(Dickensian Poverty at Play)
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A long time ago
, in a land not too distant from this one, the sons of divorced parents-- a big one and a little one ambling about in semi-confusion-- slummed along the buffer that joined unlike socioeconomic worlds like phantoms of a strange postmodern existence thrust upon us.
Yes, an unholy mingling of culture and blood from the shaggy, idealistic
early 1970's when two people, freakishly different, thought that love could conquer
all despite the lessons of history and raised eyebrows. Tell it to the divorce court, folks, and
don't let your parents berate you for marrying a shabbos goy of a husband
who will do handiwork around the house and watch over the kids while you make
all the money in private practice. Tack it up to naivet
-- "Get offfa my back, woman!"
You can say a lot of things about we kids growing up in this atmosphere (b. 1981, 1985), but boy. . . . . we were manipulative little fuckers.
As a game, my younger brother and I could play at being poor kids (-- i.e. "working-class scrappers") as we hauled ourselves out of the junky station-wagon in the parking garage and went trudging up the shadowed apartment stairwells to the murky back summit where Dad fidgeted with the keys, negotiating a box of old books. However, it was a strange "costume ball" where we spoiled little punks-- essentially camouflaged upper middle class wastrels-- could carry on like the royal classes living in a mock peasant's village, delighting in carrying our water and chopping our own wood for the sheer novelty of "life in the raw". But of course, we didn't have to do a single lick of work and lazed about in the filth like lion cubs flicking their tails. . . . . . life with the old man.
In school, I always enjoyed an inventive yarn over my classmates if asked to talk about myself-- hinting at a worldly exposure and roughness that only the black kids from the desegregation program would know (-- a token of moral credit) and the few rowdy,"wasted white boys" on the side. It was a mumbled presence; a forgiven handicap; an "underdog" modesty that made my precociousness seem that much more special against all odds and rendering less work somehow more admissible. Everyone would blink twice at this "diamond in the rough" before their astonished midst, a pleasing effect, and the teacher was certainly in no position to challenge my imposing circumstances. . . . . and then it would start off a round of "one-upmanship" between the ghetto kids and "wasted white boys" leading to a fiery rabble-rousing populism at our well-to-do elementary school which our teacher would listen to politely-- offering her undivided good cheer, her anxious, cuddly tolerance-- before clearing the discussion of all flashy segregations and hastily moving on before we tore down the map and crucified the hamster.
(You might have thought that my diet wholly consisted of watermelon, grits, beans, and sowbelly but let me be the one to tell you that it really wasn't like that!)
However, I found it keenly embarrassing when I was stuck hauling around my lunch in a pathetic, rumpled, brown paper bag that clumsy, fatherly hands had prepared upon a grimy stove with close-out food from"The Poor Man's Grocery". There was always the joke about the overworked, underpaid saint of an employee laboring under Ebeneezer Scrooge from "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, as squalid a tale of Victorian poverty if any, and the little holiday turkey he bought for his family of eight or nine. As the punch-line went, "It was all Cratchett could afford. . . . ."
Call it being jammed in with "thrifty dignity", like squished "humble-pie" that you had no choice but to eat or else you would go hungry on the Tuesday's, Thursday's, Saturday nights, and most of Sunday's that he had custody over us from the divorce settlement.
It was constantly a dance of "the good cards" vs. the ones you wanted to file under the bottom of the deck and let someone else be dealt-- a combination of the good, the bad, and the ugly from both sides or the parental split; yet these hateful offerings always had a way of cycling back in your direction at the most inconvenient of moments-- like the weather, or fate itself turning with mechanical inevitability as you had to accept "that's how life worked".
For
instance, the prize treat in said rumpled, trash lunches were these bags of
chips that Dad bought in a giant box, easily holding 40 snacks. The good ones
were the sour cream n' onion and cheddar varieties, which came in shiny emerald and gold
bags respectively. But neither me nor me nor brother wanted the "plain" potato chips, which arrived in a plain blue bag, or heaven
help us-- BBQ whose wrapper was a dull, primary orange like the dusky scratch of
minerals from a shale cliff on the side of the highway when we drove out to
grandma's. Let her gum on those as she waxed literal-mindedly
about little plastic puppy dogs from Walmart, or feed them to her unfriendly
cross-eyed cat who ran out of the room every time we came over to visit, but we
fought over the tasty bags like the Israelis and Palestinians over "The Holy
Land" until Dad would get angry, and simply put the chips on top of the
fridge so we had to chew over a bitter, BBQ'd peace like charred bodies in the
street. Or plain-baked, to be
diplomatic. . . . . until the issue flared up again.
As a social worker in the charity business, Dad never seemed to
have a shortage of big "Tootsie Rolls" which were more like old, stale plugs of
tobacco by the time he fished them out of his pocket. No candy bars, triple
chocolate ice cream, but this perennial 4th rate candy of the poor and indigent.
Yes,"Shriners" puttering around in their little cars for sick and dying
children, holding out their red fezzes and waving to the parade on a rainy, overcast morning that anyone with sense avoided
in our sclerotic downtown. But as
Richard Nixon liked to say from the stump,
My brother and I would quarrel even over this penurious offering (-- because we had nothing better to do) and would insist on dividing it down to the exact millimeter, with a surgical laser if possible. Dad decreed that whoever divides the candy gets "second choice". No takers on that one. We left it up to him, and he simply sawed it half with his key and put his hands behind his back. "Pick one". But the deal always "fell through" with anguished cries and he would end up throwing the candy out the third story window to the crows because "he had enough".
That was life with father.
He was always one to be upset with the
brutality in the world, how life had crumbled since he had grown up in the
1950's and what his minor dickering into protest politics had snowballed into,
with the wildness and irresponsibility in the culture that turned around and
said
"who are you to say, man?".
The things he could stand least was "sword n' sorcery" and writhing serpents,
and scantily-clad domnimatrixes, and some evil, hooded villain like "Skeletor" standing on top of a
mountain and communing with Satan as bald, brutish beast-thralls lugged around
chains and whipped their inferiors in a nightmare of fascistic social Darwinism
ripped out of a page from "The Third Reich".
Nor was he keen on video games that got much more radical than "Super Mario Bros.", especially the arcade favorite, "Final Fight" when you beat up the evil boss-- knocking "Mr. Big" out of his wheelchair and out the window with a crash where he fell thirty stories to his death. The rationale was, that "he was the embodiment of pure evil, man!".
Or there was "NARC"-- where you as the AK-47-toting Drug Enforcement Agent go around blowing up pushers and dealers with rocket launchers, their flaming bodies flying across the screen, their heads rolling down the streets in a frenzy of retributive justice. Or you could run them over with your car for extra points. Of course, you got more points for "busting" them, but what was the fun in that?! The party line was, "the solution to social problems is FORCE", definitely in concert with the Reagan/Bush agenda that kicked down doors and asked questions later, even shooting up the wrong person's living room! After-all, it was to protect kids like us-- that was the rationale for increased paramilitary funding-- while the social services faced a budgetary shortfall.
Dad just rolled his eyes and dug around in his pocket for a quarter, unable to stop the torrent of current trends that were stealing his children's innocence. So much for "Students for a Democratic Society". He honestly wouldn't be surprised if the government had a file on him somewhere, in some dusty archive-- a picture of a moderate college sophomore from the early 1960's in a button-down plaid shirt and box glasses. A real, fiery agitator from milk and wheat country, so stuffed with corn he couldn't outrun, much less "shoot the sheriff" as that Bob Marley song goes. Nor would it ever cross his mind to do such a thing unlike the radicals who followed a few years later, a placid ox who only gets angry when you keep shooting him in the butt with b.b's.
In his middle-age, Dad figured he ought to take us to church in order "to
instill some moral values". So a Unitarian church it was, the most
milquetoast, wishy-washy, all-inclusive place in the world.
Joke: "What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah's Witness?"
Answer: "Someone who keeps rapping on your door and then when you open it they have nothing to say!"
As a half-Jewish wise-ass, I mostly kept my mouth shut in Sunday school-- mostly with the aim of getting extra graham crackers while Jesse frolicked in the little kids' room and watched Jesus cartoons. Part of me had a sacred respect for this mumbo-jumbo, but really didn't understand any of it. What I understood was ghost stories and vampires and werewolves tearing humans asunder. You'd ask,
"what would stop a werewolf?" and they'd say "prayer" when everyone knew you needed silver bullets and to stop a vampire you cut of its head, stuffed its mouth with garlic, and buried it at the crossroads.The power of Jesus couldn't do anything really useful, like make my brother go back to his assigned room when I wanted to sit alone quietly and solemnly with Dad in church. Well, I took him outside and thumped him good-- getting him into a head-lock and throwing him to the ground. . . . . in full view of the congregation in front of a 30 foot tall plate-glass window. Dad came out there and told us "to stop it", carrying on at a pretty good pace even for him. With my sin out in the open, my "secret police" tactics exposed, I was to ashamed too go back and we never returned.
So much for moral values!
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
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