at night, but they closed at sundown and kept guard dogs. Our father would rummage around old cars to find inexpensive parts. The trouble was getting checked out. These parts had no price tags, so it was up to the owner, a toothless old creep named Hugo, to determine the price. Actually, it was up to Hugo and his obese son, who didn’t seem to have a name. He was this strange guy somewhere in his 30’s who dressed like a vampire killer in one of those cheesy Hammer horror films from England -- a round black hat with a full brim, pegged black pants, white shirt unbuttoned to show his voluminous chest hair, pointy-toed shoes, long, thin side burns, and a cheap cigar. Sometimes he even wore a cape -- George said a bullwhip and a huge gold crucifix would have completed the picture. These two would haggle over the right price in some vague Eastern European language, and inevitably it was too much. I think my father hated these guys, but even their inflated price was cheaper than buying the part new.
At least the junkyard had a run-down element of fun about it. The worst were the hardware and auto parts stores. They had that smell of clean metal and rubber. The hardware store was more metallic smelling, due to the large number of nuts, bolts, screws and the like. The automotive store had more of a plastic/rubber smell, maybe because of the tires and different belts and hoses.
Either way, they both attracted the same clientele -- mechanics. I knew some engineers in college who had a mechanical background and used it as a foundation to build more knowledge on the structure of machines. The guys in these stores had only the foundation -- the house had burned down, if they knew how to build one in the first place. Their whole world seemed to revolve around cars. People who didn’t know about cars were idiots -- if they were men and didn’t know, then surely they were gay and clearly took home economics instead of shop in anticipation of their alternative lifestyle.
I hated those fucking places, and I know George felt like a caged animal in hardware stores. The minutes crawled by on those Saturday morning trips, and in my memory, it was always raining. I’d bet everything I own this is the underlying reason George got into computers, because he knew morons of the kind we encountered in hardware stores would be left behind in the computer revolution. It was his way of saying, “I’m a man, and I’m making more than any three of you put together.” We couldn’t understand how grown men got off by making kids feel small. It especially stung because we knew that when these men were our age, they were the dolts who dropped out in the sixth grade then went on to get their 14-year-old girlfriends pregnant. There’s nothing worse for a kid than having an adult dumber than he is insulting him and getting away with it.
The king of the mechanics was this guy named Elroy who worked at Black Diamond Hardware. We knew this because of his name tag, which he wore outside of work, too. It said, "Elroy, King of the Mechanics." There was a caricature of a Monopoly board king brandishing a wrench underneath the words. He didn't own the place, probably made about $2.00 and hour or so as the manager. No one would know this to walk in the store and encounter this bald old man with a booming voice. He was one of those guys who chain smoked and weighed 98 pounds. Elroy never laughed. If he thought something was funny, his left eye would twitch. I don't think I can really describe the man any better than saying John Wayne Gacey would have felt unnerved in his presence. Naturally, he knew where every wing nut and linoleum sample was, knew the price of every product, and whether the customer wanted it or not. He was right, too, although no man wanted to be made to look incompetent (i.e., effeminate) in a hardware store. So the atmosphere of one upmanship was a given with Elroy on the job. The customers were joking, but they were serious.
Elroy liked our father because Elroy's son had served in the infantry in Korea, too. He never mentioned what had happened to his son, but George often said he was probably living somewhere in women's clothes and whispering lines like, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" in the mirror. George and I represented maybe the first generation in America never to have to fight in any war or be drafted, so naturally we were on the outside with guys like Elroy. We couldn't ride the old man's coat tails when it came to service to God and country, no sir. Ungrateful little bastards, smoking pot and worshipping faggot rock singers while our fathers died in foreign lands. That was more than an attitude. Those were actual words Elroy would use with us when our father went off to find the right size paint brush. It was like something out of a Billy Jack movie. I've often wondered about the psychotic Norman Rockwell mutations I knew as a child. I don't seem to know any people like that now, and I'm getting old enough.
If we had looked under our beds at night in anticipation of seeing a troll or demon, we would have seen Elroy, winking joylessly and calling us faggots and communists while spitting tobacco juice into a dixie cup. The man was irrational fear made real. George said he couldn't care less if Elroy wore a gold crown with twenty servants bearing him in a carriage and blasting trumpets -- so long as he didn't have any contact with him. It wasn't so much that the man was frightening as that his presence immediately made us want to leave. Everything we were, he wasn't, and we knew he had the shit end of the stick. He inspired anxious pity -- a strange combination of emotions neither of us knew how to handle.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Sunday, February 08, 2009
The Swayze Wayze
Patrick Swayze may not have long to live. Generally, you read a story about anyone with pancreatic cancer, that’s a sure sign the person won’t be around very long. Say what you want, but what I’ve learned about cancer: if you are unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with a form that’s lethal/in latter stages, it’s better to go fast than slow. The choice being a few months of agony as opposed to years of prolonged agony. Of course, life is precious, but when it’s made clear to you that the quality of your life will be such that it will be extreme physical pain and immobility, leaving in a hurry has its merits.
So I may as well do my tribute to Patrick Swayze while he’s still around. Most of the roles he’s played in movies go right by me. When Dirty Dancing rolls around on cable TV, I rarely watch more than a few minutes. You’d have to pay me to watch Ghost. Those are not the kind of movies I want to remember Swayze for, regardless of the fact that they made him a star.
I want to remember him particularly for Roadhouse, Point Break, Next of Kin and one key scene in Red Dawn. They may not be Academy Award material, but frankly, when a shit movie like Crash and half a good movie (the first half) like American Beauty win the awards for best picture, the Academy doesn’t matter in terms of what will last. The stars who win will get a nice little career boost, most likely into generic blockbusters that no one gives a shit about, but such is life in Hollywood. It’s probably better to fly under the radar out there, make less money and still have the ability to do your thing.
Ironically, the three movies noted above were meant to be blockbuster action movies for Swazye as the lead actor. Strictly speaking, the movies are trash. But within their trashiness, there’s something worthwhile, and much of that has to do with Patrick Swayze. The apex of Swayze’s run, of course, is Roadhouse: a gem of a bad movie that I can watch repeatedly, even on cable stripped of its wonderful profanity and key nude scenes, where it routinely appears. It taps into some perfect white-trash ethic much like blaxploitation flicks of the early 70s did with black audiences. Dalton, the bouncer with a degree in philosophy from NYU who Swayze plays, is the redneck Shaft.
The story is basic: midwestern bar owner needs a head bouncer to clean up his rapidly failing club, goes to New York to offer the legendary Dalton (he only has one name) the position. The bar owner thought he’d be bigger, but they strike a deal anyway. Dalton comes to town to find that not just the bar, but the entire town is in the grips of an evil local entrepreneur who runs everything through his wealth. He has a group of henchmen to help “influence” people to see his way. And it’s Dalton’s unasked for task to bring the evil businessman down. Along the way, he meets a sexy doctor who once dated the evil businessman, they fall in love, and this relationship encourages him to stay and fight. Also, his bouncing guru, a grizzled vet working in a strip club down south joins forces with him after Dalton informs him that he’s in over his head with a local power lord.
Not much of a story, but as noted, Swayze, and the rest of the cast, make it work. Frankly, if you don’t like rednecks, this is your movie, because most of it is spent with the urbane Dalton character kicking serious redneck ass. The movie is wall-to-wall ass-kicking, filled with great one liners. Red, the hardware store owner, answering Dalton’s question as to whether he’s not happy with the shakedowns his store is subject to: “Does a hobby horse have a wooden dick?” The old farmer who offers Dalton a room in a barn hay loft: “It ain't the money ya understand, but if I don't charge ya somethin' the Presbyterians around here are likely to pray for my ruination. How does a hundred dollars a month strike ya?”
The most memorable line, though, is in a key to-the-death fight scene where Dalton takes on the businessman’s main bull after he blows up the old farmer’s house. The bull gets Dalton in a headlock and mutters: “I used to fuck guys like you in prison.”
Man! Do you know what a powerful line that is? If I was in a physical confrontation like that in real life and my opponent muttered that, I’d stop, throw up my hands, and say, “You win!” Then walk away, fast. Because if the line is true, and the guy has indeed fucked guys like me in prison, man, I don’t want any part of that action. And if it’s just a put-on, putting it out there that the guy’s pondered violent homosexual rape, well, that’s enough for me to think better of doing anything with that person.
I remember hearing that line and thinking, “Perfection … that’s the sort of line that works in real life and the movies.” It’s the kind of thing a badass would say to put a horrible negative image in his opponent’s mind: a mind-fuck of the highest degree. The movie is filled with those sort of knowing tough-guy moments. Dalton doesn’t consider himself tough – he considers himself tapped into some philosophical view of the world in which bouncing, and hurting people, is a last resort, one that he unfortunately is very good at. Thus, Dalton’s quandary. He’s good at something he knows is very bad, and he wants to be good. It’s Swayze’s laidback/rural demeanor that wins us over, that makes us see this quandary his character faces. He may not be very smart, but he’s basically a very nice guy, who calls older men “sir” and won’t fight anyone unless he’s hit first.
And the reality is we as the audience think that is Patrick Swayze, that he isn’t acting at all. That same hang-loose, everyman demeanor worked to much greater effect in 1991’s Point Break, in my opinion, the best movie he made. Swayze stars as Bodhi, a charismatic surfer who turns a bunch of his surfing buddies into successful bank robbers, who don the masks of ex-presidents on their jobs and need to be brought down by undercover agent, Johnny Utah, played horribly, as usual, by Keanu Reeves, who is like a cardboard cutout next to Swayze. You want to see the difference between good actors, between those who put forth some degree of humanity in their roles and those who are just along for the ride, compare these two in this movie. Actually, you can compare Reeves to other good actors in the movie like Gary Busey and John C. McGinley. The secret of all good action movies: good actors pocketing change in supporting roles between more serious projects.
Bodhi’s cult of bank robbers forms around his dual belief in surfing as a sort of physical religion and his lack of faith in the 9-to-5 existence. He believes these people are already dead, and that he and his group of surfing robbers, if nothing else, are alive, living to surf, funding their care-free lifestyle with the occasional bank heist. It works only because Swayze is so convincing, again, that easy physicality he brings to the role – he’s the nicest guy in the movie. Even the way he walks, bow-legged and swinging his arms, suggests some guy happy with a factory job as opposed to a fearless leader.
To be honest, even with the knowledge that he and his gang were armed bank robbers willing to kill innocent bystanders, I still rooted for them, simply because I liked Bodhi and his spirit, the work ethic he imparted on a “fun” lifestyle. When he found out Johnny Utah was an FBI agent, he didn’t panic, or try to kill him. He brought him in closer and tried to win him over to his point of view. He takes him sky-diving, which proves a liberating experience for Utah, but ends when he lets him know the jig is up afterwards, and he’s holding his ex (and Utah’s current) girlfriend for ransom so he can win time to make a run for Mexico.
It’s a good lead actor who can easily move between good and bad guy roles, and the audience responds equally to both. Swayze may not have been doing Shakespeare, but whatever role he was given, he played it well. Next of Kin is the weakest of this action-flick trio. Swayze stars as a Chicago detective, from Appalachia, whose brother is killed when a mafia crew sticks up the truck he’s driving. The rest of the flick is his drawn-out revenge, uncovering the case, and losing control of it when his other brother, an Appalachian redneck played by Liam Neeson, comes to Chicago to exact his own revenge.
The problem with this movie is that Neeson steals it from Swayze. He’s brilliant, and I don’t even like Liam Neeson. The straggly-haired look, the mannerisms, the accent – he somehow nailed that deep Appalachia vibe. And he gets to steal the fire from Swayze, who plays the more rational/level-headed brother who tries to nail the mafia dons through legal methods. It’s a bad idea to make the lead actor in an action movie the voice of reason – it’s the antithesis of using the movie as a vehicle for the lead actor. We watch these kind of movies to see the lead badass kick bad guys’ asses – sorry if that sounds too pedantic. In Next of Kin, a supporting actor gets to do this. This should have been a star vehicle for Liam Neeson, save he never seemed cut out to excel at action flicks (although I see he's starring in one now and have to wonder how well it will do.)
Aside from these three movies, there is one other scene with Swayze that I always refer back to as an example of how good an actor he is. And that’s from 1984’s Red Dawn, John Milius’ heavy-handed action flick regarding the possibility of Russians invading America, and how bands of vigilantes, in this case the Wolverines (a bunch of high-school kids who slipped out of town during the attacks and lived in the woods while launching guerilla attacks on the Russians), rise up to fight back.
It’s not a bad movie. I recall at the time it got hounded for being a heavy-dose of right-wing scare tactics, but as time has gone on, it can be viewed as just an interesting, slightly above average action flick. There is one scene, though that always gets to me, and that’s when a few of the teenagers go back into town from the woods to see how things have changed under Russian occupation. Of course, everything is wrong. Tanks and troops everywhere, businesses closed down, towns people afraid to speak to each other on the street. Swayze plays one of the teenagers, along with C. Thomas Howell as his younger brother and Charlie Sheen as one of their high-school friends. Swayze finds out that his father is being held at a “re-education camp” set-up at the local drive-in for “trouble makers,” which is of course short-hand for a death camp.
Here’s a link with that scene – it starts up around the four-minute mark. I guess this got to me because I knew, as a movie-goer, that Swayze’s father had died a year or two earlier. (Believe it or not, he must be 31 years old in this scene.) Everyone is good in this scene – I’d say Harry Dean Stanton as the doomed father plays it best. But give credit to Swayze – he taps into something memorable, obviously from his own recent pain, and I’m sitting here almost 25 years later recalling that scene as if it was yesterday. That’s exactly how a bunch of high-school kids would have handled the understanding that their father was assuming he was a dead man, and this was goodbye. Crying, professing love, not sure what to do – and the father telling them to stop crying, time to be men, because he won’t be around to teach them how to do that anymore.
Swayze has other good moments – his cameo as a greasy infomercial guru in Donnie Darko was excellent. His Saturday Night Live episode from 1990 was excellent, also, although it gave Chris Farley the opportunity to over-shadow him in the legendary Chippendales sketch. Like the good actor he is, he plays the scene straight and let’s Farley shine. (It’s odd that I can’t find a direct clip of this on youtube or hulu – plenty of horrible tributes and bad songs played over the skit, but not the actual skit itself.)
Whenever Patrick Swayze passes along, it’s going to be a grand farewell, tributes of all sorts, his DVD’s selling like hotcakes. When a guy that good-looking, and that relatively young, gets a lethal form of cancer, the media machine goes into overdrive over his passing, making it more than it is. Topping it off, by all accounts, Swayze is a genuinely nice guy, not a prick, not full of himself, just a handsome guy who got into acting, had a very good run for a few decades, and seemed just as content when his star faded through the 90s and the big roles weren’t coming in.
I’ll miss him for that simple spirit he imparted in the above-noted roles, the fun he had in a piece of shit like Roadhouse, turning a rote B-Movie into a genuine cult classic. I can’t be bothered with his chick-flick movies. To me, the true spirit of Swayze, the Swayze Wayze, is that of the unassuming everyman, knows he’s a good-looking guy, doesn’t care, doesn’t rest on his laurels, knows that life is hard, and it requires making up some new rules sometimes, is content to make that stumpy weird walk of his off into the sunset, probably just like his dad did long before his time, and let people say what they want about him. He’s a star who carried himself like a supporting actor, and that says something good about his character. I want to remember him for kicking ass.
So I may as well do my tribute to Patrick Swayze while he’s still around. Most of the roles he’s played in movies go right by me. When Dirty Dancing rolls around on cable TV, I rarely watch more than a few minutes. You’d have to pay me to watch Ghost. Those are not the kind of movies I want to remember Swayze for, regardless of the fact that they made him a star.I want to remember him particularly for Roadhouse, Point Break, Next of Kin and one key scene in Red Dawn. They may not be Academy Award material, but frankly, when a shit movie like Crash and half a good movie (the first half) like American Beauty win the awards for best picture, the Academy doesn’t matter in terms of what will last. The stars who win will get a nice little career boost, most likely into generic blockbusters that no one gives a shit about, but such is life in Hollywood. It’s probably better to fly under the radar out there, make less money and still have the ability to do your thing.
Ironically, the three movies noted above were meant to be blockbuster action movies for Swazye as the lead actor. Strictly speaking, the movies are trash. But within their trashiness, there’s something worthwhile, and much of that has to do with Patrick Swayze. The apex of Swayze’s run, of course, is Roadhouse: a gem of a bad movie that I can watch repeatedly, even on cable stripped of its wonderful profanity and key nude scenes, where it routinely appears. It taps into some perfect white-trash ethic much like blaxploitation flicks of the early 70s did with black audiences. Dalton, the bouncer with a degree in philosophy from NYU who Swayze plays, is the redneck Shaft.
The story is basic: midwestern bar owner needs a head bouncer to clean up his rapidly failing club, goes to New York to offer the legendary Dalton (he only has one name) the position. The bar owner thought he’d be bigger, but they strike a deal anyway. Dalton comes to town to find that not just the bar, but the entire town is in the grips of an evil local entrepreneur who runs everything through his wealth. He has a group of henchmen to help “influence” people to see his way. And it’s Dalton’s unasked for task to bring the evil businessman down. Along the way, he meets a sexy doctor who once dated the evil businessman, they fall in love, and this relationship encourages him to stay and fight. Also, his bouncing guru, a grizzled vet working in a strip club down south joins forces with him after Dalton informs him that he’s in over his head with a local power lord.
Not much of a story, but as noted, Swayze, and the rest of the cast, make it work. Frankly, if you don’t like rednecks, this is your movie, because most of it is spent with the urbane Dalton character kicking serious redneck ass. The movie is wall-to-wall ass-kicking, filled with great one liners. Red, the hardware store owner, answering Dalton’s question as to whether he’s not happy with the shakedowns his store is subject to: “Does a hobby horse have a wooden dick?” The old farmer who offers Dalton a room in a barn hay loft: “It ain't the money ya understand, but if I don't charge ya somethin' the Presbyterians around here are likely to pray for my ruination. How does a hundred dollars a month strike ya?”
The most memorable line, though, is in a key to-the-death fight scene where Dalton takes on the businessman’s main bull after he blows up the old farmer’s house. The bull gets Dalton in a headlock and mutters: “I used to fuck guys like you in prison.”
Man! Do you know what a powerful line that is? If I was in a physical confrontation like that in real life and my opponent muttered that, I’d stop, throw up my hands, and say, “You win!” Then walk away, fast. Because if the line is true, and the guy has indeed fucked guys like me in prison, man, I don’t want any part of that action. And if it’s just a put-on, putting it out there that the guy’s pondered violent homosexual rape, well, that’s enough for me to think better of doing anything with that person.
I remember hearing that line and thinking, “Perfection … that’s the sort of line that works in real life and the movies.” It’s the kind of thing a badass would say to put a horrible negative image in his opponent’s mind: a mind-fuck of the highest degree. The movie is filled with those sort of knowing tough-guy moments. Dalton doesn’t consider himself tough – he considers himself tapped into some philosophical view of the world in which bouncing, and hurting people, is a last resort, one that he unfortunately is very good at. Thus, Dalton’s quandary. He’s good at something he knows is very bad, and he wants to be good. It’s Swayze’s laidback/rural demeanor that wins us over, that makes us see this quandary his character faces. He may not be very smart, but he’s basically a very nice guy, who calls older men “sir” and won’t fight anyone unless he’s hit first.
And the reality is we as the audience think that is Patrick Swayze, that he isn’t acting at all. That same hang-loose, everyman demeanor worked to much greater effect in 1991’s Point Break, in my opinion, the best movie he made. Swayze stars as Bodhi, a charismatic surfer who turns a bunch of his surfing buddies into successful bank robbers, who don the masks of ex-presidents on their jobs and need to be brought down by undercover agent, Johnny Utah, played horribly, as usual, by Keanu Reeves, who is like a cardboard cutout next to Swayze. You want to see the difference between good actors, between those who put forth some degree of humanity in their roles and those who are just along for the ride, compare these two in this movie. Actually, you can compare Reeves to other good actors in the movie like Gary Busey and John C. McGinley. The secret of all good action movies: good actors pocketing change in supporting roles between more serious projects.
Bodhi’s cult of bank robbers forms around his dual belief in surfing as a sort of physical religion and his lack of faith in the 9-to-5 existence. He believes these people are already dead, and that he and his group of surfing robbers, if nothing else, are alive, living to surf, funding their care-free lifestyle with the occasional bank heist. It works only because Swayze is so convincing, again, that easy physicality he brings to the role – he’s the nicest guy in the movie. Even the way he walks, bow-legged and swinging his arms, suggests some guy happy with a factory job as opposed to a fearless leader.
To be honest, even with the knowledge that he and his gang were armed bank robbers willing to kill innocent bystanders, I still rooted for them, simply because I liked Bodhi and his spirit, the work ethic he imparted on a “fun” lifestyle. When he found out Johnny Utah was an FBI agent, he didn’t panic, or try to kill him. He brought him in closer and tried to win him over to his point of view. He takes him sky-diving, which proves a liberating experience for Utah, but ends when he lets him know the jig is up afterwards, and he’s holding his ex (and Utah’s current) girlfriend for ransom so he can win time to make a run for Mexico.
It’s a good lead actor who can easily move between good and bad guy roles, and the audience responds equally to both. Swayze may not have been doing Shakespeare, but whatever role he was given, he played it well. Next of Kin is the weakest of this action-flick trio. Swayze stars as a Chicago detective, from Appalachia, whose brother is killed when a mafia crew sticks up the truck he’s driving. The rest of the flick is his drawn-out revenge, uncovering the case, and losing control of it when his other brother, an Appalachian redneck played by Liam Neeson, comes to Chicago to exact his own revenge.
The problem with this movie is that Neeson steals it from Swayze. He’s brilliant, and I don’t even like Liam Neeson. The straggly-haired look, the mannerisms, the accent – he somehow nailed that deep Appalachia vibe. And he gets to steal the fire from Swayze, who plays the more rational/level-headed brother who tries to nail the mafia dons through legal methods. It’s a bad idea to make the lead actor in an action movie the voice of reason – it’s the antithesis of using the movie as a vehicle for the lead actor. We watch these kind of movies to see the lead badass kick bad guys’ asses – sorry if that sounds too pedantic. In Next of Kin, a supporting actor gets to do this. This should have been a star vehicle for Liam Neeson, save he never seemed cut out to excel at action flicks (although I see he's starring in one now and have to wonder how well it will do.)
Aside from these three movies, there is one other scene with Swayze that I always refer back to as an example of how good an actor he is. And that’s from 1984’s Red Dawn, John Milius’ heavy-handed action flick regarding the possibility of Russians invading America, and how bands of vigilantes, in this case the Wolverines (a bunch of high-school kids who slipped out of town during the attacks and lived in the woods while launching guerilla attacks on the Russians), rise up to fight back.
It’s not a bad movie. I recall at the time it got hounded for being a heavy-dose of right-wing scare tactics, but as time has gone on, it can be viewed as just an interesting, slightly above average action flick. There is one scene, though that always gets to me, and that’s when a few of the teenagers go back into town from the woods to see how things have changed under Russian occupation. Of course, everything is wrong. Tanks and troops everywhere, businesses closed down, towns people afraid to speak to each other on the street. Swayze plays one of the teenagers, along with C. Thomas Howell as his younger brother and Charlie Sheen as one of their high-school friends. Swayze finds out that his father is being held at a “re-education camp” set-up at the local drive-in for “trouble makers,” which is of course short-hand for a death camp.
Here’s a link with that scene – it starts up around the four-minute mark. I guess this got to me because I knew, as a movie-goer, that Swayze’s father had died a year or two earlier. (Believe it or not, he must be 31 years old in this scene.) Everyone is good in this scene – I’d say Harry Dean Stanton as the doomed father plays it best. But give credit to Swayze – he taps into something memorable, obviously from his own recent pain, and I’m sitting here almost 25 years later recalling that scene as if it was yesterday. That’s exactly how a bunch of high-school kids would have handled the understanding that their father was assuming he was a dead man, and this was goodbye. Crying, professing love, not sure what to do – and the father telling them to stop crying, time to be men, because he won’t be around to teach them how to do that anymore.
Swayze has other good moments – his cameo as a greasy infomercial guru in Donnie Darko was excellent. His Saturday Night Live episode from 1990 was excellent, also, although it gave Chris Farley the opportunity to over-shadow him in the legendary Chippendales sketch. Like the good actor he is, he plays the scene straight and let’s Farley shine. (It’s odd that I can’t find a direct clip of this on youtube or hulu – plenty of horrible tributes and bad songs played over the skit, but not the actual skit itself.)
Whenever Patrick Swayze passes along, it’s going to be a grand farewell, tributes of all sorts, his DVD’s selling like hotcakes. When a guy that good-looking, and that relatively young, gets a lethal form of cancer, the media machine goes into overdrive over his passing, making it more than it is. Topping it off, by all accounts, Swayze is a genuinely nice guy, not a prick, not full of himself, just a handsome guy who got into acting, had a very good run for a few decades, and seemed just as content when his star faded through the 90s and the big roles weren’t coming in.
I’ll miss him for that simple spirit he imparted in the above-noted roles, the fun he had in a piece of shit like Roadhouse, turning a rote B-Movie into a genuine cult classic. I can’t be bothered with his chick-flick movies. To me, the true spirit of Swayze, the Swayze Wayze, is that of the unassuming everyman, knows he’s a good-looking guy, doesn’t care, doesn’t rest on his laurels, knows that life is hard, and it requires making up some new rules sometimes, is content to make that stumpy weird walk of his off into the sunset, probably just like his dad did long before his time, and let people say what they want about him. He’s a star who carried himself like a supporting actor, and that says something good about his character. I want to remember him for kicking ass.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Two Kinds of Workers
The past few weeks, my workplace has been going through a meltdown unrelated to the current economic crisis. I won’t get too specific, lest some wondrous HR matron spelunk the web and stumble across this. But the basic situation is a manager in our smallish department (about 15 people) resigned a few weeks back: found another job less than five minutes from his home in central New Jersey, which neatly dove-tailed with his rapidly eroding work relations with our overall boss. As a result, two of his employees decided it was time they left, too, as they were closely aligned with the exiting manager and must have perceived that things would not go well for them with him gone.
In my mind, they were mistaken. The nature of the work they’re doing, especially now, the company would have made efforts to keep them, even if only to maintain a semblance of stability with a key manager exiting on two weeks notice. As it was, they both resigned and made it clear they had every intention of burning bridges. Normally, not that big a deal, but in this kind of economy? Best course to take would have been wait until their new boss was hired, see how that panned out (for all they know, it could have improved their lots in life), and if they still had a negative vibe, start busting out resumes and find another job before exiting. You don’t want to get caught off base in this kind of economy, as thousands of workers are being picked off daily.
The past three weeks, phew. The key error made, I’m assuming by HR, was not to tell the two departing workers, “Sorry to hear you’re leaving, we’ll pay you for the next two weeks, feel free to use that time to find other employment.” Because they were not happy campers on the way out, were pretty up front about their negative feelings, spent a lot of time whispering (always bad when people whisper in an office), and you could cut the tension with a knife days they were there. (They seemed to burn through more than a few sick days a piece, which was a relief.) Add to that HR staff skulking around like hungry bears knocking over campsite trashcans, holding private interviews with department staff in a nearby office (they didn’t get to me, praise Jesus) to “get to the bottom of this” … and you had a very rocky, tense few weeks of work.
I pretty much kept my mouth shut. Because when I’m around angry people hinting they might indulge in lawsuits and such, I recognize any stray comment be repeated back to me in a courtroom. Work in an of itself presents enough issues with tension and problems that heaping this extraneous bullshit on top of it doesn’t help matters any. I saw more than a few positive and negative attributes of coworkers come to light. Bottom line, there’s a huge difference between your typical work-day carping about the job (which we all do, routinely) and expressing a sort of bleakness that suggests maybe you should just get the fuck out of whatever negative place you perceive yourself to be in. But what I’ve learned about people: if you’re that kind of person, everywhere you go, you find the same problems. You’re not escaping a bad situation – chances are you did a lot more to create and nurture it than you’re aware. You can’t escape yourself.
That factory job I had during college was the first time I had to work in a structured environment with other people. (Previously, it was all lawn mowing, snow shoveling, landscaping, etc. with my brothers – good work, too, that I still enjoy doing.) In that place, I learned that there are two types of workers: people who like to work, and people who don’t like to work. It’s that simple. Everything about how people function in a workplace flows from those two sources.
Too many people don’t like to work. I’ve come to realize that unfortunate reality. They somehow got it in their heads that life owes them something, and their vision of heaven would be winning the lottery and doing nothing all day in a big house … not quite realizing they’d drive themselves crazy in that kind of scenario. How many times have you read about lottery winners simply losing any sense of structure, or having any real understanding of how to preserve the enormous amount of money they’ve been given, and eventually going broke?
I should point out that there are plenty of people in my life who don’t like the work – I don’t hold it against them, just recognize this aspect of their personalities. But it just seems to be one of those things developed in childhood and followed through young adulthood to a full flowering in adulthood. I hated working as a kid, mostly because that meant my father pulling me out of some leisure-time situation, like reading or listening to music, to help him fix one of the numerous dumpy used AMC cars he purposely bought so he could work on them. It wasn’t until I grew into lawn mowing, and receiving money for this, that work made sense to me. Even through college, I didn’t much like the concept of working. College felt like enlightened play time (it was), maybe a hard slog at times, but probably the most relaxed time of life.
In my adult life, doing some freelance and temp work, I’ve gone through plenty of down periods, in which I recognized it was very easy to slip into a “not work” mode, to get up late and spread out my time, to develop routines that take up the time I would be at work, and I realized I was doing the same thing I would at work – developing a daily structure – to pass the time, save I wasn’t getting paid to do this. Thus, it made more sense to do some kind of work, even if I found it dull and recognized it took up too much time. I could separate the act of working (and making money) from the work itself. And when you do that, the doors open in some sense, because you recognize you can get through anything in life with an attitude like that. You’ve made peace with the downside of adulthood: recognizing that most of it isn’t doing what you want to do. (Even if you love what you do, you’re going to spend a lot of time doing things you don’t want to do.)
Which is why this last workplace disaster has really left a sour taste in my mouth. To walk away from work at this point in American economic history, without work to replace it, has to be one of the more shockingly foolish things I’ve ever seen in an office. But I’m also realizing these people were genuinely unhappy there. The difference is I gather they pin their unhappiness on the place itself, particularly our overall boss, when I know the greater reality is they’re the source. Most emotions are a choice. You choose to feel happy or sad, to love or hate. It may not seem that way when you’re younger, but you pass through X number of emotional states as you age, you recognize that many of these thunderbolts of emotion, you’re hurling them, not some unseen force. I’d say things like death or the birth of a child supersede emotional choice, but not much else. Most times if you’re unhappy, that’s your personal choice, not a bunch of external factors that have magically conspired to force your into a state of misery. And it’s basic force of habit that people keep moving along the path that comforts them most. If you’re more comfortable feeling unhappy, you go on that way.
You get a bad attitude, nurture it, and it will grow. I’m not saying this like I’m above or outside the influence. Hell, I have a horrible attitude towards the creepy white college grads pouring into my neighborhood and paying outrageously inflated rents, as if the quality of life has increased to match their arrival and the 100% boosts in rental values. (It hasn’t, unless you equate yearning for overpriced coffee shops and “cool” indie/empty book stores selling books at retail with quality of life.) But I also realize hating these spoiled little brats is only going to eat me up inside if I nurture it. So I keep that in mind and declare some sort of truce in my mind, because I have no power to control the situation, and going around treating these people like crap is going to change me (in a bad, corrosive way) more than it would influence them to leave. Besides which, for every overbearing, self-absorbed, twentysomething prick with an iPhone jammed in his/her ear on a crowded subway staircase, there are five people quietly going about their lives the same way I am, with the caveat that 80% of their paycheck is going to their rent to live in a working-class neighborhood.
Life is going to throw enough shit at all of us, in the forms of failing health, disease, death, the passing of loved ones, horrible accidents, frayed friendships, friends in crisis, betrayals, falling outs, crossing paths with truly rotten human beings, unforeseen money issues … the list is endless. It makes no sense to purposely make your life harder. Or to routinely choose negative emotions. To place yourself in situations where the most likely outcomes will be anger and misunderstanding. I can joke about this shit, because I’m hardly Mr. Positive, but I’ve been passing those phases in life where those people I once thought were novel and fun in their bleak attitude, I’ve slowly realized, they just get worse with age. They don’t mellow like fine cheese or wine. The quirky darkness turns into ongoing depression and medication, and sometimes even into time in institutions. Cynicism plays well in your 20s, but through your 30s and into your 40s, it gets tiresome, loathsome even, and it starts to feel like dead weight.
These are the kind of thoughts that have gone through my head the past few weeks, in a pressure-cooker situation where the maturity level felt like something similar to a high-school cafeteria. I go to work to work, not to get engaged in soap operas and psycho-dramas. If I find myself growing unhappy at work, I bide my time and figure out a way to leave. Sometimes it’s an overnight/two-weeks-notice type deal; other times, it takes months to play out. Man, I would try like hell to avoid a scenario like that right now, because this economy is no joke, not something you want to assume is going to work for you, because it just might not. About the only thing I wanted to impart to my coworkers through all this: that guy is here to work! It should be that easy, and it is, if you let it.
In my mind, they were mistaken. The nature of the work they’re doing, especially now, the company would have made efforts to keep them, even if only to maintain a semblance of stability with a key manager exiting on two weeks notice. As it was, they both resigned and made it clear they had every intention of burning bridges. Normally, not that big a deal, but in this kind of economy? Best course to take would have been wait until their new boss was hired, see how that panned out (for all they know, it could have improved their lots in life), and if they still had a negative vibe, start busting out resumes and find another job before exiting. You don’t want to get caught off base in this kind of economy, as thousands of workers are being picked off daily.
The past three weeks, phew. The key error made, I’m assuming by HR, was not to tell the two departing workers, “Sorry to hear you’re leaving, we’ll pay you for the next two weeks, feel free to use that time to find other employment.” Because they were not happy campers on the way out, were pretty up front about their negative feelings, spent a lot of time whispering (always bad when people whisper in an office), and you could cut the tension with a knife days they were there. (They seemed to burn through more than a few sick days a piece, which was a relief.) Add to that HR staff skulking around like hungry bears knocking over campsite trashcans, holding private interviews with department staff in a nearby office (they didn’t get to me, praise Jesus) to “get to the bottom of this” … and you had a very rocky, tense few weeks of work.
I pretty much kept my mouth shut. Because when I’m around angry people hinting they might indulge in lawsuits and such, I recognize any stray comment be repeated back to me in a courtroom. Work in an of itself presents enough issues with tension and problems that heaping this extraneous bullshit on top of it doesn’t help matters any. I saw more than a few positive and negative attributes of coworkers come to light. Bottom line, there’s a huge difference between your typical work-day carping about the job (which we all do, routinely) and expressing a sort of bleakness that suggests maybe you should just get the fuck out of whatever negative place you perceive yourself to be in. But what I’ve learned about people: if you’re that kind of person, everywhere you go, you find the same problems. You’re not escaping a bad situation – chances are you did a lot more to create and nurture it than you’re aware. You can’t escape yourself.
That factory job I had during college was the first time I had to work in a structured environment with other people. (Previously, it was all lawn mowing, snow shoveling, landscaping, etc. with my brothers – good work, too, that I still enjoy doing.) In that place, I learned that there are two types of workers: people who like to work, and people who don’t like to work. It’s that simple. Everything about how people function in a workplace flows from those two sources.
Too many people don’t like to work. I’ve come to realize that unfortunate reality. They somehow got it in their heads that life owes them something, and their vision of heaven would be winning the lottery and doing nothing all day in a big house … not quite realizing they’d drive themselves crazy in that kind of scenario. How many times have you read about lottery winners simply losing any sense of structure, or having any real understanding of how to preserve the enormous amount of money they’ve been given, and eventually going broke?
I should point out that there are plenty of people in my life who don’t like the work – I don’t hold it against them, just recognize this aspect of their personalities. But it just seems to be one of those things developed in childhood and followed through young adulthood to a full flowering in adulthood. I hated working as a kid, mostly because that meant my father pulling me out of some leisure-time situation, like reading or listening to music, to help him fix one of the numerous dumpy used AMC cars he purposely bought so he could work on them. It wasn’t until I grew into lawn mowing, and receiving money for this, that work made sense to me. Even through college, I didn’t much like the concept of working. College felt like enlightened play time (it was), maybe a hard slog at times, but probably the most relaxed time of life.
In my adult life, doing some freelance and temp work, I’ve gone through plenty of down periods, in which I recognized it was very easy to slip into a “not work” mode, to get up late and spread out my time, to develop routines that take up the time I would be at work, and I realized I was doing the same thing I would at work – developing a daily structure – to pass the time, save I wasn’t getting paid to do this. Thus, it made more sense to do some kind of work, even if I found it dull and recognized it took up too much time. I could separate the act of working (and making money) from the work itself. And when you do that, the doors open in some sense, because you recognize you can get through anything in life with an attitude like that. You’ve made peace with the downside of adulthood: recognizing that most of it isn’t doing what you want to do. (Even if you love what you do, you’re going to spend a lot of time doing things you don’t want to do.)
Which is why this last workplace disaster has really left a sour taste in my mouth. To walk away from work at this point in American economic history, without work to replace it, has to be one of the more shockingly foolish things I’ve ever seen in an office. But I’m also realizing these people were genuinely unhappy there. The difference is I gather they pin their unhappiness on the place itself, particularly our overall boss, when I know the greater reality is they’re the source. Most emotions are a choice. You choose to feel happy or sad, to love or hate. It may not seem that way when you’re younger, but you pass through X number of emotional states as you age, you recognize that many of these thunderbolts of emotion, you’re hurling them, not some unseen force. I’d say things like death or the birth of a child supersede emotional choice, but not much else. Most times if you’re unhappy, that’s your personal choice, not a bunch of external factors that have magically conspired to force your into a state of misery. And it’s basic force of habit that people keep moving along the path that comforts them most. If you’re more comfortable feeling unhappy, you go on that way.
You get a bad attitude, nurture it, and it will grow. I’m not saying this like I’m above or outside the influence. Hell, I have a horrible attitude towards the creepy white college grads pouring into my neighborhood and paying outrageously inflated rents, as if the quality of life has increased to match their arrival and the 100% boosts in rental values. (It hasn’t, unless you equate yearning for overpriced coffee shops and “cool” indie/empty book stores selling books at retail with quality of life.) But I also realize hating these spoiled little brats is only going to eat me up inside if I nurture it. So I keep that in mind and declare some sort of truce in my mind, because I have no power to control the situation, and going around treating these people like crap is going to change me (in a bad, corrosive way) more than it would influence them to leave. Besides which, for every overbearing, self-absorbed, twentysomething prick with an iPhone jammed in his/her ear on a crowded subway staircase, there are five people quietly going about their lives the same way I am, with the caveat that 80% of their paycheck is going to their rent to live in a working-class neighborhood.
Life is going to throw enough shit at all of us, in the forms of failing health, disease, death, the passing of loved ones, horrible accidents, frayed friendships, friends in crisis, betrayals, falling outs, crossing paths with truly rotten human beings, unforeseen money issues … the list is endless. It makes no sense to purposely make your life harder. Or to routinely choose negative emotions. To place yourself in situations where the most likely outcomes will be anger and misunderstanding. I can joke about this shit, because I’m hardly Mr. Positive, but I’ve been passing those phases in life where those people I once thought were novel and fun in their bleak attitude, I’ve slowly realized, they just get worse with age. They don’t mellow like fine cheese or wine. The quirky darkness turns into ongoing depression and medication, and sometimes even into time in institutions. Cynicism plays well in your 20s, but through your 30s and into your 40s, it gets tiresome, loathsome even, and it starts to feel like dead weight.
These are the kind of thoughts that have gone through my head the past few weeks, in a pressure-cooker situation where the maturity level felt like something similar to a high-school cafeteria. I go to work to work, not to get engaged in soap operas and psycho-dramas. If I find myself growing unhappy at work, I bide my time and figure out a way to leave. Sometimes it’s an overnight/two-weeks-notice type deal; other times, it takes months to play out. Man, I would try like hell to avoid a scenario like that right now, because this economy is no joke, not something you want to assume is going to work for you, because it just might not. About the only thing I wanted to impart to my coworkers through all this: that guy is here to work! It should be that easy, and it is, if you let it.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Fonzia: The "Born Too Late" Syndrome
Growing up in the 70s, I was constantly made aware by people who had grown up in the 60s that I had been born too late … and missed out on being a hippie, I guess. Being raised where I was, I probably missed out on going to Vietnam.
The few hippies in our small town were pretty tame. I recall the girl who played church organ wearing a gigantic peace-sign necklace – the size of a car’s steering wheel. That was about as hippie as kids got around there. I do recall the Protestant minister’s son being a bit out there. We once spied him, naked on the hill in the cemetery, lounging with his similarly naked girlfriend in the mid-day sun, probably stoned out of his mind, too. Caused quite a stir. The point being kids like that were not the norm – they were considered unusual in our small town.
A phenomenon that’s been lost with instant media is the very slow path that trends used to move on in America. In other words, it took forever, literally a few years, for cultural trends to be acceptable in rural areas that were probably commonplace in more urban areas years before. You open a yearbook from my high school from 1969, and you will see unironic crew cuts and bouffant hairdos. Open one up from 1974, and it will look like Woodstock. The kids from 1969 were certainly listening to all that great music and well aware of hippie culture. It was just a huge leap of faith to dress and act that way in a rural area, where sizable numbers of young guys were going off to fight in Vietnam. Hippies were by and large the product of the middle- and upper-middle-class – these people weren’t around so much in our rural area. You’d find occasional small-town hippies, but they would be greatly out-numbered by, well, for lack of a better word, normal people.
I can even recall vestiges of this in the 90s. In New York, white kids decked out in hiphop gear with many going the full “wigger” route and pretending they were ghetto gangstas. It’s one of America’s greatest mysteries, to me, that this whole time period and way of being has pretty much been glossed over and ignored in pop culture. I thought these kids were creepy and offensive -- ultimately racist, too, in that I grasped they’d never accept black culture to the extent of actually living in or genuinely respecting it, and that they’d abandon this morbid façade by their mid-20s, if not long before then. I think I’ve stated before that their lack of sincerity regarding an issue as serious as race relations was something I found offensive and misleading. You want to paint a star on your face and wear platform shoes in 1974, that’s one thing. Pretending you were not just black, but a deeply offensive, buffoonish caricature of black circa 1994, struck me as total insanity … and I felt pretty much alone in that belief as no one ever seemed to discuss the issue, especially in a way that would question the white kids’ motives or genuine understanding of race.
But I do recall, circa 1993 or so, walking in a mall back home, where the whole hiphop thing had yet to sink in there, and seeing some kid decked out in full fashion, which meant he looked like he was wearing a particularly gaudy pair of pajamas, shuffling through the mall, and you could tell how deeply self-conscious this kid was in that no one was dressed like him, and people were “looking at him funny.” He was way ahead of the curve, and I was mildly let down when I went to a high-school football game a few years later, probably 1996, and saw more than a few kids doing their dumb gangsta-hoody thing with the size 52 pants and untied, over-sized sneakers, the creepy Limp Bizkit, backward baseball hat and vestiges of bad facial hair, god, what a morose time that was for kids – basically indulging in flash cards of an empty culture that had nothing to do with them. I think that’s my problem with a lot of teen trends, and that one in particular: kids are coerced into favoring a temporary culture that has nothing to do with them or their ways of life, when they should be creating their own cultures based on these two things. It’s the culture of marketing as opposed to the culture of humanity, and it sucks the life out of America, not to mention every other country it touches. It’s as bad or worse than fast food and is just as corporate in its intent.
But getting back to the concept of being “born too late” – that was the whole point of 60s kids laying their trip on us 70s kids. Our culture was junk in comparison. Never mind that there was plenty of junk culture in the 60s, too. I usually find people crowing over superiority of culture based on the decade they were kids generally have nothing to do with the creation of any sort of culture: they blindly followed whatever was put in front of them at 15 and decided that was that. The cries of superiority sound more like insecurity, which is exactly what they are. There was a lot of great music in the 60s. A lot! More than in the 70s. But there was a lot of great music from that decade, too. Frankly, I thought the 50s were even more revolutionary, and in terms of folk and the blues, at a minimum, were the basis and roots of most of what has followed since. If I had to choose a decade to revisit to see the first signs of these cultural shifts, I’d surely choose the 50s and see the flowering of electric blues and then rock and roll. In my mind, that’s a few thousand times more exciting than the 60s.
But the whole “born late” ruse seems like something aimed at the young – directed at them by older generations and always meant as a negative critique of the younger one. And you’ll find some kids who play along, claiming they were born too late. (And thus missed out on some great trend, which probably was great fun at the time, but came and went, and woe unto anyone who clings to those memories as opposed to leaving them comfortably in the rear view mirror.) These kids are really trying to say they can’t stand the current teen culture foisted on them, and I can’t blame them for that. When you’re in your 40s, or probably even your 30s, you’re thinking more about dying one day, not being born too late. You’ve swam out to the deep end, where you’re a lot closer to other people drowning. Teens and 20s, that’s the time of insecurity, to wonder why you couldn’t have been born in 1954 instead of 1984. If it makes you feel any better, you probably would have been an asshole in either decade.
I came across a single the other day on youtube that struck me as being a bit odd: “I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (with Flowers in My Hair)” by Sandi Thom. Apparently, this song was a huge hit in the UK and a few other parts of the world, but not here just yet. I actually like the way the song sounds – it’s pretty novel for someone in the music industry today to make such a bare-boned song and have a hit with it. But the lyrics gave me angina. More of that mildly self-loathing “weren’t things better before I was born” mentality.
I came up with a word for that a few years ago: Fonzia. Taken from the name “Fonzie” --the cool greaser character played by Henry Winkler from the hit 70s TV series Happy Days. This show was 50s nostalgia, roughly 20 years after the fact, aimed largely at a teenage audience that wasn’t even born in the 50s. Ergo, people being made to feel nostalgic for an era that they hadn’t even been alive in. Thus, Fonzia, a sort of baseless nostalgia lacking roots in any real emotions or memories.
I think Sandi Thom has Fonzia in spades. I checked her website to see she was born in a small fishing village in Scotland and is now 26 years old, meaning she was born in 1982 (the year I graduated from high school). If she has any childhood nostalgia to ponder, it’s people with symmetrical haircuts and gigantic white t-shirts emblazoned with “Frankie Says Relax,” white-people dancing to bad synth pop.
Thus, I can’t blame her for feeling nostalgic for cultures of an earlier era. Which she gets all wrong, but who’s keeping score. I’ll print out the lyrics to “I Wish I was a Punk Rocker” below and give you my running interpretation:
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair
In 77 and 69 revolution was in the air
Of course, punk rockers didn’t have flowers in their hair. Punks hated hippies, or at least claimed to. And I am certain that hippies hated punks – most people did. Punk didn’t happen en masse in America, although you started seeing many more punk-rock kids by the early 80s when punk had become an established sub-culture around urban areas. It was a rare kid who dressed punk, or even liked punk music, in my rural area in 1982. I was one of the few kids in my high school who had Clash albums and the Sex Pistols album – most of my friends didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when it came to punk, nor did they care. Most punk music, I didn’t know myself, and could sense that stuff like Talking Heads and Elvis Costello wasn’t punk music. (They were too good and had real talent.) The situation was different in the UK in 1977, but even then, I suspect people are now pretending there were punks all over the place when they were much more of an anomaly in the overall culture – the same way every British artist of any sort you meet carries on about “bloody Thatcher,” yet the woman was routinely re-elected for years on end. Who were those invisible millions who kept voting her in?
Revolution surely was in the air of 1969, but it came to naught. It came to even less in 1977. This was a passing fashion for most people. Not meant to disparage them or their beliefs. Simply stated, revolutions did not occur. The mildly wealthy kids who shucked their nice lots in life temporarily … eventually eased back into them and became what they were meant to be – reasonably wealthy people looking to stay reasonably wealthy. If that sounds cynical, it isn’t meant to be. It’s the way of the world! Most people become what their parents were, or make serious efforts to raise themselves even higher financially. Nothing wrong with that. Just doesn’t jibe with this whole “revolutionary” stance. Which most people quietly put away in a trunk in the attic some time in their 20s. Like watching a girl go from nose and eyebrow piercings, to a nose ring, to a tasteful diamond stud in her nose, just to a plain, unadorned nose, once she realizes there aren’t many 32-year-olds wearing face jewelry.
I was born too late and to a world that doesn't care
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair
The world would have cared no more or less in 1969, 1977 or 2007.
When the head of state didn't play guitar
I guess this is a swipe at Tony Blair for being a musician. Is the implication that life was better in that pre-rock era when heads of state had nothing to do with art or music? It probably wasn’t.
Not everybody drove a car
In 1969 and 1974, most people in the UK who could drive were driving cars. Not sure what that’s supposed to mean? You have to go back another 50 years or so to find a time when a recognizable number of people didn’t get around in cars.
When music really mattered and when radio was king
Music really matters now – no more or less than it did in 1969 or 1974. (The question is does it really matter to you, and the answer, unfortunately, is "no" for many people as they age, which is a shame.) Radio was king, but by the 70s, it was pre-programmed lists determined more by marketing strategies than taste or natural appeal. There was a very small window in the late 60s into the early 70s where some DJs on the FM dial in America (and I guess people like John Peel in the U.K.) had influence enough to make or break songs, and taste enough to be excellent at their jobs and have tremendous reach for playing new music. The bulk of the industry has almost always been pre-programmed, heavily-marketed music that large record companies want to succeed. That’s still true today, as much as I wish it wasn’t. And you could argue that for a time in the mid-60s, AM radio was such that just by playing what was popular, they featured a beautiful cross section of pop music that’s still being played today. That was a great time for music. I was in diapers. Much like I don’t miss shitting them, I don’t miss those days. Live long enough, and you see diaper-shitting on the horizon again.
When accountants didn't have control
OK, so I can agree with this one! In her view of musical history, there was a time when music was more controlled by tasteful people who nurtured talent. This is very true, but again, by 1977, with the industry growing exponentially since 1969, it was growing less true by the day. If punk caught on at all, it was thanks to billionaires like Richard Branson and his record label pushing it. The accountants were gaining control in 1969 and surely had it by 1977. Good-to-great music still managed to get made, just like today.
And the media couldn't buy your soul
They still can’t, but I appreciate the gesture she puts forth. At least her heart’s in the right place.
And computers were still scary and we didn’t know everything
I never found computers scary. I found Computer Science classes scary, although I wish now I would have taken a few and added that to my list of talents. But computers, man, once it was clear how to use them, I embraced them completely. Most people did. I take it she’s being sarcastic with the “we didn’t know everything” line – good for her.
When popstars still remained a myth
Probably the best point she makes. Pop stars appeared more in magazines and on album covers than the blanket coverage they now get thanks to MTV and then the internet. There was a mythology around pop and rock music that made physically seeing stars perform, even on TV, much more exciting back then.
And ignorance could still be bliss
Again, one of those weird lines that makes no sense. Ignorance could always be bliss, even in 1469.
And when God Saved the Queen she turned a whiter shade of pale
Nifty use of Sex Pistols and Procol Harum lyrics. A word on invoking The Sex Pistols. I suspect if Johnny Rotten heard this song, he’d break into a sarcastic, loose-limbed hippie/sufi dance, waving peace signs and rolling his eyes before stalking out of the room in a profane rage. The song’s sunny pop sense is more Bay City Rollers than Sex Pistols, and I mean that as a compliment. Watching her video, if you put a can of Coke or Pepsi in her hand, the look and feel of the video would perfectly mimic your average soft-drink commercial.
When my mom and dad were in their teens
She was born in 1982, the year I graduated from high school. Meaning her parents, unless they were banging straight out of the gate, were probably born in the late 50s, maybe early 60s at the latest. I’d wager they were too young to be full-on hippies, and too old to be punks – and probably would have been neither in a small Scottish fishing village. I’d wager her parents were into glitter rock if I had to take direct aim at the timing of their youth. They might have been Bowie and Roxy Music fans, assuming they grew up liking pop music, maybe even into prog rock like Yes and Genesis. Plenty of great British rock was made in the early 70s: The Faces! Her mother was probably a Bay City Rollers fan, which I wouldn’t hold against her. (I would be in heaven if her parents had totally neglected pop music and sat around in musty kitchens playing Scottish reels on bagpipes and violins while watching the rain fall sideways.)
and anarchy was still a dream
Anarchy is just about always a dream, and meant to stay that way. Generally speaking, if you’re in a situation where anarchy rules these days, bad shit is happening. Not the utopia of intelligent, compassionate people fulfilling their individual destinies with no governmental control. If that period of history has existed anywhere in any culture in the history of mankind, I’d like to know about it. Johnny Rotten sang, “I want to be anarchy,” but you know he was full of shit – in a good way, of course. But full of shit, nonetheless.
and the only way to stay in touch was a letter in the mail
Yeah. Phones didn’t exist in 1969 or 1977. We used smoke signals and carrier pigeons.
When record shops were on top
and vinyl was all that they stocked
Record shops sure were on top for a very long time, probably up until the mid 1980s or so. But they always stocked much more than vinyl. When I was a kid in the 70s, there were eight-track tapes, and then cassette tapes, which people gravitated towards when portable and car stereos came into being. Vinyl had a nice long run, probably about three or four decades of being the main physical product in the music industry. But time marches on. I’ll never go back to vinyl and don’t miss it. Maybe the art work associated with albums, but that’s it. I’m extremely wary of vinyl enthusiasts who weren’t around when vinyl was the main game in town.
and the super info highway was still drifting out in space
I’m not sure how long the internet has been around, but I gather it goes back in some form back to the 70s. Still, the idea of mild negativity being associated with the creation of the internet is just a bad, misleading concept in my book. It’s much more beneficial than it is negative.
kids were wearing hand me downs
I’m assuming poor kids still do.
and playing games meant kick arounds
I’m sure you’ll still find kids playing football/soccer in the UK of their own free volition. Granted, I get her point about the age of video-game zombies, but let’s give credit to kids who still don’t zone out with an X Box for four hours a night.
and footballers still had long hair and dirt across their face
Every time I watch a soccer match, I’m always seeing a few players on the pitch who look like hippies.
I was born too late to a world that doesn't care
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair
You weren’t born too late, Sandi, but in light of this song, I strongly suggest you cover “Drop Kick Me Jesus through the Goal Posts of Life” by Bobby Bare. Country music. Loved by people who think hippies and punks always have been assholes. Gives you a whole new demographic to tap into, and seeing as how pretty you are, an opportunity to float a video to CMT. And you’d be better off feeling Fonzia over Hank Williams songs that are better written and more lasting than much of what went down in the 60s and 70s. Look at the big picture, lassie!
The few hippies in our small town were pretty tame. I recall the girl who played church organ wearing a gigantic peace-sign necklace – the size of a car’s steering wheel. That was about as hippie as kids got around there. I do recall the Protestant minister’s son being a bit out there. We once spied him, naked on the hill in the cemetery, lounging with his similarly naked girlfriend in the mid-day sun, probably stoned out of his mind, too. Caused quite a stir. The point being kids like that were not the norm – they were considered unusual in our small town.
A phenomenon that’s been lost with instant media is the very slow path that trends used to move on in America. In other words, it took forever, literally a few years, for cultural trends to be acceptable in rural areas that were probably commonplace in more urban areas years before. You open a yearbook from my high school from 1969, and you will see unironic crew cuts and bouffant hairdos. Open one up from 1974, and it will look like Woodstock. The kids from 1969 were certainly listening to all that great music and well aware of hippie culture. It was just a huge leap of faith to dress and act that way in a rural area, where sizable numbers of young guys were going off to fight in Vietnam. Hippies were by and large the product of the middle- and upper-middle-class – these people weren’t around so much in our rural area. You’d find occasional small-town hippies, but they would be greatly out-numbered by, well, for lack of a better word, normal people.
I can even recall vestiges of this in the 90s. In New York, white kids decked out in hiphop gear with many going the full “wigger” route and pretending they were ghetto gangstas. It’s one of America’s greatest mysteries, to me, that this whole time period and way of being has pretty much been glossed over and ignored in pop culture. I thought these kids were creepy and offensive -- ultimately racist, too, in that I grasped they’d never accept black culture to the extent of actually living in or genuinely respecting it, and that they’d abandon this morbid façade by their mid-20s, if not long before then. I think I’ve stated before that their lack of sincerity regarding an issue as serious as race relations was something I found offensive and misleading. You want to paint a star on your face and wear platform shoes in 1974, that’s one thing. Pretending you were not just black, but a deeply offensive, buffoonish caricature of black circa 1994, struck me as total insanity … and I felt pretty much alone in that belief as no one ever seemed to discuss the issue, especially in a way that would question the white kids’ motives or genuine understanding of race.
But I do recall, circa 1993 or so, walking in a mall back home, where the whole hiphop thing had yet to sink in there, and seeing some kid decked out in full fashion, which meant he looked like he was wearing a particularly gaudy pair of pajamas, shuffling through the mall, and you could tell how deeply self-conscious this kid was in that no one was dressed like him, and people were “looking at him funny.” He was way ahead of the curve, and I was mildly let down when I went to a high-school football game a few years later, probably 1996, and saw more than a few kids doing their dumb gangsta-hoody thing with the size 52 pants and untied, over-sized sneakers, the creepy Limp Bizkit, backward baseball hat and vestiges of bad facial hair, god, what a morose time that was for kids – basically indulging in flash cards of an empty culture that had nothing to do with them. I think that’s my problem with a lot of teen trends, and that one in particular: kids are coerced into favoring a temporary culture that has nothing to do with them or their ways of life, when they should be creating their own cultures based on these two things. It’s the culture of marketing as opposed to the culture of humanity, and it sucks the life out of America, not to mention every other country it touches. It’s as bad or worse than fast food and is just as corporate in its intent.
But getting back to the concept of being “born too late” – that was the whole point of 60s kids laying their trip on us 70s kids. Our culture was junk in comparison. Never mind that there was plenty of junk culture in the 60s, too. I usually find people crowing over superiority of culture based on the decade they were kids generally have nothing to do with the creation of any sort of culture: they blindly followed whatever was put in front of them at 15 and decided that was that. The cries of superiority sound more like insecurity, which is exactly what they are. There was a lot of great music in the 60s. A lot! More than in the 70s. But there was a lot of great music from that decade, too. Frankly, I thought the 50s were even more revolutionary, and in terms of folk and the blues, at a minimum, were the basis and roots of most of what has followed since. If I had to choose a decade to revisit to see the first signs of these cultural shifts, I’d surely choose the 50s and see the flowering of electric blues and then rock and roll. In my mind, that’s a few thousand times more exciting than the 60s.
But the whole “born late” ruse seems like something aimed at the young – directed at them by older generations and always meant as a negative critique of the younger one. And you’ll find some kids who play along, claiming they were born too late. (And thus missed out on some great trend, which probably was great fun at the time, but came and went, and woe unto anyone who clings to those memories as opposed to leaving them comfortably in the rear view mirror.) These kids are really trying to say they can’t stand the current teen culture foisted on them, and I can’t blame them for that. When you’re in your 40s, or probably even your 30s, you’re thinking more about dying one day, not being born too late. You’ve swam out to the deep end, where you’re a lot closer to other people drowning. Teens and 20s, that’s the time of insecurity, to wonder why you couldn’t have been born in 1954 instead of 1984. If it makes you feel any better, you probably would have been an asshole in either decade.
I came across a single the other day on youtube that struck me as being a bit odd: “I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (with Flowers in My Hair)” by Sandi Thom. Apparently, this song was a huge hit in the UK and a few other parts of the world, but not here just yet. I actually like the way the song sounds – it’s pretty novel for someone in the music industry today to make such a bare-boned song and have a hit with it. But the lyrics gave me angina. More of that mildly self-loathing “weren’t things better before I was born” mentality.
I came up with a word for that a few years ago: Fonzia. Taken from the name “Fonzie” --the cool greaser character played by Henry Winkler from the hit 70s TV series Happy Days. This show was 50s nostalgia, roughly 20 years after the fact, aimed largely at a teenage audience that wasn’t even born in the 50s. Ergo, people being made to feel nostalgic for an era that they hadn’t even been alive in. Thus, Fonzia, a sort of baseless nostalgia lacking roots in any real emotions or memories.
I think Sandi Thom has Fonzia in spades. I checked her website to see she was born in a small fishing village in Scotland and is now 26 years old, meaning she was born in 1982 (the year I graduated from high school). If she has any childhood nostalgia to ponder, it’s people with symmetrical haircuts and gigantic white t-shirts emblazoned with “Frankie Says Relax,” white-people dancing to bad synth pop.
Thus, I can’t blame her for feeling nostalgic for cultures of an earlier era. Which she gets all wrong, but who’s keeping score. I’ll print out the lyrics to “I Wish I was a Punk Rocker” below and give you my running interpretation:
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair
In 77 and 69 revolution was in the air
Of course, punk rockers didn’t have flowers in their hair. Punks hated hippies, or at least claimed to. And I am certain that hippies hated punks – most people did. Punk didn’t happen en masse in America, although you started seeing many more punk-rock kids by the early 80s when punk had become an established sub-culture around urban areas. It was a rare kid who dressed punk, or even liked punk music, in my rural area in 1982. I was one of the few kids in my high school who had Clash albums and the Sex Pistols album – most of my friends didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when it came to punk, nor did they care. Most punk music, I didn’t know myself, and could sense that stuff like Talking Heads and Elvis Costello wasn’t punk music. (They were too good and had real talent.) The situation was different in the UK in 1977, but even then, I suspect people are now pretending there were punks all over the place when they were much more of an anomaly in the overall culture – the same way every British artist of any sort you meet carries on about “bloody Thatcher,” yet the woman was routinely re-elected for years on end. Who were those invisible millions who kept voting her in?
Revolution surely was in the air of 1969, but it came to naught. It came to even less in 1977. This was a passing fashion for most people. Not meant to disparage them or their beliefs. Simply stated, revolutions did not occur. The mildly wealthy kids who shucked their nice lots in life temporarily … eventually eased back into them and became what they were meant to be – reasonably wealthy people looking to stay reasonably wealthy. If that sounds cynical, it isn’t meant to be. It’s the way of the world! Most people become what their parents were, or make serious efforts to raise themselves even higher financially. Nothing wrong with that. Just doesn’t jibe with this whole “revolutionary” stance. Which most people quietly put away in a trunk in the attic some time in their 20s. Like watching a girl go from nose and eyebrow piercings, to a nose ring, to a tasteful diamond stud in her nose, just to a plain, unadorned nose, once she realizes there aren’t many 32-year-olds wearing face jewelry.
I was born too late and to a world that doesn't care
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair
The world would have cared no more or less in 1969, 1977 or 2007.
When the head of state didn't play guitar
I guess this is a swipe at Tony Blair for being a musician. Is the implication that life was better in that pre-rock era when heads of state had nothing to do with art or music? It probably wasn’t.
Not everybody drove a car
In 1969 and 1974, most people in the UK who could drive were driving cars. Not sure what that’s supposed to mean? You have to go back another 50 years or so to find a time when a recognizable number of people didn’t get around in cars.
When music really mattered and when radio was king
Music really matters now – no more or less than it did in 1969 or 1974. (The question is does it really matter to you, and the answer, unfortunately, is "no" for many people as they age, which is a shame.) Radio was king, but by the 70s, it was pre-programmed lists determined more by marketing strategies than taste or natural appeal. There was a very small window in the late 60s into the early 70s where some DJs on the FM dial in America (and I guess people like John Peel in the U.K.) had influence enough to make or break songs, and taste enough to be excellent at their jobs and have tremendous reach for playing new music. The bulk of the industry has almost always been pre-programmed, heavily-marketed music that large record companies want to succeed. That’s still true today, as much as I wish it wasn’t. And you could argue that for a time in the mid-60s, AM radio was such that just by playing what was popular, they featured a beautiful cross section of pop music that’s still being played today. That was a great time for music. I was in diapers. Much like I don’t miss shitting them, I don’t miss those days. Live long enough, and you see diaper-shitting on the horizon again.
When accountants didn't have control
OK, so I can agree with this one! In her view of musical history, there was a time when music was more controlled by tasteful people who nurtured talent. This is very true, but again, by 1977, with the industry growing exponentially since 1969, it was growing less true by the day. If punk caught on at all, it was thanks to billionaires like Richard Branson and his record label pushing it. The accountants were gaining control in 1969 and surely had it by 1977. Good-to-great music still managed to get made, just like today.
And the media couldn't buy your soul
They still can’t, but I appreciate the gesture she puts forth. At least her heart’s in the right place.
And computers were still scary and we didn’t know everything
I never found computers scary. I found Computer Science classes scary, although I wish now I would have taken a few and added that to my list of talents. But computers, man, once it was clear how to use them, I embraced them completely. Most people did. I take it she’s being sarcastic with the “we didn’t know everything” line – good for her.
When popstars still remained a myth
Probably the best point she makes. Pop stars appeared more in magazines and on album covers than the blanket coverage they now get thanks to MTV and then the internet. There was a mythology around pop and rock music that made physically seeing stars perform, even on TV, much more exciting back then.
And ignorance could still be bliss
Again, one of those weird lines that makes no sense. Ignorance could always be bliss, even in 1469.
And when God Saved the Queen she turned a whiter shade of pale
Nifty use of Sex Pistols and Procol Harum lyrics. A word on invoking The Sex Pistols. I suspect if Johnny Rotten heard this song, he’d break into a sarcastic, loose-limbed hippie/sufi dance, waving peace signs and rolling his eyes before stalking out of the room in a profane rage. The song’s sunny pop sense is more Bay City Rollers than Sex Pistols, and I mean that as a compliment. Watching her video, if you put a can of Coke or Pepsi in her hand, the look and feel of the video would perfectly mimic your average soft-drink commercial.
When my mom and dad were in their teens
She was born in 1982, the year I graduated from high school. Meaning her parents, unless they were banging straight out of the gate, were probably born in the late 50s, maybe early 60s at the latest. I’d wager they were too young to be full-on hippies, and too old to be punks – and probably would have been neither in a small Scottish fishing village. I’d wager her parents were into glitter rock if I had to take direct aim at the timing of their youth. They might have been Bowie and Roxy Music fans, assuming they grew up liking pop music, maybe even into prog rock like Yes and Genesis. Plenty of great British rock was made in the early 70s: The Faces! Her mother was probably a Bay City Rollers fan, which I wouldn’t hold against her. (I would be in heaven if her parents had totally neglected pop music and sat around in musty kitchens playing Scottish reels on bagpipes and violins while watching the rain fall sideways.)
and anarchy was still a dream
Anarchy is just about always a dream, and meant to stay that way. Generally speaking, if you’re in a situation where anarchy rules these days, bad shit is happening. Not the utopia of intelligent, compassionate people fulfilling their individual destinies with no governmental control. If that period of history has existed anywhere in any culture in the history of mankind, I’d like to know about it. Johnny Rotten sang, “I want to be anarchy,” but you know he was full of shit – in a good way, of course. But full of shit, nonetheless.
and the only way to stay in touch was a letter in the mail
Yeah. Phones didn’t exist in 1969 or 1977. We used smoke signals and carrier pigeons.
When record shops were on top
and vinyl was all that they stocked
Record shops sure were on top for a very long time, probably up until the mid 1980s or so. But they always stocked much more than vinyl. When I was a kid in the 70s, there were eight-track tapes, and then cassette tapes, which people gravitated towards when portable and car stereos came into being. Vinyl had a nice long run, probably about three or four decades of being the main physical product in the music industry. But time marches on. I’ll never go back to vinyl and don’t miss it. Maybe the art work associated with albums, but that’s it. I’m extremely wary of vinyl enthusiasts who weren’t around when vinyl was the main game in town.
and the super info highway was still drifting out in space
I’m not sure how long the internet has been around, but I gather it goes back in some form back to the 70s. Still, the idea of mild negativity being associated with the creation of the internet is just a bad, misleading concept in my book. It’s much more beneficial than it is negative.
kids were wearing hand me downs
I’m assuming poor kids still do.
and playing games meant kick arounds
I’m sure you’ll still find kids playing football/soccer in the UK of their own free volition. Granted, I get her point about the age of video-game zombies, but let’s give credit to kids who still don’t zone out with an X Box for four hours a night.
and footballers still had long hair and dirt across their face
Every time I watch a soccer match, I’m always seeing a few players on the pitch who look like hippies.
I was born too late to a world that doesn't care
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair
You weren’t born too late, Sandi, but in light of this song, I strongly suggest you cover “Drop Kick Me Jesus through the Goal Posts of Life” by Bobby Bare. Country music. Loved by people who think hippies and punks always have been assholes. Gives you a whole new demographic to tap into, and seeing as how pretty you are, an opportunity to float a video to CMT. And you’d be better off feeling Fonzia over Hank Williams songs that are better written and more lasting than much of what went down in the 60s and 70s. Look at the big picture, lassie!
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Fred's Manhattan Adventures
Fred and I went to Penn State together back in the mid-80s. (Not his real name – all names have been changed to protect the guilty.) Upon graduation, I putzed around the home county for a few months, then had an ill-fated detour to Venice, California that wouldn’t pan out for me. Fred immediately moved to Manhattan upon graduation and got a low-level editing job at a major women’s magazine.
I’ve lived in New York City for over 20 years now, and am willing to call my living experience “New York City.” I spent just shy of 10 years in the Bronx, and have now surpassed that time in Astoria (Queens). Have gone to work every week day in Manhattan. I know my way around, even in parts of Brooklyn, where I’ve never lived. Some Manhattanites get peeved when 718 folks refer to themselves as New Yorkers, or living in New York City. I’ve lived in New York City; that’s how the five boroughs are defined. Frankly, my living experiences in “off” neighborhoods has greatly enhanced my view of the city in ways not possible in higher-end Manhattan neighborhoods. (By the same token, I have no experience of higher-end Manhattan life, and feel fine not having it.)
My point here? Manhattin living is not what most people think it is. A lot of people move there because they feel outcast where they were living. In some cases, that's legitimate. In others, those people cast themselves out because, frankly, they don't belong anywhere, and I don't mean that as a backhand compliment. I often refer to Manhattan as The Island of Broken Toys, copping a reference to that forsaken land in the Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer TV special, filled with broken Jack in the Boxes and such.
People move there and adopt a new set of values based on every conceivable stereotype you could have about “city folk.” The worst is the mildly antagonistic attitude. People who will put forth like they’re going to hit you, but if you actually cut to the chase and hit them, you’ve just entered the pantheon of Hitler and Genghis Kahn in their world view. I don’t find that half-assed intimidation novel or endearing – it grates on me. I’ve had the pleasant experience of meeting native Manhattanites who are very down-to-earth, rational people. But something about transplants, particularly from the immediate suburbs, and their dire need to impress upon everyone how deeply “New York” they are, has always rubbed me the wrong way.
Fred wasn’t like that, and I’m guessing he still isn’t. He married a woman from Staten Island back in the early/mid 90s (can’t recall the exact year), and they moved to the Washington DC area to continue their careers in journalism and start a family. Via Fred, I got some crucial insights into both the world of journalism and life in Manhattan, as he lived there for a few years, save the brief stint where he moved out to Staten Island. The world of journalism looked like burning hell to me. The world of Manhattan looked a little better, but still wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
I believe Fred used The Village Voice to get himself into some strange roommate situations when he first moved there circa late 1986. Living with total strangers was a very collegiate endeavor, so I guess doing so with a new job in a major city wasn’t much of a stretch. All I can remember of this time period is him telling me he lived with some snotty vegetarians down near the Holland Tunnel and didn’t get along with them. It’s troubling to think that in Manhattan, you have people living for decades, sometimes their entire adult lives, in these morose roommate situations, where they live with people they don’t know, or even like, for years on end, simply because their rent is so heinous that they have no choice but to rent out a room, generally in a small two-bedroom apartment, or more often, a one bedroom, where they’ll maintain the bedroom and rent out the living room to a stranger.
All just to live in this magical place! Yeah, I know it’s bullshit. You do, too. But that’s how people live here. Or you’ll get the six girls fresh out of college living in a three-bedroom, each paying four figures to have no privacy. You encounter living situations like this constantly in Manhattan where the quality of life for the people involved must be near zero.
I visited Fred a few times just before moving here myself in the fall of 1987. And those trips were invigorating. New York at that time still had vestiges of that punk/new wave vibe, particularly in the East Village. You could feel it – there was an excitement to being there. If you want good cultural reference points, watch Something Wild by Jonathan Demme, or put on a Ramones album. That’s how it felt. We’d wander around the Village at night, drinking cans of beers from paper bags, just seeing what would develop as we walked. I still recall wandering into Dan Lynch’s blues bar just off 14th Street, and being shocked to find the lead guitarist that night playing in a closet just off the stage.
But looking back … I don’t know how he or his roommates handled all that. The main apartment I recall Fred living in was a small two bedroom in a newer building in Hell’s Kitchen, which was still very much a shithole neighborhood at the time. (It still has rough edges near the public housing areas, but is nowhere near as ragged as it once was.) We’re talking lower 40s, west of 9th Avenue. He had two roommates: Dana, a woman who had worked with us on the college paper, and Lydia, a wealthy girl from Puerto Rico who knew Dana. They got the bedrooms. Fred slept on a futon in the living room. They had one bathroom. I recall visiting with Brother J while there were two other friends visiting Dana. It was insane. Of course, we spent nearly all our time out walking around the streets and didn’t have much time to cohabitate – we only slept on the living-room floor that night and left the next day.
Those kind of temporary living situations seem normal when you’re fresh out of college. I can’t imagine tolerating them now! But when you first move to a city, in my case I was thinking about moving there, you’re in love with it. You see the good in it, feel the excitement of simply being there. It’s enough just to walk around at night. While I don’t think that vibe has left New York, it just isn’t the same anymore. Manhattan is overflowing with the wealthy now. The music venues, at least the best ones, have funneled out to various parts of Brooklyn. That wonderful, punky vibe … gone. Gone as CBGB’s. A lot of the East Village has been bought out by NYU, to create student housing and such. You can’t be working or middle-classed and live in white Manhattan unless you luck into a very sweet deal. It didn’t happen much then – it happens even less now. The place is much more dull as a result. Critics often focus on the "disneyfication" of Midtown, but it holds true all over white Manhattan.
Fred’s apartment was just a generic, no-frills place, like many college-town apartments, that happened to be in midtown Manhattan, therefore the rent was grossly inflated. The neighbors were either like them or just weird. Some nights, Fred would be woken up by a clanking/whirring/moaning sound coming from the ceiling. It sounded like people were having sex with a vacuum cleaner while they lifted weights. It was the kind of sound that had you thinking, “Forget about two in the morning: when on earth could anyone make that kind of obnoxious racket and think it was normal?!”
I moved to New York around this time, finding a place in the Bronx very quickly and staying there for a long time due to the cheap rent. I recall Fred being one of the few white people who would visit me up there and not be freaked out by the distinct lack of other white faces. He was good like that – that sort of informality and acceptance served him well, as it has me. You have to be that low key if you want to survive in a rough neighborhood: keep a low profile, not get rattled, act like you belong, and you will belong in some strange sense. I caught bigoted verbal abuse on occasion in the Bronx, but that’s as bad as it got for me.
All the while, Fred worked at his crappy editorial assistant job at the women’s magazine. His bosses tended to be neurotic and often crazed. He worked 10-12 hour days routinely. As anyone who has worked for a major monthly magazine can tell you, closing week is a monthly hell they all go through. He told me he slept on his boss’ office sofa many a night, as it made no sense to go home for two hours and come back. Understand, he was being paid a pittance to begin with. If you factored in the hours he worked, he was probably making minimum wage.
It seemed like a thankless, shitty grind he was putting himself through, but I see now he had to go through this editorial boot camp to push himself to the next level. And in my eyes, the next levels didn’t look so hot either. Most editorial staffs of any publication are run like absolute shit: people working insane hours, generally for editors who have no business being editors, who usually get the positions due to nepotism or returned favors. Even if you get good editors by chance, the departments are often structured so that you will often get screwed with serious, unpaid overtime, as it’s considered a grand privilege to make a living by writing stuff you really don’t want to write. I don’t mean to single out or disparage Fred and his experience – I saw this happening with everyone who worked editorial in Manhattan. It made no sense to me why these people had to make their lives so miserable just to have a “creative” job, usually in places that had routine, inexplicable lay-offs.
So you had Fred going through this insane “sorority house run amok” vibe at work all day, then coming back to a living space where had no privacy, and not even a door he could close on the world and have his own little area. I don’t know how he did it. But I do know he got along well with Dana and Lydia, which helped a great deal. Some of Dana’s friends were annoying. I recall one girl, from Ohio, who was the nicest person when I first met her, but a year later, was Ms. “fuck this/fuck that/ayy/whassa matter for you” type phony-ass New Yorker that I didn't want to be around.
Another was a blonde floozy, the most insincere person I’ve met, who was always on the hunt for a Manhattan stud boyfriend. Think she worked with Fred at the harpy gulag. I still recall her purposely bending over at a party to show off her ass to a group of guys in a way that was missing only a spotlight on her. For some strange reason, I also distinctly recall her, Fred and I going to an NYU party, and when we approached (we were all about 24-25 years old), some smokers loitering in the lobby blurting, “Oh, man, here comes some old people.” Old people at 25! I recall feeling “old” at the time when those NYU twerps offered up their sage appraisals. There was a band playing that night who really, truly sucked – a situation we ran into whenever musical acquaintances extended an invite. The hardest part was being non-committal when they asked you how they were; the truth was they sucked donkey dicks and should have been banned from even handling small appliances, much less musical instruments.
Fred had some odd friends, too. We all did. When you’re in your 20s and fresh out of college in a new city, you tend to band together with whoever will have you, and that’s generally like-minded individuals and their friends, a floating web of old college friends and their new friends. I can’t even recall their real names, so I won’t use fake ones, but there were two guys who lived down in Alphabet City in a crappy building … that probably now is a luxury apartment. But back then, man, what a dive, in a part of town that felt like Mars to any sane person, and one of the guys was a painter from suburban Philly. Great guy in general, but had a large blind spot about his art, still recall him going into some soliloquy about “Icarus, flying too close to the sun, his wings, melting” over some painting that looked like Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song record label on the side of a van. Fred and I just gave each other a “what the fuck” look and let it go. We were all over-estimating our talents back then.
The guy’s roommate was a very sweet Buddhist. Religion warning: when you meet white Americans who claim to Buddhist, you can assume they’ve been to college. May well be vegans, too. Probably from the suburbs. I never met any Buddhists in rural Pennsylvania. Would probably meet them in rural Oregon. I’m leery of Buddhists as a result – tend to pick up on a patina of bullshit around their beliefs, the same way I would around many Born Again Christians. You live in an urban area, it gets mildly tiresome to run into what amount to Born Again Buddhists, people who weren’t raised in that culture or with that belief, but came to it later in the life, generally after reading Kerouac or having a revelation at a campus beans-and-rice social. I recall this guy being a fellow volunteer coach in Fred’s gritty Chinatown Little League baseball group (they played on an over-crowded asphalt playground often covered in broken glass), and chanting when his team got ahead, because he didn’t want to openly express a desire for his team to win. (Buddhists should not be coaches.)
Another friend of Fred’s was Nancy, a mousey girl who had the lease on a huge apartment on 96th and Broadway and was also famous for playing some odd instrument, something like the contrabassoon. She was always having a breakdown over her lot in life, or errant boyfriends, or insert twentysomething girl problem here. She encapsulated the archetypal Manhattanite to me. Someone who had the lease on an incredibly cheap, huge apartment, probably on the wrong side of Broadway at that time, but still a great piece of real estate, and she was about as in control as a dog chasing its tail. I can’t recall how she got that place, inheritance or what. But what I recall most is Fred telling me of various tear-filled lunches and phone calls where this woman was on the verge of falling apart or pondering suicide. She was basically a nice person – I remember humming a Paul Simon song to her, her grabbing my arm and breathlessly exclaiming, “you have perfect pitch” – but she seemed as fragile as an egg in the middle of Broadway.
Then there was the troubled gay anarchist who drove like a maniac and seemed like “axe murderer” might be a viable career option. Next. (If I implied Buddhists are full of shit, don’t even get me going on Anarchists. Let’s just say the association of belief systems like these with college is never wrong. You won’t find anarchists and Buddhists in a factory, unless we’re talking Ben & Jerry’s.)
When Fred, Dana and Lydia moved out of that place in Hell’s Kitchen, they teamed up with one of Dana’s friends, Arthur, and got a small two-bedroom place in Chelsea, right on 23rd Street if I remember correctly. Arthur was a strange guy – sorry to be oxymoronic when describing any Manhattan male. Apparently, he was openly gay, with his friends and family, but still was incredibly uptight. He’d always be in some bitchy mood that seemed to be unrelated to any form of reality – just the way he was.
And horrible taste in music. I recall one party, trying to slip on a mix tape Fred and I had put together, we’re talking 2-3 hours into a party, everybody flying. Within seconds of hearing a note of music that wasn’t programmed by him, Arthur flew over to the cassette deck in a rage, pulled out our cassette and jammed his own back in. I can’t recall his exact tastes, but he might have been the only gay Huey Lewis fan in America. His taste was pedestrian, at best. (I don't recall Arthur liking or disliking me -- he probably thought I was a bland straight white guy. As I may have noted in the past -- I am more than comfortable being portrayed this way by people I don't like!)
The guy was constantly depressed. I have no idea what was wrong with him – would be novel to pin it all on his sexuality, but I don’t think that had anything to do with it. All Fred knew was he had to be in the same room with him constantly; they had bunk beds, with Arthur taking the top bunk.
The last time I told Fred about this, he claimed not to have remembered. But I distinctly remember him telling me of an incident where he woke up in the middle of the night, only to see Fred’s doleful face gazing at him, leaned over the edge of the top bunk, apparently staring at him for what must have been hours. It wasn’t a gay thing – it was more likely a “locate best spot in Fred’s skull for drill bit” thing. Fred asked him if anything was wrong, and got a monotone “no” in response. It has to be an unnerving experience to know a deeply troubled person is staring at you in your sleep.
Fred’s life with Arthur and crew at the 23rd Street location was filled with moments like that. It’s one thing to live in Manhattan with relative strangers, but to live with one who turns into a huge pain in the ass has to be another circle of hell. I can’t recall how long they lived there – not long. I think after that Fred did a brief stint at a dumpy, very small two bedroom apartment in the East Village with a stranger, and then he moved out to Staten Island to work, and thus met his future wife.
I do recall both of us seeing Arthur one time after that. He and Dana had moved into a small one bedroom on Sullivan Street (West Village) with a bathtub in the kitchen. That’s something you see a good bit in older Manhattan apartments – former tenement buildings with the bathroom in what would later become the kitchen. Guess the old adage “don’t shit where you eat” didn’t apply to Manhattan real-estate mavens.
Anyway, one New Year’s Eve, Fred and I were at loose ends and took up an invitation for a party at Dana and Arthur’s place. We must have been 28 at the time – on the cusp of leaving our 20s, literally and figuratively. New Year’s Eve, we figured, look out, big party, lots of people, here we come!
It was one of the more miserable experiences of my 20s, and one of the key reasons I rarely go to New Year’s Eve parties anymore. Fred and I showed up. I think three other people did. Just a flop of a party, that wouldn’t have mattered if we all could have admitted it, broke open a bottle of wine, and just had fun hanging out. But that seemed like a physical impossibility with Arthur, who stalked around in a blank, dark mood denoting the failure of the event. Arthur was blasting some crappy 90s dance music that made everything feel even more hollow. I recall one of the women who showed up turning on the TV for some reason, and Arthur flipped out on her that she’d do something like that at one of his parties. I recall getting the fuck out of there before midnight, which was a huge insult, but at that point, man, I didn’t care. A subway ride back to the Bronx on the 1 Train was preferable to the vibe in that apartment. I recall a hispanic woman vomiting on that train ride, and her two male companions laughing at her as she struggled to wipe down her pants and shoes. It was that kind of night.
I don’t know what that was. Whether it was an ugly demarcation point where previously partying people suddenly had it shoved in their faces that they weren’t quite that popular anymore. Or a bad night to attempt gathering the tribes as most people had previous plans. All I know is it was the last time I saw Arthur. Not to mention Dana and Lydia. But whatever New Year that was, must have been 1992 or 1993, it rang in a change, a sort of kiss-off to that “must hang out in Manhattan all the time” routine I had going for the past six years.
Since then, I’ve really ditched the “circle of friends” thing. That’s something that will hold true through your 20s and into your early 30s. But right around then, people start splitting up, either naturally or forcefully. Some get married, or have kids, or move, or all three. Some just check themselves out of your life, either a slow fade or a geronimo-jump from your plane. And you do the same in return. The people who have kids scarcely have time for themselves, much less that sort of extended hang-loose time that was a staple of our 20s.
Hell, I’m single, and I choose not to have that kind of spare time. Weekends, I’d much rather do the requisite yard work around the landlord’s property, my laundry, groceries, gym each day, big Sunday meal that will feed me through the next few days. In olden times circa 1990, Saturday or Sunday would be spent oozing ever so slowly out of a mild-to-terrible hangover. I never could stand that feeling of a wasted day to get over the previous night’s drunken revelry – it just never seemed worth the trouble. I surely don’t mind going out for a few drinks. But the concept of being on a 2:30 am subway train, on one hand drunk off my ass, on the other wary and cautious as I know I’m a prime target to get robbed, just doesn’t sit well with me. I’ve done it enough times to know there’s nothing out there at 3:00 am. I used to think there was some magical, late-night world that would open up and show me all its charms, but there never was.
So, life goes on in New York City, those strange days of my first few years here seem like a very distant memory. I often have the same disconnect with my Penn State days, but with college, it's mostly because I'm never physically there, haven't been there in years. With New York City, I'm still there, and it's still there, but the city changes so fast, and sometimes slowly over the course of years and shifting real-estate sands, that you can live here the whole time and quietly lose that sense of physical connection to memories. It's a strange phenomenon, but I surely feel it now. All I know is I had a hell of a time recalling some of the above people and episodes.
I’ve lived in New York City for over 20 years now, and am willing to call my living experience “New York City.” I spent just shy of 10 years in the Bronx, and have now surpassed that time in Astoria (Queens). Have gone to work every week day in Manhattan. I know my way around, even in parts of Brooklyn, where I’ve never lived. Some Manhattanites get peeved when 718 folks refer to themselves as New Yorkers, or living in New York City. I’ve lived in New York City; that’s how the five boroughs are defined. Frankly, my living experiences in “off” neighborhoods has greatly enhanced my view of the city in ways not possible in higher-end Manhattan neighborhoods. (By the same token, I have no experience of higher-end Manhattan life, and feel fine not having it.)
My point here? Manhattin living is not what most people think it is. A lot of people move there because they feel outcast where they were living. In some cases, that's legitimate. In others, those people cast themselves out because, frankly, they don't belong anywhere, and I don't mean that as a backhand compliment. I often refer to Manhattan as The Island of Broken Toys, copping a reference to that forsaken land in the Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer TV special, filled with broken Jack in the Boxes and such.
People move there and adopt a new set of values based on every conceivable stereotype you could have about “city folk.” The worst is the mildly antagonistic attitude. People who will put forth like they’re going to hit you, but if you actually cut to the chase and hit them, you’ve just entered the pantheon of Hitler and Genghis Kahn in their world view. I don’t find that half-assed intimidation novel or endearing – it grates on me. I’ve had the pleasant experience of meeting native Manhattanites who are very down-to-earth, rational people. But something about transplants, particularly from the immediate suburbs, and their dire need to impress upon everyone how deeply “New York” they are, has always rubbed me the wrong way.
Fred wasn’t like that, and I’m guessing he still isn’t. He married a woman from Staten Island back in the early/mid 90s (can’t recall the exact year), and they moved to the Washington DC area to continue their careers in journalism and start a family. Via Fred, I got some crucial insights into both the world of journalism and life in Manhattan, as he lived there for a few years, save the brief stint where he moved out to Staten Island. The world of journalism looked like burning hell to me. The world of Manhattan looked a little better, but still wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
I believe Fred used The Village Voice to get himself into some strange roommate situations when he first moved there circa late 1986. Living with total strangers was a very collegiate endeavor, so I guess doing so with a new job in a major city wasn’t much of a stretch. All I can remember of this time period is him telling me he lived with some snotty vegetarians down near the Holland Tunnel and didn’t get along with them. It’s troubling to think that in Manhattan, you have people living for decades, sometimes their entire adult lives, in these morose roommate situations, where they live with people they don’t know, or even like, for years on end, simply because their rent is so heinous that they have no choice but to rent out a room, generally in a small two-bedroom apartment, or more often, a one bedroom, where they’ll maintain the bedroom and rent out the living room to a stranger.
All just to live in this magical place! Yeah, I know it’s bullshit. You do, too. But that’s how people live here. Or you’ll get the six girls fresh out of college living in a three-bedroom, each paying four figures to have no privacy. You encounter living situations like this constantly in Manhattan where the quality of life for the people involved must be near zero.
I visited Fred a few times just before moving here myself in the fall of 1987. And those trips were invigorating. New York at that time still had vestiges of that punk/new wave vibe, particularly in the East Village. You could feel it – there was an excitement to being there. If you want good cultural reference points, watch Something Wild by Jonathan Demme, or put on a Ramones album. That’s how it felt. We’d wander around the Village at night, drinking cans of beers from paper bags, just seeing what would develop as we walked. I still recall wandering into Dan Lynch’s blues bar just off 14th Street, and being shocked to find the lead guitarist that night playing in a closet just off the stage.
But looking back … I don’t know how he or his roommates handled all that. The main apartment I recall Fred living in was a small two bedroom in a newer building in Hell’s Kitchen, which was still very much a shithole neighborhood at the time. (It still has rough edges near the public housing areas, but is nowhere near as ragged as it once was.) We’re talking lower 40s, west of 9th Avenue. He had two roommates: Dana, a woman who had worked with us on the college paper, and Lydia, a wealthy girl from Puerto Rico who knew Dana. They got the bedrooms. Fred slept on a futon in the living room. They had one bathroom. I recall visiting with Brother J while there were two other friends visiting Dana. It was insane. Of course, we spent nearly all our time out walking around the streets and didn’t have much time to cohabitate – we only slept on the living-room floor that night and left the next day.
Those kind of temporary living situations seem normal when you’re fresh out of college. I can’t imagine tolerating them now! But when you first move to a city, in my case I was thinking about moving there, you’re in love with it. You see the good in it, feel the excitement of simply being there. It’s enough just to walk around at night. While I don’t think that vibe has left New York, it just isn’t the same anymore. Manhattan is overflowing with the wealthy now. The music venues, at least the best ones, have funneled out to various parts of Brooklyn. That wonderful, punky vibe … gone. Gone as CBGB’s. A lot of the East Village has been bought out by NYU, to create student housing and such. You can’t be working or middle-classed and live in white Manhattan unless you luck into a very sweet deal. It didn’t happen much then – it happens even less now. The place is much more dull as a result. Critics often focus on the "disneyfication" of Midtown, but it holds true all over white Manhattan.
Fred’s apartment was just a generic, no-frills place, like many college-town apartments, that happened to be in midtown Manhattan, therefore the rent was grossly inflated. The neighbors were either like them or just weird. Some nights, Fred would be woken up by a clanking/whirring/moaning sound coming from the ceiling. It sounded like people were having sex with a vacuum cleaner while they lifted weights. It was the kind of sound that had you thinking, “Forget about two in the morning: when on earth could anyone make that kind of obnoxious racket and think it was normal?!”
I moved to New York around this time, finding a place in the Bronx very quickly and staying there for a long time due to the cheap rent. I recall Fred being one of the few white people who would visit me up there and not be freaked out by the distinct lack of other white faces. He was good like that – that sort of informality and acceptance served him well, as it has me. You have to be that low key if you want to survive in a rough neighborhood: keep a low profile, not get rattled, act like you belong, and you will belong in some strange sense. I caught bigoted verbal abuse on occasion in the Bronx, but that’s as bad as it got for me.
All the while, Fred worked at his crappy editorial assistant job at the women’s magazine. His bosses tended to be neurotic and often crazed. He worked 10-12 hour days routinely. As anyone who has worked for a major monthly magazine can tell you, closing week is a monthly hell they all go through. He told me he slept on his boss’ office sofa many a night, as it made no sense to go home for two hours and come back. Understand, he was being paid a pittance to begin with. If you factored in the hours he worked, he was probably making minimum wage.
It seemed like a thankless, shitty grind he was putting himself through, but I see now he had to go through this editorial boot camp to push himself to the next level. And in my eyes, the next levels didn’t look so hot either. Most editorial staffs of any publication are run like absolute shit: people working insane hours, generally for editors who have no business being editors, who usually get the positions due to nepotism or returned favors. Even if you get good editors by chance, the departments are often structured so that you will often get screwed with serious, unpaid overtime, as it’s considered a grand privilege to make a living by writing stuff you really don’t want to write. I don’t mean to single out or disparage Fred and his experience – I saw this happening with everyone who worked editorial in Manhattan. It made no sense to me why these people had to make their lives so miserable just to have a “creative” job, usually in places that had routine, inexplicable lay-offs.
So you had Fred going through this insane “sorority house run amok” vibe at work all day, then coming back to a living space where had no privacy, and not even a door he could close on the world and have his own little area. I don’t know how he did it. But I do know he got along well with Dana and Lydia, which helped a great deal. Some of Dana’s friends were annoying. I recall one girl, from Ohio, who was the nicest person when I first met her, but a year later, was Ms. “fuck this/fuck that/ayy/whassa matter for you” type phony-ass New Yorker that I didn't want to be around.
Another was a blonde floozy, the most insincere person I’ve met, who was always on the hunt for a Manhattan stud boyfriend. Think she worked with Fred at the harpy gulag. I still recall her purposely bending over at a party to show off her ass to a group of guys in a way that was missing only a spotlight on her. For some strange reason, I also distinctly recall her, Fred and I going to an NYU party, and when we approached (we were all about 24-25 years old), some smokers loitering in the lobby blurting, “Oh, man, here comes some old people.” Old people at 25! I recall feeling “old” at the time when those NYU twerps offered up their sage appraisals. There was a band playing that night who really, truly sucked – a situation we ran into whenever musical acquaintances extended an invite. The hardest part was being non-committal when they asked you how they were; the truth was they sucked donkey dicks and should have been banned from even handling small appliances, much less musical instruments.
Fred had some odd friends, too. We all did. When you’re in your 20s and fresh out of college in a new city, you tend to band together with whoever will have you, and that’s generally like-minded individuals and their friends, a floating web of old college friends and their new friends. I can’t even recall their real names, so I won’t use fake ones, but there were two guys who lived down in Alphabet City in a crappy building … that probably now is a luxury apartment. But back then, man, what a dive, in a part of town that felt like Mars to any sane person, and one of the guys was a painter from suburban Philly. Great guy in general, but had a large blind spot about his art, still recall him going into some soliloquy about “Icarus, flying too close to the sun, his wings, melting” over some painting that looked like Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song record label on the side of a van. Fred and I just gave each other a “what the fuck” look and let it go. We were all over-estimating our talents back then.
The guy’s roommate was a very sweet Buddhist. Religion warning: when you meet white Americans who claim to Buddhist, you can assume they’ve been to college. May well be vegans, too. Probably from the suburbs. I never met any Buddhists in rural Pennsylvania. Would probably meet them in rural Oregon. I’m leery of Buddhists as a result – tend to pick up on a patina of bullshit around their beliefs, the same way I would around many Born Again Christians. You live in an urban area, it gets mildly tiresome to run into what amount to Born Again Buddhists, people who weren’t raised in that culture or with that belief, but came to it later in the life, generally after reading Kerouac or having a revelation at a campus beans-and-rice social. I recall this guy being a fellow volunteer coach in Fred’s gritty Chinatown Little League baseball group (they played on an over-crowded asphalt playground often covered in broken glass), and chanting when his team got ahead, because he didn’t want to openly express a desire for his team to win. (Buddhists should not be coaches.)
Another friend of Fred’s was Nancy, a mousey girl who had the lease on a huge apartment on 96th and Broadway and was also famous for playing some odd instrument, something like the contrabassoon. She was always having a breakdown over her lot in life, or errant boyfriends, or insert twentysomething girl problem here. She encapsulated the archetypal Manhattanite to me. Someone who had the lease on an incredibly cheap, huge apartment, probably on the wrong side of Broadway at that time, but still a great piece of real estate, and she was about as in control as a dog chasing its tail. I can’t recall how she got that place, inheritance or what. But what I recall most is Fred telling me of various tear-filled lunches and phone calls where this woman was on the verge of falling apart or pondering suicide. She was basically a nice person – I remember humming a Paul Simon song to her, her grabbing my arm and breathlessly exclaiming, “you have perfect pitch” – but she seemed as fragile as an egg in the middle of Broadway.
Then there was the troubled gay anarchist who drove like a maniac and seemed like “axe murderer” might be a viable career option. Next. (If I implied Buddhists are full of shit, don’t even get me going on Anarchists. Let’s just say the association of belief systems like these with college is never wrong. You won’t find anarchists and Buddhists in a factory, unless we’re talking Ben & Jerry’s.)
When Fred, Dana and Lydia moved out of that place in Hell’s Kitchen, they teamed up with one of Dana’s friends, Arthur, and got a small two-bedroom place in Chelsea, right on 23rd Street if I remember correctly. Arthur was a strange guy – sorry to be oxymoronic when describing any Manhattan male. Apparently, he was openly gay, with his friends and family, but still was incredibly uptight. He’d always be in some bitchy mood that seemed to be unrelated to any form of reality – just the way he was.
And horrible taste in music. I recall one party, trying to slip on a mix tape Fred and I had put together, we’re talking 2-3 hours into a party, everybody flying. Within seconds of hearing a note of music that wasn’t programmed by him, Arthur flew over to the cassette deck in a rage, pulled out our cassette and jammed his own back in. I can’t recall his exact tastes, but he might have been the only gay Huey Lewis fan in America. His taste was pedestrian, at best. (I don't recall Arthur liking or disliking me -- he probably thought I was a bland straight white guy. As I may have noted in the past -- I am more than comfortable being portrayed this way by people I don't like!)
The guy was constantly depressed. I have no idea what was wrong with him – would be novel to pin it all on his sexuality, but I don’t think that had anything to do with it. All Fred knew was he had to be in the same room with him constantly; they had bunk beds, with Arthur taking the top bunk.
The last time I told Fred about this, he claimed not to have remembered. But I distinctly remember him telling me of an incident where he woke up in the middle of the night, only to see Fred’s doleful face gazing at him, leaned over the edge of the top bunk, apparently staring at him for what must have been hours. It wasn’t a gay thing – it was more likely a “locate best spot in Fred’s skull for drill bit” thing. Fred asked him if anything was wrong, and got a monotone “no” in response. It has to be an unnerving experience to know a deeply troubled person is staring at you in your sleep.
Fred’s life with Arthur and crew at the 23rd Street location was filled with moments like that. It’s one thing to live in Manhattan with relative strangers, but to live with one who turns into a huge pain in the ass has to be another circle of hell. I can’t recall how long they lived there – not long. I think after that Fred did a brief stint at a dumpy, very small two bedroom apartment in the East Village with a stranger, and then he moved out to Staten Island to work, and thus met his future wife.
I do recall both of us seeing Arthur one time after that. He and Dana had moved into a small one bedroom on Sullivan Street (West Village) with a bathtub in the kitchen. That’s something you see a good bit in older Manhattan apartments – former tenement buildings with the bathroom in what would later become the kitchen. Guess the old adage “don’t shit where you eat” didn’t apply to Manhattan real-estate mavens.
Anyway, one New Year’s Eve, Fred and I were at loose ends and took up an invitation for a party at Dana and Arthur’s place. We must have been 28 at the time – on the cusp of leaving our 20s, literally and figuratively. New Year’s Eve, we figured, look out, big party, lots of people, here we come!
It was one of the more miserable experiences of my 20s, and one of the key reasons I rarely go to New Year’s Eve parties anymore. Fred and I showed up. I think three other people did. Just a flop of a party, that wouldn’t have mattered if we all could have admitted it, broke open a bottle of wine, and just had fun hanging out. But that seemed like a physical impossibility with Arthur, who stalked around in a blank, dark mood denoting the failure of the event. Arthur was blasting some crappy 90s dance music that made everything feel even more hollow. I recall one of the women who showed up turning on the TV for some reason, and Arthur flipped out on her that she’d do something like that at one of his parties. I recall getting the fuck out of there before midnight, which was a huge insult, but at that point, man, I didn’t care. A subway ride back to the Bronx on the 1 Train was preferable to the vibe in that apartment. I recall a hispanic woman vomiting on that train ride, and her two male companions laughing at her as she struggled to wipe down her pants and shoes. It was that kind of night.
I don’t know what that was. Whether it was an ugly demarcation point where previously partying people suddenly had it shoved in their faces that they weren’t quite that popular anymore. Or a bad night to attempt gathering the tribes as most people had previous plans. All I know is it was the last time I saw Arthur. Not to mention Dana and Lydia. But whatever New Year that was, must have been 1992 or 1993, it rang in a change, a sort of kiss-off to that “must hang out in Manhattan all the time” routine I had going for the past six years.
Since then, I’ve really ditched the “circle of friends” thing. That’s something that will hold true through your 20s and into your early 30s. But right around then, people start splitting up, either naturally or forcefully. Some get married, or have kids, or move, or all three. Some just check themselves out of your life, either a slow fade or a geronimo-jump from your plane. And you do the same in return. The people who have kids scarcely have time for themselves, much less that sort of extended hang-loose time that was a staple of our 20s.
Hell, I’m single, and I choose not to have that kind of spare time. Weekends, I’d much rather do the requisite yard work around the landlord’s property, my laundry, groceries, gym each day, big Sunday meal that will feed me through the next few days. In olden times circa 1990, Saturday or Sunday would be spent oozing ever so slowly out of a mild-to-terrible hangover. I never could stand that feeling of a wasted day to get over the previous night’s drunken revelry – it just never seemed worth the trouble. I surely don’t mind going out for a few drinks. But the concept of being on a 2:30 am subway train, on one hand drunk off my ass, on the other wary and cautious as I know I’m a prime target to get robbed, just doesn’t sit well with me. I’ve done it enough times to know there’s nothing out there at 3:00 am. I used to think there was some magical, late-night world that would open up and show me all its charms, but there never was.
So, life goes on in New York City, those strange days of my first few years here seem like a very distant memory. I often have the same disconnect with my Penn State days, but with college, it's mostly because I'm never physically there, haven't been there in years. With New York City, I'm still there, and it's still there, but the city changes so fast, and sometimes slowly over the course of years and shifting real-estate sands, that you can live here the whole time and quietly lose that sense of physical connection to memories. It's a strange phenomenon, but I surely feel it now. All I know is I had a hell of a time recalling some of the above people and episodes.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Secret Millionaire
Just got back from a Christmas visit to Pennsylvania, where one of the hot topics was a recent episode of the Fox reality TV series Secret Millionaire which featured the town of Shenandoah, just up the road from us. The concept behind the series is to take a millionaire and place that person in an impoverished environment so he can “see how the other half lives."
I hadn’t seen the episode, and the concept sounded disgusting to me. You can wikipedia Shenandoah to get their demographics -- unfortunately, they don’t have crime rates listed. You’d see something very odd, actually with that part of Pennsylvania in comparison to urban areas with similar (or higher) per-capita incomes. You’d find the crime rates to be radically lower than what you’d find in urban America. People think the sky is falling when felony crimes occur back there, but in reality, crime is much less of an issue than you’ll find in most places in America.
Shenandoah has always had the image of being a rough town. My father told me the story of his father going to a banquet at the best hotel in Pottsville, the county seat, honoring World War I vets – this must have been in the late 1940s or so. The big controversy was a table full of Shenandoah vets stole all their silverware and had to give it back. Like many people back there, I’ve always referred to the place as Chendo for short, and 462 for the area code. The natives take a perverse pride in the hard image. But in reality, you pass through neighboring towns like Girardville, Mahanoy City, Tamaqua, Ashland and such, and those towns are a little rough around the edges, too. This happened to most small towns in Pennsylvania once shopping malls rolled in throughout the 1970s: the downtown areas fell apart as business centers.
I suspect the producers of the show picked Shenandoah because it made the papers this summer when a bunch of kids beat an illegal Mexican immigrant to death one night, and there was some controversy in the amount of time it took the local police to arrest the kids – which may have been the problem of determining prosecutable charges for X number of kids or may have been incompetence and racism – I don’t know. Whatever the case, they’ll go to trial soon, and the media machine will kick into high gear again over this issue. Shenandoah is less than half an hour south of Hazleton, the town that’s attempted to ban illegal immigrants and received much press and scrutiny as a result. A much better Secret Millionaire episode would have been to drop a hispanic millionaire into Hazleton, publicize that he came from Ecuador and spoke no English, and see how that panned out.
I hadn’t seen the episode, and the concept sounded disgusting to me. You can wikipedia Shenandoah to get their demographics -- unfortunately, they don’t have crime rates listed. You’d see something very odd, actually with that part of Pennsylvania in comparison to urban areas with similar (or higher) per-capita incomes. You’d find the crime rates to be radically lower than what you’d find in urban America. People think the sky is falling when felony crimes occur back there, but in reality, crime is much less of an issue than you’ll find in most places in America.
Shenandoah has always had the image of being a rough town. My father told me the story of his father going to a banquet at the best hotel in Pottsville, the county seat, honoring World War I vets – this must have been in the late 1940s or so. The big controversy was a table full of Shenandoah vets stole all their silverware and had to give it back. Like many people back there, I’ve always referred to the place as Chendo for short, and 462 for the area code. The natives take a perverse pride in the hard image. But in reality, you pass through neighboring towns like Girardville, Mahanoy City, Tamaqua, Ashland and such, and those towns are a little rough around the edges, too. This happened to most small towns in Pennsylvania once shopping malls rolled in throughout the 1970s: the downtown areas fell apart as business centers.
I suspect the producers of the show picked Shenandoah because it made the papers this summer when a bunch of kids beat an illegal Mexican immigrant to death one night, and there was some controversy in the amount of time it took the local police to arrest the kids – which may have been the problem of determining prosecutable charges for X number of kids or may have been incompetence and racism – I don’t know. Whatever the case, they’ll go to trial soon, and the media machine will kick into high gear again over this issue. Shenandoah is less than half an hour south of Hazleton, the town that’s attempted to ban illegal immigrants and received much press and scrutiny as a result. A much better Secret Millionaire episode would have been to drop a hispanic millionaire into Hazleton, publicize that he came from Ecuador and spoke no English, and see how that panned out.
(Sidenote: I've since learned this episode was filmed last spring, i.e., before the murder took place. So I'm even more curious as to why the producers chose Shenandoah.)
But they picked Shenandoah which, in my opinion on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of rank poverty and unlivability, is about a 3, with 10 being unlivable. It gets a lot worse than Shenandoah, or any town in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania. The general reaction in the paper was outrage, particularly regarding how the montages showing the “poverty” of the region focused on the absolute worst the place has to offer: an infamous huge abandoned coal mine, some burned-out houses that haven’t been knocked down (which are eye sores all over the region …) minor displays of graffiti (graffiti in rural Pennsylvania is practically non-existent in comparison the mounds of graffiti I see routinely in the New York area) …
… and a few households that need some work, to say the least. I got news for you – I know people with homes in similar disarray. It’s rarely a money issue – it’s a personal lifestyle choice. One that I don’t make for myself – I like keeping my place in order – but I’ve been in more than a few homes that would give Sanford and Son a run for their money. The apartment this episode’s millionaire moved into in Shenandoah, all I could think was I would kill to have a similar living space in New York. Cruddy wallpaper? Mold? Dirty floors? I got news for you – a weekend of cleaning and house repair eradicates these issues. Bugs are easily taken care of. Anyone with minimal effort could have refurbished that place into a nice little apartment.
What’s more, a few months ago, I was in the apartment of a coworker who makes over a quarter million dollars per year – in a Manhattan luxury building with a doorman. I got news for you: his living space wasn’t much bigger than mine, and mine was cleaner and more homey. Of course, his location in Manhattan leaves him with a monthly nut that’s about 5-6 times the size of mine. But that’s how people are in Manhattan – they live in tiny little boxes of apartments that are a joke most places in America, but have convinced themselves that “everyone wants to live here” when reality is most people don’t. (And I am fearful that this previously working-class neighborhood I’m in now in Queens is going down the same shit road in terms of phony, over-priced exclusivity and “location, location, location” issues, thanks to twentysomething suburban WASPs moving here in droves, and local real-estate scumbags perpetuating this strange sort of acceptable racism related to grossly inflated property values due to the new landed white gentry.)
As for the locals’ sense of outrage, christ, give it a break. That area has suffered from a strange, totally unnecessary inferiority complex for decades now. You can’t say anything critical about the place without locals crawling all over you, as if you don’t recognize heaven when it’s right in front of you. The Coal Region isn’t heaven. I love being from there, love going back there on a regular basis, but the reality is I’d have a hell of a time finding good work back there. Granted, doing so with a job that paid anywhere over the mid-50s would be living like a reasonably wealthy New Yorker, as real estate and taxes are much, much cheaper back there.
But gainful employment, or lack thereof, has always been a major issue with the region, and probably the main reason why I moved out in my 20s. Frankly, I like the lifestyles of most people back there: laid back, no-nonsense, friendly in a good, genuine way. If other people don’t like it, or look down on it … who gives a fuck? Does it matter? Of course, it doesn’t. Take my word for it, these people should be elated that moneyed douchebags are looking down on them. Because, as I’m finding in Queens, if those moneyed douchebags take a sudden shine to your neighborhood, it will be a matter of time before they move in and force you and every other sane person out in favor of their exclusionary lifestyle that requires a much higher income.
But I digress. I just watched that episode of Secret Millionaire on the Fox website (it's Episode 5) and found myself strangely touched by it. Sure, the producers played a bad trump card with the montages of feigned poverty and destitution – the area is nowhere near that bad or hard. But the overall tone of the show was to focus on locals doing good, and they found some genuinely good people who could use a few thousand dollars to move forward with their charitable causes, which was fine by me.
The millionaire was a cheerleader for the Baltimore Ravens who, as my brother sagely surmised, might have sucked the right dick and won the lottery: she married a rich guy. (And I wonder if this guy saw her strutting her wares on the sideline of a Ravens home game and made his move, no doubt making it clear how much money he had straight out of the gate. Aint that America ... Big Pink Houses for you!) The show didn’t touch enough on this, but there was minor friction between her and her mother, who came from a humbler background in western Pennsylvania. (Her mother joined her on this odyssey to live in Shenandoah for a week.) Basically, this woman came from a town that probably wasn’t much different than Shenandoah, especially with its Slavic background, and you could tell by how she dealt with the locals that she felt at-home with them. Her mother could have passed for any random fiftysomething Potato Bomb (Coal Region slang for a woman of Slavic or Irish lineage who puts on double-digit poundage after the birth of her first child and children thereafter) with her short hair cut, mall glasses and sweaters. (I should also point out her mother had that look of rural kindness and understanding I know well from back there.)
The odd part of all this, of course, is the cheerleader could have left her suburban Maryland town and, within 15 minutes, been in living conditions that would have made Shenandoah seem like Shangri-La. Of course, those wouldn’t have been white people, the neighborhood would have had an astronomical crime rate in comparison, and I think if you watch a few episodes of The Wire, you’ll get the drift of the kind of neighborhoods that exist a stone’s throw from her wealthy suburb. I think that’s also why the locals back in PA resent the show – this woman could have encountered much worse poverty and hard times a few miles from her home as opposed to hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania.
What made the show worthwhile was a few of the locals this woman decided to help with big checks. In particular was the woman in Frackville operating what looks like a dog grooming place, who took it upon herself to buy groceries routinely for people having a hard time financially. I don’t know her personally, but her grooming shop is one door down from a nice Italian place, the OIP (Original Italian Pizza), where I’ll often have dinner with two old high-school friends when I go back. What this show doesn’t touch on is that I gather the owner of the OIP is probably making a fortune, as are a lot of business owners back there. The friends I have dinner with? One is making six figures as a plant manager in Harrisburg (he drives an hour south every morning on Route 81), the other making a good salary as a draftsman and a three-figure-per-hour figure in her spare time as a caricature artist. One of my brothers is making a great salary at a hardware warehouse after being there for about 10 years. Two guys in my small hometown are lawyers making six figures. More than few of my high-school classmates I met at the last reunion are well into six-figure territory with their jobs. Shenandoah? My friend who lives there, the plant manager, has a kid going to near-by Bloomsburg University … for almost no charge if he maintains a 3.0 GPA. The town has an endowment set up so that any kid who wants to can get a practically free college education if he really wants it.
In the Frackville portion of the show, the kind-hearted woman who buys groceries drops them off at what might be the only “bad” block in all of Frackville. (A friend of a friend just moved there and has been outraged at the town’s comparatively enormous tax base to other towns in the region.) I know that stretch of houses, right next to Boyer’s supermarket. One of my high-school English teachers, and his wife who taught in another school district, live just down the block, literally 20 yards away, in what looks more like an average suburban neighborhood. He was making around $70,000/year before he retired (remember, with summers off), as was his wife, and living in a house that probably had a property value of about $80,000, which they had paid off years ago on a mortgage that was half that current value.
This is poverty? Christ’s sake, if only that were true, and this was as bad as it gets in America! The cheerleader got a job in a supermarket in Mahanoy City – this used to be a stop on the line on my bus’ local route, but has since been bypassed it because it's on a hard-to-navigate side street. It’s a nice little market – clean, probably selling the same products this woman uses in her Maryland mansion. She could just as easily have gotten a McJob at the Walmart in St. Clair or Shamokin, or even better, Redner’s employee-owned supermarket on the edge of Shenandoah which, I guarantee you, is virtually identical to any supermarket she uses in her high-end suburban paradise. It was a bit disingenuous of the producers not to acknowledge or film things like this in an effort to make the area seem as down-trodden as possible. The truth is if you have a nice house and a good job in that part of Pennsylvania, you can have a lifestyle that will be virtually identical, even in terms of consumerism and all its products, to this woman’s life in Maryland.
What should they have done differently? For one thing, there are small coal patch towns around Shenandoah that appear much more ragged. I’m thinking Shaft, William Penn, Lost Creek, etc. You’ll find normal houses there, and series of crooked row houses, houses that literally lean like the Tower of Pisa and have coal banks in the backyard. What’s even more bizarre: these houses probably have a property value of less than $20,000. In front of some of these houses, you’ll see new SUVs of the type the cheerleader and her millionaire husband probably own. The car costs more than the house. And some of the shanty houses will have a satellite DISHes attached to them and 42-inch widescreen TVs in the living room.
This is how America rolls these days: even poor people can pretend they’re wealthy with these sort of bizarre product placements, most likely purchased unwisely on credit. Or, maybe some of the guys in those houses are pulling in $60K a year at some higher-end manual labor job they’ve stuck with for decades, and they just don’t feel like moving, or upgrading their homes in any recognizable way.
It’s always a different story – sometimes sad, sometimes just as I’ve described. All I know is Shenandoah – or any town in the Coal Region – isn’t that bad a place to live. You can see this in the show when the cheerleader and her mother drive around. The streets are clean. You look out their car window as they move, and you see well-kept lawns and homes. I recall things being much more basic and gritty from my childhood there in the 1960s and 70s. Now? I go back there and sometimes feel like I’m visiting a suburb, missing that deeply rural vibe that was so strong in my childhood. Of course, that’s still there, too. I’ve just traveled more since then and can see the vestiges of suburbanism creeping up ever so slowly on the place. And I’d rather not see it at all, as I know what it implies (a lifestyle requiring greed, which is the antithesis of my life these days, ergo why I often feel alien in urban environments, where money just walks around, as the saying goes).
Part of my routine when I visit back there is to drive my mom around on Saturdays to do her afternoon errands: bank, dollar store, drug store, gas station, and always end with pizza at the Pizza Place in Frackville. Almost every time, she’ll drag along a garbage bag filled with empty soda cans. Why? Because there’s a woman who lives at the top of town in Ashland who works for a local animal shelter, one that depends on donations to survive and also has an ongoing aluminum drive wherein they encourage people to give them their cans so they can trade them in for money. So Mom collects all the family’s empty soda cans and delivers them every Saturday. Doesn’t sound like much? It probably keeps at least a few stray dogs and cats in their pens alive in terms of food and services provided for directly by this. I'm just glad the producers of the show didn't see her in her windbreaker and funny hat, dragging those cans out to the car, otherwise they might have portrayed her as a bag lady. When reality is she's living comfortably off Dad's pension and her Social Security, in a clean, good-sized house with a nice backyard. The producers of the show did a great job of masking that far greater reality of the Coal Region.
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