The unsaved

Saturday, August 25, 2012

I didn’t smell gun powder, just the usual traffic fumes.

Yet it felt more than a little strange walking through streets where gun violence is almost unheard of, and the greatest danger to life and limb is being trampled to death by rude foreign tourists seeking to take a picture in front The Empire State Building or Rockefeller Center.

I didn’t even see too many police – only the usual suspects, one Jewish guy with thick black rimmed glasses learning against the railing of some high powered office tower slightly uptown from where the shooting occurred. But the news reeled off over us and around us, spilling out the details of why this garment designer decided to shoot a fellow worker – almost a classic story of desperation, unemployed, and desperate for someone to blame, and so blaming some poor fool who still has a job.

All the newscasters kept going on about how unusual the shooting was for that part of the city, as if local government had zones for certain categories of crimes – pick pockets and hustlers allowed here, prostitutes and such there, and gun violence some place else.

I recalled a junkie once trying to mug me only a few blocks from where this shooting took place. I was a messenger then, and always on the streets, always a potential victim – although rarely actually one. My best friend seemed to dominate that market, once getting mugged in the Port Authority bathroom, once even in his own building, and another time going around the block from his apartment on East 5th Street to mine on East 6th. I mostly had trouble with the macho types, the bikers who liked to browbeat me – one hitting me with chains because I refused to be browbeaten and gave them the finger.

Junkies were no match for that, and this one was more pathetic than most, desperate for his fix, barely able to hold the knife so it was no problem taking it away from him. He nearly cried when I did.

And as I walked yesterday uptown to the museum, thinking of the poor fool with a gun desperately looking for someone to blame, I thought of that poor junkie, knowing that his life had likely ended not long after my encounter with him, and that my passing through his life had only humiliated him more, not helped him.

Others like him passed through my life, too, some I professed to love and tried to rescue, but could not. And walking that street, thinking of the gun man and his victim, I understood how hard it is to save someone, and how stupid it is to try, and yet, if people don’t bother, if all we have are packs of tourists running over people in the street, then there is nothing to live for.

email to Al Sullivan

Vacation

Friday, August 24, 2012

Coney Island was a disappointment after such a long train ride to get there, although on Mondays many of its attractions were closed. I got the same feeling I had went I went back to Atlantic City in 1995 and found the wrecking ball leveling everything I thought of as valuable, and building mockery in its place. My visit to Coney Island came the same day Mayor Bloomberg suggested gambling might be allowed there as a way to boost the local economy – even though he fundamentally disapproved of the vice.

While there is beauty to be found even in the most desolate of places, such as with the fisherman who kissed the fish he caught before tossing it back into the waves, and the other black fishermen who insisted on keeping the pier free of trash, Coney Island seemed empty to me – especially after my April visit to Seaside Heights, which even at that early time, seemed filled with life. I went back Wednesday to take another look, and realized that it remained what it always had been, a haven for teens who needed to see and be seen, before they moved into the broader world, beach bum men with muscles and tans, striding along the boardwalk trying to impress people other than themselves, and pre-season high school football teams there to get united before they hit the grid iron.

Both places seemed remarkably lonely, as did the ruins of the East Village I visited in between, the gutted fish of what had once been the center of counter culture, now devoid of meaning as counter culture invaded every other town like the extended waves of a nuclear blast, leaving lives in ruins, and people confused as to what roles they need to play in a world that no longer had room for them.

This last was particularly evident when I visited Liberty State Park last night and saw the rich racing their sail boats near Ellis Island, while I dodged bicycles on the walkway – the old symbol of American immigration locked to pedestrian traffic so that people wishing to visit their glorious past had to pay for the privilege.

This tourist vision of the world I took this week made me realize that everything has become a tourist destination, specialized for people who aren’t like me at all. My visit to Woodstock in April was far different from those I took in the 1990s, when there was still life there among the natives, and the aging hippies were still respected, instead of looked on as a kind of aging beach bum going through the motions and seeking attention.

We walk in a limbo of time when changing generations means changing visions for the world – and for the first time I truly understand the frustration my father’s generation had with life, the survivors of the Good War forced to deal with the rising tide of the British Invasion, our bulk pushing them out of the places where they felt most comfortable, where they once belonged, just as we baby boomers are being pushed out.

Tonight, I return to New York, to a museum of art that is no longer modern, seeking images that I can relate to, cling to, finding immorality within their frames.

email to Al Sullivan

Not a devious guy

Aug. 22, 2012

I'm always getting blamed for things I didn't do or accused of not doing what I was supposed to. When I try to make peace, people think I'm warmongering, when I wage war, they don't take me seriously.
Lately, I'm being accused of things I couldn't possibly have done, staring at people in the hall or trying to take something they struggled hard to get.
People tend to read in me what they want to see, thinking I think like they do, like I want something they have, or want to wreck their golden opportunities, when I really want to live and let live, and maybe get some laughs along the way.
I hate being lied to, or manipulated, although I'm perfectly willing to go along with folks as long as I'm not the butt end of the joke.
Yet, I haven't laughed in a long time over any of this, and feel really badly about being so misunderstood -- so misunderstood, people want to destroy me.\
Fortunately, I really haven't done anything worth being hated for.
Unfortunately, that doesn't stop people from hating me, it just frustrates me to think that even when I make myself scarce, I still get blamed for stuff I didn't do, or I'm not clever enough to have thought up in the first place.
I'm not a devious guy
email to Al Sullivan

A learning experience

Friday, August 17, 2012

All summers pass too quickly. But it is difficult to believe 40 years have passed since that summer when my world changed, my ex-wife split for Pennsylvania, as did all the women in our lives all at once, me, Pauly, Hank, Garrick, suffering the same heart ache at the same time, forced to spend time in each other’s company – sharing each other’s misery, searching for land where we might build a new life in upstate New York.

That pain never goes away, but it fades, and other memories creep in, filling in the holes left in our lives so that after so much time that summer seemed magical, because we all did things we needed to do to survive.

I still have the tape of music we recorded for Pauly’s girl, who had gone to the West Coast, and we sat around singing sad songs with the hope he could get her back, I guess believing that if he succeeded maybe the rest of us could, when we all knew down deep we could not, and that somehow we were actually singing a dirge for a dying life, and a birthing song for a new life, as we came out of the cocoon of our illusions, and grew up a little.

After 40 years, you would think that it becomes easier to grow up, or older, or to understand the process better, so that we can get on with out lives without going through the same drama.

Oddly enough, it only took ten years for my ex-wife to accept me as her friend, and for me to understand the change in me that this required, learning that sometimes I can actually be on the right side of an issue and that someone can depend on me for something other than trouble.

I don’t know how the rest of my friends fared in this regard. Hank died in 1995, having never again seen the girl who had abandoned him in 1972, a horrible conclusion, something unresolved. Garrick saw his, but never resolved it either, bitter over it for decades, before something died inside of him. As for Pauly, I don’t think anything ever fazed him, even then. I never saw him cry, the way I saw the others do.

I’m the lucky one. Life came around to greet me, after I thought I could not resolve it.

And here, 40 years later, I can look back on the summer of 72 and think of it as a learning experience.

email to Al Sullivan

The cycles of life – well, almost

Sunday, August 05, 2012

            I take my laundry up to the top of the hill, one of a number of places called Bubbles, which I always thought of as funny.

            It’s nice to get back to routine, to think only of how everything will come out in the wash, whether the ink stain on the back pocket of my pants will fade, letting me wear them without shame.

            The heat gets to me so I stay in the car, sipping water, and foolishly coffee, to wait out the cycles of the machines – trying not to think too much about the cycles of life, or anything too serious.

            Sometimes the only thing I want to think about is the thing that matters least, having the least impact, not global warming or nuclear extinction, or any other brand of extinction I might create for myself.
            I just want the car air conditioner to work, and the coffee to taste like coffee, a dryer to be ready when the wash cycle is done so I don’t have to wait in the heat for the next stage.

            All changes in life are accompanied with pain, even the small ones, and sometimes it’s better not to think too much about them, to let them just happen, to hope that everything you need falls into place so that you don’t have to wait in heat.

            Sometimes, all you really want or need is the routine – never having to think too much about any thing except whether you have the right change for the dryer or enough gas in the car to keep the air conditioning running until this cycle ends and you can get onto the next one unscathed.

email to Al Sullivan

Putting things in perspective

July 2, 2102

The boy could not have been older than nine years. But his bald head testified to the treatment for cancer he had under gone.

I saw him coming out one of the emergency room treatment areas in Meadowlands Hospital while I lay flat on a cot in the hall.

He seemed very shy and reluctant to disturb the nurses even as he approached their work station. Around us both, the equipment that defined our health hummed and beeped, telling the staff how close we had come to the edge of life, and if they could still save us. We both seemed insignificant in the hubbub of coming and going, new stretchers rolled in, patients in the rooms moved out, an amazing business for what should have been an ordinary Saturday afternoon in late June.

When the boy spoke, I could hardly hear him, and he had to speak twice before the nurse heard him as well.

“Can I have a blanket for my mother?” he asked.

As the nurse scrambled to comply with the boy’s request, the tragic truth of the situation hit me. The boy was not the patient; his mother was.

This combined with all the other human tragedies going on in the ER, I felt more foolish than I had previously, lying there, taking up valuable time on an injury I had only suspected was a broken leg, but was likely not, and even then was the least of the most serious injuries there, created by some rather stupid lack of balance earlier in the day.

I was taking some pictures in Union City while waiting for my wife to finish shopping in one of the store in Columbia Park Mall and in a rush to get back to her I stepped off a curb into the parking lot, twisting an ankle that caused me to fall onto my other knee.

I hadn’t realized my fall until I saw strangers looking down at me, asking me if I was all right. Did I need them to call an ambulance?

I thought I was fine until I stood up and realized I could not put weight on my left leg. It buckled each time I tried to walk. I thought it was broken. I managed to hobble to a wall.

Several Latinos kept tabs on me asking if I wanted water. When I told them I needed to reach my life, they offered to help. What does she look like? Where is she? They asked this in a mixture of English and Spanish that even I found difficult to follow.

Then I saw my wife at the other end of the parking lot – more than a football field’s length away. I shouted and waved my arms. She didn’t hear me at first, and when she did, she couldn’t see me, because I was under an awning.

“It didn’t sound like you,” she said later.

Back and forth, Sharon walked, eventually ending up in front of the Shop Rite. One of the Latinas went to find her, but did not speak English well enough to convey to Sharon what had happened to me.

“Your husband he…,” the woman told my wife, then motioned to indicate that I had fallen over.

“I had no clue as to what she meant,” Sharon said later. But eventually, she caught on to the idea that I was hurt and up at the other end of the parking lot, and she rushed over.

“At first, I saw only your swollen ankle,” she told me later in the hospital. “Your pants leg covered your knee so I couldn’t see the scrape or the swelling.”

The Latina, who had gone to get Sharon, knew enough English to convey to the staff at Shop Rite that I needed an ambulance. The North Bergen Ambulance crew along with a North Bergen police car arrived a moment later for my ride to Meadowlands Hospital.

From the rear of the ambulance, I saw the familiar world in reverse, Union City giving away to North Bergen, then to Secaucus. Tragically the landscape was littered with other ambulances at other points, revealing the vastness of human suffering I would like have otherwise overlooked had I not become part of its network.

The EMT comforted me by saying that I probably did not have a broken leg.

“But that’ll be for a doctor to confirm once you’ve had x-rays,” he said.

The doctor confirmed the EMT’s suspicions but puzzled over what he called the knees of a 17-year-old, knees that showed a gap as if I was in the middle of growth spurt, but since at 61 I was unlikely to grow much more, this must have been something negative.

The EMT talked to me in the hall saying that I had not tensed up during my fall, which had kept me from breaking anything.

“Drunks do the same thing when they’re in a car crash,” he said. “They don’t realize they’re going to hit anything when they’re starting to crash. They walk away without breaking anything. It’s the people they hit that suffer the most damage.”

The ER was so busy with real tragedies, the staff had to keep me in the hall, a vantage point that allowed me to witness the human drama ongoing around me, the coming and going, the suffering almost grieving families, the machines going haywire with reports that hinted the end of life might be near. One family huddled outside the closed door of an examination room waiting for the doctors to tell them the fate of their loved one inside.

And in those moments, as nurses and technicians scrambled to provide aid and comfort, I realized how lucky I was, how I was the least injured in that place and how in the end, I would get to walk out of there on my own two feet, no more worse off than wearing a temporary cast and a cane, while people like that nine year old bald-headed boy would wait to hear the news about his mother, or the daughter outside the closed door waited to hear news of her father’s fate, their lives resting on the shoulders of this army of nurses, doctors and EMTs all who had to pause in their desperate stride to wait on me.

email to Al Sullivan