On Being (Not) Irish

On many Sundays when I was a kid, it was a tradition to go visit our aunts in Port Carbon, PA. Port Carbon was, probably still is, a rough little town just outside of Pottsville, and my aunts all lived together in a small house that faced a large wooded hill. It was just around a sharp curve at the edge of town, so I always had a sense of their house coming out of nowhere, and once there, being pressed up against that hill. In my memory, it’s always raining in Port Carbon. There was a bar on the corner with a Pabst sign in the window.

They were my grandmother’s sisters, some of whom married and were widowed, some who didn’t – I think there were four all together? It’s a bit shameful that I can never exactly recall. It was a classic Coal Region set-up, these aging Irish sisters all living together in this small house. They always had a bowl of hard candies wrapped in brown cellophane at the ready, which tasted like pennies. They had two dogs who were usually found sleeping behind the coal stove in the kitchen. One nice, one nasty. Strange dogs. When you’d come in, they’d bark and wag their tails, but never get up to greet you, not wanting to leave the warmth of the stove.

Those long Sunday afternoons in Port Carbon would go on forever, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. Bess, the leader, was a tough old broad, wore pillbox hats, I can recall her hiking up her dress to her knees to tie some kind of knot in whatever weird kind of stockings she favored. Smoked like a stack. Cat-eyed horn rim glasses. Croaked more than she talked and coughed constantly. The others were far more kind and quiet. It was always an overwhelming experience to go down there, but it gave my grandmother (who lived with us) a chance to get caught up. They’d sit around talking about old times and the weather, while all us kids lost our minds on the living-room floor. Eventually, we’d saunter off to the local playground and hit the swings or that round spinning wheel you’d hop on and get immediately dizzy. The park was wedged between a shit creek and a power plant.

Forget about big-band music. In my head, I heard 30s music when I went down there – Rudy Vallee and early Bing Crosby. Marlene Dietrich singing “Falling in Love Again.” Brother, can you spare a dime. I can still recall the time I cursed Bess – probably for a good reason as she treated kids with disdain, but still a sign of deep disrespect. And she literally made me sit in the kitchen with a bar of soap in my mouth. It tasted better than their hard candies, but I still wept because I had shamed myself. And I remember her weeping, too, when she saw how out of sorts this made me. I always had a love/hate thing going with her. Years later, brother J would inherit her beast of a car, this giant Buick from the 60s, the same dull color as their hard-candy wrapping, that got about eight miles to the gallon, had Jesus on the cross glued to the dashboard and shook like crazy when you got the car over 50 mph. We called it the Batmobile.

If you took away Port Carbon and replaced it with Donegal or Dublin, the only difference would be the accents. The sense of Irish Catholicness those women put forth was mind boggling, although it’s my understanding that their side of the family had been in America for at least a few generations. Still, because of the coal mines in the late 1800s and the coal industry thriving through the 1940s, that region was and still is a stronghold of people with Irish lineage. Cross that with my mother’s Scottish lineage … and begorrah and fiddlesticks. Actually, my surname is German, a lineage no one wants to discuss, as it’s not nearly so romantic as that of the Emerald Isle. German Scotts Irish. When I get drunk, I want to rule the world, so long as it won’t cost too much.

For all that lineage, aside from that close connection to my aunties, I can look back and see I was raised with very little sense of real Irish heritage. Which is not to say I wasn’t raised Irish – I surely was and have been pleasantly surprised to find I have a pretty similar temperament, humor and outlook on life to many actual Irish folks. Much like how a cat just knows to shit in a litterbox and bury it – I can’t really explain it.

A few years back, I wrote a story for Leisure Suit.net about dealing with the Greeks in Astoria, and one reader in particular took such umbrage that she gathered together a bunch of her like-minded harpie, neurotic friends and laid siege to that story. Her gist being that I didn’t know shit about Greek people like her … which was the whole point of my story … that the Greeks in Astoria pretty much keep to themselves and shut everyone else out … and her display of shit manners wasn’t exactly busting doors open for the community. But one of her harpy friends who stated she was Hispanic said something to the effect of: “At least I have a culture, unlike people like you.”

I didn’t really know how to answer a person that stupid. I gather plenty of 718 folks look at white people who move here (believe me, out of necessity, as everything else in New York is priced beyond insanity) and see them as this vague, threatening cloud of white suburbia encroaching on their little world. Not quite realizing people come from all over the world, from all sorts of different cultures, not some monochromatic white culture these dolts have built up in their heads based on sitcoms and the acceptable anti-white sentiment that’s second nature in the 718s. The truth is the culture of northeast Pennsylvania is fairly unique in its mix of Eastern European and Irish customs, along with a history tied to an industry that once powered the country but fell on harder times eventually. And it goes back a lot deeper than any hispanic neighborhood in New York City. But there’s no point in explaining that to some imbecile who looks at you and sees only a white cloud raining money.

When I think back on how I was raised, “Irish” wasn’t really a conscious part of it. I think working-class and 1970s, more than anything. That part of Pennsylvania was always chronically unemployed – rates always double what the national average was. When you’re raised in that sort of environment, that factor trumps just about everything else. The overall culture of the 1970s was also a strange push/pull between deeply troubled economic and political times, and the desire to forget about these things. As a kid, I was pretty happy – the music I listened to was happy. It was OK to be a happy person. Kids weren’t openly encouraged by the culture to be thugs and manic depressives. Although I can still recall guidance counselors spouting that, “It’s harder than ever to be a kid these days” line of bullshit. I found it pretty easy at the time.

“Irish” didn’t really play into that, save people noticed I looked Irish. My aunties would always say, “Oh, look at Billy, he looks just like all those little boys on that trip we took to Belfast.” By mentioning the word Belfast, they’d put the image in my mind of a little kid who looked like me lobbing a molotov cocktail at a British armored unit. At least that stark image was one I always recalled from a story in the National Geographic about Northern Ireland, the troubles of which were going full gun at the time.

So when I came to New York in the late 1980s, I didn’t really have that sense of Irishness that I would encounter with people in the tristate area. Where you’ll find a swarming Irish culture, mostly people in the suburbs of Jersey these days, a generation or two removed from the Bronx or Woodside, and probably not more than another generation from Ireland itself. A lot of Irish immigrants, too, looking for work, although there's not nearly so many these days. It’s because of one that I’m living in the apartment I’m at now, as he passed it on to me when he moved out, just as he had received it from another Irish immigrant who went back home.

It was strange for me to encounter people who recognized me as one of their own, yet I wasn’t one of their own. I did the usual things: fostering a love for Guinness, getting into Irish music (more rock than traditional, think The Pogues), and getting more into Irish literature. I had never known who J.P. Donleavy was, and reading A Fairy Tale of New York blew my mind at the time. As did The Ginger Man. But after that, it seemed like he was endlessly repeating himself with the stock character of the wily drunkard American who goes back to Ireland to live the life of a country gentleman.

Another problem with J.P. Donleavy was that I’d constantly come across these young Irish-American guys raised around New York who worshipped him, and tried to emulate not just him, but any Irish artistic figure. Which meant only one thing: alcoholism. They had this romantic images in their heads of being drunk off their asses all the time, and everyone would find them charming in their sense of Irishness. But it was never true. I can still recall an acquaintance passing out at a party after drinking half a bottle of Jamesons and shitting his pants. Again, the sort of thing that seems cool or funny when you’re 25, but, man, the guy was just a pathetic drunk, and I shudder to think what he’s doing these days.

I can still recall an old college friend asking what I was going to do for St. Patrick’s Day one year in the early 90s. “Oh,” I sniffed, “probably come home from work and read some William Butler Yeats poems. I surely won’t be going to any bars.” What a pompous asshole I was. As far in the other direction as so many guys went with the alcoholic Irishman image, I thought I was on some higher road to totally deny that. (I can’t fault anyone who wants to stay out of bars on St. Patrick’s day, but by the same token, you can have a lot of fun with tons of people in a bar who normally aren’t there.)

After awhile, I felt a bit put off by how over-the-top so many Irish folks made themselves out to be in New York. It was like they couldn’t accept being basic, every-day white Americans, so they attached themselves to this romantic image which wasn’t really who they were. Or at least I recognized strains of that in myself and backed off a bit. When you meet actual people from Ireland, they always seem perplexed by Americans who call themselves “Irish.” I remember a guy in a bar telling me: “When I’m back home, and I see an American coming on one of those walking tours, I don’t think, ‘Oh, look, here comes the Irishman.’ I think ‘Oh, look, here comes the Yank.’”

By the same token, back in Pennsylvania, my dad married a Protestant, and this was considered a mixed marriage at the time. And for how sweet my aunties were, there were many times later on in their lives when my Mom would drop off my grandmother to spend time with them, and they'd inundate her with anti-Protestant rhetoric to the point that Mom would spend the next week or two hearing why she was such an awful human being for not being Catholic. Understand that this occurred after my grandmother had a severe stroke which left her greatly disabled, and my Mom basically did everything in terms of taking care of her. It's to Mom's credit that she never once blew her cool, or told my aunties to fuck off, which would have been totally within her right.

The whole Catholic/Protestant theme was nowhere near as desperate as it really was/is in Ireland, but it was a recognizable rift, not just in my own family, but in our town. The kids knew what denomination all of us were, and it would sometimes come out in fights, but usually only then. The cemeteries on the hill in our town were split by a white picket fence – Protestants on one side, the Catholics on the other. The fence is gone, but I imagine it will take years for people to be buried there and have that subtle barrier broken.

But overall, I do get a kick out of “the Irish” in New York. Because you get right down to it, there is that strange bond I can’t deny, and so many odd little cultural touchstones that I recognize we were all raised with, most related to Catholicism and all the rules we had to tolerate as kids. Confession, catechism, confirmation, etc. I think with being Irish, it’s more a recognition of temperament and sense of humor than anything else. You can heap all these other things on top of it: love of the Notre Dame football team, drinking Guinness, being into The Pogues and such, acquiring a huge library of Irish authors, etc. But that shit doesn’t make you Irish, much like listening to hiphop doesn’t make you black (a message lost on so many culture-less kids over the past two decades).

I think I’m noticing the difference between cultural affectation, which runs rampant in our country, and the simple reality of quietly being raised with traditions that don’t readily announce themselves and aren’t recognizable to the outside world. Irish? Nah – I’m an American when it comes down to nationalities. And a non-hyphenated one at that. But it is interesting for me to meet other people of Irish lineage, or actual Irish people, and get those strange little jolts of recognition.

Baccalaureate Banshee Blues

When I started up with this blog, one of my intentions was to recall that hazy period of college life and shortly thereafter. In a lot of senses, that time period, from about the age of 18 to 25, seems very distant to me now. I think the main reason is because I don't physically have a lot of those people and places in my life. All of my old college friends have spread out over the years, and the last time I made it back to Penn State was for a summer arts festival in the early 90s. Which felt weird.

Life works like that -- if you don't have constant physical reminders of people and places, they fade out. I knew dozens of people in college – hesitate to call them friends – but these days, I’m in touch with maybe eight of them. Why? For most, it’s simply because they moved elsewhere, as did I in terms of coming to New York. Moving is one thing, but when you move and stay apart for years, unless you had a real strong bond with that person, it’s just simple physics that you’ll drift further apart. No great crime in this, although it’s interesting to note I still know more people I grew up with back home. And part of that is because that’s a physical place I visit often.

Penn State is like a vague dream to me now. I think it was a good dream – I know it wasn’t a nightmare. But for the most part, those days are distant past, not so much buried as faded. I can look back and see that was a good experience in terms of establishing my adult identity, which has surely changed much since then. I’d say our natures stay roughly the same, but everything else gets constantly rehauled, tested, burned out, reborn, discarded, etc. We often think we stay the same, but there are constant flutters in the under-current that we’re not fully aware of.

Some of those people from college didn't fade out – they either jumped or were pushed. Not in some outraged, violent way. More in a way of “we’re not the same people anymore, no need to stay in contact” – which has happened with people I went on knowing after college, but somewhere in the mid-20s to early 40s, zoned out on. Strangely enough, all women, albeit none with any sort of romantic attachment. And all worked for the same college paper with me. I think it’s interesting to look at just what happened with each.

AV was a damn good writer, when she wasn’t so mildly self loathing that she refused to indulge in anything creative. Came from a small town just outside of Pittsburgh, working class, brother became a state cop, etc. Really like a lot of kids at Penn State, including me. Deeply into the Alternative music scene of the 80s, which is how I got to know a lot of cool people at college.

There’s a difference I’ve noticed in people in their teens/early 20s and older people that some might call cynicism, but I’d just call common sense. And that’s younger people will have mentally troubled people in their lives and either not sense this in any way, or sense it and downplay it. Ergo, most of the similarly-aged mentally troubled kids they know are still on that upward arc of their problems and haven’t come down the other side, when things like lifelong prescriptions of mood enhancing drugs become part of their lives.

I don’t think AV was ever that far gone, but I think she had issues. I still recall the one time a few of us went to Pittsburgh to see a show, and she knew the town well. I was driving, and we came to a busy intersection near the Pitt University campus where I had to go straight to get where we were going. I asked her, what do I do here. She just looked at me. Then she blurted out don’t turn left. By this time, I was in the intersection, coasting, and waiting to be in an accident. Since I was in the right lane, I jerked the car right, to which she blurted out, you went the wrong way. I asked, why didn’t you just say, “Go straight”? She answered, “Because I’m no longer using the word ‘straight’ in any form since it’s derogatory to homosexuals.”

Back then, I just stared at her and shook my head. These days, I’d have thrown her out of the fucking car. Granted, I’ve met a lot of left-leaning people in NYC who I believe are nuts, but this was taking it a step further – we nearly got t-boned over her sense of political correctness. (And guess how I’ve felt about that concept ever since!)

Like all of us, she meandered for a bit after graduation before heading south, ending up in New Orleans. It didn't matter to me what her job there was, which was something like being a porter in a funky hotel – good for her. It’s just that she kept veering farther left (not "straight"), to the point where there was no talking to her anymore if you disagreed with her. It started with her becoming a soldier in the pro-choice army, attending many abortion clinic protests all over the south to the point where she and her friends knew all the pro-life nuts they were forever counter-protesting. I still don’t know how she’d manage to be at a clinic rally in Birmingham one day and back at work the next.

As we moved into our 30s, it became clear that most of her friends were kids fresh out of colleges like Tulane and LSU, bumming around New Orleans, barstool anarchists and such. I knew plenty of people like this in New York, and at that point in my life, all that stuff started fading out. You get tired of beat-down looking white boys reading Bukowski and Chomsky in shitty bars and wonder how these people survive with no visible means of support. It gets old. Sooner or later, you recognize the whole routine is an act of denial over their moneyed backgrounds, because you actually came from one these guys envied, for some stupid reason, and there’s no way you could afford to do nothing all day and somehow get by.

I think the last straw for me was when she put up a few MOVE members at her place while they were in town. If you don’t remember MOVE, they were the black “back to nature” armed separatist movement that set-up shop in Philadelphia and ended up getting bombed out of their fortress by Philadelphia's new black mayor, Wilson Goode. You may not also remember this was a cause celeb in the early 90s after a few books came out on the subject. Never quite understood why these folks didn’t join forces with the Waco/Koresh camp, because they’d have gotten along like gangbusters, despite being on opposite ends of the political spectrum.

But hearing AV go on about how wonderful these people were, and then start in with their rhetoric, that was pretty much it for me. We had some weeks-long email blow-out, and I left it at that. I guess it was her point of view that I was selling out by not agreeing with all these far-left points of view. The reality was I was just trying to survive in a major city, and frankly wasn’t that heavily into politics, never really had been, nor had she for most of the time I knew her at college (or at least she kept this hidden from me). Still, even through all the crap, I could see she was a good-hearted person, but you reach a point where if people make it difficult for you to be in their lives, you just get the fuck out.

Both AV and I were good friends with PK, an editor at the paper, and a damn good one at that. She was about 10 years older than all of us, going to grad school for a Masters in Psychology, which I don’t think she ever got. PK had an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music, which meant we got along like gangbusters. Our first contact was me dropping a note in her mailbox chastising her for picking Reckoning over Born in the USA as album of the year for 1984.

I will forever be in PK’s debt for turning me on to so much cool music in the mid-80s, whether it was newer alternative stuff, or older blues and soul which was completely fresh to me. Her apartment was packed with records – literally thousands. (I never got near a thousand with records, as my collecting years have straddled records, cassettes, CDs, and now MP3s. I do have thousands of CDs. Threw all my records out.) PK always had a good, matronly way about her, which served her well as an editor. She was a good friend, too. A lot of us into the local music scene would spend hours in her apartment listening to advance copies of albums we knew were incredible. For some reason, I distinctly recall drunkenly dozing off one night in her La-Z-Boy while Camper Van Beethoven’s “Good Guys and Bad Guys” played on MTV’s new-wave show.

After college, I moved to NYC, and she went back home to Connecticut, where she immediately got an editing job at a magazine, which I assume she’s still at all these years later. It became a habit for me to take the Metro North train up there for regular visits, which was a cool weekend getaway. I got along fine with her parents, flinty, hard-as-nail Yankee types from New England. PK stayed at home at first because she couldn’t afford to move out on her lousy editing pay, on top of which real estate in most of Connecticut is obscenely over-priced. (She eventually got her own place near-by when her pay improved.) Our visits were usually us getting caught up on new music and movies, on top of sampling local restaurants and such. Good, relaxing visits for the most part.

What happened? I don’t know. All I know is that right after 9/11, it became obvious that she was blowing off not just me, but a handful of people she knew from college – simply staying out of contact, not returning calls or emails. In my case, that was real bad timing, as I was feeling emotionally devastated for a few months after 9/11, as most New Yorkers were. Nearly everyone I knew that night or the following day checked in to see if I was still alive – not PK. That silence stretched into months. A mutual friend from college checked in to see if anything was wrong with her. Nope. Nothing wrong. Sorry to be out of touch. Will be better about this in the future. That was the last he heard from her.

Did this come out of left field? For me it did. For our mutual friend, who was a bit closer to PK than I was, he was on the receiving end of some strange tirades that hinted at lunacy. I only saw this once, when both he and I visited PK. No one was there to pick us up at the train station at 9:00 on a Friday night, so our friend called PK’s mom and asked what was going on. Apparently, PK’s mom freaked, didn’t appreciate the way he was speaking to her. (I have no idea if he was in any way belligerent … both of us were kind of peeved to come all that way and find no one there waiting for us). Passed it on to PK, who should have been there to pick us up but apparently was out running an errand. (She got her times mixed up.) PK blew up at our friend in the car, really lighting into him, bringing up all kinds of other weird stuff that I wasn’t privy to, and all I could think was, “Man, this is some real left-field bullshit she’s laying on him.”

But that was the only hint I had through all those years. Again, I don’t know why people do or don’t do the things they do. Why did PK choose to cut-off a handful of people from her college days? I have no idea. None of us had done anything to merit this. If it was her idea to start over with a new bunch of friends, got news for you, that’s something you don’t do in your late 40s (the age she was at when she made this choice). One thing I’ve learned over time, it’s that if you have people in your life you can count on, it’s a good idea to keep them around, you don’t throw people out unless they give you a damn good reason to do so. None of us gave her any reason.

The last one is AR, who worked on the “business” side of the newspaper. Not sure why she did this – she, too, was another very good writer, but had always been raised with a strong sense of business acumen. She minored in one of those “business” areas along with her English degree. I should have done the same, but guess what, I’ve probably learned as much shit, and more, as any business minor has, just by working in NYC offices and keeping my eyes open. AR was also a slutty sorority girl (pardon the redundancy), drunk a lot, very much into that scene, which was filled with drunk/stoned girls from the suburbs, chunky and depressed, looking to get back at their fathers. Which is no crime – I think it was at that time with all of us stuffed-shirt English majors, but I’ll bet those frat boys and sorority girls had a ball for the most part. I could still do without the stereotypical mentality, but I’ve met plenty of now-sane people who went this route in college.

She and I constantly flirted around at college, but nothing ever really came of it. Ditto a weekend when I visited her in Harrisburg, where she took her first job with a phone company – it just didn’t feel right to go in that direction. This all happened in that strange area of post-college life before I moved to New York, so I was probably doing jack shit back in Pennsylvania, waiting for the next move. When I moved to New York, that encouraged her to do so a year later, and we became fast friends again.

So I got to see her do her “That Girl” thing – every chick who moves here from somewhere else thinks she’s Marlo Thomas. Which usually ends the first time she catches some old pervert jerking off in a raincoat as he leers at her on a bus, which was clearly not part of the That Girl opening montage. I got to see her go through all those 20s dating scenarios: drunken, uni-browed firemen, a shady Puerto Rican guy she met in the gym who only operated in cash, a Puerto-Rican Irish guy who was trying to franchise a Domino’s pizza place, an Irish guy who was just a typical Irish bum but won over hearts with his accent, a weird carpenter from Westchester County who always reminded me of Corky, the retarded kid from the 80s TV series, Life Goes On.

Through it all, we stayed friends, although I found myself getting annoyed by two things. One, even though I’d been there longer than she had, and never played this up, she tried to position herself as “The New Yorker.” Which struck me as the kind of annoying thing people who come here do when they have no real personality of their own. You see this shit all the time. People acting like really rude pigs, trying to get over on you, when you know this poseur grew up in some Midwestern suburb. Everyone who moves here goes through that phase, but most of us grow out of it fast and eventually identify ourselves more with where we’re from. Some people latch on to that ersatz personality – like women who identify a little too heavily with Sex in the City – and it becomes who they are, which means you can never reach them again.

Two, she got a little too far into that “business minor” mindset, making a good bit of coin in her time here while turning into the consummate business woman. But even then, in her early 30s, she hit some kind of road bump, must have realized she wasn’t too happy, sold her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen (bad move) and moved to Colorado. I don’t know – guess she thought she was going to fuck some John Denver type guy and see God in a wheat field or something. But it didn’t happen. She came back to New York about two years later, got a marketing job at a paper company that was a major step down from the high-tension/long-hour path she’d been on. I recall in her 20s she had constantly carried on about wanting to start a big family, four or five kids, and I think she realized that would never happen with the kind of life she had been living here. It seemed she came back here with her head on straight.

But not really. All that time in her 20s, she was prone to losing touch with me, and other people in her life, for no obvious reason. I’m not a stickler with keeping in touch; I don’t see it as a game of ping pong where I hit the ball over the net, and you hit it back. Sometimes people lose touch for weeks, or even months. I understand that. But some people … if you don’t contact them, then you never hear from them again. And when it gets to that point, that’s where you decide how important that person is, and by simple attrition, the answer becomes “not very” after a few years. This gave me much more trouble in my 20s. I recall writing her impassioned letters, that we were fading out of each other’s lives, and this was a very bad thing, a dangerous precedent to set.

I’d laugh at those letters if I read them now over their heightened sense of drama. Some people just fade out – I’ve learned this. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. And AR chose to fade herself out – not just with me, but I knew this happened with other key people in her life, too. I tried to keep her in the loop when she came back. The impetus for her to come back was 9/11. She called me a few days afterwards during that highly emotional game the Mets played at Shea – the first game in New York since that day – and she was in tears. Oh, I have to get back there, and be closer to people like you again, why did I ever leave, etc., sniff, Tito, get me some tissues.

Well, she came back all right, and immediately started in with the same distancing bullshit she had always been famous for. You tell me! Last time I saw her was a year after that at a CD release party for one of her friends down at CBGB’s Gallery – a nice, quiet little spot just off the main club. I wasn’t that crazy over her friend’s singer/songwriter leanings, which I was up front about, but I strongly doubt that was any huge issue with her, or at least I had never sensed as much. Besides which, I ended up emailing her a day later that the CD had sounded a lot better than the patchy cassettes and demos I had heard before this. And her friend did seem like a pretty good guy. Fuck, all the guys in her life were pretty good guys, me included.

But being a pretty good guy doesn’t mean shit in the long run. Again, she faded out after that. Never heard from her after a few email exchanges, all funny and friendly, as usual. Not quite sure how to put a finger on that situation. I can see now the same thing happened a handful of times in our 20s, and the only reason it kept happening was that I kept at her to hang around.

So you can see, on top of all those college friends who simply faded into the mist of the past, some of them went there awkwardly, strangely, in ways that I’m never going to fully grasp. Does it bother me now? In some ways, sure, but on the other hand, I wonder what in the hell goes through a person’s mind to get that careless with other people. The college friends I still have check in and out every now and then – most far away, or so wrapped up in their own lives that checking in is like coming up for a breather for them. I appreciate their sanity and hope they get the same sense of comfort from mine. Because, for the life of me, if you find yourself on the outside of my life, I’ll find some way to make that crystal clear to you and not leave any doubts as to why this happened – and it will have to be over some very bad shit. Not on a god-damned whim. I think that’s what bothers me more than anything.

Web Wackiness

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much time I waste on the web and how that impacts my writing output. It’s made me realize that the web serves as a sort of adult video game, where you can spend hours putzing around on it and not accomplish a single quantifiable thing. But kids playing video games inadvertently develop their motor-reflex skills? Well, something tells me if that kid was an actual sniper wandering around a warehouse shooting everyone in sight, that might be a different story. Ditto, writing a lot of stuff on the web isn’t quite the same thing as structuring an actual story, or even a coherent point of view.

In particular, internet message boards present a real diversion from actually getting anything done. I’ve been on a few, dropped off nearly all of them, and the one I remain on, related to the music industry, I hardly post at all because I’ve let most of my connections to that industry slide (which isn’t a bad thing), on top of which, folks on that board are notoriously infantile and snotty. Which is what you would expect from the music industry. I’m finding it more enjoyable just to read these things for pertinent information, contribute briefly when I can, and stand back when people start getting strange with each other, which is a large part of the attraction for a lot of folks. In these politically-charged times. In which the country is split in half. (Sidenote: the country is not split in half. The assholes in our country are split in half, and they like fighting with each other, particularly on the internet.)

I was recently on a board associated with my neighborhood in Queens, but realized in a hurry that there was a strange, unspoken Lord of the Flies type hierarchy in place there, complete with a deeply misguided morality. One apparently unpopular member with these folks was openly ridiculed in a thread created explicitly for his humiliation. (I'd been on this board about two months -- I saw the guy post numerous times, and didn't see him post anything horrible.) A few people piled on (as expected), a few like me called bullshit, then most people bent over backwards to coddle the guy who started the thread – who normally seemed like a pretty sane guy on the board – because one of their own had been called into question (and he responded like a fucking child).

The guy apologized to the board, but not the person he intended to humiliate – it was a “joke,” which was supposed to alleviate any qualms anyone had. Right. All I could think was this was a dime-store version of Bob Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" -- a spoiled rich kid beating a murder rap because his victim was a social outcast. I wanted no part of that shit, even if it was only minor public humiliation as opposed to murder. A lot of people showed their true colors on that issue, and I don't want them in my life (because I'd forcibly remove them, sooner or later, for being so casually amoral).

What anyone who’s spent any time on an internet message board immediately sensed was a ton of private messages among the inner circle, rallying troops in this time of crisis. Maybe that weekend, a gathering of bored and lonely thirtysomethings at a backyard beer bash, commiserating with their “us against the world” attitude … with a bunch of, when you get down to it, people who were total strangers months or weeks ago, but have suddenly become brothers in arms on some internet message board. I know how that scenario plays out. A lot of people suss out that they’re not part of the inner circle, they fade out of the mix, that core group of true believers stops growing, and sooner or later, they start lighting each other up in private the way they do some undesirable entity on the board. It all ends up with hurt feelings, betrayals and cliques worse than anything you’d find in a junior high school.

It’s all about loneliness. In Queens right now, you have neighborhoods being newly populated by white folks with college educations, entering environments that run from indifferent to hostile (most likely over issues of gentrification … although Queens natives will gladly treat you like an asshole for no good reason), and they want to band together in some sense. Which makes perfect sense to me. A lot of people I’ve been seeing on the streets lately in my neighborhood, fuck’s sake, if I was criminal-minded, I’d be taking them off, because they’re so obviously green and out of place in a working-class neighborhood (which is rapidly changing).

So I can easily grasp how these new people would want to come together with like-minded individuals. I just can’t wrap my mind around how these little fifedoms come into being and flourish. You talk to any of these people individually, and they’re shocked and amazed that you see this happening, and frankly insulted that you’d think they’d be part of something that insidious. But they don’t realize it’s just a healthy dose of human nature, and no great crime, but a little one all of us commit on occasion. And, of course, none of them will admit that they know at least a few of the people in their group are certifiable. It’s the internet: the perfect hideout for maniacs and misfits. You can’t put any group together on it and not turn up a few garden-variety sociopaths, and plenty of other people who have the charisma of body odor.

What was funny to me about that whole scenario, while I was inadvertently defending a person I didn’t know (it was more the principle of someone being singled out, followed by a pile on and a noticeable lack of shame), was that 10 years ago, about the age I suspect most of that inner circle are now, I was famous for ripping people on another internet message board, in ways that would make anything these rank pussies came up with seem downright quaint. At that time, I think I was fairly unhappy, albeit making the most money I ever would in my adult life. But it was at a job where I was getting put through the paces daily, and just not seeing any sort of future in the place, save more money and the same strenuous work load. I escaped by turning into this scandalous internet villain, infamous for brawling with any and everyone who wanted. Granted, the folks I brawled with were nutty and obtuse, but I was pretty good at it. I eventually quit the place a few times, but still read the board for its information.

(For the record, I spent most of the time being a fairly docile, albeit highly-entertaining and well-informed member of the board. People tend to remember the flare-outs much more vividly, whereas I remember everything. Do I regret brawling with people? Sure, it was stupid and nasty -- indicative of the unhappy place I was in at that time of my life. But more than anything, I regret wasting that much time on meaningless issues, with people just as or far more fucked up than I was. I'd say I'm happier these days simply because I'm older an wiser, more attentive to passing time, and not willing to waste it in that sort of manner. I'll still waste tons of time, but not by messing with people, that's for sure. You put loved ones in the ground, time becomes a real issue in how you go on living. Boredom and loneliness are not valid options. One of my golden rules of New York life has always been “avoid meaningless confrontation” – damn near every confrontation on the internet is meaningless.)

Along with the fighting, most boards start repeating themselves fairly regularly and quickly. Threads and ideas that rolled around last year will pop up again this year, and next year, and the following year, and the same people will respond to them as if they are fresh and new. If someone notices and takes umbrage, it will be duly noted, and people will still go on responding positively to the thread. Is this insanity? Not really. We do it with each other in terms of personal conversations – often times to create small myths, or simply because some things bear repeating and taking comfort in. That’s one thing I notice about myself as I get older. I have the same conversations with people I’ve known for years, many times over. And when I’m having these conversations, I’m well aware we’ve had these conversations many times before. Live long enough and you accept this, as opposed to flagellating yourself for going through the motions.

People on these boards carry on about creating community, but for the life of me, I see no community there. I see a bunch of lonely (and/or unsatisfied) people, floating in their personal space, connected by this very thin thread, the main requirement of which is to spend time alone in front of a computer. When people do get together, good and bad things happen. Hell, sometimes people even fall in love – it’s not all bad. But for the most part, the usual things happen when you gather people who have very little in common (beyond whatever the board is about), living different lifestyles, often pretty set in their ways, and it doesn’t take long before people realize, “Man, I really don’t like that guy!” Or guys. Or girls. Or girls and guys. Or every fucking person in sight. And their dogs. Then people split apart, which is good, as they learn to take away relationships and things that will last, as opposed to forcing some canned sense of community. It's not a failure of humanity -- it's reality.

We all reach a point in our lives where we close ranks. Slowly lose the acquaintances. Start counting the real friends on two hands or less. If we have kids, we focus on them. Focus on work. And I think at first, that’s a fairly lonely feeling, as opposed to the tribe mentality we’re imbued with in high school, and often foster throughout our 20s. Before wedding bells (and other such shit) start breaking up that old gang of ours. People go their own ways. And that’s just the way of the world.

With internet message boards, a lot of us hope to stave off that sense of isolation, or hopefully create another avenue to a new group of friends. But it never fully happens – you’ll pull a few friends from these things, but most people will pass you by. And I’d say that’s ultimately a good thing. I’m a lot better off doing what I’m doing now than trying to deal with people who may be totally nuts or part of some half-assed cabal, but, more than anything, are probably lonely as hell and looking to create some sparks in their lives. Can't fault them for that, and don't feel any need to be their flint.

Back to PA

Well, heading back to Pennsylvania tomorrow for one of my 6-8 weeks-ish trips. When I first starting doing this in 1987, I could go round trip for $44. Now, it’s $84. Then again, I’m also taking the bus straight to my town, as opposed to getting off at one of the main stops (Hazleton – about half an hour north on Route 81), which tacks on a few dollars both ways. But the price really has gone up. Burns me that there are round-trip buses out of Reading (about an hour south) for $40, total. Just have to grin and bear it.

I think back then in the late 80s, I envisioned myself having a car to make this trip somewhere down the road – in my 30s somewhere? But I’ve come to realize having a car tends to be a real hassle in New York. I’d never use it during the week, save to change the sides of the street to avoid being ticketed on street-cleaning days. I’d have to watch over to it to make sure it didn’t get stolen, broken into, vandalized, towed or otherwise messed with. It would come in handy on weekends, and surely for trips like this. But when you factor in all that negative stuff, on top of the outrageous New York state auto insurance, gas prices, repair, inspection – and worst of all, simply driving around New York – I can live without it.

So, when I get back there, you better believe I get behind the wheel of my mother’s car every chance I get. Love driving back there, despite the unignorable fact that drivers tend to be just as bad there, save there’s simply far less of them to deal with. Can’t begin to tell you of all the times I get tailgated doing 50 in a 45 zone, and this is only driving once every six weeks – if I had that happen to me all the time, I’d be murderous. I don’t know how people think life works. You ride my ass like that, I’m not going to speed up. I’m going to make it a point to you that you have no control over me. So either back off, or grow a set of balls and pass me out (which never seems to happen … I don’t get it … you’re a speed-demon badass … pass me out already … isn’t your middle name “Danger”?).

Her car only has a radio, which isn’t that much of a drag as there’s a pretty solid 70s station I always find. Invariably, this time of year, I often hear Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” on the radio, and there’s nothing like hearing that song riding home on a September night. Fuckin’ Seger rules! (Then again, I made the mistake of buying his new album … “ruled” might be more grammatically accurate.)

I also can’t help but notice a pox on the land in terms of McMansions springing up all over the place. I hate the sight of these things – the cheesy faux classical architecture and such. Just the most gaudy looking pieces of shit to blot out the American landscape in the past decade. About the only good thing I can say about them is people back there don’t make the houses take up every inch of the property, as they’re doing in the suburbs around here, which is just so mind-blowingly awful to see, you have to wonder if these people are mentally disturbed to wipe out their front and backyards to expand these trashy little fortresses.

In terms of drinks, forget it, I’ve really curtailed my use from visits in my 20s and 30s. There’s a real gestapo mentality in Pennsylvania regarding sobriety check points which I find borderline fascistic – whatever happened to cops doing their job and simply being alert to bad drivers on the highway? Forget about cutting back – the prospect of getting snared in one of these things makes me not want to drink at all – and I often don’t when I go back there.

But back in my 20s, christ, things got strange on a regular basis. We still had Lil’s Valley Tavern at the edge of our town, which had been a sleepy little redneck bar when we were growing up, but somehow caught on a semi-hip bar in the early 90s. It was fun to go out there on a Friday night, about a 30-second drive, and hang out, often getting blotto. (I remember the night I played air guitar on a pool cue to Night Ranger’s Greatest Hits on the jukebox. And damned if I didn’t buy the thing for $0.50 on Half.com when I got back to New York.)

If any of us had gotten DUIed driving the few hundred yards home, we would have deserved it. Hell, push came to shove, we could have walked home and been there in five minutes. (There was that infamous night I missed when someone’s headlights came across our neighbor JB taking a shit by the side of the road at two in the morning – apparently, too hammered and ready-to-go to make it home.) Most good drinking stories involve blood, feces and vomit – we’ve all got them, so I’ll spare you mine. Lil’s inexplicably shut down by the late 90s – probably more bad management than anything, as they were making money hand over fist. Used to think it would be cool to own a bar, but think about it, slow nights, spotty employees, serving alcoholic customers and just the constant buzz of people getting strange and often doing bad shit. That stops being cool after awhile.

More than anything, I just go back to relax and keep connected to that way of life. I remember being interviewed in college when I worked for the newspaper, someone asked me if I’d ever consider living in New York. I remember frowning and saying, “I don’t think I could ever live that way. It’s too intimidating.” Or something like that. And I guess it is intimidating at first. But you live here long enough, it gets relatively easy, although I’m looking down the road a piece and seeing myself having a very hard time with rental/property values here (i.e., they keep rising astronomically). All I knew back then was my home area in Pennsylvania, and a college town, State College, PA which, looking back, seems like a strange dream I had one night and have nearly forgotten. Again, I used to think, wouldn’t it be cool to live here the rest of my days. But then that scene in Breaking Away comes back to me, where the Cutters are sitting on a hill overlooking the Indiana stadium, watching the football team practice. And Mike, the failed quarterback, shakes his head and says, “Each year, all of us are going to keep getting older. And those guys down there, all these college kids, are going to stay the same age.” I suspect that’s pretty much how I’d feel about college-town life now.

(One vivid memory. In my junior year, I went home nearly every weekend – a two-hour drive straight through Pennsylvania on Route 80. I just liked going home! Suffered all the lectures of friends, blah, blah, blah, spread your wings and fly, must break that bond, etc., but it always made more sense to me to maintain that connection. Every Friday, I’d get my mostly humor column published in the newspaper, feel like a million bucks, then get in my yellow hornet station wagon, hit a convenience store on the edge of State College, getting one of those humongous Big Gulps of Coke, and driving straight through with, at that point, stuff like the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan and The Replacements blasting from my shitty home-made speakers. One Friday, I went to a lawn party, where I knew no one and everyone knew who I was. So I basked in that cheap glory for awhile, then slipped away, and that particular time period, I was totally immersed in 60s soul music and had just dubbed one of those key Atlantic Rhythm & Blues collections (probably the 1965-66 two-album set) to cassette, put that thing on for my trip home, and had one of those revelatory night drives, hearing Sam and Dave, Otis, Aretha, etc. for the first time and really getting it. Man, that was a night.)

And when I’m back in Pennsylvania now, I can recall vestiges of being a teenager, and that was the only world I knew. Driving around at night. Blasting Frank Zappa and T. Rex from the cassette deck. Wondering what the hell to do. I drive those same roads now and still don’t know what the hell to do, but I’ve learned how to make money and support myself, so that sense of urgency no longer exists. What are you gonna’ do with your life? You’re going to live it, and chances are it’ll bear little resemblance to how you thought it was going to be when you were a teenager. I think I was picturing some type of Stephen King existence: mansions in New England, fame, money, begrudging respect, etc. But the only person living a Stephen King existence is Stephen King, and that poor bastard got run over by a van a few years ago and probably rattles when he walks now.

So, in the meantime, I’ve lived almost 20 years in New York, learned how to box, lost my father, had middling success as a writer, got real disillusioned with the writing world in general, made myself useful in many New York offices, walked away from big money a few times, as I had no urge to get an MBA, no matter who was paying for it, lived long enough to see a major revolution in music (MP3 files), embraced it, didn’t get married, fielded many heartfelt questions about being gay, never worried about not being married or gay, learned to stand my ground, developed a real grace under pressure that others notice, shut my fucking mouth and learned, turned into my father, turned into my mother, learned not to fear this, gladly embraced it, moved with time instead of stopping to worry, as time never stops, and the smart thing is to keep moving with it until you stop, just now catching glimpses of what it really means to be old, learned to laugh at 25-year-olds who whine about feeling old, made some dumb mistakes, made some smart ones, learned how to save money, threw a lot away on stupid shit, but apparently nowhere near as much as your average American, lived debt free after sinking the college loan in my mid-20s, never got as far as I thought I would, never self destructed, found a new reality that I can stay sane and healthy in, figured what the fuck, run with it, this is all that really matters, don’t worry about my life, because I don’t.

An epic? Hardly – probably a lot of the same bullshit you’re going through, or will go through. These are the kind of random thoughts that flash through my head when I’m driving down some country lane back there, hopefully without some neurotic shithead riding my ass like I was driving on four flats. There’s some strange sort of comfort in taking stock on those roads, and it always relaxes me, which is purely the effect of being in a place I was born and raised in. When people ask where I’m from, I often answer, the middle of nowhere, as they’ve never heard of any of the small towns between Reading and Scranton. I like being from the middle of nowhere, and I like going back to nowhere. Neil Young has a great song called “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” which is about all the bullshit of living in Los Angeles, and it could just as easily apply to New York. Too many boring-assed, uninspired people hitch a free ride on New York’s image. Nobody does that with nowhere.

9/11 Remembrance

I wont’ be forgetting that day any time soon, or the weeks and months afterwards when this city was dealt a harsh blow. That fall, I wrote a lot about it – many little tidbits about New York life that appeared in the NYPress, some of them blasts against the New York Times Style section, which was running rampant with truly awful stories, basically media vampires trying to portray themselves as people with souls. Not to stand in judgment – but I can smell bullshit a mile away. And many of the stories at that time reeked of it, totally lacking in sincerity or gravity, people who didn't care about anything suggesting the exact opposite.

Between all that bullshit, a lot of real stuff was going on, and it was interesting. One piece I wrote at that time really stands out – The Portraits of Grief Experiment in Leisuresuit.net. If you follow the link, the story explains itself. I also wrote a basic, day-to-day diary of what life was like in the immediate aftermath, but can’t seem to track it down online – email me if you want a PDF copy. Another piece that stands out was a paragraph I did for the NYPress, describing the effect of being downtown for the first time since that happened – probably late October of 2001. I went down to J&R Music World, just to go more than anything, as it was literally in the shadow of the old World Trade Center towers. And seeing those huge arc lights in use at that time to clear out the pit. The sun had just gone down, the streets were empty and still stank with that acrid smell from that day. And I recalled how seeing those lights reminded me of when my brother and I went to high-school football games back home in near-by towns, often the only way to find the stadium was to look in the night sky as we drove around and try to find the same kind of arc lights being used for demolition in the pit.

What a horrible time that was. But I learned a lot after that, especially after Dad passed on in the winter of 2004. And that’s we all got shit to deal with, and his passing means more to me than all this lousy 9/11 stuff. I didn’t know it at that time, or have any frame of reference to compare. But when you lose a family member, whatever the circumstance, that’s going to register far more harshly than an event like 9/11, assuming you lost no one that day. Of course, millions of people all over the world have died since 9/11, most of natural causes, others not. And for each of those people, you’re going to find a few people who have that space to deal with. I’ve been watching all this 9/11 stuff on TV over the past week, and all I can think is, this is nice, but that was a long time ago, and a lot of us had other shit dropped on us in the mean time, or had other shit before this that resonates more strongly now, simply because it’s personal.

But 9/11 was just one of those events – I’m hoping a “once in a lifetime” sort of thing for us. I won’t be forgetting the truly shitty, wounded way I felt that day, or for months afterwards. But life went on, and I can see that we’re all going to have these emotional gunshot wounds in our lives, parents dying, friends dying, siblings dying, to a point in our lives where very few people we know will be left alive. And then we’ll become aware of our own time coming, and from what I saw of Dad on his death bed, that’s a rough place to be. The point being that the first half of your life is relatively death-free, and the last will be all of us dealing with this. And I can see it’s going to be a balancing act between remembering those who have gone accordingly, and learning how to let them go. A lot of strange stuff, some comforting, some not, still swirls around in that empty space.

Dewey Beach: Asshole of the Universe (Part 2)

So, the story picks up again with John S., his wasted friend Rich and I watching Rich's idiotic ex-wife dancing on a lawn like a headless chicken in Dewey Beach, Delaware: Asshole of the Universe. Just watching that woman move, I could see the Dewey Beach partyville ethic expressed in her being: awkward, shameless, Wonder Bread and way too wasted for its own good.

Another thing occurred to me, especially with this lawn party. I was meeting an inordinate number of people from Washington DC and its surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. And these folks spooked me. Being from DC, they had a big-city attitude, mixed with that special sort of arrogance you get only from people who work in political or governmental jobs. If you’ve never seen the TV series West Wing – and if you’re one of those special people, I congratulate you on your superior taste – you can see all the characters have this sort of brusque, condescending tone about them that would be funny, I guess, if they stopped long enough to laugh, which they can’t, man, because they’re saving mankind with Martin Sheen, while walking through a dimly-lit hallway, and then a burst of sunlight, and then a dimly-lit hallway, and then a burst of sunlight, etc. Imagine these people drunk and trying in vain to relax, and you get another aspect of why Dewey Beach is so desperately fucked up. It’s crawling with these insincere DC vampires, who drive a long way to be just as uptight and annoying as they are in whatever foo-foo Georgetown watering hole they favor.

After about an hour of this torture, John suggested a drive over to Rehoboth Beach, where “all the fags and families go on weekends.” I had heard Rehoboth was a legendary “fag” beach, along the lines of Fire Island. And while I’m certain there are designated bars there and such where that fag vibe is overbearing, for the most part what I saw driving and walking around there for an hour felt like heaven compared to Dewey Beach, Delaware: Asshole of the Universe. There were gay couples all over the place, and families having dinner. And they weren’t drunk off their asses and roaming around in packs like eternal frat boys wandering a circle of hell. The worst that happened to us was a bunch of cute guys in a jeep stopped and blew their horn at us, but we played hard to get.

John tired of Rehoboth quickly, and we made the short trek back. Dewey Beach, Delaware: Asshole of the Universe is a town that normally has a population of about 300 that balloons to about 30,000 on summer weekends. And the town is geared towards servicing 300 people in terms of the highways and such. So every time you get in a car, you’re automatically in a traffic jam, and chances are good you’ll have a very hard time parking again. If you’ve rented a parking space, as many people do, someone will probably be parked in it, and it will take forever to get the local cops to ticket and/or get that car out of your space.

So, we got back around sundown, and at that point, I was exhausted, going on about three hours sleep in the past 24 hours. We grabbed a bite to eat at the local legendary burger place, where the owner treats everyone like an asshole, and the burgers are nothing to write home about. As darkness fell, we did what most people do all day there: the bar crawl. Once again, every place we went was jammed with shitty dance music blasting away at ear-splitting volume. By about 10:00, I told John, look, I got to go back to hell house and crash, I’ve had it.

I forgot to mention, but when we were back in the house in that wondrous afternoon time, I took that "alone" time to do my laundry – the only chance I had all weekend to do my normal laundry load. Nobody was around, it didn’t seem like a big deal. Well, as people started filtering back in, one of the harpies in the share with John flipped her lid when she found out I did one washer load of laundry. No reason why. Hadn’t broken any rules. She was just peeved that a house guest did something normal. I can’t recall exactly what I said to her, but there was a threat of physical violence, and she recognized it. Probably something like, “If you don’t stop bothering me for no good reason, I’m going to knock you the fuck out.” You’ll have to forgive me – I tend to grow more eloquent with anger. But at that point, I’d had it with the pig Delaware attitude. I was literally on the verge of attacking someone.

So, at 10:00, I take the chance and go back to the house. After I threatened that woman in the afternoon, for some odd reason, she became very nice and suggested that John and I should get space in one of the bedrooms on Saturday night, which would probably mean both of us on the floor while some rude, drunk skank slept on the bed. The house was empty when I got back. I went up to the room we were promised, closed the door, turned off the light, lie down on the bed and tried to sleep, which was impossible with the noise level of drunken parties and Skynyrd blaring from every house on the block. I managed to slip into a fitful half sleep.

I can’t recall what time it was. Probably around one or two in the morning. House still empty. When I heard banging come up the steps. A man and a woman’s voices. Drunk. Laughing. The door slammed open and the lights went on. I pretended I was asleep, but discretely peeked out through half-closed eye lids.

It was Connie and her boyfriend. Connie was a rotten cunt – there, I said it. Sorry to use the “c word” – if you’re offended, I apologize. But Connie was a rotten cunt – a walking black cloud of negativity, bad vibes and just an open sore of a human being. Every second I spent around this woman, it was like a scene from The Exorcist, where the room goes ice cold, then smells like sulphur, and some psychic force cries “Get out!” in backwards Latin. Understand that there was one nice woman in the house sharing with John, and it’s to my discredit that I can’t remember her name. The other handful were just awful people – how John got to know them, I can’t recall. How he ever trusted to them to the point where he agreed to a summer share with them, that’s a black mark on his character for the rest of his days.

“Who the fuck is that sleeping my bed?” she cried out.

I couldn’t believe it – this was like being in a profane version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Only it was Sane Man and the Multitude of Delaware Pricks in my case. Again, I’d pretty much had it. I snapped my eyes open, bolted out of the bed and got straight into Connie’s homely Italian face.

“I’m sleeping in your bed, asshole! What are you going to do about it? Kick me out? Have your faggot boyfriend kick my ass? Let’s go, bitch! I’ll fight both of you right now!”

To the boyfriend’s credit, he kept a cool head. Actually, he looked kind of scared, too. He knew Connie positioned herself as some sort of bad ass, and now she was being called out on it. Also understand, I can count on one hand the times where I got this nuts to the point of violence, two of them occurring that weekend. This is what sleep deprivation and being placed in a hostile environment will do to otherwise sane people.

“Oh. I’m sorry. We’ll get another room,” she murmured. I could see she was about to cry. Maybe it was that sort of thing where you had to violently confront these people to get them to understand just how far gone their manners were? I don’t know. Whatever it was, it worked. If I’d known this sooner, I would have smashed a beer bottle first thing Friday night and put it into Connie’s face -- like a new guy in prison kicking someone's ass so he doesn't become someone's bitch.

Connie and her man quietly shut the door. But that wasn’t the end of it. For about the next half hour, I could hear her sobbing and whining downstairs. I guess she was too freaked out to go to another room. The game plan was probably for those two to come back to an empty house and fuck, but I inadvertently rained on that parade. But since I went psycho on her, that took her out of her game, and all that was left to do was mutter recriminations and vague threats out of my presence. I could hear stuff like “I’m going to get that asshole kicked out” and such. To which I thought, oh, please try that, honey, please try. And you better hurry, because I’m out of here in a few hours, and if I ever see you again, it will be because I lived a wrong life and ended up with you sticking a pitchfork in my ass somewhere in hell.

So I floundered around in that weird sort of dream state for awhile. Eventually, probably around four in the morning, John got back. He was laughing his ass off. Apparently, he had run into Connie downstairs and got the lowdown on what had happened. He was in heaven, as he couldn’t stand her. No one could, but he was one of the few people in the house who was up front about it. We had that whole room to ourselves that night. And we sat around laughing our asses off like a pair of grave diggers sharing a bottle of whiskey. I just couldn’t believe what he had gotten himself into. And every now and then, I’d call out “That cunt, Connie!” in my loudest voice to let her know we were talking about her. John wasn’t worried about getting kicked out of the house, which he would have welcomed at that point, especially if he got his money back.

This went on until about 5:30 in the morning, at which time we decided it was in our best interests to sneak out, get some roadside breakfast about 30 miles up the road, then make a straight shot back to Wilmington so I could get an afternoon train back to New York. This is pretty much what happened. When we got downstairs, Connie and her sad boyfriend were sound asleep, as was everyone else. We ran into Butch in the driveway, and he shook our hands and was actually pretty pleasant. A nice way to leave. When we stopped at the roadside place, John did what he had to do: shook me down for $40, the fee all house guests had to pay. A nice little side business they had going to help them all get money back on their original investment. Let’s say a minimum of ten guests a weekend? That was $400, and I gather that most of these people, when you got right down to it, were doing these hellhole weekends for free – minus the cost of gas, food and, most importantly, drug and alcohol intake. But theoretically, they could all make back their nut in terms of the original four-figure sum they all laid down for the house in the spring.

This wasn’t the last time I’d see Dewey Beach. The next summer when I visited John, he was living in New Castle, Delaware: Not the Asshole of the Universe. And he had just leased a jeep and wanted to road trip. So we took the bridge outside of New Castle into New Jersey, drove straight across those wicked pine barrens and hit that stretch of primo Jersey shore resort towns south of Atlantic City. It was a sunny day, and we both got burned before investing in some sun-tan lotion in Avalon.

By the time we hit the Jersey-Delaware ferry in Cape May, I was red as a beet. I hadn’t looked in a mirror in a long time either. That ferry ride was wonderful – basically a nice long boat ride while you sun on a deck. When I came in off the deck, this teenage kid blurted out, “Look out! Here comes the Heat Miser!” He seemed to be talking about me, but I couldn’t tell. I mentioned it to John, and he started laughing his ass off. That’s when I saw myself in a window – burnt cherry red with my hair standing straight up from riding in a jeep for about three hours. The little bastard, he was right, and I couldn’t help laughing at myself.

But we got off the ferry in Lewes Beach, a much more sedate Delaware shore town where John eventually lived for a few years before moving back to Wilmington, and then down to Florida to be closer to his parents who had retired there a year or so earlier. Haven’t spoken to him in years over some silly falling out we had around one of our friend’s wedding, but he did send a nice card to my Mom when he learned my father had passed on. I know John and his dad are big fans of reading our home county Pennsylvania newspaper online for the obituary section.

But we spent that afternoon in Dewey Beach, and it was fine. I knew it was afternoon lull time from the previous year, when most people are just getting up, lazing around cramped houses with hangovers and awkward conversations with strangers. I could see that the right way to do Dewey Beach, Delaware: Asshole of the Universe, or any shore town, assuming you aren’t lucky or rich enough to have a house to yourself, is to simply drive there early on a Saturday morning, spend all day at the beach, then drive back Saturday night, foregoing any predictable drinking games at shitty, over-priced bars and missing the horrible Sunday night traffic jam. I strongly doubt I’ll ever lay eyes again on that godforsaken town, and not so sure I’ll ever pass through Delaware again. If I want to be treated like a worthless asshole, you better believe I can do it for free here in New York.

Dewey Beach: Asshole of the Universe (Part 1)

I’ve never been much for the beach-house scene. In New York, that implies going in on a summer rental of a 3-4 bedroom house in Long Island or New Jersey, for some extortionate five-figure sum, with literally dozens of other people, most of them strangers, who arrange a strict “every other weekend” schedule in which the renters can or cannot use the house with guests, and the number of guests fluctuates wildly so that a dozen or so people are invariably camped out on the living-room floor in sleeping bags. A majority of those people will be drunk and ornery.

The last and only time I went on a beach house weekend was back in the early 90s, with old pal John S., who lived in Wilmington, Delaware and had a summer share with a dozen other people in Dewey Beach: Asshole of the Universe. I’d trademark that delineation if I could, because as far as I’m concerned, forget about the Bronx, or Beirut, or the slums of Rio, or Fallujah. Dewey Beach, Delaware is the asshole of the universe.

What was I then – 27, 28? Thereabouts. Late 20s, which may be the most volatile time in most adults’ lives, when they get it into their heads that everything must happen by 30, that success or failure is determined at that age, and if not reached by that point, then something must really be wrong in their lives. This, of course, is thanks to our deranged youth-oriented culture which has zero understanding of reality or passing time. Never trust anyone over 30? The folks who came up with that bon mot will die of old age soon, god willing, if all the coke they did over the years doesn’t clog their arteries first. (Side note: I much more think about life as an ongoing series of small successes and failures, no matter what age you are. I’ve met way too many people in New York whose professional lives are radically successful, which is all they’re judged by, while their personal lives are rubble, and a lot more indicative of the real person.)

Thirty is also the mating age. Why guys fall for that shit, I don’t know, whereas I can see women wanting to cash in their chips before the dew is off the lily. Thus, any time you get people together hovering around that 30-year mark, you get a group who are still teenagers in their minds, very old teenagers, but have been socked with elements of the adult world so that they’re filled with a sufficient amount of fear to view 30 as an artificial dividing line between youth and adulthood, when there really are no dividing lines, just a whole bunch of experiences and choices (many of them bad) one has to glean some sort of knowledge from.

Throw in alcohol abuse, the beach and people who want good times greater than their dollar value, and you have Dewey Beach: Asshole of the Universe. I’d imagine a summer share set-up in any resort town tends to be a dice roll, even if you know the parties involved. My experience that weekend showed me that the type of folks who go for the “summer beach share” scene are party people, drink too much, stay out all night, insert hard-living cliché here. If they lived alone, no big deal, but put them in a house with a dozen other strangers, most of them with the same mindset, and you get a very bad scene.

This was what I walked into with John that summer. The strange thing was, he knew I’d hate it, but I think he wanted to show me the burning hell he had foolishly signed on for earlier that spring so that I could understand why he was so depressed. He was working one of those shitty computer support jobs that pays very well, but demands a beeper (at that time – surely a cellphone now) that invariably goes off Saturday night and requires one to make it into work to help some schlub on midnight shift who could fix the computer problem by turning the machine off and on again. So he had that draggy, overtime kind of existence during the week, followed by weekends where he’s always tense in a house full of drunken strangers for the most part, living like a bunch of punk kids who just ran away from home.

Just getting there was a hassle. John lived in Wilmington, which I got to via Amtrak train from New York, and normally that alone would be a good hike for me – and we had plenty of good visits just doing that, as Wilmington isn’t a bad town at all. But from there, we had to drive south through Delaware to the very southern tip, which took a few hours. Don’t know if you’ve ever driven through Delaware, but it’s like Kansas without the cornfields: mile after mile of farms and small wooded areas once you get outside the major cities. On top of which, for this trip there was a light drizzle the entire way and bad traffic once we got halfway through the state.

So we got there later on a Friday night – about 10:00 as opposed to 8:00. Admittedly, when we first got there, it wasn’t so bad walking into the small beach house. A few people were hanging out, playing cards and drinking at a table in the kitchen, and they were friendly enough. I thought, “Well, the rain must have scared a bunch of people away, this should be a fun weekend.”

We put our stuff in a corner of the living room and headed out for some drinks. There was very much a college-town vibe to Dewey Beach – college town in the midst of a Division I-A football game. Drunken people everywhere – and not kids, adults anywhere from their mid-20s to their 40s. Wandering around in packs. I remember that this wasn’t unusual at Penn State, especially on a football weekend. The thing was, I was almost a decade away from that sort of vibe, and it now struck me as being lame, like I was at a very bad party that should have ended a long, long time ago. You get that many drunken people stumbling around, and stupid shit happens, be it meaningless fights, various displays of beer muscles, girls getting way too slutty for their own good, guys just acting like total goons because they’re hammered and have an audience, etc.

What really depressed me was half a block away, we came across a hotel with an outdoor area for bands to play. According the marquee, Marshall Crenshaw was playing there that night, and I could hear the echoes of some bopping, rockabilly type song playing. All I could think was, “Marshall, you poor fuck, it comes to this, playing a hotel in Dewey Beach, Delaware in 1998.” Then again, most of his audience was so falling-down drunk, he probably could have played “Freebird” on a kazoo all-night long and received standing ovations.

John and I ended up in some nondescript shore-town bar that, of course, was jam-packed. One of his housemates was there, and we got into a vacuous, “adult” conversation about real estate – always a mistake, because the person starting a conversation like that is looking to rub your nose in shit. Some of the folks in John’s house seemed to be like this – yuppies in training, the LaCoste knit shirt/country club crew. Not my kind of folk! Luckily, one of the most obnoxious people John knew in Delaware, this strange, extremely wealthy guy named P.J. who made all his money shaking down working-class folks on high-interest loans and credit-card payments, wasn’t in his house – but we’d see him off-and-on all weekend. To me, the guy was obviously gay – it wasn’t just the pictures of bare-chested male models he kept on his refrigerator (claiming they gave him inspiration to lose weight). He was gay – but in his mind, he was a young gun on a prowl for a wife. His denied sexuality was a non-issue, especially compared to the spoiled rich kid vibe this guy oozed like chronic flatulence. James Spader would have a field day playing him in a movie.

So, we spent the requisite few hours crammed into this bar, then decided to call it a night. When we went back to the house at about 2:00, we found it jammed with people, most of them total strangers to John. Some passed out, others drunkenly wailing, some fighting. This was bed time. And this is how bed time is when you’re dealing with a bunch of spoiled brats ripped to the tits on $7.00 beers. I just couldn’t believe the scene. We’d have to sleep on the living-room floor in the area where we flopped out our personal stuff upon arriving. Every bed was taken, the floors of the bedrooms were taken, the little screened-in porch was taken, leaving only the living room and kitchen for people to sack out on. John said he shared the house with about five other people – there were about 20 people in the house that night.

I’m a light sleeper to begin with – put me in this kind of set-up, and forget it, I got about two hours sleep, if that. People farting in their sleep. Getting up to piss or puke every 15 minutes. Some people having strange drunken conversations with each other in the dark. Like I said earlier, if I had been a kid in a punk-rock band, this would all be very cool. For a 28-year-old guy who thought he was coming to a beach house with a few people casually hanging out – and all sleeping in beds – it was a bit of a shock.

I think I started nodding off in earnest about 6:00 in the morning. The house was finally quiet as the sun was rising. At which time, I heard someone stomping around upstairs. He takes what has to be the loudest piss I’ve ever heard – it was like he had a garden hose with a nozzle pointing into the toilet. He farted and burped all the while. He stomped down the stairs. I could see this guy was stone white trash – probably late 30s, scraggly-looking, forearm tattoos, smoking. He stomped across open patches of the living-room floor and kitchen so he could slam-dunk an empty Bud can into the trash. He slammed out the kitchen door. About the only thing he didn’t do was crash two trashcan lids together like cymbals.

John later told me this was Butch – one of the more normal house members. Something I haven’t mentioned about Delaware, and something Delawarians will either deny or hate me for. But Delaware has to be one of the unfriendliest states I’ve ever been in – and I can say this after dealing with the worst New York City pricks you can imagine for the past 20 years. I can’t vouch for southern or middle Delaware – they could be fine for all I know. But northern Delaware, which is where all these beach-house people were from, has a really odd vibe to it. “Unfriendly” might be too strong a word – “prickly” might be better. And I suspect it’s because there are so many corporate headquarters and such centered around Wilmington (because Delaware has such lax tax laws for corporations) that this corporate vibe seeps into the every-day fabric of life for people living there. Probably no different from any Westchester County suburb in New York. But every time I would visit John, I’d find myself thinking, “What is it with people around here? Why are they so rude?”

And that was Butch, even though he was a factory worker. How he got tied in with John’s crew, I have no idea. I’d see Butch all weekend, stalking around, grunting at people, smoking and staring at the sky like a caveman waiting for a pterodactyl to swoop down and snatch him away. This was fun for him? He looked like he’d be better off drilling holes in his skull. The guy didn’t once go to the beach. All he did was drink and smoke. John and I were the only two people in the house who actually went to the beach which, as far as I was concerned, was the only reason to be there. You could be a drunken, miserable prick for free at home just as easily as you could paying money for a beach house.

Since Butch had me wide awake – amazingly, everyone else seemed to sleep through his barrage – I decided to slip out of the house and go running on the beach. This was the best decision I made all weekend. It was a hazy/sunny day, and I gave myself a good 5-mile run along the shoreline, taking time afterwards to just sit there and take it all in.

When I came back, a few more people were up, sitting around the kitchen table. One of them was a bleached-blonde floozy, a really hammered looking woman, clearly still drunk from the night before, smoking. She takes one look at me and sarcastically blurts out, “Who the fuck is that?” loud enough for me to hear.

Understand that this house was filled with people she didn’t know. John would later tell me he didn’t know who she was, and he’d been there every weekend for the past month. She turned out to be a house guest, just like me, and a total fucking pig to boot.

I walked over to the table and introduced myself.

“My name is Bill. I’m a friend of John’s.”

I pointed to him sleeping on the floor.

“John’s one of the few people here who has a share in the house. Are you one of those people, too?”

I was talking at her like she was a bank teller, but I figured what the hell, if you’re going to lay this ugly Delaware charm on me, I’m giving it back in spades. She explained that no, she wasn’t, but she was tired of all these people showing up she didn’t know. Luckily, John got up right then, and he knew a few of the people at the table. I took him aside and told him we needed to get the hell out of there, get some breakfast and hit the beach.

Which we did. And that part of the trip was also good – just body surfing and such most of the day, lazing on the beach, I managed to get about another hour of sleep. The beaches in Delaware are no great shakes. That area of water is basically a very large bay with New Jersey on the other side. As a result, the water is pretty tepid and lifeless – you probably get better waves on one of the Great Lakes. Still, the beach is the beach no matter where you are, and this was far better than hanging around a bunch of strange drunken bastards.

Coming back to the house was possibly the epiphany of the weekend. We got back around 3:00 pm, and the house was empty. Bathed in sunlight. I guess that was about the time all the drunks had finally woken up and decided to go out and get something to eat, or maybe start drinking again. In any event, we had the place to ourselves, and just sitting around the living room on a nice shore-town Saturday afternoon, I could easily see the attraction of having a beach house. The catch being you had to be rich to do this for yourself, and we had no chance of having an entire weekend this peaceful and normal.

All this time, John is gauging my emotions, and I’m making no bones about them. I tell him his beach house is filled with a bunch of miserable alcoholics, and I’d be suicidal if I had to spend all my spare time on weekends around such a bunch of pricks. I think he was looking for that sort of confirmation from a friend, and I gave it to him, both barrels. The guy wasn’t happy to begin with, and placing himself in this sort of environment every weekend, and paying good money to do so, wasn’t helping matters any. He seemed relieved to hear this. And he knew that I was pissed off that I’d be living like an animal all weekend. I think we both sensed that the beach and these few minutes sitting around an empty house were about as good as it was going to get.

Sure enough, people started filtering back in, so John took me to a lawn party he had been invited to. Where we ran into his pal Rich, who was drunk off his ass in the mid-afternoon, probably blasted on coke, too. But having no fun … because his ex-wife was there, dancing up a storm. Rich was a good guy – he had a really likable personality and was one of the few people John hung around that I could actually stomach. But to see how hang-dog he was in the presence of his ex-wife. Who was every over-rated suburban harpy you’ve ever met rolled into one. Not a total zero of a woman, but deeply average looking, not very intelligent, and totally bereft of personality in that sparkling Delaware way. She told us she was a dancing queen and was going to dance all night long. The thing was, I’ve seen people on crutches with better moves – picture that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine tries to dance. She was awful, and totally in the dark about how awful she was. And to see Rich pining for a woman this clueless was painful. No wonder he was blasted out of his mind every waking hour. He just couldn’t see life clearly. Not that any of us can, but I’d cut off one of my hands before I lost one minute of sleep over a woman like his ex-wife.