We’re all right

Aug. 31, 1969

Alf calls me at the hospital to tell me everybody’s all right. This is about an hour before lights out, and the ward nurse, a bastard of captain eyes me like I just sold my country to the Vietcong.

We don’t generally get phone calls from off base. So three in a month, and two within a week, are just too much for the captain to handle.

The fact that Alf is on the other end puzzles me.

We don’t talk much. For the most part, we’re adversaries, rivals in some imaginary game I’ve yet to learn the rule of or what it is about.

“We had an accident,” Alf tells me, referring to him, Bob and Pauly.

The trio apparently decided to take a drive after Bob and Alf dropped acid. Bob refused to let Alf drive, and Pauly being Pauly, said he didn’t care what they did as long as he didn’t have to hear any of the BS.

Bob’s Volkswagen is legendary, and so is Pauly’s ability to cause damage to other people’s vehicles. So as Alf relates the story, I believe it, I see it unfolding in my head like a grain movie: Bob behind the wheel, Alf in the passenger seat, Pauly in the cramped back seat playing solitaire, pretending everything is normal when it clearly is not.

He’s always doing this, trying not to let any of us get to him, when I’m pretty sure, behind that unmoved expression, some voice inside him screams about our being nuts.

Anyway, Alf tells me Pauly suddenly laughs and says he sees a spider.

Alf says he doesn’t see any. Bob looks into the rear view mirror and wants to know what the fuck Pauly is talking about. Pauly leans between the seats and points at the front windshield.

Alf still doesn’t see anything. Neither does Bob.

Pauly smacks the windshield with the heal of his hand, causing it to crack.

“There,” he says, pointing at the cracks. “That’s its web.”

At this point, Bob, who is paying more attention to his cracked windshield than he is to the road, steers the car into a curb.

“It drove the steering box through the front fire wall,” Alf told me over the phone. “But we’re all right. But Bob wants to kill Pauly – not only because he caused the crash, but because he got out of the car and blamed Bob for everything. He even says Bob screwed up his game of solitaire. I think Bob really would have killed him, if Pauly hadn’t waved down a passing car and asked for a ride. He fucking left us there, the prick. But we’re all right.”

After he hangs up and the ward lights go out, I crawl into bed and ponder all this. Around me, I hear the heavy breathing of soldiers who have seen too much war, some of whom won’t be leaving this place alive, and I’m thinking: We’re all really all right, aren’t we?”

All Soul’s Day

Sunday, November 01, 2015

It’s All Saint’s Day. Tomorrow is All Soul’s Day. These are the other two days in a trinity of celebration for the departed.

Growing up a Catholic and attending a Catholic school through my early grades, these days played a bigger role in my life than they do now, although with so many of my family now part of the departed, I feel their impact more.

Starting in the late 1980s and through the early 2000s, I watched most of those closest to be pass away – my mother dying at the end of 2001.

The last two hold outs in this were my uncles, Ted and Pete.

Ted was my mother’s brother. Pete married my mother’s sister, Alice (who died in late 1975).

I remember Ted pulling me aside at my mother’s funeral to say “We’re the last two,” meaning the last of the old Crooks Avenue household, where five brothers, two sisters lived clan-like with my grandparents in a large old Victorian era house.

When Ted passed away in 2010, I felt incredibly alone.

His home in Toms River during the 1980s and 1990s was nearly a weekly journey from wherever I happened to live. Even though he moved to North Carolina shortly before his death, his home in Toms River was as much mine as his, and I still can’t pass that exit on the Parkway without thinking of him.

When Pete died in early 2012 I was devastated. This was partly due to the fact that I was the last one standing from that generation, and from the fact that I was feeling my own morality. I had just undergone extensive eye surgery, and began to hear the whisper of the grim reaper in my ear.

Fortunately, during the last few years, I discovered that I am not alone, and found that a whole new family had sprung up on me.

Until recently, I had assumed that I was an only child. My father left my mother shortly after I was born, and I have no living memory except one of his holding me as an infant.

Caught up with the idea of finding out what happened to him, I eventually encountered cousins on my father’s side, who in turn, helped me find half sisters I never knew I had, and a step-mom who I actually got to talk to briefly about my father before she passed away earlier this year.

On this day of the year, it is good for me to remember those I love and have loved, but need not dwell on the idea that I am alone.

We are never as alone as we believe we are. Even if those we loved most have passed on, they still with us, imbedded in our genes, living out an extended life through us as we will in our children later.

And as sad as family history can sometimes be – my family has very sad stories – it is also remarkably rich, part of a living legacy each of us carries to the grave and beyond.

I miss my mother, my uncles, my aunt, my grandparents, but I also feel them stirring inside of me with each breath I take, and it is a remarkable feeling, a feeling of intense joy.

Who is beholden to whom?

Saturday, October 31, 2015

I hate political endorsements.

Mostly they have nothing to do with the candidates, and everything to do with the people doing the endorsements.

This is particularly true when politicians, unions and other prominent citizens wade into the middle of this race or that.

In most cases, a politician who endorses is usually sending a message to his or her following that this or that candidate can be trusted “to do the right thing,” and by “right thing,” he or she means the candidate will do what the politician wants.

Unions have the same philosophy. A union endorsement has nothing to do with a candidate’s ability to do a job in office, but on what side a candidate will stand when it comes to negotiating contracts or other issues the union finds attractive.

This is why I tend to vote for people who do not have a lot of endorsements, and yet seem uniquely qualified to actually perform the job they are running for.

This is particularly true in school board elections, where I want a candidate to be sympathetic to teachers, but someone who isn’t going to sell out the school district simply because he or she feels beholden due to a union endorsement.

This is even truer when it comes to political heavy weights wading into the middle of a school election, blurring the line between separation of power.

Since I live in Jersey City, I have very few choices in the election since at least three of the four candidates are so heavily weighted down with endorsements from politicians, unions and even developers.

So turned off am I by the endorsements, I’ll most likely vote for the one candidate without any.

In Bayonne – where I cannot vote – the matter is more complex, partly because there are so many more candidates running for a number of different terms of office.

Most people expected the mayor to refrain from endorsing any candidate, so that there was significant disappointment when he did. This is partly due to the fact that most the candidates running supported his election two years ago.

The union endorsement is even more confusing. The union issued a questionnaire to determine who they would support – looking for candidate positions on things such as Core curriculum and testing, issues more relevant to teachers and potential employment evaluations than actually educating kids. While I mostly agree with teachers on both, I have a problem with unions stacking the board with pro union board members when the community foots the bill.

Some candidates posted their answers on line, and candidates such as Gina Garofalo-Irizarry seemed to show sympathy for union and teachers’ concerns without completely promising to sell out the school district to give the unions what they wanted.

A teacher, herself, she seemed to understand the issues better than most of the candidates I saw, and appears to be running to actually do the job. Some of the other candidates running in Bayonne are so slick with their campaigns, you’d think they were running in the Presidential primary, spending a small fortune on campaign literature as to raise a question as to why they need to spend so much for what is one of the most thankless jobs in government. School trustees put in long hours and often get grief for their efforts.

So you have to wonder if the slickest campaigns are really designed for higher office later on, and that candidates who spend a lot are looking perhaps for a slot on the city council in the future.

I have a lot of friends in the Bayonne school board race, people I trust, and believe are there for the right reasons. In most cases, these are people failed to get the endorsement of mayor or union, such as Garofalo-Irizarry, and yet seem to be more qualified in most cases than the people with the endorsements.

In Jersey City, I’ll be voting for “the other Gina,” and knowing that if I was in Bayonne, I would be voting with the same aim at having someone who is beholden to parents and the public, and not those who gave endorsements.

But then, I always go with the underdog, just like I am with The Mets in The World Series, hoping against hope that the best candidate actually wins.

 

 

Another piece of Jersey City gone

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Bob is dead.

A neighborhood icon, the former fireman apparently died in his home late last week.

His family has lived in this neighborhood for generations, and so his passing is a loss to local history. A scrounger in the best sense of the word, Bob often collected items from various estates, often coming up with curious items he sometimes could not sell, such as the remnants of a famous actor who long fell out of the national spotlight.

I remember his having historic photos of when the tire and car industry destroyed the local trolley system, as part of its campaign to get more people to drive in the 1950s. He had images of the trolley cars being dumped into the New York Harbor.

His was a living memory of that transition time when Jersey City turned the corner from its post World War II industrial past to its financial district dubious future.

Although a firefighter most of his life, his personal roots were blue collar, and he stood on the wrong side of a wave of change that altered this world forever.

I met him and his wife almost from the day I came into the neighborhood, and from them, I learned about how Maxwell’s coffee plant in Hoboken used to dump its grounds in the meadows at the bottom of the hill, just across the highway – part of a perverted landfill scheme that hasn’t yet amounted to much except to bring the smell off coffee out in extremely warm days.

He and his wife owned several houses in the area, but lived across the street from us in a building with multiple units. They were always suffering through city regulations that they complained the illegal conversions elsewhere in our neighborhood did not have to comply with. They apparently didn’t know the right city inspectors to bribe, or simply refused to, being more honest than many of their counterparts in the city.

Over the years, they maintained a large truck in which they transported goods they bought at auctions, and the bottom floor of the rental building and a significant portion of a house they owned a block away, were hives to odd items they tried to sell at flea markets around the area.

They were always coming up with interesting items, and for a time, held a semi-regular sidewalk sale on the corner during warm days, drawing small crowds.

Several years ago, Bob’s health started to deteriorate, and he began to need oxygen – one sign of impending doom. Such people rarely last long once their lungs fail. But he held on. But this put a burden on his wife, who had to care for him as well as other members of their family who inevitably moved in with them.

For the last year or so, I saw Bob only once, on a particularly warm day. He was seated on the stoop of his house taking in the sun. He looked happy, but in that fog that end of life always brings. And like others I had seen, I knew he was seeing an end we could not so easily see.

As with my friend, Hank, Bob didn’t leave without leaving signs – such as a plastic fireman’s hat on the street near where he lived. One day last week, we all heard the sound of bagpipe’s playing Amazing Grace. Nobody knows where this came from. We’d never heard it before, and haven’t since. Perhaps this was one more message since had Bob opted for a fireman’s funeral; bagpipes would have played that song.

The neighborhood is significantly lessened by his passing, the loss of one more piece of the past none of us can recover, one more sign that the Jersey City that once was is fading away.

Back to what future?

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

So where are the flying cars?

This is the year that Marty McFly came to when he came “Back to the Future” in the second of the series of movies filmed in the late 1980s.

He encountered flying cars and other such stuff, most of which has not transpired.

What we got instead is a William Gibson version of the future – where we as people change, not in particular the external fixings.

Visionaries of the past painted a number futures for us, but most falling into two basic modes: external change, and internal.

Flying cars are part of the external change.

Computer technology, the internet, cyber warfare and the other stuff of William Gibson novels, are the other.

We, of course, are also getting a bit of the Mad Max, Waterworld or Tank Girl future, where we have so degraded the planet that we must use internal technology merely to survive.

Many of our leaders deny global warming because as Gore put it, it’s an inconvenient truth. But recent reports suggest that some leaders of the oil industry not only knew about the impacts, but embraced them, possibly altering the environment intentionally in order to access untapped reserves in places then frozen over near the North Pole.

I wouldn’t put it passed them.

But the technology itself scares me.

We keep talking about going green, and then expand our devices that depend on rare minerals we must wage wars to gain access to. The most recent example is the find of rare minerals under Afghanistan.

We give up paper – which is a renewable resource – only to create mounds of unusable out of date computers. We replace the 100 watt filament light bulb with new energy efficient bulbs that when broken can puncture the skin and cause death, or spread poison into the soil of landfills that the old variety did not.

Still more terrifying is the use of cloud and other data storage to replace bound books and other material storage, creating a situation where everything human kind as gathered could be wiped out in even a small nuclear incident or some other cosmic disaster.

I’m told an asteroid is about to pass near by us even as I write this.

We’ve given up letter writing for emails –which vanish at will. In fact, we won’t soon be teaching cursive writing at all, which makes me wonder, how people will in the future sign documents? Will we have to use a retina scan or a thumb print, or will future generations degenerate to the X that our less educated ancestors used?

The FAA finally put limits on larger drones, adding one more page to the chapter called ‘What the hell were they thinking when they unleashed this piece of crap on the world?”

While all this might make me sound like I'm anti-technology, in truth, technology isn’t often an improvement – it is often merely a change.

Some technology serves to create problems and provide the cure for the problem it creates – such as the assembly line – which set the stage for rapid Nazi weapons development, and later allowed America to overcome both German and Japanese military advances. But ultimately, workers trained for assembly lines got replaced by robots, or slave labor in other countries. Now, the trend is to train kids to embrace technology, jobs that will vanish the way assembly line jobs did as soon as we perfect artificial intelligence.

This is also a week where we here in Jersey City have embraced things like Uber taxis and Airbnb, building a network of convenience for some and lack of regulation for others. Uber exists partly because traditional taxi services failed to embrace new technology. Airbnb exists because government cannot control the one basic principle behind all these so called technological improvements: human greed.

Karl Marx mistakenly believed that workers would eventually unite to overthrow corporate masters. He was wrong on two key points. He said people can control the means of production and then have power. But people never have control long, and Marx also failed to see that people do not want to revolt, most want to become the masters. This was also the failing of Franklin and Jefferson when the government allotted plots of land to settlers in the Ohio Valley, only to find some bought or stole lots assigned to others in order to build petty empires.

We cannot overcome the basic flaw and perhaps we are foolish if we try.

So where are the flying cars? They’ll be here when people really want them. For now, we’re happy with an Uber app.

A taste of wine

August 24, 1969

I got the call last Friday before my duties were done.

The ward sergeant yelled for me to come to the phone. Since I never get calls on base, I thought it must be serious.

I thought it might be my mother or my girlfriend.

I envisioned that time I came home from school to find my uncle Pete on the front porch with news about my grandfather’s dying.

So all more was the surprise when the voice on the other end of the line was Pauly’s.

“Are you coming home this weekend?” he asked.

“Yes, I have a pass,” I said, wondering what this was all about.

My pass was suspended last weekend because some idiot got sick and I wound up on a helicopter flying over some large field in New York State where they had a concert going on. We didn’t land. But I saw the whole mess from the air while clinging to the strap, scared shitless about falling.

I heard a few days ago, Hank had been there and got flown out sick.

Perhaps he’d gotten ill from the trip to the shore two weeks ago Pauly had orchestrated, and from which I was still recovering. This made me wonder what he was up to.

“Perfect,” he said. “Wear your uniform.”

Then, he hung up.
Vince drove us north and left me off at the George Washington Bridge Port Authority building like he normal did when we went awol during the week. I took a train to the other Port Authority in Time Square because I didn’t know the buses out of Hackensack as well as I did the ones I took back and forth from New York to Paterson with Hank.

When I got home, my uncles told me I had a phone message and that my friend said it was urgent.

Pauly answered on the first ring.

“Are you home?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good, we’ll pick you up in the morning,” he said, and then after a slight delay. “You have your uniform?”

“Yes,” I said. “But why…”

But he was already off the line.

The next morning, someone rang the front bell.

I remembered two weeks ago when I warned Pauly not to come to the front door after he, Bill, and Bob had rousted me out for the trip to the shore.

Through the glass this time, I saw Bob instead of Bill, and down at the curb, Bob’s VW Beetle with Pauly in the passenger seat.

My uncles wanted to know where I was going wearing my uniform. Since I didn’t know myself I couldn’t tell them and hurried down the front stairs and somehow managed to cram myself into the Beetle’s back seat.

“Do you mind telling me why I’m dressed up to go trick or treating?” I asked Pauly when Bob pulled the car into traffic.

“We have a dinner engagement and the girls told me we have to bring wine,” he said.

“I don’t get what that has to do with me?”

Pauly turned and looked at me.

“None of us are old enough to buy booze, and all the people we rely on normally won’t buy us any,” he said.

“That’s because you still owe them money,” Bob pointed out/.

“A small matter,” Pauly said.

“Not to them. Especially because you also owe them money for pot.”

“So where do I fit into this?” I asked. “I’m 18. I’m not old enough to buy booze either.”

“Ah, but you’re wrong,” Pauly said. “What right minded patriotic store keeper would deny you, one of the boys destined to serve country over seas?”

“I’m not going over seas,” I said, although I knew I was still disputing the orders that had me slated for Vietnam.

“Ah, but the store keeper won’t know that.”

“So you want me to lie?”

“Lie? That’s such a harsh word. Fib is better.”

“So it’s still illegal for him to sell me booze, whether I’m a soldier or not.”

“True. But he’ll sell it to you anyway. He wouldn’t deny you with your short hair and your uniform.”

“Damn you, Pauly. Why are you always getting me wrapped up in your schemes?”

“Scheme? This is no scheme. We have several young ladies who are cooking their hearts out for us as we speak and all they ask of us is to bring them a few bottles of wine.”

“Now it’s a few bottles…”

“Hush, boy. Let’s not bicker over this. I’m not asking for you to pay for all the bottles yourself.”

“You want me to pay?”

“But not for all of it.”

“Why should I pay for any of it?”

“If you imbibe of the food, then you should share in the expense of the drink.”

“I don’t recall anyone inviting me to any dinner.”

“Another petty detail. How can anyone refuse you when you’re bringing the drink?” Pauly asked, displaying once more his usual circular logic.

“You might as well just do it,” Bob said. “He won’t let you out of the car until you agree.”

So I agreed.

Pauly had Bob pull up around the corner from the liquor store so that the store keeper wouldn’t see us together.

“No use tempting fate,” he explained, and then put some money in my hand.

“What kind of wine do you want?” I asked.

“Use your judgment,” he said.

“I don’t know anything about wine,” I said.

Beer, I knew. We could buy nearly all the watered down low alcohol beer we wanted on base. But wine was a mystery to me.

“You’ll figure it out,” Pauly assured me.

Less than confident, I went into the store. The store keeper was busy with another customer and so I wandered up and down the aisles staring at labels that were meaningless to me.

A moment later, the clerk – an elderly man with gray hair and classes – asked what I needed.

“I need some wine,” I said. “For a dinner.”

The man looked me over and my age easily registered in his eyes. But so did some deeper sadness I didn’t understand. He seemed full of pain, especially when he looked at my uniform.

I thought he was going to throw me out. But instead, he smiled.

“Where you stationed, boy?” he asked.

I told him.

“I just finished basic training,” I said. “I’m waiting to ship out for advanced infantry training.”

“My son trained there,” he said, sounding said. “They sent him out to Fort Sills. He was artillery.”

I thought he was going to ask me if I knew his son. But he went mum about it, and looked even sadder than he had.

“What kind of wine did you need?” he asked.

This was like asking me what lay on the dark side of the moon. I shrugged.

“Whose the dinner with?” he asked.

“Some girls I know,” I said, although in truth, I didn’t know them.

“Ah, a shipping out dinner,” he said. “Then you’re going to need something special.”

He brought me to the counter and then produced a wide green bottle with dust on it.

“I was hoping to buy two bottles if that’s possible,” I said.

“Not a problem,” he said, and found another bottle equally dusty. “My son had this kind of wine for the party when he shipped out. It’s fruitier than most wines, but I’m sure the girls will like it.”

I tried to pay, but he wouldn’t take the money.

“It’s my gift,” he said. “If you come back safe, then you can come tell me how you and the girls like it.”

I tried to thank him. He shook his head.

“Just enjoy,” he said.

I made my way out to the car.

Pauly was ecstatic.

“See!” he told Bob. “I told you it would work.”

Bob drove off grumbling.

I felt bad for the old man, but couldn’t say why. I also felt like I had misled him, though in truth, I did have orders for Vietnam, orders that I would not likely have to follow.

Bob drove to West Paterson and through the winding streets on the western slope of Garret Mountain. He pulled into a driveway that already had several cars parked in it.

“We’re here,” Pauly said. “Let me take one of those bottles.”

I suppose he wanted to get credit for bringing in the booze. So I handed him one.

Alf was there. So was Garrick. I didn’t know the women until Pauly introduced me: Jane, Ann, and Margaret.

Pauly was apparently dating Jane.

Ann was some kind of chiropractor, and Jane was in training to become one.

They had incense burning, and a buffet set up on the table with cheese, crackers and other stuff.

They told us to help ourselves.

“That’s caviar,” Ann told me, pointing to a plate with black stuff on it.

Following the example of others, I put some of a few crackers and some crackers on a plate and sat down in one of the chairs.

I was way out of my league here and I knew it.

I felt embarrassed without having done anything.

Then I bit into the cracker and nearly choked.

The caviar tasted awful, but I couldn’t just spit it out in public. I saw a similar reaction on Pauly’s face, and Garrick’s, and Bob’s. Pauly handed us each a glass of wine, and I gulped my down to wash the horrible taste away.

But the wine lingered on my tongue like an old memory, and for some reason, I kept thinking of the old man, and his son.

Somehow I got through the rest of the dinner without totally making a fool of myself, mostly by keeping quiet, drawing some notice from the three girls who commented that I didn’t talk a lot.

Later, Bob drove me home without Pauly, who went off with Jane.

I finished out my pass the next day in Washington Square Park, just taking in the sights and listening to David Peal sing.

But I could not get the old man out of my mind. I still can’t now that I’m back at the hospital. I keep looking at the wounded veterans who have come here from Vietnam and wonder if any of them was the old man’s son. But I know better. I know that while I’ll be going home soon, his son never will be.

And I keep tasting that wine.

A brave new world?

Friday, October 16, 2015

I heard on the news this morning about how rail road companies are guarding against people wandering onto tracks and how to detect objects on the tracks that might derail trains.

Maybe I’m a little too much like Mark Twain in that I am nostalgic for a simpler and more innocent past.

As a boy, the tracks were always my pathway to some other world, some better place, a connection that if I touched the metal I could feel in Chicago or San Francisco.

I wandered tracks every chance I got. In fact, the tracks came out on Crooks Avenue allowed me to go to downtown Paterson or downtown Passaic, depending on which way I turned. I often crossed them during my walk to junior high school. Later, when I cut high school, I often wandered down to the freight tracks, hopping on a train that took me north to places like Mahwah and Suffern.

People have always gotten hurt on rail road tracks, a fact of life that in the past did not matter nearly as much as it does today.

Sociologists note that as a society moves from working class to middle class, they become more protective of its kids – part of the social conflict underway currently in America.

I wrote about a playground this week that is not a playground, but a health center, a gated community with rubberized floor and a variety of devices kids have to be educated to use before they are allowed to play there.

In the past, playgrounds were risky places, where kids learned the most basic rule of life: how not to get hurt in a harsh world.

Our movement into middle class also brings up the battle of Planned Parenthood – and the massive amount of abortions it does yearly. In the past, families had lots of kids, and kids often did not survive out of childhood. Like most mammals, we managed to maintain society through breeding. A more protective childhood allows most if not all kids to survive, and so like Huxley’s Brave New World, we select sooner who will be allowed to live, doing away with the pain of losing a child after being born.

The video tapes that right to life activists doctored were far less offensive for the presumption of Planned Parenthood’s ghoulish selling of body parts as was the tone and attitude un-undoctored that showed just how uncaring these defenders of women’s rights were: they cold, calculating and unsympathetic to the idea that they wield the power of life and death. They have become the technicians in the Brave New World who do not see themselves as playing god, but merely stamping out defective parts on an assembly line. This is offensive.

This, of course, is mostly a middle class problem. Immigrants and poor still tend to overproduce babies, and thus continue to concept that more is better for the survival of the species.

The other reason for over protected middle class children has to do with the expense of raising kids these days. Medical and educational costs have been inflated by a greedy system and so each kids becomes nearly as precious as parents seem to see them, and to lose a child to some unfortunate accident on a playground or a rail road track is to lose an investment that cannot simply be made up by having another child.

Over protected kids, of course, produce spoiled, self-indulgent adults, who assume that because they were treated special in childhood that they must be special in the real world, and so we get this concept of entitlement: they can do what they want to do when they want to do it, regardless of the impact it has on others around them.

Some anthropologists have also noted that the safer a society feels the more stupid and reckless individuals become. Intelligence is a survival mechanism, something that is often produced in order to overcome danger.

Until 9/11 America has largely escaped many of the dangers faced in other parts of the world, a perfect breeding ground for an overly careless population. And because many grew up with the parents protecting them, they submit more easily to state mandated Homeland Security measures that turn America into one vast prison, subjecting us to searches we would not have tolerated a generation ago all in the assumption of keeping us safe.

I miss the rail road tracks. I miss the idea that I have to look out for myself and protect myself, and cannot rely on some parent or government to make the landscape so safe I never encounter danger.

But as train tracks get closed off, and cars are built so they can run themselves, we grow less intelligent and more reliant on social institutions or the computer apps to do our thinking for us.

It is very sad.