Digging dirt in New England

Friday, June 21, 2013

The last time I traveled north, I didn’t go as far as New England, just up the Hudson to Kingston, and a few miles west to Woodstock.

New England is as foreign to me as mars, although my father’s family came from East Boston, a place I need to visit before I die.

I made it to Boston with Garrick and Pauly one very rainy winter in the mid 1970s to help move a mutual friend who was going to attend art college there.

That was the year McDonald’s went on a sales pitch about getting your burger anyway you wanted it, and pissed off Pauly when we had to wait an hour to get it. That was also before the Sandinistas took over and drove out the rip off cattle ranches that allowed McDonald to sell beef cheap. But that’s a whole different direction.

Hank and I speculated about buying land upstate New York, or even in New Hampshire, were we might till the land and make our living digging dirt.

These days digging dirt in that part of the planet means something entirely different, but I still long for the peace of it.

I missed the gang’s trip to Nova Scotia – because I was on the west coast at the time. My family has roots there, too, from the con-artist that married by Great Great Grandfather just prior to his death and took off back to where she grew up in Nova Scotia with the lawyer and the family fortune.

My grandfather on my father’s side also married a woman from Nova Scotia – although she apparently resided elsewhere in New England before marrying him. So I suppose I should go to Nova Scotia before I die as well.

Hank, Rob, and Pauly made that trip in the summer of 1971 just after Hank broke up with Peggy, the love of his life, but managed to blaze a trail of love making the whole way up and back, once even abandoning Pauly and Rob at a broken down motel so he could go with a girl to a rock club miles away.

I remember hearing about the argument about whether or not to take a ferry or drive through New Hampshire, with Hank arguing for the longer driving route only to get outvoted and threatened if he didn’t take the ferry.

But even getting to Nova Scotia they still weren’t safe, getting lost at the top of some mountain where Hank tossed the keys out of the car into a field of grazing cows, while Rob hunted for the keys, Hank sat on the hood of the car singing, and Pauly with his tape recorder interviewed the cows. After digging dirt for a while, Rob eventually came up the keys and they went on their way, down into the mists, and back to civilization, the dirt of that hill top clinging to their heels.

All these years later, I still have the tape Pauly recorded on that trip, including the interviews with the cows. But I really want is to feel the dirt they dug, feeling it against my skin, thinking that if I can’t get there, at least I got to touch a bit of it before I die.

Evil like rust never sleeps

Evil like rust never sleeps

Tuxedo

Tuxedo

Truth, justice and fair play

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Who knew a year ago when he and I sat in the park in Hoboken sharing secrets that we would a year later be sitting in a restaurant in Jersey City still caught in the same web of deception, how our lives have become entwined, not because of what either of us did to each other, but what has been done to us, spun around us, and slowing forcing us together – like or not.

Good guys don’t always finish last, but foolish good guys do, especially when bad people convince us we are better than we are or can have more than we have a right to expect or are somehow special when no one is as special as fantasy makes us seem.

It is always the same routine on the telephone, how someone really digs us, and how much we can teach them, or how really great we could be if only… well, if only something, I always forget what comes after that.

And a year later, the only thing special about either of us is how empty we feel, used up, but not of any less use.

I find villains the more fascinating characters in films I watch and so playing the role of one over the last year has been no problem, even though deep down I’m more a flawed hero, one who stands up for righteousness when all else gives into the temptation and seduction.

It doesn’t make me bleed any less, but it certainly makes me feel like the loss of blood served some purpose higher than someone else’s greed.

All good heroes – flawed or not – stand up against evil even when they risk losing everything, not because they know they will win, but because the world cannot afford to let bad guys win.

And sitting at that table, hearing the same old deception being cast in new words, created by some web master no longer visible, from whom we have no need to hide like we did last time.

After a year of people trying to lure me into ugly situations, after learning that personal politics often bleeds into the larger variety, and that people bent on getting what they want at any cost, I’ve learned not to take things face value, but always question odd turns of phrase or ill logic, or even subjective truth.

I learned no good cause can be served by a lie, and that right and wrong might be relative, but they still exist, and that fair and unfair show the quality of lack of in people who accept or reject them, and that cheaters often win, but end up with nothing for their efforts – and that some people are so bent on cheating, they don’t’ care.

But then, these were lessons I always knew and needed to be reminded that down deep, where it counts most, I still stand for things like truth, justice and fair play, and I’m willing to give up all I have to uphold them – and that truth can’t be manufactured out of lies, and justice can’t be served by deception, and the only really valuable people are those who play by the rules – even if they don’t win.

Poison Ivy

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

The Beatles version of the old song keeps playing over and over in my head.

I’m allergic, but not so bad as some, although if a plant breathes on me, I get the rash.

I’ve never had my throat close up, although I have had one eye closed once, when I got it as a boy scout all those years ago.

Combined with the fact that we brought in a new cat – and inevitably the problem such cats bring in fleas – we make a terrible family, all of us scratching – although unlike the cats, I try to resist.

There where and when of the contact with the evil plant remains a mystery since I tend to wander off the beaten path often. I do have a batch of the stuff in my back yard where I might have received a dose while cutting the lawn. But most likely, I encountered the plant when wandering in the remote portion of Bayonne behind the former A&P where the cats run wild and weeds grow over a small swamp.

I must have brushed my shoulder against it because my right shoulder and under arm are the worst hit portions with only a little spreading to my other arm.

None the less, it comes at a time when others I know suffer serious illness while I have for the most part in my life escaped with minor injury. My eyes are the worst part of my problems over the years which seem to be better now, while friends and family perish under the gloom of heart ailments and cancer.

So I consider myself lucky, and struggle with resisting itching rather than with resisting treatments that might leave me zombie-like or worse.

My life has always been a blessing, I attribute most to my mother whose daily rosaries kept me from harm at the worst of times, such as when the motorcycle gangs in LA tried to beat me up, or Billy Night Rider tried to shoot me, or even when the police pursued me and Mike Day in a high speed car chase in Portland.  I was even immune against the Manson Family when they decided to throw me out of an apartment in Las Vegas. They could have killed us, although I think they were a little bit under pressure since their goal at the time was to get Charlie Manson out of jail.

My mother’s prayers got me through more scrapes than I can recount, keeping me from jail to ill-fated romances, although her most persistent prayers were reserved for my first marriage. She always wanted me to reunite with my first wife and my child, and oddly enough, in its own fashion, during my mother’s funeral it did.

But prayers alone can’t save me from the ill weed of poison ivy, and as the song runs through my head I fight the urge to scratch and make it worse. There are some rashes that need to heal themselves, and patience is the only real cure.

It’s all I have

April 29, 1982

My parents took me home after my giving my mother nine months of living hell.

She said I kicked a lot, but I refused to believe it. Other kids kicked to get out. I liked it there.

Maybe I didn’t want to come out to see them fighting all the time, even when they said the right things about me being their “bundle of joy.”

Even a kid at my tender age could handle only so much of the sap.

Perhaps I only kicked now and then to remind them I was still there.

I don’t know if it was that first day that I remember or one of the days just after, but it’s the only memory I have of my father holding me.

I remember going from a bright place to a dark place and getting scared.

I might have been as old as six months, but I remember my father’s strong arms around me – because he split about that time and I never saw him again – swoosh like a scared rabbit, sending ten bucks a week to my mother from some place in Passaic before vanishing entirely along with his money.

I remember them taking me home from some place, along a dark alley I much later picked out on 21st Avenue in Paterson, a dark alley along side a white building which would later get covered over with aluminum siding. But in those days it was wood. I remember how stiff he felt, as if he was wood, or I was, carrying me like the carbine he must have carried when in navy boot camp.

As I said, he didn’t stick around long enough for me to get to know him. So I treasure this memory and that long walk down the short alley, because it’s all I have, and I remember that dark alley like I remember my first two front teeth. I remember the door to our apartment was about half way down that alley on the left. I remember my nervous mother scrambling ahead and how the keys jangled as she tried to unlock the door. I started to cry again which only made her more nervous. I could hear my father’s hushed voice trying to soothe me. I just wouldn’t be hushed.

There was something dark in that whole business, bad feelings that filled me with fear and wouldn’t be flushed out even when my mother flicked on the lights inside the apartment. That only seemed to scare me more and made me cry even louder.

My father and mother were angry, but not at me.

Yet when my father put me down in the crib, I screamed even more. The animals painted on the sides of the crib scared me, pink and blue creatures floating on a background of varnished wood.

The crib was the gift from some neighbor who said she wouldn’t need it any more.

My mother and father left me then. They were always leaving me, always fading out beyond the haze which thickened around me, becoming a blur among blurs. I remember the room growing dim again, and I kept crying until it hurt too much to cry, and so I stopped.

Oedipal indigestion

May 7, 1982

We interrupt this current thought for a message from a dream: my mother is a go go dancer.

Yeah, that’s right folks; you too can smash glass and dishes while dreaming of your mother making the grand attempt to stop her from stepping out onto the stage.

It all connects as I lay sleeping with sweet and wonderful Doreen.

My mother is a stripper.

Anyway, the other great love of my life is elsewhere.

What a terrible connection for my unconscious to make.

But Freud’s been on my brain lately. And there is it, a single dream, meaning everything he said it should mean.

For me personally, it was a nightmare.

I dreamed I was standing in the kitchen of the old Crooks Avenue house with my uncles and my mother. I was smashing dishes at my mother’s occupation.

“It isn’t decent!” I heard myself say.

My gallant uncles did nothing.

But I sensed their approval, just as sensed their disapproval at everything bad I did in my life.

They just wouldn’t voice their judgments.

The dream had several terrifying interpretations.

First there is the obvious oedipal complex issue.

Secondly, there is Louise, who really is a stripper and more, and my frustration at trying to keep her out of porno flicks in LA, and my joining her to keep tabs on her, growing hurt over every explicit act.

Now, more than a decade later, she keeping appointments, I dare not object to, though feel as if each is the lash of a whip, aching for her to be something else, perhaps as pure as my mother is, and in my twisted dreams, my unconscious gets it wrong, and I wake up in a sweat wondering where I went wrong.