Washington Square

Friday, May 31, 2013

It is the same place – only different – to which I come each time this thing takes me, the spray of wet from the elevated gush of a found that will call to me long after I have gone to the grave, Garibaldi’s stone face glaring at me across the circle, not just over distance I can traverse with a few stiff strides, but across generations, from the grave of my great great grandfather who fought side by side with him that set his people free the way Washington did ours, and for some reason I do not know or understand, links me to a past I know only from family lore; this place a face of a time in my life when I needed a friend when no other might be found, where I could sit and think and devise a solution other places seemed incapable of inspiring, my life journey circling this circle in an endless spin, a roulette wheel upon which no fame or fortune is made, just some inner treasure I can’t cash in any bank, an answer that is never really an answer, a voiced that makes no sound yet I can hear.

This is the saddest place on earth, the core of my being and the heart where all the hearts I ever knew beat as one, and from them, out of this flood of pain some something important, a fire that I need to keep me alive, so blistering it eats me up from the inside so that this shell of agony, this ache I always feel when I seek this place burns away from me and I can leave renewed, if not always completely enlightened.

Spiderman vs. Superman

Superman in the meadows

Friday, May 24, 2013

My best friend Frank always told me he hated Superman because Superman seemed without flaw, perhaps as insane as Nietzsche’s version, who assumed that laws were meant for little people, like us, while only shackles on great people like him, and that Superman seemed inhuman to Frank, someone who didn’t cry or feel love, who didn’t care about anything except cheers from the police chief every time he saved the city. Spiderman on the other hand Frank said felt real, someone who didn’t want to feel special, but strived to be normal when he couldn’t. I usually didn’t take a stand, hating Superman and Spiderman equally if for different reasons, knowing that Superman violated everything that human kind was all about, cooperation and unity, while Spiderman got sucked up in his own weak ego, never able to rise out of the personal to embrace the race and work towards common good.

But one night, staying over at Frank’s East Village tenement apartment, I gave both a test, as to which comic when rolled up killed the most cockroaches, shocking Frank the next morning when he found out what use I put them to, pathetically scraping off the remains of roach guts from his precious Spiderman #1.

“How could you do this?” he said, peering over the ruins of the cover at me.

“Easy,” I said, years later realizing that I have spent a life time continuing the pursuit of tearing down false gods, and coming to understand there are no super people landing here from other planets to which we owe some kind of tribute, no Nietzsche super people better than others or above common laws only flawed people painting their flaws into super powers, pretending that a spider bite makes them invulnerable when it only makes us weak.

I was always a little more comfortable with the groups of super heroes like the Fantastic Four, but even they seemed a little too arrogant, a special club I couldn’t get in until I had some weird perversion and a hunger for power – a club Frank always fantasized that we could become a part of, some artistic cult he thought we could build in some remote place, one time even willing to invest in the purchase of a farm near the Canadian border where we might built our own little Fortress of Solitude, each of us displaying our artistic superiority – a dream that never materialized, not because we couldn’t afford the land, but because each in their own way, my friends gave up what truly make them unique, their humanity, and the more remote they became, the more inhuman, and the saddest day of my life was not the day my best friend actually died, but two decades prior to his death, when the dream did, when pursuit of fame became more important that what we contributed, and when he was willing to sacrifice basic human values, the building blocks upon which our humanity is built, for his own special place in the clouds. He also forgot that our gifts (our so called super powers) are only the bottom rung, and that the rest of the trip we had to make by pulling ourselves up rung by rung, and that half the value of reaching the top is how we get there. He was always looking for an escalator or an elevator, laughing at me because I kept both hands firmly on the rung I was on.

Watching him fall off, watching him give up on those things that truly made him great, remains the saddest moment in my life, partly because back when we met, when he was still a struggling artist, he inspired me, giving me faith that I – an ordinary, everyday kind of guy – could do something extraordinary, but because I was a superman, not because I was held back by the rules of society, but because I was a part of the greatest single exclusive club on the planet, the human race, and if what I did made the race better and elevated ordinary people’s out of their pain, or I could document the passage of ordinary lives, I was indeed someone special.

I still miss Frank, especially those days when he and I walked around the streets singing, not for money or fame, but because it changed the world from something ugly into something amazing, cheering people’s lives even when they mocked us.

I remember the confidence man who promised to make Frank a star, taking Frank’s inheritance for a week long session in a second rate recording studio before disappearing leaving Frank with a cassette copy (which I still have) and a lot of empty promises, and I remember seeing the dream die in Frank’s eyes (just as I later saw it die in the eyes of others just like him, who mistook pursuit of fame for art) and I remember thinking how he would never be the same, and he wasn’t.

Me, I’m still clutching to rungs on this insane ladder of life, not sure I’ll ever reach the top or get anywhere, but as someone one time told me, it’s not the destination, that matters, it’s the journey, and hell, this is one hell of a ride – and I don’t need a cape or to get bit by a spider to know how special it all is.

Cold medicine philosophy

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

It’s night time and I’ve had too much night time medicine leaving me light headed as if drunk – a bad time to read Freud, although better drunk than sober – something I should not say too loudly or old Dr. Thomas, my psych professor, would howl. He was such a fanatic, and deceptive because when I signed up for my first course with him called myth and symbolism and got Freud, I got mad, and snuck off to sit in another professor’s class to study Faulkner, getting into a pissing contest with that professor over what things meant in various Faulkner novels – we usually coming out even, which pissed him off since professors are supposed to know more about the novels they are teaching than some self-educated boob from the ghetto.

Anyway, Dr. Thomas got hurt and wanted to know why I didn’t like his class, and when I told him I’d come to study Greek and Roman mythology not so whack job from Vienna, he decided to analysis me, giving up after a dozen sessions when all I wanted to talk about while on the couch was literature, and bringing poems to read instead of symbol-rich dreams he counted out to reveal how someone like me got to be someone like me in the first place, all that repressed catholic morality and indignation at the outrageous of an unjust world.

Freud annoyed me for a number of reasons, but fundamentally because he believed that can never be anything more than what we were meant to be, presuming to think that we are only when we have experienced, and that who we are is defined somewhere in the chemical synapses turning on and off inside of us, the repressed memories of God and country, nuns banging rulers on our knuckles for being bad (a very big part of my unconscious I can tell you), god merely a foreboding father or mother figure that we are destined to murder or fuck, and once set on a particular path destined to stay there for eternity like a record needle stuck in the grooves an old fashioned long playing record.

Einstein, my favorite mad scientist growing up (along with Tesla) defined madness as a skip in that record where we repeat the same thing over and over and think we are making progress.

If both men (white males) are right, then are all crazy, locked into believing what we already learned to believe, justifying what we already think we are, white knight or realistic opportunist, reliving our expectations over and over as our individual records skip.

The hardest part is not so much expecting change (we know we can’t bust out of this role we live) or even accepting who or what we are (we accept it even if we don’t particular like the person we’ve become). The hardest part is accepting people who are not like us and the fact that their reality is valid for that other person, if not for us. The bigger the difference in background and the subsequent moral and cultural values, the harder it is to bridge the gap.

Dr. Thomas never could understand how a street kid like me from a Paterson ghetto could hunger for Jove, lust after Athena or admire Odysseus (who is by far my all time hero), or how Faulkner’s south and his admiration for the fallen woman could resonate so deeply in my heart, nor could he understand that every strip club on Market Street in Paterson was filled with Shakespearian tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and how sometimes I felt as indecisive as Hamlet, chasing ghosts of things I ached to achieve.

Somewhere else in those noble institutions of college or the street, I learned (if not well) that life isn’t about accepting other people skips in the record, but finding some common ground without making judgments, without using or being used, finding some element of character in another that some how resonates – one skip in one record someone harmonizing with the skip in another. If not, then almost.

Sometimes, it is like two drunks too drunk to see straight or walk far in a world that seems to roll like the deck of a ship at storm, finding that if they lean together long enough to get their bearings they might make out things in the world around them they might otherwise miss, none needing the other except as a brief respite in the storm.

And maybe the haze of a good drunk provides more clarity than staggering around in the presumption of being straight, when no one in this world is free of being crazy, and sometimes, if you lean long enough, you learn to look at more than just the flaws in others or even in the world, and just appreciate that for once in this nutty life time, you aren’t falling down.

This, of course, is my cold medicine talking. Give me a shot of Jack Daniels and it’s a whole different rap.

ill again

Monday, May 20, 2013

I keep thinking of Men in Black II, and of the goddess that creates rain any time she is sad, and how the rain over the last few days reflects the rain inside, as if one could not exist without the other.

We brought in another cat only to have one of the other cats take offense at it, and so increase tension.

Sick last night and up for a cup of tea, I picked up the phone to hear my daughter’s voice – she reaching out because she needed someone she could trust to talk to, like me caught up in that social nightmare of being uncomfortable in a world of aggression, and needing some ally against the dark forces overwhelming her where she lives.

She and I have always been the best of friends, the people we could trust most, and feel most comfortable around, and the most stouthearted, because we are both so similar.

I couldn’t really help her except to listen, which is almost all anyone can do, but listening to her aided me in some fashion though I went straight to bed for another ten hours of sleep I desperately needed, my dreams less dark than her world is or even the waking world in which I wander normally, but troubled dreams none the less, full of anguished voices one of which was my own.

Waking to rain the prospect of work, I am still ill, and still hear those voices crying out.

Back in Secaucus again?

 

Aftermath of Passaic fire Labor Day 1985

February 18, 1986

Secaucus again, and wet with a wonderful winter rain storm.

How much more romantic can you get?

Sitting here filing out forms for yet another grand insurance plan, I realize all the strange times I’ve had in this amazing institution. This month marks my four year on and off since I finally admitted to myself that I was not yet ready for the big time as a creative writing.

That new years (1982) I resigned from Dunkin Donuts (leaving Phil) to make my living as a writer.

What a bleeping joke!

Two months later I was crawling into the Rutherford store to be interviewed by Bonnie, recommended by Michael Alexander and his girlfriend, Linda.

I was looking for the perfect job that would allow me to study as I worked. But the pattern for self-destruction was already set and I pulled out of school for the semester overwhelmed again by trying to make a living while studying – training came as precisely the wrong time in my college schedule and so I was confounded by film sizes as much as I was by Shakespearian sonnets. Eventually, I found myself in a Fotomat booth, an infamous pretender claiming myself writer, poet and thinker but without accomplishment. And I was caught up with old ghosts, my ex-wife back in my life but none of the money I stole when I first fell in love with her, but instead, I gave her bits of the little bread I made because she was as bad off or worse than I was.

I was always scrambling for hours, leaving my number in each booth in case someone needs me to fill in, a hopeless gypsy in Secaucus today or Hohocus tomorrow, and yet there is a kind of freedom in not being tied down in one booth every day. Sometimes, I even come across old friends, such as Dan Zack working in the Bloomfield Dunkin, or a night guard I worked with in Willowbrook when I still worked the Dunkin there, or even one of the drunken madmen from Wine Imports when we all loaded trucks at night (putting as much wine in us as we did in the trucks.)

But it gets old, and even I know I can’t drift like this forever.

You need predictability. So not long later, I begged for a store of my own and Bonnie – with tears in her eyes – gave me one in Clifton, near where I grew up and where I met Anne (the girl I dated for three years if dated is what that amazingly strange experience was) and Bob Adams became my boss, and from time to time, he still asks me to fill in places, such as here in Secaucus – this booth in the middle of a nightmare parking lot where traffic never stops – and the tiny library across the street where I often flee to get a break even when I really don’t need to use the bathroom.

Stuck in a booth in Secaucus

November 6, 1985

I’m in Secaucus again.

I seem to be repeating myself, an aggravating habit I just can’t seem to kick, time going round and round with the changes so small as to seem insignificant.

Yet there are changes.

My first visit here came near the beginning of the summer. I was Bonnie’s gopher and found myself in a panic after the first ten minutes in this Fotomat booth. The cars just didn’t want to stop.

There was no single-storied building behind me then. In fact, I watched that rise slowly from the ground during subsequent trips here, pile drivers shoving steel beams deep into the earth. By that time, Bob Adams was my boss and he commented on the need of such beams, speculating that the building had to be at least three stories high.

Before that, there was only earth and an old style donut shop called Mr. Donut, with faded pink and blue paint, and rats in its trash.

The donut shop is still there, but has undergone a name change, and perhaps and ownership change, too – only now it is included in the new building along with a line of other small shops, less outlandish, but still reminiscent of the old silver sided diners that Dunkin and other donut stores were based on.

The new building is one of a number of changes such as Harmon Cove down by the water and a perceived need to upscale the town’s image from the pig farms it once had here.

People don’t want to be perceived as poor or even too hillbilly and so they pass laws to keep people from raising farm animals and construct new buildings on the bones of old ones, hoping that the world will think this place is different than it once was, when down deep it can’t be, until this generation dies out.

Other places charge more dramatically by fire – Hoboken most frequently, and where I live in Passaic – with the suspicious fire on my block last Labor Day that wiped out the industrial base of the city and killed a Secaucus fire fighter who had struggled to keep the flames from crossing the street to the building I lived in.

But whatever plan the mayor had after that fire doesn’t seemed to have worked. No Harmon Cove will rise on the Passaic River the way it did here on the banks of the Hackensack. Even the plans to tear down the old Tuck Tape factory a few blocks from my house seem like wishful thinking.

I suppose the master’s of finance do not consider Passaic close enough to the money-rich race track and sports complex the gambling industry built in East Rutherford, while this place filled with pig farmers might more readily get hoodwinked into thinking all this new construction is being done on their behalf.

At night, when I’m driving up the Turnpike from my mother’s house, I see the glow of the sport complex and the glare of lights that fills the Meadowlands, I even see the twinkle of Harmon Cove, an Oz-like place being magically transformed from something real and solid, into something like a fairytale, and even though I remember the stench of the slaughter houses from when my grandfather used to drive through this part of the planet, it seems a more honest scent to me than the stink of fast food I catch these days along the highway.

It’s all personal preference, I guess.

Morris Canal folly

Thursday, May 16, 2013

I made my pilgrimage to the waterfront again today, not the old river, but the mighty Hudson where Liberty State Park is split in two, the Morris Canal and the Yacht basin isolating this small peninsula where I have come more than once for solace, though today, I came on assignment, and felt none of the woes of old days when I needed water of some kind of soothe me.

Although the Hudson is not the Passaic, and does not have the same healing powers, the canal connects them and the pieces of my life, since I have spent most of my time on earth near some faction of the spoiled pre-Civil War dream that northern robber barons hoped would spell the end of the Noble South. The brown water looks as spoiled as those ambitious dreams, filled with the muck and disgust that all such ambition breeds, and yet, it is not without beauty, and even the overgrown places I knew best back in what was once called West Paterson (before some egomaniacs decided they hated Black people too much to bear the same name as the nearby city that had once served as the industrial engine for America) proved pathways for my private journeys. The old Tow Path rock club where the band once played had its roots in this one time navigational route. In one spot, behind an old VFW hall there is even a little wooden bridge over the place where the canal once flowed, although the only time it has water in it is when some powerful storm lifts up the river and drips brown liquid into it.

Even this place at the corner of Jersey City where I came today suffered this fate when Sandy struck and left this place better suited for Noah’s Ark than for anything walking on two or four feet.

Workmen struggle to replace the wooden walkway behind the old Sugar House, as I stroll over land that had been so saturated that even now, it seems soaked, although I know this is the result of recent rain, not the flood that had left all within view underwater.

Other work transpires, not the least of which is that of the so-called Freedom Tower across the river, that mockery of industry everybody praises, but which remains an elevated middle figure to the world it exploits, just as the twin towers had served to symbolize the British two finger salute that meant the same things.

This greed, this wanton ambition for power, this insanity of importance that Americans seek so that they can look down on all the other people of the world remains one of the great mysteries of my life, although I have encountered it on every level, from the hovels of the ghetto to the rich East Side I used to deliver to as a messenger, people who feel so utterly unimportant doing anything and everything to make sure they are more important than some else. No one wants to be last on line outside Club 54 or at the bottom of some Wall Street pile of crap. If they can be even moderately higher on the totem pole, they have power.

A backhoe digs up earth near the Colgate Clock – a sad testimony to what America has become. we have the clock here, but none of the production facilities to which it once been attached – just as we lost the big cup from the Maxwell House factory in Hoboken when I first moved their in 1992. Then we lost the factory, and all the factories, and all the jobs, so that all that is left is the empty ambition of mountain climbers scaling Freedom Towers only to find utter emptiness when they get to the top.

I stare down into the water and see fish stirring there and the reflections of clouds, and something else, deeper down, some aspect of self I have yet to understand, perhaps will never understand no matter how many times I come across this canal, puzzled by the utter failure it symbolizes within eyesight of the rail road that replaced it.