There’s been a lot of talk over the past year whether this financial quagmire we find ourselves in is a full-blown depression, or just a deep recession. For anyone out of work for awhile and having a hell of time finding a new job, it must seem like a depression. I know a few people in this boat, but can also add that one of them checked in last week to say she’s had three job offers in one week, so hers is about to end.
All other arrows point to a very bad recession. I’m not going to get into particulars because frankly I’m not qualified. I gather most qualified people on financial TV shows are the kind of folks who would stick it in and break it off, so I’m not sure who you should trust. But I can tell you that while I don’t know what this thing is, it is surely not a depression.
How do I know this? For one reason only: my parents lived through the Depression, were kids at the time, and the views they have on money and spending, as a result, are nothing, and I mean NOTHING, like anything that’s come before or since. I’m a pretty frugal person in general, thanks to their lectures and examples, but compared to them, I’m a spoiled brat who may as well be lighting cigars with $100 bills.
Dad would often tell the story of he and his brothers having one baked-bean sandwich in the morning for breakfast, and then no food until dinner that evening … which invariably was another baked-bean sandwich. Baked beans were cheap, and both that and bread tended to make them feel full. He wasn’t bullshitting – one day in my late teens, when I was at my thinnest, I found a pair of Dad’s army pants stored away in a closet in the attic. He had a 26-inch waist! I had a 32-inch waist at the time and couldn’t get those up past my thighs.
Apparently, his father, my grandfather who died before I was born (in his 50s, not unusual back then), worked in the coal mines (not “in” them but I think his job was right at the entrance, doing exactly what, I’m not sure), which during The Depression meant working two days a week like all the other workers – just enough to house and feed a family of seven with minimal amounts of food, but never save a dime. There was no work for the kids. Dad let me know, growing up, that mowing lawns for money was a luxury he didn’t have. So I was made to understand that busting my ass in the hot summer sun for a few hours, while hard work, was hard work for money, and something he and his brothers would have killed for in the 1930s. (We seemed like extravagant pansies to him in comparison. We were. Almost anyone, unless they lived in third-world poverty, would be. He always had that unbeatable trump card as a father.)
Mom’s stories are much the same, although she was born just after The Depression started and has her memories of that time rooted in early childhood, much like I have mine in the 60s. (I remember bits and pieces of the 1960s but very little. Most memories I do have of that time are elemental and not culture-related, i.e., I remember childhood experiences, but few things directly tied into the 1960s.) No matter, because Mom’s spending habits, to this day, are a constant reminder of The Depression and what it meant to people who lived through it.
It’s still quite an experience to go grocery shopping with her. My favorite occurred about a year ago when we were going down the candy aisle, and she gazed over the small bags of individual chocolates. I could see all the Hersheys stuff was on sale and said, “Ma, I know you like a bargain, why not get a bag of kisses.” She frowned at me, “After what they did to their workers when they moved their factories to Mexico? I’ll never eat another piece of chocolate from Hershey again, those bums.”
And she meant it! Beyond that, every item she bought was measured against the item next to it on the shelf. If it was a cent or two cheaper, get the cheaper item. Donuts? Get the stuff near or past expiration as it’s marked down. Ditto bread, or any perishable item on the shelves. Keep the coupons handy, because a lot of them will be doubled at the register.
It made me think of my own spending habits, which are pretty in control, but a good example of our differences would be in how we make chicken soup. Mom will buy the cheapest canned broth out there, because it’s the cheapest, buy whole carrots, the generic-brand string beans, corn, lima beans – all in cans – and find the cheapest chicken meat in that section. I’ll buy the good broth, in cartons, baby carrots that cost a little more, but mean less chopping, and the more expensive boneless chicken breasts as I like that meat better and don’t want to be bothered with bones. Don’t pay much mind to the difference in cost of canned vegetables either, save to say I avoid the generic store brands that Mom favors. I’ll buy the big white onions that cost a little more as opposed to the bags of smaller onions. I’m sure if you totaled up the bills of our preparations for chicken soup, mine would come out anywhere from $5 to $10 more. But you know what? That will feed me for a work week (with Friday off to relax and buy some local Chinese or Thai). Mom always buys with the concept of X number of mouths to feed (seven when I was growing up, three now) and will pinch pennies at every corner in terms of meal planning.
There’s one thing I would criticize my parents for, and there are damn few things I’m willing to do that on these days. But that would surely be buying the cheap shit in a supermarket when buying slightly more expensive, healthier stuff would have done us kids a world of good. I have a sweet tooth now that I can surely trace back to childhood, and the concept of making soda the official house drink. I can see the draw in the supermarket, especially with four kids. It’s cheaper than healthier drinks. When I go back to visit now, I have a hard time with how little there is to drink in the house as it’s soda or milk. The odd part about the 70s was my parents would cave in and buy the most sugary, most expensive cereals (Lucky Charms in particular) and ice cream, I guess because they knew in a small way that they were special treats they never had as kids. For once, I had wished they would have busted our asses and made us stick to fruits and vegetables … which were never as plentiful in our house as nearly every permutation of junk food, Little Debbie, be damned.
There’s a flintiness to people like my parents that’s noticeably absent in people now. A good word, flintiness. Hard people created from harder circumstances. So many people are spoiled now, mislead to believe their lives are gauged solely by status and wealth. When you come across people who, as a generation, didn’t have any of either – most people were in the financial shithouse in 1930s America – you get a broader sense of life. I try to be like them as much as possible. Not so much as a tribute to them – just because I know they have it right to see the world this way. Understand how hard it is from the get-go, as opposed to being raised in a cocoon. And spend the rest of your days knowing your value lies in things that can’t be bought. Of course, self-made millionaires are made of the same stuff, knowing they never want to go back to how hard things were. But many more people took that hard upbringing and nurtured it, as opposed to putting it in a rear-view mirror as something to be feared.
I’m not getting that “no bullshit” sense from most people these days. I gather what’s going on now is a speed bump in the grand scheme of things. That this system we built is so foul that the only way it could possibly change would be to have it come crashing down which, as we’ve seen, can come pretty close to happening, but never does. I’ve been reading lately of how the real estate market is recovering when the reality is we’ve just missed a golden opportunity to unwind decades of bullshit, go on having reduced property values and rents, and allow people to live halfway sane lives where they’re not killing themselves just to make their monthly nut. This industry recovering is good news only to people who want to sell their homes for a profit … a concept that always seemed unsavory to me, unless it was a cash-in near the end of one’s days to pay for the remaining few and leave a nice present for the kids. Most people I knew in 1970s Pennsylvania bought their house for one reason only: so they could die in it one day many years later and let their kids take it over afterwards. Not cash it in like a winning lottery ticket.
If you had explained that concept to millions of Americans in the 1930s, that one day it would be a common practice for people to buy houses just so they could sell them again, they’d have laughed at you. That sort of frivolity was hard to come by when so many people had lost their homes or were hanging onto one by their fingernails.
But I suspect a lot of what goes on today would strike your average American from that time as complete insanity. With Mom and Dad there is one issue that I can see they split on, possibly because Dad was the one making money while Mom ran the house. When Dad and I started talking more, in my 20s, when he’d come pick me up from the bus station and give me a ride back to the house on my PA visits, we’d talk about work. And he was always over-joyed when I told him I was making good money which I think he assumed was much more than it really was.
That may have been parental pride on one hand, but on the other, I could sense the he felt he had let his family down by not making more in his life. Or at least he’d occasionally drop comments to the effect that if he had more money, life would have been a lot easier. Not quite realizing that the concept of Dad with immense wealth was just as ill fitting as his size 26 army pants on me.
Unlike me, Dad has never spent serious time around people making bucket loads of money and never got to see how miserable and nuts so many of these people are. Because of their money, and the mental illness they have in terms of maintaining that status and pushing hard so that they get more. Don’t get me wrong – I think money surely serves a purpose in our lives, and having a lot of it, if you know how to make it last, must be a good thing. The problem is most of the people he perceived as being well off really weren’t all that well off. They had money, but they also had to work like fiends to get it and keep it. I’ve been around these people for decades now and can see they tend to bite off much more than they can chew, are constantly in debt, have self image issues because they can see so many people out there much more wealthy than they are (most of them simply born into it), and a vast majority of the time, have elemental “Daddy” issues that leave them seeking the approval of some miserable father figure incapable of offering approval. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that in NYC offices.
Meanwhile, Mom has always grasped the zen of being happy with what you got, not longing for someone else’s wealth. Sure, she played the lottery for years, and complains about utility bills now, but beneath that surface yearning is someone who has always seemed pretty comfortable and happy with her way of life. Dad was usually smart enough to see that, too, but as noted, every now and then he let on that he thought he missed out on something by not having more money. Maybe he did. Maybe I am now. But it’s not something I lose sleep over.
When you’ve known people like this who lived through The Depression – not so much in the things they say but more so in how they are – you get a sense of people who understand what it means to have nothing, and the ability to go on living with nothing. These days? I’m sensing the ability of people who pretend they have everything to go on bullshitting themselves that they do, even with warning shots that imply all the things they believe in are absolute bullshit. But to acknowledge this would be to stare into a huge void within themselves. And that might be the main reason why this sure as hell isn’t a Depression we’re living through right now. A lot of depressed people, but no Depression.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
The "Angry" Lottery Loser
The first Saturday of the new year was one of those mangy sweep-up days on the sidewalk. Not as bad as the previous Sunday, the first sweep-up after a blizzard. I don’t know what it is about blizzards that brings out the wet, floppy pieces of cardboard. But every time we’ve had a major snowstorm, the following thaw always deposits huge chunks of blown cardboard on the sidewalk. On top of the rock salt and dogshit.
But the past few days had been a wind tunnel with sub-freezing temperatures. Any time we have high winds, forget it, there’s all kinds of stuff on the sidewalks. Living near a night club, a few blocks away, there was some of the usual stuff. I’m always seeing the remnants of cigars pulled apart so the user can stuff the inside with marijuana and smoke his big ganga stogy before, yo, goin’ to the club. Usually the cigar box, too. And the plastic bag that held the pot. But it’s always the torn-up cigar innards that get me. There’s the usual small empty zip-lock pouches that held designer drugs like X – not tons, but enough to let me know some Jersey Shore-style douchebags were out there last night getting tuned up in their car before, yo, goin’ to the club. (Sidenote to New Jersey readers: I recognize the irony of this show's title, that these people aren't from New Jersey at all and, in fact, tend to be NYC-based guidos renting beach houses. Just goin' with the flow, know what I'm sayin'?) And someone has to fill me in on this, as I found this, too: a clear surgical glove? Not the first time, and I live nowhere near any medical facility. I’m guessing a woman is getting funky with a guy’s ass and doesn’t want to get her fingers dirty? Sorry if my imagination is too vivid, but why am I occasionally finding clear surgical gloves on the sidewalk?! I’m assuming doctors aren’t getting stoned in their Mercedes out there.
And there was the usual junk: plastic bottles, shopping bags, fliers, cigarette butts, beer bottles, a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts detritus (cups, container tops, napkins, bags) … one opened up recently an avenue block south … and I’d say the most common form of junk now on the sidewalk is Dunkin’ Donuts dumpings. The Dumpin’ Douchebags. Which unfortunately underlines my theory that the more fast-food/generic the eating establishment, the bigger the slobs who consume there. You can see this if you pay attention near any urban fast-food establishment: their junk will be all over the sidewalks in the immediate vicinity, even if public garbage bins are plainly visible.
But something really caught my eye this time. It looked like a scrap of cardboard, some type of form, but there was a black magic-marker message scrawled on it: “fuck you god and your bastard child.” It was on the back of a Super 9 Lottery scratch-off card. Well, someone’s a sore loser, I thought as I deposited it into the garbage bin.
Fast-forward about half an hour. I’m in the middle of laundromat loads, hustling back from the supermarket to my place so I can dump off my groceries and catch the load coming out of the dryer. I’d just left the supermarket, in front of the marble-cutting factory up the block, ready to hit the small hill leading up to my place. When I notice something on the ground: a Super 9 Lottery scratch-off card. It can’t be, I think. But I kneel down and flip it over out of curiosity’s sake. Sure enough, the same message: “fuck you god and your bastard child.”
This changes everything. It wasn’t just some one-off angry lottery loser … it was a conspiracy. Someone had it in for God … and His “bastard child.” A few thing I could already establish. This person was a Christian, no matter how bitter. If you don’t believe in God, then you don’t curse Him – He’s a non-entity if you’re an atheist. And this person was a pretty dumb Christian. Christ wasn’t a bastard. Mary was married to Joseph. You could make the case the Joseph was cuckolded by the Almighty, and must have had the patience of a saint to roll along with a deep WTF situation. But I gather you’re not too steamed when you’re poor as dirt, wandering around with your knocked-up old lady on a jackass, the only place you can find to settle down for the night is a dirty manger (must have been convention week in Bethlehem for the “no room at the inn” treatment they got all over town), and out of nowhere, as your wife is giving birth, three kings show up and start laying out expensive gifts to the son you know isn’t your own. I think at that point, you just throw your hand up and say, well, I’m not happy that the old lady is having someone else’s child, but I don’t have a pot to piss in, and this is all getting very interesting in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
I’d like to picture some middle-aged guy, angry with the world, buys a handful of lotto tickets, scratches them all off, lost again, and in his anger, at the world, at himself, at his poverty, angrily scrawls out “fuck you god and your bastard child” on the lotto cards and throws them randomly on the sidewalk in hopes that other people out there will find his bitterness, like a message in a bottle, and perhaps take a moment, and think, “Yeah, fuck you god and your child.”
But I suspect the reality isn’t quite so romantic. For one thing, the handwriting wasn’t so angry. It was carefully crafted, as though someone took his time to write the words clearly and concisely, slowly working the magic marker over the slim piece of cardboard. The person put thought into it; he didn’t explode in a moment of rage. For another, that sort of shadow figure whom life has forgotten, skulking around in his shadow world of broken dreams and mild rage, gets harder to find in this neighborhood, replaced by the spunky girl with an iPhone who peppers “you know” and “like” and “totally” in her cellphone conversations while discussing boyfriends named Chase and Dylan.
No, I’d picture the darker side of the brat pack who’ve been moving here en masse. The aging wigger who just ditched the nose ring two years earlier because you don’t wear those kind of things in the office. Faded family pictures from Christmas 1999, Dad, Mom, little sis with a smiley face, in front of the gaily-lit Christmas tree, and Vanilla Ice, yo, in a size XXXL Atlanta Falcons football jersey and sideways baseball hat, arms folded, fingers held in gang signs, glaring at the camera as if he was America’s Most Wanted, vainly trying to grow the wisp of a peach-fuzz goatee. This picture, of course, no longer exists because he made sure to tear it up Thanksgiving 2006, a few years after he dumped the gangsta pose, and the evidence of his growing pains slightly pre-dates the digital age, thus there might be some negatives buried deep in a drawer back home, but they’ll stay there, hidden and gathering dust.
That’s the kind of guy I picture scrawling such a message on a lotto card. And not so much because he’s angry with the world. More because he’s angry with himself, feeling himself drifting further away from that culturally-fueled teenage rage that pushed him straight through his mid-20s, but seemed out of place and childish at his 10th high-school reunion. And now he’s an adult, for lack of a better word, and that anger has no place to go. It has to die, and hopefully come back as some similar form of adult rage, although never felt as strongly. Pissed off at the boss. This job sucks. How about those (insert political leaning here that somehow offends your sensibilities). It’s always something. But never the same as being 19 and pissed off at everything in sight.
God can take it. His bastard child can, too. Just dump it on them, they’ll absorb it. World’s big enough for you anger, and then some. They get it, too. Angry message scrawled on the back of a losing lottery card. Good one! Scrawl it again. Spread the word. Drop this wondrous message on the sidewalk at various points in the neighborhood. Viral marketing. Nothing personal, God. Don’t really care about You. You’re just a pawn in my game here. But somebody’s got to take the hit for me here.
Of course, if the real culprit of this infantile crusade was found, it would probably be a 13-year-old kid from the neighborhood who’s pissed at his Dad for making him go to Catholic school! Found worthless, scratched-off lotto cards in the garbage bin, and the lightbulb went off over his head. Who knows. But I find people sincerely angry, truly enraged with the world, generally aren’t this calculating. This felt more like a failed art school experiment by someone with a mediocre mind and just enough education to be stupid. The sort of folk who’ve been piling in here lately … pining for a Trader Joes to open up just like the one back home … missing those Pita Puffs with Sea Salt so much it fucking hurts … ah, Trader Joes, Walmart for the baccalaureate set. That’s how it works in the city these days. If you build it, they will come? Nah, if they come, you will build it. And I just saw two fliers the other day heralding the rapture.
But the past few days had been a wind tunnel with sub-freezing temperatures. Any time we have high winds, forget it, there’s all kinds of stuff on the sidewalks. Living near a night club, a few blocks away, there was some of the usual stuff. I’m always seeing the remnants of cigars pulled apart so the user can stuff the inside with marijuana and smoke his big ganga stogy before, yo, goin’ to the club. Usually the cigar box, too. And the plastic bag that held the pot. But it’s always the torn-up cigar innards that get me. There’s the usual small empty zip-lock pouches that held designer drugs like X – not tons, but enough to let me know some Jersey Shore-style douchebags were out there last night getting tuned up in their car before, yo, goin’ to the club. (Sidenote to New Jersey readers: I recognize the irony of this show's title, that these people aren't from New Jersey at all and, in fact, tend to be NYC-based guidos renting beach houses. Just goin' with the flow, know what I'm sayin'?) And someone has to fill me in on this, as I found this, too: a clear surgical glove? Not the first time, and I live nowhere near any medical facility. I’m guessing a woman is getting funky with a guy’s ass and doesn’t want to get her fingers dirty? Sorry if my imagination is too vivid, but why am I occasionally finding clear surgical gloves on the sidewalk?! I’m assuming doctors aren’t getting stoned in their Mercedes out there.
And there was the usual junk: plastic bottles, shopping bags, fliers, cigarette butts, beer bottles, a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts detritus (cups, container tops, napkins, bags) … one opened up recently an avenue block south … and I’d say the most common form of junk now on the sidewalk is Dunkin’ Donuts dumpings. The Dumpin’ Douchebags. Which unfortunately underlines my theory that the more fast-food/generic the eating establishment, the bigger the slobs who consume there. You can see this if you pay attention near any urban fast-food establishment: their junk will be all over the sidewalks in the immediate vicinity, even if public garbage bins are plainly visible.
But something really caught my eye this time. It looked like a scrap of cardboard, some type of form, but there was a black magic-marker message scrawled on it: “fuck you god and your bastard child.” It was on the back of a Super 9 Lottery scratch-off card. Well, someone’s a sore loser, I thought as I deposited it into the garbage bin.
Fast-forward about half an hour. I’m in the middle of laundromat loads, hustling back from the supermarket to my place so I can dump off my groceries and catch the load coming out of the dryer. I’d just left the supermarket, in front of the marble-cutting factory up the block, ready to hit the small hill leading up to my place. When I notice something on the ground: a Super 9 Lottery scratch-off card. It can’t be, I think. But I kneel down and flip it over out of curiosity’s sake. Sure enough, the same message: “fuck you god and your bastard child.”
This changes everything. It wasn’t just some one-off angry lottery loser … it was a conspiracy. Someone had it in for God … and His “bastard child.” A few thing I could already establish. This person was a Christian, no matter how bitter. If you don’t believe in God, then you don’t curse Him – He’s a non-entity if you’re an atheist. And this person was a pretty dumb Christian. Christ wasn’t a bastard. Mary was married to Joseph. You could make the case the Joseph was cuckolded by the Almighty, and must have had the patience of a saint to roll along with a deep WTF situation. But I gather you’re not too steamed when you’re poor as dirt, wandering around with your knocked-up old lady on a jackass, the only place you can find to settle down for the night is a dirty manger (must have been convention week in Bethlehem for the “no room at the inn” treatment they got all over town), and out of nowhere, as your wife is giving birth, three kings show up and start laying out expensive gifts to the son you know isn’t your own. I think at that point, you just throw your hand up and say, well, I’m not happy that the old lady is having someone else’s child, but I don’t have a pot to piss in, and this is all getting very interesting in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
I’d like to picture some middle-aged guy, angry with the world, buys a handful of lotto tickets, scratches them all off, lost again, and in his anger, at the world, at himself, at his poverty, angrily scrawls out “fuck you god and your bastard child” on the lotto cards and throws them randomly on the sidewalk in hopes that other people out there will find his bitterness, like a message in a bottle, and perhaps take a moment, and think, “Yeah, fuck you god and your child.”
But I suspect the reality isn’t quite so romantic. For one thing, the handwriting wasn’t so angry. It was carefully crafted, as though someone took his time to write the words clearly and concisely, slowly working the magic marker over the slim piece of cardboard. The person put thought into it; he didn’t explode in a moment of rage. For another, that sort of shadow figure whom life has forgotten, skulking around in his shadow world of broken dreams and mild rage, gets harder to find in this neighborhood, replaced by the spunky girl with an iPhone who peppers “you know” and “like” and “totally” in her cellphone conversations while discussing boyfriends named Chase and Dylan.
No, I’d picture the darker side of the brat pack who’ve been moving here en masse. The aging wigger who just ditched the nose ring two years earlier because you don’t wear those kind of things in the office. Faded family pictures from Christmas 1999, Dad, Mom, little sis with a smiley face, in front of the gaily-lit Christmas tree, and Vanilla Ice, yo, in a size XXXL Atlanta Falcons football jersey and sideways baseball hat, arms folded, fingers held in gang signs, glaring at the camera as if he was America’s Most Wanted, vainly trying to grow the wisp of a peach-fuzz goatee. This picture, of course, no longer exists because he made sure to tear it up Thanksgiving 2006, a few years after he dumped the gangsta pose, and the evidence of his growing pains slightly pre-dates the digital age, thus there might be some negatives buried deep in a drawer back home, but they’ll stay there, hidden and gathering dust.
That’s the kind of guy I picture scrawling such a message on a lotto card. And not so much because he’s angry with the world. More because he’s angry with himself, feeling himself drifting further away from that culturally-fueled teenage rage that pushed him straight through his mid-20s, but seemed out of place and childish at his 10th high-school reunion. And now he’s an adult, for lack of a better word, and that anger has no place to go. It has to die, and hopefully come back as some similar form of adult rage, although never felt as strongly. Pissed off at the boss. This job sucks. How about those (insert political leaning here that somehow offends your sensibilities). It’s always something. But never the same as being 19 and pissed off at everything in sight.
God can take it. His bastard child can, too. Just dump it on them, they’ll absorb it. World’s big enough for you anger, and then some. They get it, too. Angry message scrawled on the back of a losing lottery card. Good one! Scrawl it again. Spread the word. Drop this wondrous message on the sidewalk at various points in the neighborhood. Viral marketing. Nothing personal, God. Don’t really care about You. You’re just a pawn in my game here. But somebody’s got to take the hit for me here.
Of course, if the real culprit of this infantile crusade was found, it would probably be a 13-year-old kid from the neighborhood who’s pissed at his Dad for making him go to Catholic school! Found worthless, scratched-off lotto cards in the garbage bin, and the lightbulb went off over his head. Who knows. But I find people sincerely angry, truly enraged with the world, generally aren’t this calculating. This felt more like a failed art school experiment by someone with a mediocre mind and just enough education to be stupid. The sort of folk who’ve been piling in here lately … pining for a Trader Joes to open up just like the one back home … missing those Pita Puffs with Sea Salt so much it fucking hurts … ah, Trader Joes, Walmart for the baccalaureate set. That’s how it works in the city these days. If you build it, they will come? Nah, if they come, you will build it. And I just saw two fliers the other day heralding the rapture.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Baby Made Boom Boom
I’ve heard New Year’s Eve described as “amateur night” many times over, referring to partiers who can’t handle being drunk and act buffoonish as a result. But when you think about it, every night is amateur night in bars everywhere, and a lot of those amateurs are alcoholics. I’ve never walked into a bar to find "a professional": some suave, middle-aged man in a cummerbund or cravat, sipping aged whiskey and putting forth like Oscar Wilde. If I did, I’d assume I’d stumbled into a gay bar, and one that specialized in old queens.
I’m sitting here, snug and warm in my apartment, after having a ragged-ass day at work because a few people are out next week and used today to gun out whatever they could. No intentions at all of going out. I work in the western part of midtown Manhattan; they’ve had the parade iron gates lining up each avenue the past two days so that you can’t jaywalk, not quite realizing things get dangerous when you have hordes of tourists making it impossible for sane people to get around them. It’s been a bad scene all week with people who really ought to go the hell home instead of coming here, not quite realizing it still isn’t Disneyland despite Guilliani’s efforts in the 90s to make it so.
And I wasn’t spared my one amateur. Got on the train about 4:00 pm, just beating that undefined time when the cops lockdown midtown and start putting those metal gates all over the place and guiding people away from subway stations. As I did, a twentyish guy, long and lanky, got on at the Times Square stop with me. Seemed normal. Stood by the door. Train wasn't crowded at all. Two stops later, we found ourselves sitting next to each other, albeit with a long bar in the middle of the subway car between us.
He was drunk off his ass, listening to hiphop on his iPod. I could tell because he had earphones that rested on top of his ears, and I could hear the sound bleeding out. The paper bag in his hand turned out to be a beer … which was such a throwback to the “old” days of New York when it was easy to walk around in public with a can of beer and not get hassled. (You now will for breaking open container laws.) I could respect the guy for being so brazen, but that’s where it ended. Like so many dickheads listening to hiphop, he was gesturing with his arms while he listened, you know, the phony jabbing of fingers, the hand signals and swaying of shoulders, like a five-year-old emulating his take of bloated adulthood.
He was drunk, no need to bust his chops or get weird, so long as he kept it relatively under control. About all he did was rub up against me by accident a little too much, not enough to act offended and make a scene, but enough to make me think, “Get off the train, you drunken prick.” Every time the train hit a turn or quicker stop, he’d lean too far against me, like someone does when he falls asleep on the train. Again, the key to surviving in New York is quietly riding out situations like that. If it gets too weird, find some way to walk away, or act out, quickly and decisively. I surely had him in the corner of my eye.
But then, this smell … he shit his pants! I know he did. I suspect he knows I know he did. The smell just sort of came at me in a small wave, but I’ve been around enough homeless people to know – if I had kids in diapers, I could assure you, it would be the same smell. Not a full-on dump. He probably squeezed out a small turd by accident on one of those sharp turns. You couldn’t see it. Man, you could smell it. Again, not an over-powering stench, but enough to let me know baby made boom boom. I know after that smell, he stopped futzing around with his “white rapper representin’, yo” routine he had been putting on. That tends to be the case when you have a load in your pants!
He made it past Roosevelt Plaza, the first above-ground stop in Queens. But, luckily, he shuffled, and I mean shuffled, like a penguin, towards the door at 39th Avenue, the next stop and leaned off the train. He was so drunk he stumbled towards the subway wall and crouched against it, with his back to it, leaned over. I assume he was getting ready to puke to go along with his boo-boo.
But the doors shut, and the train pulled away. Man, what a New Year’s that guy must be having. Who knows, maybe his girlfriend dumped him, he lost his job, one of his parents passed on, D, all of the above, who knows. He wasn’t a happy, kazoo-blurting party drunk in a plastic hat tossing confetti. He was a drunk, lonely kid on the train who shit his pants, getting off on a train stop that’s still a bit dicey in terms of safety. Happy New Year! I hope his day got better once he got off at 39th, but who knows. He seemed harmless enough, but it’s my firm belief that anyone listening to an iPod and “acting out” the music, whatever kind of music, has to be a horse’s ass on some deep, abiding level that I don’t want to contemplate. Paths cross, assholes fade like tail lights in the dark, life goes on.
Such is life in the big city. The night before, my old friend Fred came into the city for a visit while staying with his extended family in a Jersey town this week. (This is the same guy from this post detailing our crazy “NYC in our 20s” days.) I haven’t seen Fred in years, maybe a decade? It’s been a long time. The dude hasn’t changed physically one iota since his college days. Maybe his pants size are up a notch or two (unlike six or seven like mine!), but he still looks physically healthy, hasn’t gone gray or lost his hair, and despite a high-pressure job in a major city, doesn’t have that sort of stress he must feel routinely showing at all in his face. I’ve seen this way of life age people in dog years. Fred must be a vampire, drinking blood in the dead of night to maintain this Dorian Gray personage. I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s working.
We had some dinner and drinks down in the East Village, Alphabet City to be exact, one of Fred’s last stops before he moved out to Staten Island, met his wife and eventually left New York. If you’re unfamiliar with New York, this is an area on the Lower East Side that has changed drastically in the last 20 years, going from a rundown, anarchistic squatters paradise with burned-out buildings and a thriving drug trade … to an obscenely-expensive, highly-exclusive residential area that, I guess, must have started as geared towards the young and hip, but you can’t be too young and hip these days and still afford the sky-high rents and real-estate values down there. That goes for all of white Manhattan. Parts of it used to be a genuinely intriguing mix of people across all social strata. Now, you’re going to find smatterings of projects housing the very poor, or people with A LOT of money, with very few social classes in between. No struggling writers, artists, or poets, or musicians. Most of them have gone out to Brooklyn and are in the process of being priced out of most of those neighborhoods, too.
I don’t know who lives down there now. I do know you still have sizable projects when you get over to Avenues C and D (this area is called Alphabet City because it’s a large, rectangular block of a neighborhood intersected north/south by Avenues A through D). So things can still feel hairy down there depending on where you walk. But, man, nothing like in the 70s and 80s, surely up through the mid-90s when things changed rapidly along Avenues A and B. When Fred and I sat down for dinner at a nice “American” style restaurant (with prices better than what I find in my neighborhood in Astoria!), it was nearly empty just after six, but filled up fast, most of them a younger crowd. No way on earth could they have lived around there. They were probably like me – in the city for a night of hanging out. I neglected to mention to Fred, who had been asking what happened to all the old clubs and great places to see bands we knew and frequented, there still are a few places like that around, like The Living Room, Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge just south of where we were. But not many.
That was our main draw to hanging out downtown back then, the allure of seeing good music in a small club, which we did dozens of times, at places like the old Ritz on 11th between 3rd and 4th Avenues, and The Knitting Factory when it was on Houston Street. A bomb has gone off in Manhattan though in terms of night clubs, and most bands now, when they come to New York, head out to various small clubs in Brooklyn to make their small legends. You saw people like us wandering around downtown, most of the time we were out to see bands. Those days are just about gone in Manhattan.
It was a kick to later walk the streets of Fred’s old neighborhood and gawk in disbelief at what it had become in the past 20 years. Understand that before I moved to New York, the two or three times I visited Fred in his cramped/shared apartment just west of Times Square, whoever was up for it, we’d all get on the subway down to the East Village, get cans of beer in paper bags at the nearest bodega (much like the dude noted above on the train today!) and just walk in the night. Man, just walking around New York in the 80s, you could still feel “that vibe” – a wonderful feeling, like sparks. The place felt so alive and vibrant. Run-down as hell, sure, but that was part of it. I’m sure part of it was being a bit of a rube and feeding off the different kind of energy a major city provides after dark, but with New York, it was something else, too, something much larger. And I should point out we weren’t acting like “frat boys” or in any way kicking up a fuss. Just walking and taking it all in. Pass a bar? Man, let’s go in and have one. The night would piece itself together like that until we got back on the train, exhausted, and went back uptown to sleep fitfully on hardwood living-room floors.
I guess Fred and I did roughly the same last night, save we had our beers in the restaurant and just walked, particularly down the block that was his last living space down there, a dumpy apartment building on 13th Street between A and B. I remembered that place. Every time I went down there to see him, someone on the first floor would be wailing away on a drum set and sounding terrible. Fred noted that his most vivid memory was the night there was a fire in the building, and everyone filed in their pajamas and blankets, huddled in the water and smoke-filled street in front of the apartment building, dazed and half asleep, not being able to go back in until later the next morning and the whole place smelling like smoke.
It still looked dumpy, as some apartment building always will. But just across the street was a palace, a very nice-looking building with arty lanterns and such hanging from awnings and immaculate brickface on a building that looked like a grand old hotel that had been there for centuries. Well, Fred informed me, that was a squat back in 1989. A burned-out hulk of a building with no windows, graffiti-covered, runaway kids and older boho artist types making a stand there because whoever owned the building had let it rot, so these people moved in and made a go of it without any heat or running water. They’d tap into electricity from street lights in front of the building. This was the urban version of “off the grid” people you’ll find out west living on the edges of deserts and in the deep woods. Some good people, some crazy and lost, all trying to make lives for themselves outside the rule book.
Who knows when that particular squat shut down, but they all did down there, and there were surely dozens, as that whole neighborhood changed in the early 90s. The Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988 was probably the last hurrah of the rebel side of the neighborhood, where the various forces at play in the neighborhood came to a head, and “law and order” prevailed, thus paving the way for gentrification. Surely, when Fred lived there circa 1990, it was still rough, but I’m sure signs of the impending changes were taking root right then. It blew his mind to look across the street from his old building in 2009 and see this beautiful art-deco apartment building standing where what you might call a black hole of hope once stood.
As Fred noted last night, what the hell, you can piss on gentrification all you want, and for good reason, but by the same token, drugs, squalor, shootings and general mayhem going on all up and down the block at all hours is hardly an ideal living situation, even for a young guy looking for a grittier alternative to wherever he’d just been. I don’t like gentrification at all – in fact, find it horrifying in some senses now that I’m actually living in a neighborhood where I can see how insidiously it works – but when you see the end results, years later, you do get that deep “what the fuck” moment and realize you, as a small person in a set place and time, are more like a cork bobbing on a wave in the ocean than anything else. Shit happens in place and time, and you move along with it, sometimes rolling along nicely for years, other times being swept away for various reasons, in best cases, of your own choice.
And I guess that applies to our lives, too, which is I what I got from walking around with Fred last night. You just roll with the waves and see where they take you. At least that’s how I’ve lived my life. Which must sound like a nightmare to a go-getter with everything that’s going to happen in his life laid out in outline format. Well, outline formats always come up with unanticipated sub-numbers that tend to spread out the broadly-stroked Roman Numerals of Big Shit Happening. You roll with things. And as I told Fred, last night, like a grumpy old man laying out the mystery of life while I clutched my newspaper and harrumphed: sane, healthy and solvent … the rest takes care of itself. You just take whatever shit rolls your way – good, bad or indifferent – and improvise to the best of your abilities. I think I realized this walking around last night, and the vibe was virtually no different from the one we had back in 198X roaming around as kids looking for sparks, as opposed to middle-aged guys who had found them in some sense, and watched some of them die, others go on glowing in the night.
I think the key to life is to simply not shit your pants on a subway train in New York!
I’m sitting here, snug and warm in my apartment, after having a ragged-ass day at work because a few people are out next week and used today to gun out whatever they could. No intentions at all of going out. I work in the western part of midtown Manhattan; they’ve had the parade iron gates lining up each avenue the past two days so that you can’t jaywalk, not quite realizing things get dangerous when you have hordes of tourists making it impossible for sane people to get around them. It’s been a bad scene all week with people who really ought to go the hell home instead of coming here, not quite realizing it still isn’t Disneyland despite Guilliani’s efforts in the 90s to make it so.
And I wasn’t spared my one amateur. Got on the train about 4:00 pm, just beating that undefined time when the cops lockdown midtown and start putting those metal gates all over the place and guiding people away from subway stations. As I did, a twentyish guy, long and lanky, got on at the Times Square stop with me. Seemed normal. Stood by the door. Train wasn't crowded at all. Two stops later, we found ourselves sitting next to each other, albeit with a long bar in the middle of the subway car between us.
He was drunk off his ass, listening to hiphop on his iPod. I could tell because he had earphones that rested on top of his ears, and I could hear the sound bleeding out. The paper bag in his hand turned out to be a beer … which was such a throwback to the “old” days of New York when it was easy to walk around in public with a can of beer and not get hassled. (You now will for breaking open container laws.) I could respect the guy for being so brazen, but that’s where it ended. Like so many dickheads listening to hiphop, he was gesturing with his arms while he listened, you know, the phony jabbing of fingers, the hand signals and swaying of shoulders, like a five-year-old emulating his take of bloated adulthood.
He was drunk, no need to bust his chops or get weird, so long as he kept it relatively under control. About all he did was rub up against me by accident a little too much, not enough to act offended and make a scene, but enough to make me think, “Get off the train, you drunken prick.” Every time the train hit a turn or quicker stop, he’d lean too far against me, like someone does when he falls asleep on the train. Again, the key to surviving in New York is quietly riding out situations like that. If it gets too weird, find some way to walk away, or act out, quickly and decisively. I surely had him in the corner of my eye.
But then, this smell … he shit his pants! I know he did. I suspect he knows I know he did. The smell just sort of came at me in a small wave, but I’ve been around enough homeless people to know – if I had kids in diapers, I could assure you, it would be the same smell. Not a full-on dump. He probably squeezed out a small turd by accident on one of those sharp turns. You couldn’t see it. Man, you could smell it. Again, not an over-powering stench, but enough to let me know baby made boom boom. I know after that smell, he stopped futzing around with his “white rapper representin’, yo” routine he had been putting on. That tends to be the case when you have a load in your pants!
He made it past Roosevelt Plaza, the first above-ground stop in Queens. But, luckily, he shuffled, and I mean shuffled, like a penguin, towards the door at 39th Avenue, the next stop and leaned off the train. He was so drunk he stumbled towards the subway wall and crouched against it, with his back to it, leaned over. I assume he was getting ready to puke to go along with his boo-boo.
But the doors shut, and the train pulled away. Man, what a New Year’s that guy must be having. Who knows, maybe his girlfriend dumped him, he lost his job, one of his parents passed on, D, all of the above, who knows. He wasn’t a happy, kazoo-blurting party drunk in a plastic hat tossing confetti. He was a drunk, lonely kid on the train who shit his pants, getting off on a train stop that’s still a bit dicey in terms of safety. Happy New Year! I hope his day got better once he got off at 39th, but who knows. He seemed harmless enough, but it’s my firm belief that anyone listening to an iPod and “acting out” the music, whatever kind of music, has to be a horse’s ass on some deep, abiding level that I don’t want to contemplate. Paths cross, assholes fade like tail lights in the dark, life goes on.
Such is life in the big city. The night before, my old friend Fred came into the city for a visit while staying with his extended family in a Jersey town this week. (This is the same guy from this post detailing our crazy “NYC in our 20s” days.) I haven’t seen Fred in years, maybe a decade? It’s been a long time. The dude hasn’t changed physically one iota since his college days. Maybe his pants size are up a notch or two (unlike six or seven like mine!), but he still looks physically healthy, hasn’t gone gray or lost his hair, and despite a high-pressure job in a major city, doesn’t have that sort of stress he must feel routinely showing at all in his face. I’ve seen this way of life age people in dog years. Fred must be a vampire, drinking blood in the dead of night to maintain this Dorian Gray personage. I don’t know what he’s doing, but it’s working.
We had some dinner and drinks down in the East Village, Alphabet City to be exact, one of Fred’s last stops before he moved out to Staten Island, met his wife and eventually left New York. If you’re unfamiliar with New York, this is an area on the Lower East Side that has changed drastically in the last 20 years, going from a rundown, anarchistic squatters paradise with burned-out buildings and a thriving drug trade … to an obscenely-expensive, highly-exclusive residential area that, I guess, must have started as geared towards the young and hip, but you can’t be too young and hip these days and still afford the sky-high rents and real-estate values down there. That goes for all of white Manhattan. Parts of it used to be a genuinely intriguing mix of people across all social strata. Now, you’re going to find smatterings of projects housing the very poor, or people with A LOT of money, with very few social classes in between. No struggling writers, artists, or poets, or musicians. Most of them have gone out to Brooklyn and are in the process of being priced out of most of those neighborhoods, too.
I don’t know who lives down there now. I do know you still have sizable projects when you get over to Avenues C and D (this area is called Alphabet City because it’s a large, rectangular block of a neighborhood intersected north/south by Avenues A through D). So things can still feel hairy down there depending on where you walk. But, man, nothing like in the 70s and 80s, surely up through the mid-90s when things changed rapidly along Avenues A and B. When Fred and I sat down for dinner at a nice “American” style restaurant (with prices better than what I find in my neighborhood in Astoria!), it was nearly empty just after six, but filled up fast, most of them a younger crowd. No way on earth could they have lived around there. They were probably like me – in the city for a night of hanging out. I neglected to mention to Fred, who had been asking what happened to all the old clubs and great places to see bands we knew and frequented, there still are a few places like that around, like The Living Room, Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge just south of where we were. But not many.
That was our main draw to hanging out downtown back then, the allure of seeing good music in a small club, which we did dozens of times, at places like the old Ritz on 11th between 3rd and 4th Avenues, and The Knitting Factory when it was on Houston Street. A bomb has gone off in Manhattan though in terms of night clubs, and most bands now, when they come to New York, head out to various small clubs in Brooklyn to make their small legends. You saw people like us wandering around downtown, most of the time we were out to see bands. Those days are just about gone in Manhattan.
It was a kick to later walk the streets of Fred’s old neighborhood and gawk in disbelief at what it had become in the past 20 years. Understand that before I moved to New York, the two or three times I visited Fred in his cramped/shared apartment just west of Times Square, whoever was up for it, we’d all get on the subway down to the East Village, get cans of beer in paper bags at the nearest bodega (much like the dude noted above on the train today!) and just walk in the night. Man, just walking around New York in the 80s, you could still feel “that vibe” – a wonderful feeling, like sparks. The place felt so alive and vibrant. Run-down as hell, sure, but that was part of it. I’m sure part of it was being a bit of a rube and feeding off the different kind of energy a major city provides after dark, but with New York, it was something else, too, something much larger. And I should point out we weren’t acting like “frat boys” or in any way kicking up a fuss. Just walking and taking it all in. Pass a bar? Man, let’s go in and have one. The night would piece itself together like that until we got back on the train, exhausted, and went back uptown to sleep fitfully on hardwood living-room floors.
I guess Fred and I did roughly the same last night, save we had our beers in the restaurant and just walked, particularly down the block that was his last living space down there, a dumpy apartment building on 13th Street between A and B. I remembered that place. Every time I went down there to see him, someone on the first floor would be wailing away on a drum set and sounding terrible. Fred noted that his most vivid memory was the night there was a fire in the building, and everyone filed in their pajamas and blankets, huddled in the water and smoke-filled street in front of the apartment building, dazed and half asleep, not being able to go back in until later the next morning and the whole place smelling like smoke.
It still looked dumpy, as some apartment building always will. But just across the street was a palace, a very nice-looking building with arty lanterns and such hanging from awnings and immaculate brickface on a building that looked like a grand old hotel that had been there for centuries. Well, Fred informed me, that was a squat back in 1989. A burned-out hulk of a building with no windows, graffiti-covered, runaway kids and older boho artist types making a stand there because whoever owned the building had let it rot, so these people moved in and made a go of it without any heat or running water. They’d tap into electricity from street lights in front of the building. This was the urban version of “off the grid” people you’ll find out west living on the edges of deserts and in the deep woods. Some good people, some crazy and lost, all trying to make lives for themselves outside the rule book.
Who knows when that particular squat shut down, but they all did down there, and there were surely dozens, as that whole neighborhood changed in the early 90s. The Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988 was probably the last hurrah of the rebel side of the neighborhood, where the various forces at play in the neighborhood came to a head, and “law and order” prevailed, thus paving the way for gentrification. Surely, when Fred lived there circa 1990, it was still rough, but I’m sure signs of the impending changes were taking root right then. It blew his mind to look across the street from his old building in 2009 and see this beautiful art-deco apartment building standing where what you might call a black hole of hope once stood.
As Fred noted last night, what the hell, you can piss on gentrification all you want, and for good reason, but by the same token, drugs, squalor, shootings and general mayhem going on all up and down the block at all hours is hardly an ideal living situation, even for a young guy looking for a grittier alternative to wherever he’d just been. I don’t like gentrification at all – in fact, find it horrifying in some senses now that I’m actually living in a neighborhood where I can see how insidiously it works – but when you see the end results, years later, you do get that deep “what the fuck” moment and realize you, as a small person in a set place and time, are more like a cork bobbing on a wave in the ocean than anything else. Shit happens in place and time, and you move along with it, sometimes rolling along nicely for years, other times being swept away for various reasons, in best cases, of your own choice.
And I guess that applies to our lives, too, which is I what I got from walking around with Fred last night. You just roll with the waves and see where they take you. At least that’s how I’ve lived my life. Which must sound like a nightmare to a go-getter with everything that’s going to happen in his life laid out in outline format. Well, outline formats always come up with unanticipated sub-numbers that tend to spread out the broadly-stroked Roman Numerals of Big Shit Happening. You roll with things. And as I told Fred, last night, like a grumpy old man laying out the mystery of life while I clutched my newspaper and harrumphed: sane, healthy and solvent … the rest takes care of itself. You just take whatever shit rolls your way – good, bad or indifferent – and improvise to the best of your abilities. I think I realized this walking around last night, and the vibe was virtually no different from the one we had back in 198X roaming around as kids looking for sparks, as opposed to middle-aged guys who had found them in some sense, and watched some of them die, others go on glowing in the night.
I think the key to life is to simply not shit your pants on a subway train in New York!
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Winter Ball
The trip back to PA last week was pretty tolerable, especially considering it was two days before Christmas, and the bus was full of the usual suspects who make that once-a-year trip. What made it nice was the sun was out, and it looked like they got a lot less snow than we did in NYC – a few inches as opposed to a foot. The fields and farms between Easton and Lehighton were coated a perfect white and put me in the right frame of mind. And my morning run on Christmas Eve was the same: sunny, brisk and unbroken white fields everywhere I went along the backroads.
Of course, it pissed a cold, cold rain the next two days, I ate like a hog, and the cat hair drove me so nuts in the dead of winter that I had to leave a day early. Of course, it’s all gravy compared to the Christmas of 2004 when Dad passed on. But a real mixed bag nonetheless. One thing that struck me, with that small patch of nice weather, and the sight of so many unattended basketball rims in schoolyards and driveways, was how much I used to play basketball as a kid.
Basketball came in on the tail end of football in our neighborhood sports world, which meant early December. We’d all just put down the football and spend more time getting into basketball games in the local schoolyard next to our house. Football, after a certain point, would only occur if it snowed, and we could indulge in those much-loved “snow games” which were fun. (I really didn’t enjoy playing football after awhile – I could see we were all getting too big to be doing this shit without supervision or protection, and didn’t see the point of getting my head kicked in to prove what a bad-ass I was in the neighborhood.)
I loved basketball simply because I was good at it. Football and baseball, I’d usually get picked just above or middle of the pack. We were all reasonably good players. If a kid wasn’t, he simply stopped playing after awhile. Thus, there wasn’t that “last guy picked” vibe so many disgruntled adults complain about regarding their youth. Basketball, I was the one. I either picked the team or was the first picked. For one reason only: my set shot was literally about 80% accurate, some days closer to 90%. Sounds outrageous? It was. I could score from anywhere on the court – the farther away, the better. Put two guys on me, and I’d still score. It was a rare game where I’d screw the pooch and make my team lose by errant hot-dogging. And we’d normally play to 50 or 100, by ones, depending on how much time we had. These games would get nutty, like a board game that drags on for hours and finds the fortune of the players changing dramatically over time. One team would be down 75-40 and end up winning 100-97. Just crazy shit sometimes.
Did this prowess on the court transfer to high-school ball? No, despite the fact that the coaches I had in junior high and freshman year saw I could put the ball in from all over the court. We’d have free-throw practice at the end of each practice, the object being keep going until you miss a shot. I’d normally go through 30 shots or so before missing. When I got into games, again, I could hit from anywhere.
The problems? Defensively, I was a pretty average player, surely nothing special. And I didn’t understand plays, as we never used them in neighborhood ball. Plus, the plays always seemed designed to get the ball as close to the rim as possible – I wasn’t nearly as good inside as I was out. Still, my specialty was swishing the ball from the side court just outside the three-point line. Another thing I had to realize was there were other guys in the school who were just better than I was, this guy Nick in particular, a great guy who’s now a state cop, just a great all-around player who was an even better long shooter than I was, too. I would back him up after the coach toyed with starting me, but put me down when he saw I wasn’t fitting into the other roles – too short to be a center, not quick enough for guard, and the other forward was a great defender, if nothing special offensively.
So, I said fuck it after freshman year and stopped playing for the high-school team. What do I remember most about that season? This time of year. Steamed-up school buses driving through the snow, to cramped rural gyms, wearing our uniforms under our clothes, so we could strip off like Superman and be ready for the court. And Billy Joel’s album The Stranger. One of the kids had it on eight-track and played it incessantly. (Think it came out in the fall of 1977, but rest assured, it was still being played to death a year later.) The album is burned into my mind for that reason. Every time I hear the title track, I feel like it’s the winter of ’78 and I’m on my way to a game in Tamaqua or Mahanoy City. We even nicknamed the cute cheerleader/starting guard couple “Brenda and Eddie” after the characters in “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.”
Another thing that occurred to me later: I was simply more geared towards the rim, type and height, of the backboard in the schoolyard, which was a rusting old hunk of metal on an uphill incline. It was probably about three inches or so shorter than a regulation rim, and bent down in front. Understand that I’d spend hundreds of hours practicing on this rim. So my touch was geared towards that very specific type of shooting, which does make a difference when playing on a regulation-length basket on a flat wood surface. I was still a pretty good shot, but not the dead-eye I was on that shitty schoolyard court.
When I say I played day and night, I’m not joking. Many times, I’d be up there alone, sometimes in the dark, shooting by the light of the moon, and making it. I learned to judge my shots by the feel of the ball leaving my fingers, not what I was seeing, and I’d be just as accurate at night. That wasn’t such an abnormal thing in winter. We wouldn’t play after dark, meaning after 5:00 or so in December and January, but there was nothing wrong with shooting baskets after dark, and it wasn’t like I was out there until midnight. Most nights, I’d wrap it up and 7:00. My neighbor, Pat S., who was also a pretty good player who did well on the local Catholic-school team, would come down and join me some nights.
If it snowed, I was the first one out there to shovel out the court after clearing out our cars and walkways. This is what I was thinking about most on that drive home a few days ago. None of the kids along the way loved the game enough to shovel out the court, which I did routinely back then. Just enough to have a foot or two outside the normal lines of play. And we found that the concept of showing up dressed for the tundra was ludicrous. We had rubber balls for days like this, as opposed to leather, so they’d bounce in cold weather, and we’d start playing, and surely be sweating our asses off after about 20 points on either side. The play along the lines could be intense and often ended up with guys splayed out in the snow along the sides, which was a kick if one wasn’t too embarrassed over how he ended up there.
The best nights, though, were me alone out there, shooting under a full moon, court freshly shoveled, I could see my breath in the dark, feel the cold air in my lungs, and pumping in shot after shot from way outside. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Before high-school ball, I surely thought I was going to be a star, as we all do with various sports when we were kids. I’d get the same vibe playing tennis a few years later, and would become a good player, but nothing like a professional, or even great amateur. After I gave up on the high-school version, it occurred to me that I simply liked playing the game, this way, with no designed plays and no player set to be the star of each play. Whoever had the hot hand, feed him the ball and let him do his thing – and that was usually me in the schoolyard. When I was by myself, it was simply a good way to get out of the house, get some fresh air and do something constructive, even if it had no net effect that I could use in the “real world.” A waste of time? Sure, but I wasn’t hurting anybody, and my “alone” time as a kid was severely curtailed by seven people in a house meant for four. And a neighborhood full of howling, tail-end baby boomers who were always up to some kind of semi-evil shit or another. It was a pleasure to be able to do something I was good at, by myself, on a winter’s night.
That rusty, old, cast-iron backboard came down years ago … I can’t even recall. Maybe in the late 80s or early 90s? There’s a day-care center in that old school now next door to the house back there, and that whole area where we once played all our neighborhood sports has been replaced with a playground for toddlers. In warmer months when I go back there, those kids come out every hour on the hour, running around doing their kid things, teasing each other, laughing, weeping, stirring up shit, making friends and enemies. So not much has really changed back there. I haven't touched a basketball in years and have no inclination to do so. Adult leagues seem a bit half-assed to me, and from what I've seen, most of the guys play like apes anyway, all bad fouls and mediocre hot-dogging.
Still, I can’t help but think on some winter’s night, the ghost of my teenage self is back there, in his ragged hand-me-down clothes, hooded sweatshirt and kelly-green Philadelphia Eagles knit cap, bouncing the ball, throwing it in the air, satisfying swoosh and snap of ball hitting nothing but net, ball bounces, repeat about 150 times, maybe humming an Alan Parsons Project song every now and then, coming in for some hot chocolate and a night of bad TV. I guess anything seemed possible on those nights in the middle of nowhere, even if nothing ever happened.
Of course, it pissed a cold, cold rain the next two days, I ate like a hog, and the cat hair drove me so nuts in the dead of winter that I had to leave a day early. Of course, it’s all gravy compared to the Christmas of 2004 when Dad passed on. But a real mixed bag nonetheless. One thing that struck me, with that small patch of nice weather, and the sight of so many unattended basketball rims in schoolyards and driveways, was how much I used to play basketball as a kid.
Basketball came in on the tail end of football in our neighborhood sports world, which meant early December. We’d all just put down the football and spend more time getting into basketball games in the local schoolyard next to our house. Football, after a certain point, would only occur if it snowed, and we could indulge in those much-loved “snow games” which were fun. (I really didn’t enjoy playing football after awhile – I could see we were all getting too big to be doing this shit without supervision or protection, and didn’t see the point of getting my head kicked in to prove what a bad-ass I was in the neighborhood.)
I loved basketball simply because I was good at it. Football and baseball, I’d usually get picked just above or middle of the pack. We were all reasonably good players. If a kid wasn’t, he simply stopped playing after awhile. Thus, there wasn’t that “last guy picked” vibe so many disgruntled adults complain about regarding their youth. Basketball, I was the one. I either picked the team or was the first picked. For one reason only: my set shot was literally about 80% accurate, some days closer to 90%. Sounds outrageous? It was. I could score from anywhere on the court – the farther away, the better. Put two guys on me, and I’d still score. It was a rare game where I’d screw the pooch and make my team lose by errant hot-dogging. And we’d normally play to 50 or 100, by ones, depending on how much time we had. These games would get nutty, like a board game that drags on for hours and finds the fortune of the players changing dramatically over time. One team would be down 75-40 and end up winning 100-97. Just crazy shit sometimes.
Did this prowess on the court transfer to high-school ball? No, despite the fact that the coaches I had in junior high and freshman year saw I could put the ball in from all over the court. We’d have free-throw practice at the end of each practice, the object being keep going until you miss a shot. I’d normally go through 30 shots or so before missing. When I got into games, again, I could hit from anywhere.
The problems? Defensively, I was a pretty average player, surely nothing special. And I didn’t understand plays, as we never used them in neighborhood ball. Plus, the plays always seemed designed to get the ball as close to the rim as possible – I wasn’t nearly as good inside as I was out. Still, my specialty was swishing the ball from the side court just outside the three-point line. Another thing I had to realize was there were other guys in the school who were just better than I was, this guy Nick in particular, a great guy who’s now a state cop, just a great all-around player who was an even better long shooter than I was, too. I would back him up after the coach toyed with starting me, but put me down when he saw I wasn’t fitting into the other roles – too short to be a center, not quick enough for guard, and the other forward was a great defender, if nothing special offensively.
So, I said fuck it after freshman year and stopped playing for the high-school team. What do I remember most about that season? This time of year. Steamed-up school buses driving through the snow, to cramped rural gyms, wearing our uniforms under our clothes, so we could strip off like Superman and be ready for the court. And Billy Joel’s album The Stranger. One of the kids had it on eight-track and played it incessantly. (Think it came out in the fall of 1977, but rest assured, it was still being played to death a year later.) The album is burned into my mind for that reason. Every time I hear the title track, I feel like it’s the winter of ’78 and I’m on my way to a game in Tamaqua or Mahanoy City. We even nicknamed the cute cheerleader/starting guard couple “Brenda and Eddie” after the characters in “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.”
Another thing that occurred to me later: I was simply more geared towards the rim, type and height, of the backboard in the schoolyard, which was a rusting old hunk of metal on an uphill incline. It was probably about three inches or so shorter than a regulation rim, and bent down in front. Understand that I’d spend hundreds of hours practicing on this rim. So my touch was geared towards that very specific type of shooting, which does make a difference when playing on a regulation-length basket on a flat wood surface. I was still a pretty good shot, but not the dead-eye I was on that shitty schoolyard court.
When I say I played day and night, I’m not joking. Many times, I’d be up there alone, sometimes in the dark, shooting by the light of the moon, and making it. I learned to judge my shots by the feel of the ball leaving my fingers, not what I was seeing, and I’d be just as accurate at night. That wasn’t such an abnormal thing in winter. We wouldn’t play after dark, meaning after 5:00 or so in December and January, but there was nothing wrong with shooting baskets after dark, and it wasn’t like I was out there until midnight. Most nights, I’d wrap it up and 7:00. My neighbor, Pat S., who was also a pretty good player who did well on the local Catholic-school team, would come down and join me some nights.
If it snowed, I was the first one out there to shovel out the court after clearing out our cars and walkways. This is what I was thinking about most on that drive home a few days ago. None of the kids along the way loved the game enough to shovel out the court, which I did routinely back then. Just enough to have a foot or two outside the normal lines of play. And we found that the concept of showing up dressed for the tundra was ludicrous. We had rubber balls for days like this, as opposed to leather, so they’d bounce in cold weather, and we’d start playing, and surely be sweating our asses off after about 20 points on either side. The play along the lines could be intense and often ended up with guys splayed out in the snow along the sides, which was a kick if one wasn’t too embarrassed over how he ended up there.
The best nights, though, were me alone out there, shooting under a full moon, court freshly shoveled, I could see my breath in the dark, feel the cold air in my lungs, and pumping in shot after shot from way outside. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Before high-school ball, I surely thought I was going to be a star, as we all do with various sports when we were kids. I’d get the same vibe playing tennis a few years later, and would become a good player, but nothing like a professional, or even great amateur. After I gave up on the high-school version, it occurred to me that I simply liked playing the game, this way, with no designed plays and no player set to be the star of each play. Whoever had the hot hand, feed him the ball and let him do his thing – and that was usually me in the schoolyard. When I was by myself, it was simply a good way to get out of the house, get some fresh air and do something constructive, even if it had no net effect that I could use in the “real world.” A waste of time? Sure, but I wasn’t hurting anybody, and my “alone” time as a kid was severely curtailed by seven people in a house meant for four. And a neighborhood full of howling, tail-end baby boomers who were always up to some kind of semi-evil shit or another. It was a pleasure to be able to do something I was good at, by myself, on a winter’s night.
That rusty, old, cast-iron backboard came down years ago … I can’t even recall. Maybe in the late 80s or early 90s? There’s a day-care center in that old school now next door to the house back there, and that whole area where we once played all our neighborhood sports has been replaced with a playground for toddlers. In warmer months when I go back there, those kids come out every hour on the hour, running around doing their kid things, teasing each other, laughing, weeping, stirring up shit, making friends and enemies. So not much has really changed back there. I haven't touched a basketball in years and have no inclination to do so. Adult leagues seem a bit half-assed to me, and from what I've seen, most of the guys play like apes anyway, all bad fouls and mediocre hot-dogging.
Still, I can’t help but think on some winter’s night, the ghost of my teenage self is back there, in his ragged hand-me-down clothes, hooded sweatshirt and kelly-green Philadelphia Eagles knit cap, bouncing the ball, throwing it in the air, satisfying swoosh and snap of ball hitting nothing but net, ball bounces, repeat about 150 times, maybe humming an Alan Parsons Project song every now and then, coming in for some hot chocolate and a night of bad TV. I guess anything seemed possible on those nights in the middle of nowhere, even if nothing ever happened.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Snowy Weekend before Christmas
Well, New York got pounded with a blizzard this past weekend. Woke up Sunday to find about a 12 inch base with drifts up to 20 inches on the landlord’s sidewalk. I know most adults are supposed to hate the snow. But, man, I love shoveling it: a great workout. Nothing like pushing yourself hard with that cold, clean air and silence.
Of course, if I had a car, I’d be pissed, as every one I’ve seen on the streets has been ploughed in on one side or the other. Not everything to do with a snow storm is pleasant. Like the supermarket on Saturday. I normally grocery shop in between laundry loads at the laundromat on the end of my block ... on Saturday morning. A block north and west, there’s a big, nice suburban-style supermarket that, I’ve found, allows me to hustle over there, get all my groceries and get back in time for the 40-minute dryer load coming out. I know where everything’s at in there, so I can always make a quick sweep. And the music fucking rocks … they had Otis Redding playing this time.
But I should have know, through previous experience and all the cars in the strip-mall parking lot, that the place would be a madhouse. Most of the actual aisles weren’t bad, save the last … which featured a long line of people, I’m talking at least 30 deep, waiting their turn at the registers. I don’t know what’s with people, supermarkets and snowstorms. Your average American at any given moment has more food in his house than most third-world people will eat in a month. He has enough food to last a few weeks, probably, unless he’s living like a college kid on ramen. He surely has enough food to last the day or two a major snow storm might inconvenience his travel.
So why do these obnoxious jackasses ALWAYS flood into supermarkets on the eve of major snow storms? I know the answer … they’re shitheads … but why the overbearing bad manners and sense of panic? They’re in the supermarket. The food is in their carts. They have the money to pay for their food. So, the line is a little longer this time. They will be served. They will take their food and go home, self-satisfied that they have all the meat, bread and milk they could possibly need for the next 12 hours of snow fall. Knowing, in their heart of hearts, that the Dark Lord of Blizzards will, within minutes, sweep down on that particular supermarket and turn everyone inside into ice statues, laughing maniacally all the while at all these people who would have survived His Frigid Wrath had they just gotten there and bought all their shit 15 minutes earlier.
The problem in the supermarket came when it became clear that all these people waiting in that huge serpentine line were getting screwed by your usual suspects … the tunnel-vision pigs who jump lines. There was no store manager or employee ensuring this wouldn’t happen. So you had all these patient, relatively sane people on this huge line to the left slowly noticing that monstrous pricks were wheeling right up to the cash registers and completing ignoring this clear-as-day/a-blind-man-could-see huge line. After a few minutes, people started cursing, shouting and breaking line. An Italian guy and his girlfriend wheeled in front of everybody and explained what was happening, and that we should all free-for-all mad dash to the registers. God bless the Queens douche bag two people in front of me, in her fake fur coat and spray-on tan who, up to that point, had been annoying the hell out of me with her cellphone brayings. She barked out, in that thick, horrible accent: “Look, you sweet-talking dago, if you really feel that way, why don’t you get the fuck behind us and let us go first to the other registers?”
The guy just stood there sort of slack-jawed and didn’t move. But he eventually pretended he never heard her and hustled in front of everyone with his embarrassed girlfriend and their cart. Assholes, like so many of the others. It was at that point where I calmly took my cart, which had about 15 items, and put them back in their places on the shelves, and I later ditched my empty cart in a corner of the supermarket. While I could hear screaming and “fuck yous” and such in that garbage Long Island accent at the front of the store while I quietly slipped out through the in door.
The next day, I went back at 11:00 am after shoveling snow and found myself the only person in the whole place with the aisles perfectly stocked with all the food I could ever want.
Saturday was a weird day like that, with all the gray, cold, humid anticipation of an impending blizzard. Like a low-humming electricity. After the supermarket fiasco, I had some lunch, took a nap, then headed south to the gym, and to get a haircut before Christmas as I was getting shaggy. I was also hoping to snag a free bottle of wine, which the Russian barber I go to down near 30th Avenue has given me the past two years when I’ve gone there just before the holidays. No wine this time … guess things are tight for the old barber. But he was glad to see me, as he always is, calling out “Hello, ult friendt” and waving. He has a younger Asian guy working with him now on Saturdays in place of his son, he of the 80s metal mullet. But I always let the old man cut my hair if no one else is there, and the place was empty.
I’ve never owned a small business in a city, so I guess this happens all time, but a guy walked in off the street selling shit. Previously, I’ve seen two different guys come in with a suitcase filled with porn DVDs, which the mulleted son waded through and came out with a handful each time. This guy was selling scissors – barber’s scissors in particular, which are a lot more expensive than I thought. The guy was asking $90.00 for a particular pair, with the old man barking out, “Eh, I can get those for $50 from my normal guy, go on, get out.” The younger Asian guy seemed more open to this guy’s wares, as the salesman was Asian, too, but not much of a salesman. After about 15 minutes, the old guy told him he’d go as high as $55 or nothing, so the guy said, $70 is as low as I can go, and the barber just waved his hands and said, “Be gone.” He had tried those $90 clippers on me and said, “Not bad, but no better than what I already got for $50.”
So, the old guy finished me off. I always feel his belly pressing against my shoulder, a rotund older guy who likes being rotund, and laughing. I could somehow sense that small sadness that he couldn’t give me a free bottle of wine after the cut – I didn’t ask because I knew it could be embarrassing for him. So I said, see you in February, which I will, and left him to wait out the day while everyone hid because of the flurries just then starting. Man, that place is just a good-sized room with three barber chairs, a full-length wall mirror, a sink to wash hair, and a bathroom for the workers and patrons. The guy’s made his living there! Years, kids, grandkids … all made possible by this little room he’s had going since the 70s.
I had a sick iPod all weekend. Don’t even ask. When those things fuck up, they make your life a living hell. I won’t get into specifics, but let’s just say it’s another instance of “never take the advice of internet nerds who make out that Methodology X is easy as pie and the obvious solution to all your problems.” My bad. I basically had to wipe my iPod clean, take it back to factory settings (i.e., going from nearly 18,000 tracks to none) and rebuild it from the iTunes library on my hard drive. Losing the Playlists, too, which I use constantly, but I’ve had a surprisingly easy time rebuilding those, so all was not lost. Just made hellish for a good few hours Friday through Sunday. As I tried to finish off the last vestiges of a very bad sinus problem that had me stoned on Dayquil the whole time, feeling like a methadone addict. Shit, what a weekend.
About the only good part was shoveling snow, which, like mowing lawn, raking leaves or just sweeping up, I take some simple, deep pleasure in that I can’t fully explain. Enjoyed the hell out of it, even with my landlord banging on the window and instructing me to only cut a foot-wide path on the sidewalk for people to pass. I do a lot of walking in New York. The only thing worse than those lazy pricks who cut the foot-wide path on their sidewalks after a snowstorm are the pricks who don’t shovel at all. I just can’t do that. I knew all she was going to do was bang on the window and carp. That she wouldn’t rush out and stop me, wouldn’t even open up the door and yell, so I just did what I always do, the right thing, which was to shovel out as much of the sidewalk as I could, including the long path down the side, which she was motioning not to do at all. Christ … makes me wonder what went on before I moved here, and how much people must have cursed her after a snowstorm if this is how her property was handled.
You got to put out for people after a storm. No two ways around it. I know I feel good when I go down a sidewalk when someone has done what I do, which is wipe it clean and make it seem like nothing ever happened here, and the hour or two of work was something you need not worry about. You won’t win any medals, but sane people will remember.
Of course, I say all this knowing some bastard let his dog shit on the clean sidewalk this morning, and another bastard shoveled a few feet of snow onto the sidewalk along the side of the house while cleaning out his four-wheel drive piece of shit that technically shouldn’t need any sort of shoveling done around it. But such is life in Queens, in New York City in general. The bastards will always be here, and you do what you can to negate their influence.
Of course, if I had a car, I’d be pissed, as every one I’ve seen on the streets has been ploughed in on one side or the other. Not everything to do with a snow storm is pleasant. Like the supermarket on Saturday. I normally grocery shop in between laundry loads at the laundromat on the end of my block ... on Saturday morning. A block north and west, there’s a big, nice suburban-style supermarket that, I’ve found, allows me to hustle over there, get all my groceries and get back in time for the 40-minute dryer load coming out. I know where everything’s at in there, so I can always make a quick sweep. And the music fucking rocks … they had Otis Redding playing this time.
But I should have know, through previous experience and all the cars in the strip-mall parking lot, that the place would be a madhouse. Most of the actual aisles weren’t bad, save the last … which featured a long line of people, I’m talking at least 30 deep, waiting their turn at the registers. I don’t know what’s with people, supermarkets and snowstorms. Your average American at any given moment has more food in his house than most third-world people will eat in a month. He has enough food to last a few weeks, probably, unless he’s living like a college kid on ramen. He surely has enough food to last the day or two a major snow storm might inconvenience his travel.
So why do these obnoxious jackasses ALWAYS flood into supermarkets on the eve of major snow storms? I know the answer … they’re shitheads … but why the overbearing bad manners and sense of panic? They’re in the supermarket. The food is in their carts. They have the money to pay for their food. So, the line is a little longer this time. They will be served. They will take their food and go home, self-satisfied that they have all the meat, bread and milk they could possibly need for the next 12 hours of snow fall. Knowing, in their heart of hearts, that the Dark Lord of Blizzards will, within minutes, sweep down on that particular supermarket and turn everyone inside into ice statues, laughing maniacally all the while at all these people who would have survived His Frigid Wrath had they just gotten there and bought all their shit 15 minutes earlier.
The problem in the supermarket came when it became clear that all these people waiting in that huge serpentine line were getting screwed by your usual suspects … the tunnel-vision pigs who jump lines. There was no store manager or employee ensuring this wouldn’t happen. So you had all these patient, relatively sane people on this huge line to the left slowly noticing that monstrous pricks were wheeling right up to the cash registers and completing ignoring this clear-as-day/a-blind-man-could-see huge line. After a few minutes, people started cursing, shouting and breaking line. An Italian guy and his girlfriend wheeled in front of everybody and explained what was happening, and that we should all free-for-all mad dash to the registers. God bless the Queens douche bag two people in front of me, in her fake fur coat and spray-on tan who, up to that point, had been annoying the hell out of me with her cellphone brayings. She barked out, in that thick, horrible accent: “Look, you sweet-talking dago, if you really feel that way, why don’t you get the fuck behind us and let us go first to the other registers?”
The guy just stood there sort of slack-jawed and didn’t move. But he eventually pretended he never heard her and hustled in front of everyone with his embarrassed girlfriend and their cart. Assholes, like so many of the others. It was at that point where I calmly took my cart, which had about 15 items, and put them back in their places on the shelves, and I later ditched my empty cart in a corner of the supermarket. While I could hear screaming and “fuck yous” and such in that garbage Long Island accent at the front of the store while I quietly slipped out through the in door.
The next day, I went back at 11:00 am after shoveling snow and found myself the only person in the whole place with the aisles perfectly stocked with all the food I could ever want.
Saturday was a weird day like that, with all the gray, cold, humid anticipation of an impending blizzard. Like a low-humming electricity. After the supermarket fiasco, I had some lunch, took a nap, then headed south to the gym, and to get a haircut before Christmas as I was getting shaggy. I was also hoping to snag a free bottle of wine, which the Russian barber I go to down near 30th Avenue has given me the past two years when I’ve gone there just before the holidays. No wine this time … guess things are tight for the old barber. But he was glad to see me, as he always is, calling out “Hello, ult friendt” and waving. He has a younger Asian guy working with him now on Saturdays in place of his son, he of the 80s metal mullet. But I always let the old man cut my hair if no one else is there, and the place was empty.
I’ve never owned a small business in a city, so I guess this happens all time, but a guy walked in off the street selling shit. Previously, I’ve seen two different guys come in with a suitcase filled with porn DVDs, which the mulleted son waded through and came out with a handful each time. This guy was selling scissors – barber’s scissors in particular, which are a lot more expensive than I thought. The guy was asking $90.00 for a particular pair, with the old man barking out, “Eh, I can get those for $50 from my normal guy, go on, get out.” The younger Asian guy seemed more open to this guy’s wares, as the salesman was Asian, too, but not much of a salesman. After about 15 minutes, the old guy told him he’d go as high as $55 or nothing, so the guy said, $70 is as low as I can go, and the barber just waved his hands and said, “Be gone.” He had tried those $90 clippers on me and said, “Not bad, but no better than what I already got for $50.”
So, the old guy finished me off. I always feel his belly pressing against my shoulder, a rotund older guy who likes being rotund, and laughing. I could somehow sense that small sadness that he couldn’t give me a free bottle of wine after the cut – I didn’t ask because I knew it could be embarrassing for him. So I said, see you in February, which I will, and left him to wait out the day while everyone hid because of the flurries just then starting. Man, that place is just a good-sized room with three barber chairs, a full-length wall mirror, a sink to wash hair, and a bathroom for the workers and patrons. The guy’s made his living there! Years, kids, grandkids … all made possible by this little room he’s had going since the 70s.
I had a sick iPod all weekend. Don’t even ask. When those things fuck up, they make your life a living hell. I won’t get into specifics, but let’s just say it’s another instance of “never take the advice of internet nerds who make out that Methodology X is easy as pie and the obvious solution to all your problems.” My bad. I basically had to wipe my iPod clean, take it back to factory settings (i.e., going from nearly 18,000 tracks to none) and rebuild it from the iTunes library on my hard drive. Losing the Playlists, too, which I use constantly, but I’ve had a surprisingly easy time rebuilding those, so all was not lost. Just made hellish for a good few hours Friday through Sunday. As I tried to finish off the last vestiges of a very bad sinus problem that had me stoned on Dayquil the whole time, feeling like a methadone addict. Shit, what a weekend.
About the only good part was shoveling snow, which, like mowing lawn, raking leaves or just sweeping up, I take some simple, deep pleasure in that I can’t fully explain. Enjoyed the hell out of it, even with my landlord banging on the window and instructing me to only cut a foot-wide path on the sidewalk for people to pass. I do a lot of walking in New York. The only thing worse than those lazy pricks who cut the foot-wide path on their sidewalks after a snowstorm are the pricks who don’t shovel at all. I just can’t do that. I knew all she was going to do was bang on the window and carp. That she wouldn’t rush out and stop me, wouldn’t even open up the door and yell, so I just did what I always do, the right thing, which was to shovel out as much of the sidewalk as I could, including the long path down the side, which she was motioning not to do at all. Christ … makes me wonder what went on before I moved here, and how much people must have cursed her after a snowstorm if this is how her property was handled.
You got to put out for people after a storm. No two ways around it. I know I feel good when I go down a sidewalk when someone has done what I do, which is wipe it clean and make it seem like nothing ever happened here, and the hour or two of work was something you need not worry about. You won’t win any medals, but sane people will remember.
Of course, I say all this knowing some bastard let his dog shit on the clean sidewalk this morning, and another bastard shoveled a few feet of snow onto the sidewalk along the side of the house while cleaning out his four-wheel drive piece of shit that technically shouldn’t need any sort of shoveling done around it. But such is life in Queens, in New York City in general. The bastards will always be here, and you do what you can to negate their influence.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Letter Excerpts
Well, caught with my pants down again! End of the month crept up on me, away for a few days, eating like a horse in the country, and before you know it, it's November 30th.
Here's what I'll do to round out this one. I stumbled upon a folder of old letters I've written to various people. By "old" I mean early to mid-9os, when I had access to a computer and was probably just getting used to MS Word, thus I managed to salvage some of these from various floppy discs. Before that, we're talking handwritten letters, and I photocopied none of them, which is good, because most of them were some of the most half-assed, embarrassing love notes anyone's ever written, some of the most truly desperate shit you would ever be bound to read. If I could go back in a time machine, I would seriously kick my own ass from the age of, say, 21 to 28.
But, here's some snippets of stuff that caught my eye. Makes no sense, may be a silly read, but could be some fun stuff along the way, too.
***
I must say, out of all the tapes I make for people, 70's one-hit wonders or pop tapes are always my favorites. I think people make the mistake of looking at their deep teenage years as a time to remember "their" music. Nah -- for me it was my childhood leading into my early teens. That's the music that sticks with me, that haunts me, that uncovers certain emotions and situations that go a long way to describing who I am. As a "deep" teenager, i.e. the late 70's early 80's, I'd be hung up on stuff like Cheap Trick and The Clash. Not bad stuff, but it doesn't seem to mean as much to me. I find myself buying 80's collections every few months, but that's more for a kick. Rhino hit the bull's eye with their mammoth 70's pop collection -- a milestone, and I've also partaken of many of their "Soul Hits of the 70's" series, although not nearly as much. Stuff like this does represent a tremendous service to the listener. Until this stuff came out, the only connection I had to these songs were dusty and broken 45s in the basement. My brother M was a singles man -- he had hundreds -- literally every song on this tape, and an amazing majority of the songs listed in the "Have a Nice Day" series. With each one, he'd get out his special "M Repsher" address sticker he had sent away for and put it on the label, thus making it worthless for collectors. (He had more than a few early 70's Beatles solo records that fall into this category, with the split and full apples on the label -- oh well.) Unfortunately, 45s being what they were, and kids being who they were, these records were scratched and beat to shit within a matter of months. We took shitty care of them, and almost as bad care of our albums.
***
Greetings from the ghost of Christmas past, yeh cancerous little gobshite.
It’s me, Bill Repsher, back from the dead, or should I say back from the living, to rain bad tidings and gloom upon that netherworld of lost and doomed souls otherwise known as P____ & S______. To save you from professional embarrassment, I’ve refrained from placing my name anywhere on the outside of this envelope. I thought about putting “Ted Kozinsky, c/o Montana Federal Correctional Facility” on the outside, but that’s not a very wise idea, especially considering that P_______ is really ripe for this sort of thing.
I’d imagine I’m persona non grata around that joint, that if I showed up unexpectedly for a unscheduled lunch appointment with our man B_____, I’d have a few of those guys with walkie talkies in the lobby looking to practice their Tiger Schulman karate moves on me. And I dig that – for once in my life, I had the chance to nail a total bastard in public, and I took it. My only regret is that they couldn’t have published my five-page, single-spaced diatribe I sent to B_____ privately the same day, and that it couldn’t have been The New York Times instead. For what it’s worth, and I know it’s very little, I hope the man looks out a rain-streaked window on a particularly bad day, and some of the issues I dredged up in that letter play on the fringes of his warped mind. That’s all I ask. Even Satan wept when he saw Jesus walking alone through the fires of hell.
Enclosed please find a load of Irish Sounding Shite I threw together recently. Knowing you are a connoisseur of music from the isles, and that you may have known more than a few of these musicians personally, I figured you’d enjoy having a copy sent your way. It may well be preaching to the converted, but it sure beats preaching to a bunch of mean-spirited pricks throwing eggs and tomatoes at you.
Keep on smoking, poster boy for electronic voice boxes. Allow me to say that of all the people I have worked with, from ex-cons and white supremacist in various factory stints to blue blood Wasps from Westchester County who couldn’t get electrons shot through their anuses, that among this sad troop of misguided souls known as my lifelong coworkers, you were definitely one of my favorites, a true character, like some updated pervert from a Dickens novel. I can picture you giving lung cancer to Tiny Tim as he sat in the corner piping, “God bless us one and all.” You’d smoke that gimpy little bastard to death. Frankly, I’d have spent more time around you, but I’d probably be in an oxygen tent right now gasping, “That bald-headed prick Yul Brenner was right.”
I’ll be thinking of you when I’m vomiting in my green plastic derby on St. Patrick’s Day. Long may you run.
Oh – and fuck Bob Geldof.
***
I wouldn't say I think what you do is a waste of time. What I do at work is a waste of time -- but I'm getting paid well for it, and I'm supporting myself on it. I'd say the things you're doing for free are a lot more honorable than what I'm getting paid for. But, damn, A____, what are you doing? I'd understand if you had sugar daddies back home bank-rolling your existence, but how are you living? How do you do it? What I'm questioning -- because I'm honestly at a loss -- is how you seem to be getting by with no visible means of support. I'd be jealous, if I weren't under the impression that you must be near broke 100% of the time. I've been there -- a few times, the last being when I decided to temp right in the middle of one of the worst recessions to hit this country. I was down to about $300, with no work coming in, and I didn't feel like working anymore, period. It didn't feel good. A few weeks later, the jobs started picking up, and then I landed the job at the ad agency that kept me in the green for the following three years. That's as close as I got to going under, and with a college education and a fair amount of street smarts, I felt like a fool for letting myself go that far.
***
You look like a fucking gangster! The black leather coat, the shorter hair – your face has grown more character, you look real Italian now. When I first saw you, I didn’t know if I should say hello or reach for my wallet. Which is good, if you ask me – I’ve learned that having the power to physically intimidate people in some way is an effective tool in staying alive, especially in the city. I’ve had people tell me I’ve spooked them just by the way I walk up to them, but I’m sure not aware of it.
***
So I find it’s good not to get too hung up on one’s life direction. I live in a town filled with neurotic people who let such things blow their minds and either turn them into freakish trolls, or send them to psychoanalysts who get rich for basically being bartenders without alcohol and a loud jukebox to contend with. Everyone I know seems to have some grievous life crisis going on. Some for real (a friend back home going through an ugly divorce that involves kids), some imagined (another friend in California who’ll call at three in the morning to tell me he’s going bald). My only crisis is that I’m not doing exactly what I want to do, and I haven’t whipped myself into the proper state of righteous indignation to draw lines and make it happen. I’ve grown old enough to know that life rolls along no matter what you do, whether you appreciate every second or try to throw it all away, it goes on. And when you go, it goes on without you. (All right, so I stole those last two lines from a coffee cup.) I like the way I’m turning out -- most days I feel I can handle anything. If there’s one thing I’m acutely aware of, it’s that I’ve made a promise to myself to always live like I did as a child -- not to take things too seriously, and to treat everyone with the respect they deserve. And New York has taught me not to panic -- you live here, and you either learn that implicitly, or you never learn it at all. For most people, this is panic central, and I don’t know why these people just don’t up and move.
I’ve thought of doing that myself. I’ve been in the Bronx too long. It’s not a terrible place -- I’ve lived there around seven years and have no scars, war stories or police reports to show for it. But in a lot of ways, it’s very isolating, because people are afraid to visit me there, and I can’t blame them. I think people see me as somebody who wants to be an outsider. No -- I just want reasonable rent. I may move just because I’m getting the urge to have a relatively normal life living around white people again. (The only way my life is abnormal now is that I live in a place where no one else is white. If a black man who lived around white people told me he was sick of white people, I’d know exactly what he was talking about and wouldn’t take it personally.) I think every New Yorker spends half his day thinking, “Man, it’s time I left.” We’ll see what develops -- I haven’t gotten myself tied down yet, although I did have a pretty strange date last Friday which I won’t comment on.
***
I don’t know what you’ve gathered of my childhood from that big story and things I’ve told you about. It was a strange time. When I was, say, eight years old, there were probably around 15 kids between one and four years older than me, around 10 the same age, and around 10 more kids four years or younger. Right around 40 kids all told -- this was in a small town of 500 people -- an outrageous number of kids. We ran around like wild dogs -- adults couldn’t wield too much control over us. Luckily, they didn’t really have to, because most of us were raised by fairly strong-handed parents, but there were also a few wild dog kids, like LC, who served a few years in jail a while back for drunk driving and running down two small children one Sunday morning, and Tommy One-Nut, a member of the Warlocks who recently died when he ran his Harley over the high side of a rail one Friday night back in July. We played sports constantly in the schoolyard right next door to our house. Every single day -- all day during the summer. And at night we played this game called Jailbreak, an off shoot of Hide and Seek.
Basically, we were the tail end of the Baby Boom, and we were all over the place. There just aren’t too many kids back there these days, and the ones who are seem strange -- they don’t indulge in team sports, maybe because there aren’t enough kids to get good games going. I was raised in a totally different place from these kids, although the physical environment hasn’t changed much. Not many of my “kids” showed up at the block party -- I put kids in quotes, because I’m 31, and everyone else is either in his mid-30’s or late 20’s -- not exactly kids anymore.
Those guys still live around town -- J, our neighbor JB, GB, a goat-like human who will eat anything -- he’s responsible for some of the most foul, eye-watering farts I’ve ever smelled. His worst was after an all-night drunk with J and JB. G was in the back seat, and he made a strange sound. After a moment or two, J noticed a rotten egg smell. JB smelled it and vomited out the window -- he had to bolt from the car, as did J, at a red light. When they got back, GB was laughing his ass off. J asked G if he had burped or farted, and G mumbled, “I don’t know.”
We managed to have a great time talking about the vicious, bloody football games we used to have back then. (Once, a kid from a neighboring town had his ear ripped off, and I can clearly recall DT doing a full, unintentional split on wet grass, me getting a bloody nose and going home with a white shirt turned completely red down the front, and Z getting his nose broken and having two black eyes for weeks afterwards -- weird, nasty stuff.)
But the real kicker was running into JC, LC’s kid brother. JC is three years older than me, LC is around six years older, and the oldest brother MC is eight years older. MC’s famous because he turned down a minor league pitching contract to marry his girlfriend. LC’s famous because he was psychotic -- the kid scared everyone. He was about six feet tall and probably weighed around 160 lbs. -- a skinny, wiry guy, but muscled like a greyhound. The guy never worked out, and he had a body like an olympic athlete. Actually, he did heavy amounts of drugs, smoke, drank and abused his body in every way possible and had a body like an olympic athlete. Top this with a truly maniacal, criminal attitude, and you have one scary motherfucker. He had a weird, nasty look in his eye, even if he liked you.
While JC inherited some of LC’s rough edges, he was always a very effeminate kid. So it should have been no surprise to me that he’s out-of-the-closet gay and brought his partner to the picnic. Mindblowing, Daniel in the Lion’s Den stuff -- this took real guts. He was smart enough not to camp it up -- basically, if you didn’t know JC’s history, you’d say there goes two guys who must be related. JC does have a slight effeminate lisp and one of those “not an ounce of fat, sunshine” perfectly-toned bodies many gay guys seem to favor. But he still puts out those spooky LC vibes.
I remember when we were growing up, girls in town would practice to be cheerleaders while we played baseball. JC would start out playing baseball, but sooner or later, he’d break away and start leading the girls in their cheers. If anyone would make fun of him, he’d come over and kick the shit out of him -- I know, he did it to me once and beat me until I didn’t want to get up.
My childhood is filled with all kinds of incidents like that. It would have been a kick to go over some of them with the guys. I know everyone at the block party had as good a time as I did -- hopefully that will spur someone on back there to arrange some kind of reunion. I realize now that those kids I grew up with were just as, if not more, influential on me as my high school and college friends. I can’t lie to those guys, or pretend I’m something I’m not -- we go all the way back to our very beginnings. I think high school and definitely college presented an escape from the people we thought we were. We could go somewhere else, make new friends, act differently, pick up new interests. But the guys I grew up with -- they’ll be able to point out good and bad things about my character that may not be obvious to people who’ve met me down the road. I think it was absolutely necessary to leave them behind -- there were a lot of bad things going on back then, too, kids getting caught up in drugs, and just a general “Lord of the Flies” type attitude that was spooky and mean-spirited at times. But to go back and be able to see these people again in a totally new light, yet still the same in so many ways -- it’s a mind-blowing experience.
***
I’m sitting here tonight, Ms. G, listening to pop music and tossing around ideas on the laptop. When I got home tonight, I could smell my laundry on the drying rack I put over the radiator – a wonderful smell, clean and boyish. It’s good to know the things I wear smell like that – makes me want to toe that hard, fragrant line. Now that’s discipline! I’ve been told I still smell like a boy – and I know that smell, I catch it sometimes, a weird, clean smell, like a kid who’s just worked up a light sweat playing baseball, but his clothes are clean, so both sides come together and make this boy smell. So long as I don’t smell like shit, B.O. or heavy cologne, I’m doing all right. I tend to be an extremely clean person.
***
I can’t accept that philosophy. I think that’s why I’ve fallen out with AS, although I used the smoke screen of her getting all weird back in January about that time I called up late to go out for lunch. Regardless of how smart she is, she’s got herself into the mindset. I’ve never met her parents, but I can tell you they must be decent people from the suburbs, working towards some defined goal, a nice house and kids, the whole deal. She wants those things, which I understand and appreciate, but she also wants to blaze her own trail in business. Those two worlds aren’t going to peacefully coexist. I think she knows that, and the kind of guys she sets herself up with have to fit into that neat little picture. Sometimes I get the impression she wants to trash the whole business thing and just walk around some big house, giving her kids weird names and trying to live some way of life that doesn’t exist.
What a turnaround from the sorority girl who cut loose five nights a week and must have done her weight in guys. I see too many weird conflicts in her. We’ve all got them (I call them paradoxes when I want to be nice), but hers expose a little too much of a conniving mind. Conniving towards positive goals, but conniving nonetheless. I think she’s a good-hearted person, but I also think she’s going to have some sort of breakdown before she’s 40, where all these things come to a head, and she sees what everyone sees sooner or later -- there’s no way out. Every action will have positive and negative effects. There’s always a certain amount of shit to take. You may not get what you want, and if you actually get what you want, it won’t be what you thought it was. I don’t trust people who don’t understand that, and it seems that as people get older, they pick up on it real quick, or never pick up on it at all.
There’s no way out -- I like that concept. It makes you take responsibility for the way things are, and makes you realize it’s pointless to sit around pining for someone else’s apparently “better life.” We have no better lives than the ones we live. There’s no way out -- make what you have work. And if it doesn’t work, fuck it -- park it on the side of the road and walk away. I wish I could go back to high school and give that as a speech -- hey, kids, if you’re thinking high school’s over, you’ve just walked out of prison and now you’re free, I’ve got some news you might want to hear ...
But I do recall the end of high school as being a major relief. College was another story -- I recognized that was it for that way of life -- having friends around all the time, getting bombed in the middle of the week, having days where you only had one class and all kinds of time to play around with. College was a kick -- I have good memories of it, and I don’t ever want to go back (Dewey Beach, Dewey Beach). I guess it would still be possible to have that lifestyle, a lot of people I know have no qualms about hanging out until two in the morning on a work night. But that shit just wipes me out anymore, I can’t do it. Give me a good night’s sleep instead. Good bowel movements, a good night’s sleep and an occasional roll in the hay -- the rest is only window dressing.
***
I think I ended our situation because it felt like a job to me. We weren’t going anywhere. Maybe I filled some small role in your life, but I never had the feeling it was anything more than that. That gets tiresome, especially when you see possibilities in someone. And as you know, we let that cat drag from the bumper for more than a few blocks. It wasn’t easy drawing a line and saying, “This has to end.” But I think that moment was when I finally started to concern myself with the things I wanted, and to act accordingly. Call me a little boy for cancelling the whole party, but what else was I supposed to do? In terms of patience, I ran that well dry a few times. I did learn a lot about what it means to love someone, and I learned that I was willing to stick to my guns and see people for what they are (as opposed to what I want them to be). And I learned to walk away.
Here's what I'll do to round out this one. I stumbled upon a folder of old letters I've written to various people. By "old" I mean early to mid-9os, when I had access to a computer and was probably just getting used to MS Word, thus I managed to salvage some of these from various floppy discs. Before that, we're talking handwritten letters, and I photocopied none of them, which is good, because most of them were some of the most half-assed, embarrassing love notes anyone's ever written, some of the most truly desperate shit you would ever be bound to read. If I could go back in a time machine, I would seriously kick my own ass from the age of, say, 21 to 28.
But, here's some snippets of stuff that caught my eye. Makes no sense, may be a silly read, but could be some fun stuff along the way, too.
***
I must say, out of all the tapes I make for people, 70's one-hit wonders or pop tapes are always my favorites. I think people make the mistake of looking at their deep teenage years as a time to remember "their" music. Nah -- for me it was my childhood leading into my early teens. That's the music that sticks with me, that haunts me, that uncovers certain emotions and situations that go a long way to describing who I am. As a "deep" teenager, i.e. the late 70's early 80's, I'd be hung up on stuff like Cheap Trick and The Clash. Not bad stuff, but it doesn't seem to mean as much to me. I find myself buying 80's collections every few months, but that's more for a kick. Rhino hit the bull's eye with their mammoth 70's pop collection -- a milestone, and I've also partaken of many of their "Soul Hits of the 70's" series, although not nearly as much. Stuff like this does represent a tremendous service to the listener. Until this stuff came out, the only connection I had to these songs were dusty and broken 45s in the basement. My brother M was a singles man -- he had hundreds -- literally every song on this tape, and an amazing majority of the songs listed in the "Have a Nice Day" series. With each one, he'd get out his special "M Repsher" address sticker he had sent away for and put it on the label, thus making it worthless for collectors. (He had more than a few early 70's Beatles solo records that fall into this category, with the split and full apples on the label -- oh well.) Unfortunately, 45s being what they were, and kids being who they were, these records were scratched and beat to shit within a matter of months. We took shitty care of them, and almost as bad care of our albums.
***
Greetings from the ghost of Christmas past, yeh cancerous little gobshite.
It’s me, Bill Repsher, back from the dead, or should I say back from the living, to rain bad tidings and gloom upon that netherworld of lost and doomed souls otherwise known as P____ & S______. To save you from professional embarrassment, I’ve refrained from placing my name anywhere on the outside of this envelope. I thought about putting “Ted Kozinsky, c/o Montana Federal Correctional Facility” on the outside, but that’s not a very wise idea, especially considering that P_______ is really ripe for this sort of thing.
I’d imagine I’m persona non grata around that joint, that if I showed up unexpectedly for a unscheduled lunch appointment with our man B_____, I’d have a few of those guys with walkie talkies in the lobby looking to practice their Tiger Schulman karate moves on me. And I dig that – for once in my life, I had the chance to nail a total bastard in public, and I took it. My only regret is that they couldn’t have published my five-page, single-spaced diatribe I sent to B_____ privately the same day, and that it couldn’t have been The New York Times instead. For what it’s worth, and I know it’s very little, I hope the man looks out a rain-streaked window on a particularly bad day, and some of the issues I dredged up in that letter play on the fringes of his warped mind. That’s all I ask. Even Satan wept when he saw Jesus walking alone through the fires of hell.
Enclosed please find a load of Irish Sounding Shite I threw together recently. Knowing you are a connoisseur of music from the isles, and that you may have known more than a few of these musicians personally, I figured you’d enjoy having a copy sent your way. It may well be preaching to the converted, but it sure beats preaching to a bunch of mean-spirited pricks throwing eggs and tomatoes at you.
Keep on smoking, poster boy for electronic voice boxes. Allow me to say that of all the people I have worked with, from ex-cons and white supremacist in various factory stints to blue blood Wasps from Westchester County who couldn’t get electrons shot through their anuses, that among this sad troop of misguided souls known as my lifelong coworkers, you were definitely one of my favorites, a true character, like some updated pervert from a Dickens novel. I can picture you giving lung cancer to Tiny Tim as he sat in the corner piping, “God bless us one and all.” You’d smoke that gimpy little bastard to death. Frankly, I’d have spent more time around you, but I’d probably be in an oxygen tent right now gasping, “That bald-headed prick Yul Brenner was right.”
I’ll be thinking of you when I’m vomiting in my green plastic derby on St. Patrick’s Day. Long may you run.
Oh – and fuck Bob Geldof.
***
I wouldn't say I think what you do is a waste of time. What I do at work is a waste of time -- but I'm getting paid well for it, and I'm supporting myself on it. I'd say the things you're doing for free are a lot more honorable than what I'm getting paid for. But, damn, A____, what are you doing? I'd understand if you had sugar daddies back home bank-rolling your existence, but how are you living? How do you do it? What I'm questioning -- because I'm honestly at a loss -- is how you seem to be getting by with no visible means of support. I'd be jealous, if I weren't under the impression that you must be near broke 100% of the time. I've been there -- a few times, the last being when I decided to temp right in the middle of one of the worst recessions to hit this country. I was down to about $300, with no work coming in, and I didn't feel like working anymore, period. It didn't feel good. A few weeks later, the jobs started picking up, and then I landed the job at the ad agency that kept me in the green for the following three years. That's as close as I got to going under, and with a college education and a fair amount of street smarts, I felt like a fool for letting myself go that far.
***
You look like a fucking gangster! The black leather coat, the shorter hair – your face has grown more character, you look real Italian now. When I first saw you, I didn’t know if I should say hello or reach for my wallet. Which is good, if you ask me – I’ve learned that having the power to physically intimidate people in some way is an effective tool in staying alive, especially in the city. I’ve had people tell me I’ve spooked them just by the way I walk up to them, but I’m sure not aware of it.
***
So I find it’s good not to get too hung up on one’s life direction. I live in a town filled with neurotic people who let such things blow their minds and either turn them into freakish trolls, or send them to psychoanalysts who get rich for basically being bartenders without alcohol and a loud jukebox to contend with. Everyone I know seems to have some grievous life crisis going on. Some for real (a friend back home going through an ugly divorce that involves kids), some imagined (another friend in California who’ll call at three in the morning to tell me he’s going bald). My only crisis is that I’m not doing exactly what I want to do, and I haven’t whipped myself into the proper state of righteous indignation to draw lines and make it happen. I’ve grown old enough to know that life rolls along no matter what you do, whether you appreciate every second or try to throw it all away, it goes on. And when you go, it goes on without you. (All right, so I stole those last two lines from a coffee cup.) I like the way I’m turning out -- most days I feel I can handle anything. If there’s one thing I’m acutely aware of, it’s that I’ve made a promise to myself to always live like I did as a child -- not to take things too seriously, and to treat everyone with the respect they deserve. And New York has taught me not to panic -- you live here, and you either learn that implicitly, or you never learn it at all. For most people, this is panic central, and I don’t know why these people just don’t up and move.
I’ve thought of doing that myself. I’ve been in the Bronx too long. It’s not a terrible place -- I’ve lived there around seven years and have no scars, war stories or police reports to show for it. But in a lot of ways, it’s very isolating, because people are afraid to visit me there, and I can’t blame them. I think people see me as somebody who wants to be an outsider. No -- I just want reasonable rent. I may move just because I’m getting the urge to have a relatively normal life living around white people again. (The only way my life is abnormal now is that I live in a place where no one else is white. If a black man who lived around white people told me he was sick of white people, I’d know exactly what he was talking about and wouldn’t take it personally.) I think every New Yorker spends half his day thinking, “Man, it’s time I left.” We’ll see what develops -- I haven’t gotten myself tied down yet, although I did have a pretty strange date last Friday which I won’t comment on.
***
I don’t know what you’ve gathered of my childhood from that big story and things I’ve told you about. It was a strange time. When I was, say, eight years old, there were probably around 15 kids between one and four years older than me, around 10 the same age, and around 10 more kids four years or younger. Right around 40 kids all told -- this was in a small town of 500 people -- an outrageous number of kids. We ran around like wild dogs -- adults couldn’t wield too much control over us. Luckily, they didn’t really have to, because most of us were raised by fairly strong-handed parents, but there were also a few wild dog kids, like LC, who served a few years in jail a while back for drunk driving and running down two small children one Sunday morning, and Tommy One-Nut, a member of the Warlocks who recently died when he ran his Harley over the high side of a rail one Friday night back in July. We played sports constantly in the schoolyard right next door to our house. Every single day -- all day during the summer. And at night we played this game called Jailbreak, an off shoot of Hide and Seek.
Basically, we were the tail end of the Baby Boom, and we were all over the place. There just aren’t too many kids back there these days, and the ones who are seem strange -- they don’t indulge in team sports, maybe because there aren’t enough kids to get good games going. I was raised in a totally different place from these kids, although the physical environment hasn’t changed much. Not many of my “kids” showed up at the block party -- I put kids in quotes, because I’m 31, and everyone else is either in his mid-30’s or late 20’s -- not exactly kids anymore.
Those guys still live around town -- J, our neighbor JB, GB, a goat-like human who will eat anything -- he’s responsible for some of the most foul, eye-watering farts I’ve ever smelled. His worst was after an all-night drunk with J and JB. G was in the back seat, and he made a strange sound. After a moment or two, J noticed a rotten egg smell. JB smelled it and vomited out the window -- he had to bolt from the car, as did J, at a red light. When they got back, GB was laughing his ass off. J asked G if he had burped or farted, and G mumbled, “I don’t know.”
We managed to have a great time talking about the vicious, bloody football games we used to have back then. (Once, a kid from a neighboring town had his ear ripped off, and I can clearly recall DT doing a full, unintentional split on wet grass, me getting a bloody nose and going home with a white shirt turned completely red down the front, and Z getting his nose broken and having two black eyes for weeks afterwards -- weird, nasty stuff.)
But the real kicker was running into JC, LC’s kid brother. JC is three years older than me, LC is around six years older, and the oldest brother MC is eight years older. MC’s famous because he turned down a minor league pitching contract to marry his girlfriend. LC’s famous because he was psychotic -- the kid scared everyone. He was about six feet tall and probably weighed around 160 lbs. -- a skinny, wiry guy, but muscled like a greyhound. The guy never worked out, and he had a body like an olympic athlete. Actually, he did heavy amounts of drugs, smoke, drank and abused his body in every way possible and had a body like an olympic athlete. Top this with a truly maniacal, criminal attitude, and you have one scary motherfucker. He had a weird, nasty look in his eye, even if he liked you.
While JC inherited some of LC’s rough edges, he was always a very effeminate kid. So it should have been no surprise to me that he’s out-of-the-closet gay and brought his partner to the picnic. Mindblowing, Daniel in the Lion’s Den stuff -- this took real guts. He was smart enough not to camp it up -- basically, if you didn’t know JC’s history, you’d say there goes two guys who must be related. JC does have a slight effeminate lisp and one of those “not an ounce of fat, sunshine” perfectly-toned bodies many gay guys seem to favor. But he still puts out those spooky LC vibes.
I remember when we were growing up, girls in town would practice to be cheerleaders while we played baseball. JC would start out playing baseball, but sooner or later, he’d break away and start leading the girls in their cheers. If anyone would make fun of him, he’d come over and kick the shit out of him -- I know, he did it to me once and beat me until I didn’t want to get up.
My childhood is filled with all kinds of incidents like that. It would have been a kick to go over some of them with the guys. I know everyone at the block party had as good a time as I did -- hopefully that will spur someone on back there to arrange some kind of reunion. I realize now that those kids I grew up with were just as, if not more, influential on me as my high school and college friends. I can’t lie to those guys, or pretend I’m something I’m not -- we go all the way back to our very beginnings. I think high school and definitely college presented an escape from the people we thought we were. We could go somewhere else, make new friends, act differently, pick up new interests. But the guys I grew up with -- they’ll be able to point out good and bad things about my character that may not be obvious to people who’ve met me down the road. I think it was absolutely necessary to leave them behind -- there were a lot of bad things going on back then, too, kids getting caught up in drugs, and just a general “Lord of the Flies” type attitude that was spooky and mean-spirited at times. But to go back and be able to see these people again in a totally new light, yet still the same in so many ways -- it’s a mind-blowing experience.
***
I’m sitting here tonight, Ms. G, listening to pop music and tossing around ideas on the laptop. When I got home tonight, I could smell my laundry on the drying rack I put over the radiator – a wonderful smell, clean and boyish. It’s good to know the things I wear smell like that – makes me want to toe that hard, fragrant line. Now that’s discipline! I’ve been told I still smell like a boy – and I know that smell, I catch it sometimes, a weird, clean smell, like a kid who’s just worked up a light sweat playing baseball, but his clothes are clean, so both sides come together and make this boy smell. So long as I don’t smell like shit, B.O. or heavy cologne, I’m doing all right. I tend to be an extremely clean person.
***
I can’t accept that philosophy. I think that’s why I’ve fallen out with AS, although I used the smoke screen of her getting all weird back in January about that time I called up late to go out for lunch. Regardless of how smart she is, she’s got herself into the mindset. I’ve never met her parents, but I can tell you they must be decent people from the suburbs, working towards some defined goal, a nice house and kids, the whole deal. She wants those things, which I understand and appreciate, but she also wants to blaze her own trail in business. Those two worlds aren’t going to peacefully coexist. I think she knows that, and the kind of guys she sets herself up with have to fit into that neat little picture. Sometimes I get the impression she wants to trash the whole business thing and just walk around some big house, giving her kids weird names and trying to live some way of life that doesn’t exist.
What a turnaround from the sorority girl who cut loose five nights a week and must have done her weight in guys. I see too many weird conflicts in her. We’ve all got them (I call them paradoxes when I want to be nice), but hers expose a little too much of a conniving mind. Conniving towards positive goals, but conniving nonetheless. I think she’s a good-hearted person, but I also think she’s going to have some sort of breakdown before she’s 40, where all these things come to a head, and she sees what everyone sees sooner or later -- there’s no way out. Every action will have positive and negative effects. There’s always a certain amount of shit to take. You may not get what you want, and if you actually get what you want, it won’t be what you thought it was. I don’t trust people who don’t understand that, and it seems that as people get older, they pick up on it real quick, or never pick up on it at all.
There’s no way out -- I like that concept. It makes you take responsibility for the way things are, and makes you realize it’s pointless to sit around pining for someone else’s apparently “better life.” We have no better lives than the ones we live. There’s no way out -- make what you have work. And if it doesn’t work, fuck it -- park it on the side of the road and walk away. I wish I could go back to high school and give that as a speech -- hey, kids, if you’re thinking high school’s over, you’ve just walked out of prison and now you’re free, I’ve got some news you might want to hear ...
But I do recall the end of high school as being a major relief. College was another story -- I recognized that was it for that way of life -- having friends around all the time, getting bombed in the middle of the week, having days where you only had one class and all kinds of time to play around with. College was a kick -- I have good memories of it, and I don’t ever want to go back (Dewey Beach, Dewey Beach). I guess it would still be possible to have that lifestyle, a lot of people I know have no qualms about hanging out until two in the morning on a work night. But that shit just wipes me out anymore, I can’t do it. Give me a good night’s sleep instead. Good bowel movements, a good night’s sleep and an occasional roll in the hay -- the rest is only window dressing.
***
I think I ended our situation because it felt like a job to me. We weren’t going anywhere. Maybe I filled some small role in your life, but I never had the feeling it was anything more than that. That gets tiresome, especially when you see possibilities in someone. And as you know, we let that cat drag from the bumper for more than a few blocks. It wasn’t easy drawing a line and saying, “This has to end.” But I think that moment was when I finally started to concern myself with the things I wanted, and to act accordingly. Call me a little boy for cancelling the whole party, but what else was I supposed to do? In terms of patience, I ran that well dry a few times. I did learn a lot about what it means to love someone, and I learned that I was willing to stick to my guns and see people for what they are (as opposed to what I want them to be). And I learned to walk away.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
9/11: Songs That Got "Us" Through
Back when large CDs stores existed, there was a certain kind of “various artists” CD I’d always notice in the Jazz section. Who knows, maybe this held true when vinyl albums ruled, but I just never noticed (because I never bought any records that were even remotely associated with jazz). This type of music was related more to Big Band, which most stores recognized as a subset of Jazz.
But I’d notice, and eventually buy a few of, these CDs that were entitled something like Songs that Got Us Through World War II. Or World War I. Sometimes even The Korean War. The concept was to note Big Band songs that pertained specifically to the war: “White Cliffs of Dover,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” “G.I. Jive,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company C,” etc. And there would be songs that weren’t specifcally about the war, but had a connotation of linking the song to the experience: “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” come to mind. Millions of people were away from home, thus a lot of songs got written about what that felt like, with the very real understanding that they may never come home again.
I noticed in the Pop/Rock section, the few CDs I saw about the Vietnam War weren’t positioned that way – the title would usually include reference to Vietnam, but no mention of “getting us through.” That war wasn’t viewed sentimentally. Glen Miller and The Andrew Sisters, or their 60s equivalents (were there any?) did not write songs specifically about the war experience. Songs that were specifically written about the war experience back then were generally by younger artists, who clearly were not feeling sentimental over friends and family sent overseas, but whose main message seemed to be: “Let’s get the fuck out of there.”
Now, most large stores have very small CD sections, and behemoths like Tower and HMV, where I’d find these CDs in their huge aisles, are long gone. I haven’t been in an indie CD store in eons either, although a handful still exist in NYC. But it got me thinking, forget about Vietnam, there were no Songs That Got Us Through 9/11 collections either.
And that was for a number of reasons. Personally, my biggest one was simple: no songs got me through 9/11. I was emotionally numb on 9/11 as I walked home over the 59th Street Bridge and watched hours of the horrible TV footage like the rest of the world did, even though I saw everything but the first plane go in from the 35th floor of an office building about six miles north of there that morning. Fucking numb. Followed shortly by enraged … a feeling that has surely let up since then, but that’s the one that still sticks with me the most.
No, a few days later, as I’d ride the subway with my MP3 player (pre-iPod, using the sturdy Creative Nomad 30 GB Zen Jukebox, I could feel certain songs cutting through the haze. You have to realize, it wasn’t a situation of everything snapping back to normal once we could all go back to work later that week. It took months for the lower part of Manhattan to open up again. The smell of what happened, burning debris of all sorts, hung over the city like a pall for weeks afterwards. People were constantly on edge, expecting a second wave of attacks at any time, particularly on the subway. Everywhere you walked in Manhattan, there were mimeographed and color-copied photos of the missing. Less than two months later, a plane crashed in the Far Rockaways, on its way to Puerto Rico, killing dozens, and I recall the sickly feeling of “here we go again” that morning. (That was determined an accident, but I still have my doubts.)
Once music started making sense to me again, probably by about 9/18 or so, it really helped me along. I’d like to note a few of those songs here now, and figure out why they worked. There are no “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” type songs here. There are no songs that were even remotely traditional hits of any sort. I was heavily into the indie scene at the time, thus was listening to that music the most, and that music was and is like a secret handshake. And I’ve never warmed up to the secret handshake method of music appreciation, i.e., I’m no hipster. I was raised with huge bands playing arenas and everyone knowing the hits. But there came a point in the late 80s into the 90s where the kind of music I liked was only happening with indie bands, and I was getting older, thus found myself truly repulsed by Top 40, which makes sense. I’ve listened to a lot of great indie music over the years, but it’s not the music of grand gestures. These people are not rock stars. They don’t shape generations. Which is good and bad. But most of the time, most people won’t know who in the hell I’m writing about! Nevertheless, these songs got me through that horrible time period when very little else could reach me.
(And for the record, at the time, I was extremely leery of any talk of “the new sincerity” and “how this has changed us” – leery to the point of derision. And I was right. Nothing changed after that, that much I can see clearly almost a decade later. If anything, New Yorkers tend to be even more vacuous, empty and insincere. It’s just the way a lot of people are here, which was true long before 9/11 and will be true long after. Skyrocketing real estate values since then, too, have done wonders in terms of injecting the city with new waves of greedy vampires totally lacking in any senses of soul or empathy. You need to live around people like this to understand how genuinely unappealing a lot of these folks are.)
But I’d notice, and eventually buy a few of, these CDs that were entitled something like Songs that Got Us Through World War II. Or World War I. Sometimes even The Korean War. The concept was to note Big Band songs that pertained specifically to the war: “White Cliffs of Dover,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” “G.I. Jive,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company C,” etc. And there would be songs that weren’t specifcally about the war, but had a connotation of linking the song to the experience: “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” come to mind. Millions of people were away from home, thus a lot of songs got written about what that felt like, with the very real understanding that they may never come home again.
I noticed in the Pop/Rock section, the few CDs I saw about the Vietnam War weren’t positioned that way – the title would usually include reference to Vietnam, but no mention of “getting us through.” That war wasn’t viewed sentimentally. Glen Miller and The Andrew Sisters, or their 60s equivalents (were there any?) did not write songs specifically about the war experience. Songs that were specifically written about the war experience back then were generally by younger artists, who clearly were not feeling sentimental over friends and family sent overseas, but whose main message seemed to be: “Let’s get the fuck out of there.”
Now, most large stores have very small CD sections, and behemoths like Tower and HMV, where I’d find these CDs in their huge aisles, are long gone. I haven’t been in an indie CD store in eons either, although a handful still exist in NYC. But it got me thinking, forget about Vietnam, there were no Songs That Got Us Through 9/11 collections either.
And that was for a number of reasons. Personally, my biggest one was simple: no songs got me through 9/11. I was emotionally numb on 9/11 as I walked home over the 59th Street Bridge and watched hours of the horrible TV footage like the rest of the world did, even though I saw everything but the first plane go in from the 35th floor of an office building about six miles north of there that morning. Fucking numb. Followed shortly by enraged … a feeling that has surely let up since then, but that’s the one that still sticks with me the most.
No, a few days later, as I’d ride the subway with my MP3 player (pre-iPod, using the sturdy Creative Nomad 30 GB Zen Jukebox, I could feel certain songs cutting through the haze. You have to realize, it wasn’t a situation of everything snapping back to normal once we could all go back to work later that week. It took months for the lower part of Manhattan to open up again. The smell of what happened, burning debris of all sorts, hung over the city like a pall for weeks afterwards. People were constantly on edge, expecting a second wave of attacks at any time, particularly on the subway. Everywhere you walked in Manhattan, there were mimeographed and color-copied photos of the missing. Less than two months later, a plane crashed in the Far Rockaways, on its way to Puerto Rico, killing dozens, and I recall the sickly feeling of “here we go again” that morning. (That was determined an accident, but I still have my doubts.)
Once music started making sense to me again, probably by about 9/18 or so, it really helped me along. I’d like to note a few of those songs here now, and figure out why they worked. There are no “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” type songs here. There are no songs that were even remotely traditional hits of any sort. I was heavily into the indie scene at the time, thus was listening to that music the most, and that music was and is like a secret handshake. And I’ve never warmed up to the secret handshake method of music appreciation, i.e., I’m no hipster. I was raised with huge bands playing arenas and everyone knowing the hits. But there came a point in the late 80s into the 90s where the kind of music I liked was only happening with indie bands, and I was getting older, thus found myself truly repulsed by Top 40, which makes sense. I’ve listened to a lot of great indie music over the years, but it’s not the music of grand gestures. These people are not rock stars. They don’t shape generations. Which is good and bad. But most of the time, most people won’t know who in the hell I’m writing about! Nevertheless, these songs got me through that horrible time period when very little else could reach me.
(And for the record, at the time, I was extremely leery of any talk of “the new sincerity” and “how this has changed us” – leery to the point of derision. And I was right. Nothing changed after that, that much I can see clearly almost a decade later. If anything, New Yorkers tend to be even more vacuous, empty and insincere. It’s just the way a lot of people are here, which was true long before 9/11 and will be true long after. Skyrocketing real estate values since then, too, have done wonders in terms of injecting the city with new waves of greedy vampires totally lacking in any senses of soul or empathy. You need to live around people like this to understand how genuinely unappealing a lot of these folks are.)
***
“Under the Western Freeway” by Grandaddy. This was the first piece of music that got through to me after 9/11; in my mind, it sounded exactly like 9/11. Or at least touched on that feeling I had of that stark footage of the streets down there just after the second building collapse, where all was silence, save for the gentle beeping of firefighter’s emergency signal devices. That gray cloud of dust covering everything. Unnatural silence for a city– it only gets that quiet with snow falling late at night. In the song, you can hear a metallic grinding in the background. That’s pretty much how I felt for days afterwards.
“Protected from the Rain” by Grandaddy. Grandaddy made a lot of sense to me that fall. I had liked them before, but so much of the band’s feel was geared directly towards that feeling of mild suffering most people were going through. (I’ve since realized these sort of enormous cultural events are just that, unless you know/knew someone directly involved. Took it much harder at the time, but it was mild compared to my Dad passing on three years later.) Lyrics sound absolutely senseless, but again, that rolling, electronic sound these guys had was perfect, like a lullaby for adults.
“Don’t Be Crushed” by Hawksley Workman. If there’s one theme that I can see with most of the songs that registered with me then, it was that quiet, healing quality. Which is odd, because I was about as angry as I’ve ever been in my life: a low, steady rage that I felt for months afterwards. I had to find a way to counter-balance that with something, so music seemed to be it. Beautiful song by Hawksley Workman. Lyrics get a bit disingenuous in places, and a little too close to home with the airplane imagery, but the message driven home in the title was something I could relate to at the time. Most older rock fans will point to a song like this as a reason for not liking indie music. The music is there – it sounds expansive, the work of a talented artist. But the lyrics are so idiosyncratic, and the singer not fitting into that traditional “rock star” voice, that they can’t help but reject it. They rightly recognize a song like this could never be a hit, despite having the potential to be one. And that’s probably why I like indie music. You lose that huge generational appeal kids were raised with in the 60s and 70s, but you still gain something worthwhile.
“I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy” by Antony & the Johnsons. Antony is one strange guy – looks like an alien, assume he’s gay, and wrapped in a cloak of gentility akin to Bryan Ferry’s bigger ballads. It’s a bit of a shtick, but it works because the guy is a genuinely talented singer and songwriter. “Dead Boy” is one of his better songs, and touched on that theme of constant death floating around the city at the time. I saw Antony perform at a local PS on the Lower East Side that December, and this song brought the house down, as he sang with these odd images on a large screen behind him that looked like a city in foggy ruins … which is exactly how NYC felt at the time. (My audience experience was greatly decreased by the gay couple openly making out in front of me. Audience was mostly gay, which was fine by me, but these guys were going at it like two virgins pulling their moves from an Idiots Guide to Gross Public Displays of Affection. Don’t think that scenario is an issue many places in the world! Besides, what kind of people would make out to a song like this ... vampires?)
“Cybercar” by East River Pipe. East River Pipe is really a one-man band named Fred Cornog who’s put out album after album of home-made recordings heavy on keyboards and synthesizers. As noted in an interview I did with him for Leisuresuit.net in 1999, the guy had been through a lot and had found a way to make his life work through music. “Cybercar” had that sound of emptiness and hurt following 9/11. I’m noticing with all these songs, they’re not just simple rock ballads in that traditional Carpenters/Bread way, but close. In this case, there’s that flurry of electric guitar that works through the song. These are more like disjointed ballads where something has been knocked off its axis … again, this is how the world felt for a few months the fall and winter of 2001.
“Mellow (Part 1)” by Mellow. Mellow was (is?) a French pop band with a real yen for 60s style Britpop. I lost track of them after this album, save to note they did the soundtrack for the indie flick, CQ. I must have been coming out of the funk when this track hit me because it’s a fairly happy sounding song. I didn’t have much need for happy-sounding music in the immediate aftermath … wasn’t exactly walking on sunshine.
“Suffering” by Satchel. Painful to admit I was turned onto this song from the awful movie, Beautiful Girls, featuring a barely teenage Natalie Portman and a bunch of then twentysomething name actors stumbling through a bad script. I take it “Suffering” is about suffering, but really can’t tell from the lyrics, which sound mostly nonsensical. But what a melody and singer, like something from the Stones late 60s heyday. When you can put out a song that gets into the vibe of "You Can't Always Get What You Want," you're in a good place. It surely felt right in that dark time.
“Last Night on Earth” by The Mekons. One of my favorite bands, The Mekons, have always struck me as a bunch of well-meaning assholes. I recall Jon Langford, the band’s leader, making some truly stupid statements about the state of America as the Iraq War started. (He called it the worst time ever in American history … he wasn’t an American … has lived in the Chicago area for roughly a decade … and seemed to have no knowledge of little things like slavery, numerous plagues, a fucking Civil War, radical mistreatment and genocide of Indians, working conditions before unions and child labor laws, two World Wars that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, centuries under British rule, but never mind all that.)
I forgave Langford because he has a great band, and “Last Night on Earth” was archetypal Mekons: “Life is a debt/That must someday be paid/Born when we were born/Left us helpless and self obsessed.” Amen to that. The song had nothing to do with 9/11 directly, but seemed to address that more real sense of people getting back to the less dramatic emptiness of their lives as compared to what had just passed. This was also a “life is getting better” song from that time, although better in that Mekons “world is fucked” sort of way. You have to love The Mekons for grasping humor from the darkness of life.
Seanchai – Gates of Hell. This was the only song specifically written about 9/11 that I can handle. I took a lot of heat at the time for noting in print what an awful song “Let’s Roll” by Neil Young was. It still is! His heart was in the right place … but, dear Lord, what an awful song. The small handful of those big-name artist songs related to 9/11 were. (“Into the Fire” by Springsteen does work, give him credit.) Seanchai was a NYC celtic band led by a former member of Black 47, and also, I gather, a former NYC policeman. Thus, he had insight to what was going on in the weeks after 9/11 in terms of endless funerals for cops and firemen featuring empty coffins, as there was often no body left to bury. I’d wager anyone living near a cemetery in the tristate area must have been hearing “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes a few times a week through early November. This song captures it all beautifully, particularly noting how many Americans of Irish lineage died that day, just by doing their jobs. If there’s one song you pull out of this piece, make it this one.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
These Are the Days
Well, the Philadelphia Phillies came a long way this year, all the way to the World Series, only to be out-played by the New York Yankees. Never going to be a Yankees fan, nor a Mets fan, nor a fan of any New York sports team. I firmly believe the teams you follow as a kid are the ones you stick with as an adult. (I really tried being a Yankess fan when I lived in the Bronx, but these were the Deion Sanders years of the early 90s, i.e., they were pretty bad, and my heart just wasn't in it, although there was plenty of leg room in the upper decks of Yankee Stadium back then.)
They had a ticker-tape parade for the Yankees on Friday in the Canyon of Heroes down by City Hall. For one day, it became the Canyon of Guidos. I could see them on NY1 when I woke up in the morning, already tipsy at seven in the morning, grown men wearing baseball jerseys and gold chains, Yankees hats set slightly askew in that dickhead style made popular by hiphop artists in the 90s, baying into the camera like senseless hounds at a full moon. I saw them on the subway train, too, going to and from work. Butch-looking guys in Yankees jerseys and sweatshirts. A lot of mustaches. Surprisingly, a lot of teenage kids, many with that surly “Uncle Vinny has a union job lined up for me when I flunk out of high school” look: a real strange, unfriendly vibe. People who normally don’t ride a subway train. You could tell by their pose.
But who am I kidding? If they were to throw a parade in downtown Philadelphia, I’m convinced the participants would be exactly the same, save the South Philly contingent of guys whose lives appear to be unironic glorification of Italian-American stereotypes. All that would change would be the team jerseys. Yankees fans strike me as being no more or less boorish than any grown man who would go around in a team jersey carrying on like a mental patient in the streets when his team wins. Fun, to a point, but, buddy, it gets strange and tired after awhile.
There used to be a white kid who lived in the apartment house across the street from me here, actually the kid and his mother: Fat Johnny and his White Trash Mother. At least that’s how I referred to them. Astoria used to be much more gritty; we’re talking less than a decade ago. That building now houses nearly all affluent white folks paying what I’d guess are outrageous rents – the only things that remain the same are the Mexican super and his gigantic family living in the ground-floor apartment, and the decrepit state of the building.
Johnny was a chunky little white kid with blonde hair, a real loudmouth, too, you could always hear him in the street. I note his skin color because he was caught in that unfortunate wave of 90s kids who were convinced they were ghetto gangstas, when they were just creepy white kids with no identity and a repulsively moronic view of what it meant to black. I don’t like using words like “white trash” (because I don’t call downtrodden black folks “niggers”), but, boy, his Mom had it written all over her. She was permanently stuck in the second-floor window of one of those apartments, calling down to Johnny to tell him to shut up. You could often hear her phone conversations from the street, most of which concerned her hassling with the Duane Read pharmacy to have welfare cover payments for various medications. She never seemed to move from that spot – you could see her bulbous face, hovering behind the screen, like a priest in a confessional booth.
She seemed like a nice person in general, but then again, she gave the world Fat Johnny. Fat Johnny’s Dad would come around once or twice a year – please see above references to Italian-American stereotypes. Just this roly-poly loudmouth of a guy, you could tell he was no good, yelling at his ex-wife while he picked Johnny up and dropped him off. And he’d always yell when he left in that thick Queens accent: “Yo, Johnny, hang tough! Hang tough, Johnny! Yo, Johhhnnnyyyy! Hang tough, Johnny!” This would go on for a good five minutes. And he’d finally leave. Not every weekend like a good father with visitation rights would demand. I can recall that guy showing up maybe a handful times in the roughly five years they lived over there. Thus, Johnny’s anger with the world, or at least the roots of it.
What’s notable about all this? Every time the Yankees would play, and they won, Fat Johnny would hang his gigantic head out their second-floor apartment window and bay out the “Let’s go, Yankees!” chant, for minutes on end. Every single time. If you recall, the Yankees were pretty damn good in the late 90s, thus Johnny had many opportunities to serenade the neighborhood. It was like the “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” scene in Network … replaced with an angry 11-year-old kid with a voice like a braying jackass.
Have you already read between the lines that I couldn’t stand Fat Johnny? I’ve always had a hard time with trashy white folks: I take it personally. Come from roughly the same socio-economic class. Feel a radical difference between working class white folks raised in rural and urban areas … notice a much worse edge on the urban variety. Or maybe it’s just New York and the 718 vibe … although I suspect I’d be catching the same vibe in Philly, or Baltimore, or Boston. Then again, these days, I go home, and it seems like the bar keeps dropping lower on the white working class and how they carry themselves, all those 90s kids raised on grunge and Limp Bizkit coming into their 20s, and man, they’re not changing or growing one iota, just like all those hair metal assholes from the late 80s who still seem to be hair-metal assholes in their early 40s now. People have just developed this innate, sickly desire to go through life with their teenage predilections and tastes, which seems like a radical error to me.
Don’t know when it happened, but one day, Fat Johnny and his White Trash Mother simply weren’t there anymore. I imagine their lease rolled over, and they got the “make way for the enlightened white folks with college degrees and money to burn” bumrush that so many people have gotten over the past decade. (Hell, I’ve got a college degree, and I’ll get this, sooner or later, too!) Johnny did seem to blossoming into a more normal teenager. He grew a few inches and seemed a lot less brash the last few months they were over there, so who knows, maybe that kindness I could sense fleetingly in his mother was starting to shine through on him.
Your average Yankees fan? Hardly. Most fans of a team, you don’t see them in the stadiums. Think about it. It costs a fortune to see any pro sport on a regular basis these days. You will find working-class guys, especially in construction, getting season tickets and such to their favorite football teams. But most people in those stadiums are burning serious money to be there routinely. Obviously, the crowd grows more gritty the farther away you get from the playing field, but even those nosebleed seats don’t come cheap.
No. Most sports fans, you never seem them on TV. They’re on the other end, watching the TV. A stadium at its largest for, say, college football, will hold just over 100,000 people. There are millions of people watching those games. Frankly, I would never pay to see a pro football or baseball game. Every now and then, I luck into a free ticket to a baseball game, but never football, nor basketball or hockey, which seem even more expensive. It just aint worth it, and if I’m really watching the game, you can’t beat the TV at home, not in a bar or restaurant.
Guys like Fat Johnny, or those vaguely creepy guys I was seeing on the subway and streets all day Friday during that parade, while I wouldn’t call them the “real fans” they do represent a sort of silent majority of sports fans, the guys who either can’t afford to go to too many games, if any, and spend all their spare time in bars and family rooms tying one on while their team hopefully does them proud. The Yankees make them feel like winners by extension … and I can’t fault them for seeking out that sort of positive emotional identification in their lives.
I guess I’m one of them, too, although you’d have to pay me to wear a team jersey. (That seems like such a fucking childish thing to me … honestly, kids wear that sort of shit, not grown men.) I’m just as informed as any slightly above average fan and have a sense of team history going back to the early 70s (which was much stronger then thanks to baseball cards and the tons of information noted on the back of each card). I’m not one of these Ken Burns/George Will baseball fans … waiting for Morgan Freeman’s melodious voice to say something profound about Babe Ruth over a George Winston piano solo while the camera slow pans a stock black-and-white photo … fuck that shit. Guys who feel that way about baseball tend to have never played the game at all. I’m not a historian or uber-fan. I just enjoy watching the games and feel some sense of connection in my life to trace this minor passion back to my childhood.
And one thing I realized, even watching the Phillies lose this past week: these are the days for Phillies fans. Think about it. When I was a kid, the Phils truly sucked in the early part of the 70s, they got Steve Carlton, guys like Mike Schmidt, Greg "The Bull" Luzinski and Larry Bowa came up through the farm system, and they slowly changed, so that by 1976, they were a very good team. Went all the way in 1980. Lost in the World Series like they did this year in 1983. And that stretch from 1976 to 1983, in my mind, are The Golden Years (of my life) for the Phillies, filled with legendary players, back when life was good, things were easier, made more sense, etc.
But I was a kid in a small town, and it was the 70s. The Phils have been playing on a playoff-quality level since 2007, and if all goes well, should do the same next year, and a few more years to come if they can keep their core group of good players (Utley, Howard, Rollins, Victorino, Werth) intact and pick up some good pitching. They apparently have a pretty good farm system with some new names that will probably be on the team next year to hopefully add to the long list of solid regulars. It feels pretty good to be a Phillies fan right now.
And, in my mind, these are the days, now, just like they were back then. Save the players are now almost half my age. I don’t look up to them – in fact, a lot of them seem a bit weird. Jayson Werth looks like he should be wearing a sheepskin vest and screwing a girl on a rock in some heathen ceremony in the woods. Shane Victorino, the Flyin’ Hawaiian, looks like he’s about to jump out of his skin every second of the game. Cole Hamels, last year’s ace and this year’s goat, has a permanent southern Cal surfer dude smirk on his face that works real well when he’s winning, but turned sour this year. I don't know what Chase Utley has in his hair each game, but it looks like a handful of Crisco.
But they’re not the bunch of miscreants who stumbled through a losing effort in the 1993 World Series. That team seemed like a 75 Pinto shot into space like a freak comet. Guys like John Kruk at first, who hit well, but looked like he should have been playing the field with a can of Pabst in his throwing hand. And Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams on the mound, working a serious mullet, as many of the guys on that team did. From Wikipedia, a great quote from John Kruk about that team: “The previous year, noting the presence of the clean-cut Dale Murphy, Kruk himself described the team as ‘24 morons and one Mormon.’” They were in last place in 1992 and would sink back into a long malaise after that season -- which was nothing new for long-time Phillies fans.
No, right now, things are pretty good, and it’s worthwhile for me to note that. The “good old days” are never the good old days when you’re living them.
They had a ticker-tape parade for the Yankees on Friday in the Canyon of Heroes down by City Hall. For one day, it became the Canyon of Guidos. I could see them on NY1 when I woke up in the morning, already tipsy at seven in the morning, grown men wearing baseball jerseys and gold chains, Yankees hats set slightly askew in that dickhead style made popular by hiphop artists in the 90s, baying into the camera like senseless hounds at a full moon. I saw them on the subway train, too, going to and from work. Butch-looking guys in Yankees jerseys and sweatshirts. A lot of mustaches. Surprisingly, a lot of teenage kids, many with that surly “Uncle Vinny has a union job lined up for me when I flunk out of high school” look: a real strange, unfriendly vibe. People who normally don’t ride a subway train. You could tell by their pose.
But who am I kidding? If they were to throw a parade in downtown Philadelphia, I’m convinced the participants would be exactly the same, save the South Philly contingent of guys whose lives appear to be unironic glorification of Italian-American stereotypes. All that would change would be the team jerseys. Yankees fans strike me as being no more or less boorish than any grown man who would go around in a team jersey carrying on like a mental patient in the streets when his team wins. Fun, to a point, but, buddy, it gets strange and tired after awhile.
There used to be a white kid who lived in the apartment house across the street from me here, actually the kid and his mother: Fat Johnny and his White Trash Mother. At least that’s how I referred to them. Astoria used to be much more gritty; we’re talking less than a decade ago. That building now houses nearly all affluent white folks paying what I’d guess are outrageous rents – the only things that remain the same are the Mexican super and his gigantic family living in the ground-floor apartment, and the decrepit state of the building.
Johnny was a chunky little white kid with blonde hair, a real loudmouth, too, you could always hear him in the street. I note his skin color because he was caught in that unfortunate wave of 90s kids who were convinced they were ghetto gangstas, when they were just creepy white kids with no identity and a repulsively moronic view of what it meant to black. I don’t like using words like “white trash” (because I don’t call downtrodden black folks “niggers”), but, boy, his Mom had it written all over her. She was permanently stuck in the second-floor window of one of those apartments, calling down to Johnny to tell him to shut up. You could often hear her phone conversations from the street, most of which concerned her hassling with the Duane Read pharmacy to have welfare cover payments for various medications. She never seemed to move from that spot – you could see her bulbous face, hovering behind the screen, like a priest in a confessional booth.
She seemed like a nice person in general, but then again, she gave the world Fat Johnny. Fat Johnny’s Dad would come around once or twice a year – please see above references to Italian-American stereotypes. Just this roly-poly loudmouth of a guy, you could tell he was no good, yelling at his ex-wife while he picked Johnny up and dropped him off. And he’d always yell when he left in that thick Queens accent: “Yo, Johnny, hang tough! Hang tough, Johnny! Yo, Johhhnnnyyyy! Hang tough, Johnny!” This would go on for a good five minutes. And he’d finally leave. Not every weekend like a good father with visitation rights would demand. I can recall that guy showing up maybe a handful times in the roughly five years they lived over there. Thus, Johnny’s anger with the world, or at least the roots of it.
What’s notable about all this? Every time the Yankees would play, and they won, Fat Johnny would hang his gigantic head out their second-floor apartment window and bay out the “Let’s go, Yankees!” chant, for minutes on end. Every single time. If you recall, the Yankees were pretty damn good in the late 90s, thus Johnny had many opportunities to serenade the neighborhood. It was like the “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” scene in Network … replaced with an angry 11-year-old kid with a voice like a braying jackass.
Have you already read between the lines that I couldn’t stand Fat Johnny? I’ve always had a hard time with trashy white folks: I take it personally. Come from roughly the same socio-economic class. Feel a radical difference between working class white folks raised in rural and urban areas … notice a much worse edge on the urban variety. Or maybe it’s just New York and the 718 vibe … although I suspect I’d be catching the same vibe in Philly, or Baltimore, or Boston. Then again, these days, I go home, and it seems like the bar keeps dropping lower on the white working class and how they carry themselves, all those 90s kids raised on grunge and Limp Bizkit coming into their 20s, and man, they’re not changing or growing one iota, just like all those hair metal assholes from the late 80s who still seem to be hair-metal assholes in their early 40s now. People have just developed this innate, sickly desire to go through life with their teenage predilections and tastes, which seems like a radical error to me.
Don’t know when it happened, but one day, Fat Johnny and his White Trash Mother simply weren’t there anymore. I imagine their lease rolled over, and they got the “make way for the enlightened white folks with college degrees and money to burn” bumrush that so many people have gotten over the past decade. (Hell, I’ve got a college degree, and I’ll get this, sooner or later, too!) Johnny did seem to blossoming into a more normal teenager. He grew a few inches and seemed a lot less brash the last few months they were over there, so who knows, maybe that kindness I could sense fleetingly in his mother was starting to shine through on him.
Your average Yankees fan? Hardly. Most fans of a team, you don’t see them in the stadiums. Think about it. It costs a fortune to see any pro sport on a regular basis these days. You will find working-class guys, especially in construction, getting season tickets and such to their favorite football teams. But most people in those stadiums are burning serious money to be there routinely. Obviously, the crowd grows more gritty the farther away you get from the playing field, but even those nosebleed seats don’t come cheap.
No. Most sports fans, you never seem them on TV. They’re on the other end, watching the TV. A stadium at its largest for, say, college football, will hold just over 100,000 people. There are millions of people watching those games. Frankly, I would never pay to see a pro football or baseball game. Every now and then, I luck into a free ticket to a baseball game, but never football, nor basketball or hockey, which seem even more expensive. It just aint worth it, and if I’m really watching the game, you can’t beat the TV at home, not in a bar or restaurant.
Guys like Fat Johnny, or those vaguely creepy guys I was seeing on the subway and streets all day Friday during that parade, while I wouldn’t call them the “real fans” they do represent a sort of silent majority of sports fans, the guys who either can’t afford to go to too many games, if any, and spend all their spare time in bars and family rooms tying one on while their team hopefully does them proud. The Yankees make them feel like winners by extension … and I can’t fault them for seeking out that sort of positive emotional identification in their lives.
I guess I’m one of them, too, although you’d have to pay me to wear a team jersey. (That seems like such a fucking childish thing to me … honestly, kids wear that sort of shit, not grown men.) I’m just as informed as any slightly above average fan and have a sense of team history going back to the early 70s (which was much stronger then thanks to baseball cards and the tons of information noted on the back of each card). I’m not one of these Ken Burns/George Will baseball fans … waiting for Morgan Freeman’s melodious voice to say something profound about Babe Ruth over a George Winston piano solo while the camera slow pans a stock black-and-white photo … fuck that shit. Guys who feel that way about baseball tend to have never played the game at all. I’m not a historian or uber-fan. I just enjoy watching the games and feel some sense of connection in my life to trace this minor passion back to my childhood.
And one thing I realized, even watching the Phillies lose this past week: these are the days for Phillies fans. Think about it. When I was a kid, the Phils truly sucked in the early part of the 70s, they got Steve Carlton, guys like Mike Schmidt, Greg "The Bull" Luzinski and Larry Bowa came up through the farm system, and they slowly changed, so that by 1976, they were a very good team. Went all the way in 1980. Lost in the World Series like they did this year in 1983. And that stretch from 1976 to 1983, in my mind, are The Golden Years (of my life) for the Phillies, filled with legendary players, back when life was good, things were easier, made more sense, etc.
But I was a kid in a small town, and it was the 70s. The Phils have been playing on a playoff-quality level since 2007, and if all goes well, should do the same next year, and a few more years to come if they can keep their core group of good players (Utley, Howard, Rollins, Victorino, Werth) intact and pick up some good pitching. They apparently have a pretty good farm system with some new names that will probably be on the team next year to hopefully add to the long list of solid regulars. It feels pretty good to be a Phillies fan right now.
And, in my mind, these are the days, now, just like they were back then. Save the players are now almost half my age. I don’t look up to them – in fact, a lot of them seem a bit weird. Jayson Werth looks like he should be wearing a sheepskin vest and screwing a girl on a rock in some heathen ceremony in the woods. Shane Victorino, the Flyin’ Hawaiian, looks like he’s about to jump out of his skin every second of the game. Cole Hamels, last year’s ace and this year’s goat, has a permanent southern Cal surfer dude smirk on his face that works real well when he’s winning, but turned sour this year. I don't know what Chase Utley has in his hair each game, but it looks like a handful of Crisco.
But they’re not the bunch of miscreants who stumbled through a losing effort in the 1993 World Series. That team seemed like a 75 Pinto shot into space like a freak comet. Guys like John Kruk at first, who hit well, but looked like he should have been playing the field with a can of Pabst in his throwing hand. And Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams on the mound, working a serious mullet, as many of the guys on that team did. From Wikipedia, a great quote from John Kruk about that team: “The previous year, noting the presence of the clean-cut Dale Murphy, Kruk himself described the team as ‘24 morons and one Mormon.’” They were in last place in 1992 and would sink back into a long malaise after that season -- which was nothing new for long-time Phillies fans.
No, right now, things are pretty good, and it’s worthwhile for me to note that. The “good old days” are never the good old days when you’re living them.
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