on the road to father and bonding
Otto stared down at the phone he had just hung up. He paused. “Well, that’s a revolting development.”
I had hired Otto, a portly attorney and friend of my wife’s father, to find me another attorney who would handle my case in Virginia — site of the “revolting development.” He found Ms. Stacy Slatterhouse, with an office across from the Halifax County Courthouse, and we had just debriefed her on the details of my case.
“I can’t promise anything,” said Ms. Slatterhouse.
Days before, Virginia state troopers snared me racing 94 MPH under clear skies and with little traffic on Route 58E along the Virginia-North Carolina border. I was in a 60 MPH zone. They swooped in and nailed me roughly halfway between Roanoke and Richmond, about 400 miles from home near Philadelphia.
94 MPH is double reckless driving, Ms. Slatterhouse informed us. The judge conceivably could reduce the charge to defective equipment. Then again, “94 is a high number, very aggressive driving,” said Ms. Slatterhouse. Ms. Slatterhouse also brought up the touchy business of my son, Steve, being with me when I sprung the trap. “The judge might take into account, how can I put it, some egregious parental role modeling,” said Ms. Slatterhouse. But Steve was sound asleep in the shotgun seat when the blue lights lined up behind us. “What? What’s going on?” he asked groggily, realizing we were boxed in by three brown and tan state patrol cars. His first question was the same one the trooper asked me as he leaned into front seat: “What on earth are you doing going this fast?”
“When you come down for your court date, and make no mistake, you must appear,” said Ms Slatterhouse, “bring along your toothbrush. Just a heads up. You just might spend some nights across the street from the court house in the county jail.”
“You know, I was up your way not long ago,” said one of the troopers after studying my driver’s license. I know. Everybody drives fast up there. It’s different down here. It’s a different world. Why don’t you let your son slide over and drive for a while? He’s driving age, isn’t he?”
Sure he is, we’re out here hunting for a college, after all. That’s what Steve and I had been doing for eight days. I told one of the troopers we were tired and just wanted to get home. A plea he has heard, oh, possibly thousands of times. My bad. I should have stuck with the “different world” rationale. Steve slid behind the wheel and locked in a steady 60 MPH. We said nothing. Hell, we were out of cell phone range and I couldn’t even phone home and freak out on my wife.
I wouldn’t say Steve and I committed to this trip with a high sense of purpose, like actually finding a school for Steve. No, we didn’t drill down too deep. My wife Suze suspected all along we had other plans, other goals for this summertime road trip. To be sure, we stayed away from anything organized, organized campus tours, orientations, interviews, print propaganda handouts. We breezed through campuses, sometimes not even getting out of the car, and went with first impressions and gut feelings:
Penn State — 41,700 students, almost all white. Sprawling vanilla campus without discernable personality. At least the massive football stadium is a walk away from the dorms. A steady rain while we were there left a bland impression.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania — Workable size, 14,310 students. IUP wasn’t on the initial itinerary, but like many decisions on this trip, we improvised on the move. Old projects-like dorms are being demolished for new two- and four-person suites with private baths. This is a trend all across campus America. Kids coddled at home want to bring as much comfort and privacy with them to college as they can. The campus lifestyle factor can be a significant determinant.
University of Pittsburgh — Probably too urban for Steve. Petersen Events Center, where the Pitt Panthers basketball team plays, is a NBA-worthy glass and steel palace. It also houses the student fitness center. Rec centers and student centers are other major “lifestyle” draws on college tours. A classroom is a classroom, a commodity when college shopping, but student centers with multiple flat screen monitors and food courts, and gyms with rock climbing walls, this is part and parcel of creating brand reputations and positioning schools competitively. After 18 years of training, our kids know what to look for when they shop.
University of West Virginia — Confusing campus layout. The school loses points as we lose patience trying to find the football stadium. We find it, it’s locked up, we climb over the gate and stroll the astroturf field. You’ve noted no doubt the emphasis we put on athletic facilities. Colleges pour millions into their athletic budgets every year; athletics is part of the lifestyle equation and brand building; so we feel obligated to check out their investments. Of course that’s horeshit. Steve and I are serious sports fans, have been all our lives, and we’ll take every opportunity (or risk) to walk the fields we see on TV. Beyond sportsdom, Morgantown has too much weedy, ramshackle off-campus housing winding up into the hills. I heard someone once say WVU is too “trailer park.” That’s a helluva image problem for the admissions people to deal with. They’ve got to free the state university from the baggage of the state.
The College of Wooster — Classy, leafy, brick-lined liberal arts campus. Immediately out of our price range. And as Steve asks, “What good does a liberal arts degree do for you?” “It’s your ticket to keep studying a few more years in a grad program,” I explain.
Ohio State University — OSU suffers from bad timing on this trip. Columbus is hot and crowded and we’re hot and tired. Still, we push on to locate the famed Horseshoe, Ohio Stadium, “one of the most recognizable landmarks in all of sports” according to the Buckeye web site. Colleges love to tout recognizable landmarks, and of course most of them are the towering football stadiums. After all, ESPN, CBS Sports, ABC Sports et al don’t come to campuses to photograph the library or the physics lab.
Ohio University — Steve would be a legacy kid here, with both his mom and I OU alumni. “It’s a party school isn’t it?” he asked. “Aren’t they all?” I answer. I think he’s looking to escape his legacy, and more important, that zoombifying eight-hour drive from Philadelphia. OU is in fact a perennial top five finisher in annaul national collegiate party power rankings. The admissions folks grit their teeth and prepare their spin every year the rankings come out. “Oh, that’s such an old story by now…”
Virginia Tech — Steve likes the slate stone architecture of the buildings circling the expansive grass drill field, the heart of the campus has a military feel like West Point. Va Tech is another school standing in the shadows of an enormous football stadium. As mentioned, Steve’s not one for long windshield time, and Va Tech, like OU, is a drive too far.
Actually Steve and I didn’t talk about specific colleges on this tour as much as we went back and forth on areas of study. Steve is taking a shotgun approach to what major to pursue, and I can’t keep up with the rounds of questions. “What do you do with a sports administration major? What if you combined it with journalism? Is journalism dead? What’s a sports information director do? ESPN did a show about them. Seems there is a lot of pressure to those jobs. How much do they get paid. What do you do with a general business degree? What’s business administration? What kind of job could I get in TV production? How do you a get a job with NFL Films or ESPN or The Speed Channel?”
“Wanna see Applachian Bible College?”
“What?”
“Just messin’ with you. You don’t have to figure out the entire arc of your career when you’re 17.”
“But if I don’t know what I want to do, maybe I shouldn’t go to college for a year. Maybe community college. It’s expensive. Give you and mom a break. I know we don’t have a lot of money now.”
As you can see, there are no secrets, financial or otherwise, in our small ranch house. But the boy is prone to thinking too much. Just like his mom, dad and sister. We all need to chill a little more. Of course the stakes of finding an affordable four-year college experience don’t lend themselves to chillin’.
Our road trip talk becomes much easier to handle when music is the topic, which happens at some point every day on this trip. In the back seat sits a cooler packed full of CDs. Steve’s a particular fan of what’s called “Brit Pop,” the wave of British rock and roll bands from the ‘90s. He started listening to The Clash and took it from there. Oasis. Blur. Pulp. Coldplay and Radiohead, the Libertines, Keane. Back to Led Zep, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who. Throw in a lot of Marley, a bit of Dylan and The Band. I don’t want to lay my musical prejudices on him. Pick out another CD, Steve. But what’s most annoying is the iPod generation’s itchy trigger finger that keeps pushing the damn forward button searching for another single track. They’re “single minded,” no different than the transitor radio craze in the ‘60s.
A more complicated topic that often comes up has to do with what I’d call “cultures,” for lack of anything more descriptive. Steve doesn’t use the word per se, but he’s something of an anthropologist. Now how do you make money out of that? For years he’s followed the NASCAR culture and the Formula One racing culture. College football cultures and traditions, especially the hardcore southern schools and midwest Big Ten schools in towns and states without professional teams. Texas and Ohio high school football cultures. Books like “Friday Night Lights,” and “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.”
Steve talks some on this trip about the rust belt culture we’ve been driving through.Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Akron. Canton. He finds something interesting in the decay and the people and the towns hanging on. He zeroes in on the tortured history of the Cleveland Browns. Something about the old school plain orange helmet he likes. And the Browns’ history of Hall of Famers, die-hard fans, the Dawg Pound, and never being in a Super Bowl.
Dipping into NASCAR culture was a main attraction of this road trip. We aimed to see the Bristol (Tennessee) and Martinsville (Virginia) tracks. The Martinsville track is the smallest NASCAR races on the circuit. Bristol, aka “Thunder Valley,” is a pilgrimmage shrine. If you took the grandstands at Daytona International Speedway, which stretch for miles, wrapped those stands around and around, coiled them tight as a drum, higher and higher around a half-mile oval, until you had a ten-story coliseum, that’s Bristol Motor Speeday. The “world’s fastest half-mile,” with 160,000 seats.
Twice a year NASCAR races at Bristol, on a spring Sunday and an August Saturday night. In mid-July, when we drove up to the track, it was after hours and the tours were done for the day. The museum was closed. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, with a few other straggler fans.
Damn if a gate to the track was open and some fans were wandering in. We walked down the rows of seat, slipped through an opening in the chain-link fence circling the tracks, and ran laughing up and down the steep raceway banks like concrete sand dunes. Suddenly a red pickup flies by us on the track. “Isn’t that the guys who were out here taking pictures?” asks Steve. Hmmm. Sure enough, track workers left open a drive-in gate down by turn one. Steve and I hurried back to our car.
“You drive,” I told Steve.
“Why?”
“You wanted to see Bristol. Well, nobody’s here and the track’s open. Take a few spins around.”
“Really?”
“Hell, yes. Who wouldn’t want to take their car out on Bristol and turn a couple laps. Damn straight.”
Steve guns our Mazda and its puny put-put engine around the high banks, once, twice, three, four times. That’s two miles. Then it’s my turn. Twice around for a mile. We laughed our asses off.
We weren’t laughing several days later when a patrolman caught us trespassing inside the Martinsville track. The thing is shaped like a paper clip, track walls are scarred and gouged by metal and rubber, with the stands sunk low in a valley, hard to see from the highway.
“Can’t you read? Read the signs?” an old, leathery guard asked me. “I could arrest you for being out here.” Of course two “No trespassing” signs hung on the fence right above where I had slid on my back to wriggle my way on to the track. “Come on, Steve,” I yelled. He was wandering the far end of the paper clip. “Sorry sir,” I said to the guard.
Before the old boy had more time to consider our fate, we were in the Mazda heading east on Highway 58. We were leaving behind the old south culture and heading toward home, to Philadelphia. “Racin’ the way it oughta be!” as the Bristol Motor Speedway motto says. Leaving behind strip malls and Hardees, Long John Silver, Arby’s, Subway, Wendy’s, Burger King, Sam’s Club, Daylight Doughnuts, Doggy Bakery, General Tire, Auto Zone, K Mart, CVS, Lowe’s, Kohl’s, Food City, Walgreens. Cash Now. Cash 1. Bristol Cash. Gun’s ‘n Pawn.
Bristol is the “Birthplace of Country Music,” where the Carter Family came out of Poor Valley to first record here in ’27. Where hell-bent Saturday nights turn into solemn Sunday mornings. “Speak something worth hearing or be silent” commands one church message board. It’s not a long walk from the State Line Bar & Grille, Logan’s Roadhouse, Borderline Billiards to that Sunday morning coming down feeling at the Sacred Cross Church, Volunteer Baptist Church, the Faith Community Fellowship.
Bristol, the Carter Family, old time music, old time racing, they all were part of my romantic reflection until we were about two hours down the road on 58E and the blue lights came out of hiding.
It was a damn good ride while it lasted. Steve and I hit many of our targets. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a subterranean collection of musical misfits, outcasts and geniuses. The Pro Football Hall of Fame. A World War II sub. The Pittsburgh Vintage Car Grand Prix in rainy Schenley Park — MGs, Austin Healys, Jags, Rolls Royces, Lotuses. A 14-inning Pirates game after a torrential rain delay to see ace Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum, thin as a reed, hair like a surfer’s, last year’s Cy Young winner. An Indians game viewed from scorching left-field bleachers, with a clown in the top row pounding on a tom-tom drum that just made you sweat more.
We drove through mountains and hollows in West Virginia. Where the Ghent Fire Department features Mountain State wrestling. Where in White Sulphur Springs, Mud Bogs are organized on city property. Whoever can drive an ATV, 4x4 truck and/or SUVs the furthest distance in the mud pit in the shortest time wins.
One afternoon we drove 40 miles south on Ohio Route 3 from Wooster to Mount Vernon, a rich green stretch of farms, hay fields, pastures, soft hills and a hot haze out on the horizon. Classic Ohio Gothic. I counted 93 barns during that stretch of road. Small, large, aluminum, tin, wooden, brand new and rusted ruins.
We had buffet dinners at Iron Skillets and Golden Corrals. Load the plates high and come back for seconds and thirds. Our minor contribution in the nation’s obesity crisis.
There was that Blacksburg pub where a spunky waitress described what it was to be a Hokie, the Va Tech mascot. “Soon as you get here, the first day, you buy your Hokie tee shirt and from then on you’re a Hokie. It is a family. Especially after the killings.”
“Were you on campus?” I asked.
“Yes. You had to stay wherever you were. Sirens went off and the school sent everyone an email saying there had been a shooting and to stay where you are. We all spent the rest of the day texting and emailing our friends to make sure they were all right.”
“Did you know anyone who was shot?”
“Yeah, my friend Michael was killed, shot in the back.”
There was one night in Athens, Ohio, when Steve and I had dinner at The Oak Room, serenaded by one sorry out-of-tune townie singer-guitarist-harmonica player, trying to win the crowd with ‘70s chestnuts by the Eagles, James Taylor, Pure Prairie League, the Beach Boys. Reminded me how fortune we are that it isn’t the ‘70s anymore, and never will be again.
Another night in Athens I left Steve to ESPN’s Sportscenter in our room at the OU Inn and traipsed up a bluff overlooking the Hocking River and the OU campus. Up there sits what once was the Athens Lunatic Asylum, dark and menacing, with more than 1,800 patients at its peak in the ‘50s. Behind barred windows patients had a panoramic view of the Hocking Valley. Plenty of sunlight and fresh air was the prescription for improved health. Of course some bizarre behaviors and procedures went on behind the barred windows. The focal point of the sprawling complex, spread over hundreds of acres, is a four-story fortress-like intimidating institution. It still stands, a series of set-back wings extending from the main entrance for a total 853 foot length. More than 18 million bricks, all manufactured on the grounds, went into construction of the rock solid building, along with concrete and a tin roof.
What was I doing up there in my bare feet alone with the ghosts?
Three shots of bourbon and a beer at dinner helped lubricate my way. Steve and I had been on the road five days at this point and needed some separation time. I needed a break from the steady rotation of ESPN updates that Steve never tires of. And it’s not all that ghostly up on the old asylum grounds. The hospital had been extensively renovated by OU’s Board of Trustees in the mid-‘90s, renamed The Ridges, and at the cost of four-million dollars turned into an art museum. The refurbished, stately central administration building was named Lin Hall in honor of former Dean of Fine Arts Henry H. Lin, the father of Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Now it’s one of those recognizable campus landmarks.
I spent the evening sitting up there on The Ridges working the right side of my brain. Call it a baby boomer’s fantasy guilt trip. Fantasizing about hardships we never had to face.
I thought back to our walk through the World War II submarine U.S.S. COD, docked next to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the shores of Lake Erie. “Find them, Chase them, Sink them” was the COD’s motto, accompanied by a graphic of a topedo smashing through the skull of the enemy. So damn cramped and confined. A city 312 feet long. Mess hall/movie theatre. Sleeping berths stacked four high in spots. Mini toilets, showers, washrooms, a laundry, a galley, They stayed trapped idown there up to 74 days on patrol. Twenty-two percent of all U.S. Navy subsmariners were killed in action in World War II. Death, how’d they live with it?
And I imagined what went on behind the dark brick walls of the asylum. Another self-contained city, with a dairy, a farm, a water system. Numb days and nights. Frozen stares. Music and dance shows were put on by patients. Lobotomies peeled back facial skin to run a spike up through the brain, sometimes successful, sometimes not. Screams. Shouts. Howls. Sobs. Most patients remained until they died, and were buried out back if not claimed by families. Rumors of chains on walls. False. Rumors of ghosts, of course. A dark, dank medieval basement for the craziest. An attic full of tight passageways. Lost patients. In the ‘50s and ‘60s the medication revolution commenced and mass institutionalization was out. Soon patients were out on the streets.
Yeah, it had been a damn good trip. There was the afternoon Steve displayed admirable patience, typically not found in large reserves in 17-year-old boys. After getting lost time and again, I finally found the Carter Family Fold and A.P. Carter’s log cabin birthplace and the general store he owned next door. We were in far southwest Virginia in Poor Valley, up against the Clinch Mountain. Steve fiddled with his iPod in the car for a half hour or more while I roamed around shooting pictures. Then I struck up a conversation with a couple inside the Fold. The Carter Fold is a sort of micro-Opry, a barn with a wood-beamed ceiling, ceiling fans, 850 hard-back seats, and a stage with a wooden bench, room for a dozen musicians, and framed photos of the Carter kin and various guest musicians. Off to the left on a podium is an open Bible.
“Of the sisters, Anita had the best voice, that high soprano. June (Johnny Cash’s second wife) was the best entertainer and personality, but she wasn’t the best singer. And then there was Helen,” says Paul, a slight, retired U.S. Department of Agriculture attorney. Faith Collins, a volunteer at the Fold, has talked Hal into staying over another night so he can make the Saturday night show, this one featuring the old-time band Wayne Henderson & Friends. I don’t think I’d have that kind of luck convincing Steve. He’s not much for songs about lost loves, buried lovers, foggy mountain tops, wrecks on the highway.
“It’s in my genes to love music,” says Faith. “I was born dancin’. My dad sang gospel. Sang in quartets. People who don’t have no music in their cars, it’s like a morgue. I don’t understand. Soon as I get in a car I turn on the music. I always have music on in my house. You come here tomorrow night, you’ll be up dancin’. Two years up to 90 years old you’ll see them dancin’. The three of us come out of the kitchen dancin’.”
“I owe you big time,” I said to Steve when I had heard enough and finally returned to the car.
“No problem,” he said. “How’d you find this place?”
“You don’t unless you really want to.”
It’s like finding Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana’s home, which we did courtesy of the Dawg.
Dawg and I have known each other for at least 15 years, with him writing a number of short articles for my magazine. The Dawg played football at West Virginia University, and before that with Joe Montana for a season. Dawg was a skinny sophomore at Ringgold High School, about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Montana was the senior starting quarterback.
The Montana tour doubles as a tour of Pittsburgh’s destitute Mon Valley. Donora, the Dawg’s hometown, has lost about two-thirds of its population since the mills’ belched and boomed in the ‘20s, 30s and ‘40s. Monongahela, Montana’s hometown, also has dropped two-thirds of its population since the 1970s. Both towns stretch up hills rising from the Monongahela River; both are faded blue-collar capitals with largely empty downtowns and blank, boarded up storefronts. A male resident of Donora today brings home an average salary of about $33,000.
“There’s nothing to do here. No jobs,” says the Dawg. “Used to be a bar on every corner. Millworkers would work all day, stop at the bar after work for shots and beers, get home for dinner, go to bed, get up and do it again and again every day. My dad worked one of the mills for 30 years. Never got sick. Now you gotta get out of here when you’re young or drugs will get you,” says Dawg. “It’s bad.”
A few weeks after our trip came to its abrupt conclusion, I was getting my hair cut, preparing for the court date in Virginia. Rose, who has cut my hair ever since I got out of college, had some muse-like advice. “You know, I know your back story well enough to know this about you. And your son should know this too, if he doesn’t. You’re a romantic.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“An imaginative romantic.”
“Guilty.”
“A bourbon romantic.”
“Guilty.”
“A mandolin romantic.”
“Guilty.”
“You live in the moment”
“Guilty.”
“You’re about experiences.”
“Guilty.”
“And you were on a mission on this trip.”
Rose has more insights than my shrink, and is of course a helluva lot cheaper.
“Yeah? What was that?”
“You wanted to give your son the experience you never were able to have with your dad.”
“Yeah, maybe it was a major ‘make-good.’ Making up for what I didn’t get to do since my dad died when I was 12. But my dad wasn’t a bourban man at all, never drank in front of me, didn’t know anything about NASCAR, and never would have taken me on a trespassing after-hours spin around one of the country’s most famous race tracks.”
“How do you know what crimes your dad might have had in mind? He was an artist, a romantic, he would’ve taken chances somewhere.”
The judge seemed in good spirits the afternoon he was to hear my case in the Halifax County Courthouse. “Let’s get these cases moving,” he said. “There are a lot of people here who don’t want to see me, and I don’t want to see them.”
He had no time for me, that’s for certain. “First thing here I want to say is that the state of Virginia law requires jail time for any speed over 90 miles an hour. The man was going 95. My god, I can land my plane going slower than that,” said the judge.
“I’m not going to touch this case. The law stands as is.”
Ms. Slatterhouse was caught by surprise, then jumped in: “Your honor, the defendant has driven 400 miles to appear here. He has completed an eight-hour driving course, and an orientation session for Habitat for Humanity.”
“I don’t care. Unless you can get the commonwealth attorney to advise against sending this man to jail…”
“When? Now?”
“Yes.”
A few sweaty minutes later my attorney reappeared with the smiling commonwealth attorney.
“I was going out to lunch when I was grabbed to hear this case, your honor,” said the commonwealth attorney. “The trooper says the gentleman was very cooperative when arrested. Given his clean record, the commonwealth does not advise jail time.”
The judge took a breath and looked me over. Maybe he saw another carpetbagging Yankee in a nice jacket and tie, fresh hair cut, trying to squeeze his way out of a tight spot with courtesy and remorse. Hell, all the locals in the room wore flip-flops and shorts. I was over-dressed. The judge wasn’t having any of it.
“I will reserve my comments on what I think of driving 95 miles an hour and keep them to myself. Since no one else here seems interested in this case except me, and the commonwealth has advised against jail…pause…$1250 fine. That’s it. Guilty as charged. I’ve traded you money for jail time,” he said to me.
Ms. Slatterhouse immediately advised me to appeal. That would require another trek down here. No, I was out of my element. A local got caught speeding at 92 MPH and the same judge dismissed his case completely this morning. No jail time. No fine. No nothing. Dismissed. I’ll pay the damn fine in full and hope Steve finds a college that gives him aid money.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Knockin’ on Johnny Cash’s door
I pulled up in front of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home and couldn’t tell if anyone was home or not. A rusted old car sat in the gravel driveway, but the beaten-down wood frame shack, white with red trim around the windows, with a sloped roof jutting out over a small front porch, appeared empty. Johnny lived here from age three, in 1935, until graduating from high school in 1950. This is where he picked cotton, learned to play guitar and write songs, lost his brother Jack in a saw mill accident, listened to gospel music on the radio, and sang on a local radio station in high school
You pass just one other home on Arkansas West County Road 924 before reaching the Cash place. West County Road 924 is nothing more than a narrow dirt lane with potholes and mud puddles that just about swallowed up my tiny Ford Focus rental. Lined by tilting, wind-whipped wooden telephone poles and sagging wires, it cuts through miles of flat rice and bean farmland outside of Dyess, Arkansas, population 515, about 38 miles northwest of Memphis. The 2006 Cash biopic, “Walk the Line,” has overhead crane shots of young Johnny walking alone on barren and desolate 924. When I stopped by wearing a tweed jacket and tie after making sales calls in Memphis, the late afternoon chill, spitting rain and low clouds of November cast the bottomland in black and gray. A perfect day for the man in black.
In Philadelphia, where I’m from, you don’t just walk up to a stranger’s house and knock to see if anyone’s home. My internet research said the Cash place was owned and occupied by a William Stegall. Supposedly, he allows photographs for a donation, and there is a donation box out front so you don’t have to bother him.
I didn’t see any box as I slowly drove past, snapping photos from my open window. I did see a large hand-scrawled “Welcome” sign, which was enough encouragement for me to stop, take a chance, and knock on the front door.
“Come on in,” I was surprised to hear. Again, where I come from you don’t let strangers in your house, sight unseen. Let alone in the rural hinterlands at the isolated iconic home of one of the 20th century’s most influential musicians. Anyone from anywhere could be at the door. I pushed the creaking door open and there sat Willie in a recliner, watching a game show on a small TV with rabbit ears sitting on a stand.
I introduced myself and thanked him for inviting me in. The last thing I expected. Willie, short, on the hefty side, wearing several layers of worn t-shirts and sweaters and a day’s stubble of whiskers, said he’ll be 75 years old on April 14, 2010. He bought the Cash home “34 years ago, 35 in 2010, for $4,500,” he said, “from an old boy from Tupelo who got in trouble drinking, lost his wife, so he sold it to me. It’s home. It’s peaceful here, I enjoy it, but I’m getting’ old.”
I sat down on one of two ripped sofas in the living room. Willie’s cat jumped from one to the other. A rusted wood stove sat in the room, unused. The walls were peeling white-painted wooden planks with the wallpaper stripped away. A single bare bulb screwed into the ceiling cast a hard light on the wooden parquet floor.
“I just got in,” Willie said, motioning to the two electric heaters warming up. This was a world away from the “Blingdom” promoting Elvis’s Graceland on Memphis billboards.
“It’s nice meetin’ people,” said Willie. “I can’t keep up with ‘em all.” He had a way of immediately putting you at ease. “It’s better to be a good person than a mean person,” he said at one point. “People come from all over, across the water (the Atlantic Ocean), they know more about Johnny Cash than I do. Tour buses run out here from Memphis and Little Rock. One time a fella was selling bags of dirt from the yard for a dollar. The producer of that movie, he came in one time with Cuban cigars, said he wanted to sit around and get a feel for the place. Wanted me to show him how to pick cotton. Here, let me show you around.”
The kitchen sink was piled and jammed with a couple of week’s worth of dirty plates, pots and pans. The dining room table was piled with papers. Seven Cash children lived in this five-room house. Willie, walking with his cane, took me out back through sliding glass doors to show me where he planned to fix up a shed and clear out a small junkyard. That’s if he stays around. “I’ll have it fixed up by April if I’m still here,” he said. On Friday Willie said he was meeting with a banker from Little Rock who wanted to buy the property. “The state wants to buy it too, and pave the road. My ex-wife wants me to sell it. I want the cash in hand. You can’t believe half of what you hear.” Willie lives by himself. One of his sons comes over regularly to help him out. He still works, operating Caterpillar backhoes and excavators.
“I gotta quit,” he said. “But you get used to working and it’s hard to sit down and quit. You know what I mean.” I took it he was referring to my jacket and tie. “If they buy it, I might move to Wilson (a town to the east on the Mississippi River). Nice folks there. I don’t want a place in town. Want to be out where I’m by myself.”
Willie walked me out to the front yard and saw my mud-splattered Ford Focus parked down the road. “What’d ya park way down there for? You come back anytime. And park in the driveway, not way out there.”
I bounced along West County Road 924, looking at the empty land where Willie said “a lot of people just moved off,” thinking if I ever came back the road would be paved, Willie’s driveway too. There would be no pots and pans in the sink. The Cash place would be as clean as Elvis’s pristine birthplace in Tupelo. Thy “Blingdom” come.
You pass just one other home on Arkansas West County Road 924 before reaching the Cash place. West County Road 924 is nothing more than a narrow dirt lane with potholes and mud puddles that just about swallowed up my tiny Ford Focus rental. Lined by tilting, wind-whipped wooden telephone poles and sagging wires, it cuts through miles of flat rice and bean farmland outside of Dyess, Arkansas, population 515, about 38 miles northwest of Memphis. The 2006 Cash biopic, “Walk the Line,” has overhead crane shots of young Johnny walking alone on barren and desolate 924. When I stopped by wearing a tweed jacket and tie after making sales calls in Memphis, the late afternoon chill, spitting rain and low clouds of November cast the bottomland in black and gray. A perfect day for the man in black.
In Philadelphia, where I’m from, you don’t just walk up to a stranger’s house and knock to see if anyone’s home. My internet research said the Cash place was owned and occupied by a William Stegall. Supposedly, he allows photographs for a donation, and there is a donation box out front so you don’t have to bother him.
I didn’t see any box as I slowly drove past, snapping photos from my open window. I did see a large hand-scrawled “Welcome” sign, which was enough encouragement for me to stop, take a chance, and knock on the front door.
“Come on in,” I was surprised to hear. Again, where I come from you don’t let strangers in your house, sight unseen. Let alone in the rural hinterlands at the isolated iconic home of one of the 20th century’s most influential musicians. Anyone from anywhere could be at the door. I pushed the creaking door open and there sat Willie in a recliner, watching a game show on a small TV with rabbit ears sitting on a stand.
I introduced myself and thanked him for inviting me in. The last thing I expected. Willie, short, on the hefty side, wearing several layers of worn t-shirts and sweaters and a day’s stubble of whiskers, said he’ll be 75 years old on April 14, 2010. He bought the Cash home “34 years ago, 35 in 2010, for $4,500,” he said, “from an old boy from Tupelo who got in trouble drinking, lost his wife, so he sold it to me. It’s home. It’s peaceful here, I enjoy it, but I’m getting’ old.”
I sat down on one of two ripped sofas in the living room. Willie’s cat jumped from one to the other. A rusted wood stove sat in the room, unused. The walls were peeling white-painted wooden planks with the wallpaper stripped away. A single bare bulb screwed into the ceiling cast a hard light on the wooden parquet floor.
“I just got in,” Willie said, motioning to the two electric heaters warming up. This was a world away from the “Blingdom” promoting Elvis’s Graceland on Memphis billboards.
“It’s nice meetin’ people,” said Willie. “I can’t keep up with ‘em all.” He had a way of immediately putting you at ease. “It’s better to be a good person than a mean person,” he said at one point. “People come from all over, across the water (the Atlantic Ocean), they know more about Johnny Cash than I do. Tour buses run out here from Memphis and Little Rock. One time a fella was selling bags of dirt from the yard for a dollar. The producer of that movie, he came in one time with Cuban cigars, said he wanted to sit around and get a feel for the place. Wanted me to show him how to pick cotton. Here, let me show you around.”
The kitchen sink was piled and jammed with a couple of week’s worth of dirty plates, pots and pans. The dining room table was piled with papers. Seven Cash children lived in this five-room house. Willie, walking with his cane, took me out back through sliding glass doors to show me where he planned to fix up a shed and clear out a small junkyard. That’s if he stays around. “I’ll have it fixed up by April if I’m still here,” he said. On Friday Willie said he was meeting with a banker from Little Rock who wanted to buy the property. “The state wants to buy it too, and pave the road. My ex-wife wants me to sell it. I want the cash in hand. You can’t believe half of what you hear.” Willie lives by himself. One of his sons comes over regularly to help him out. He still works, operating Caterpillar backhoes and excavators.
“I gotta quit,” he said. “But you get used to working and it’s hard to sit down and quit. You know what I mean.” I took it he was referring to my jacket and tie. “If they buy it, I might move to Wilson (a town to the east on the Mississippi River). Nice folks there. I don’t want a place in town. Want to be out where I’m by myself.”
Willie walked me out to the front yard and saw my mud-splattered Ford Focus parked down the road. “What’d ya park way down there for? You come back anytime. And park in the driveway, not way out there.”
I bounced along West County Road 924, looking at the empty land where Willie said “a lot of people just moved off,” thinking if I ever came back the road would be paved, Willie’s driveway too. There would be no pots and pans in the sink. The Cash place would be as clean as Elvis’s pristine birthplace in Tupelo. Thy “Blingdom” come.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Update from Owl Road
Previously on Owl Road, when I last wrote about it, back in 1986, we had freshly emigrated from center city Philadelphia, Fitler Square. I was nursing a sick lawn mower, we were weighing gutter guard options, sizing up storm doors, and propping up a sagging carport. Kids were a consideration, but not a reality. I was unaware of the BK/EC great divide: Before Kids and Ensuing Chaos.
A couple of nights ago, Monday night, about seven, I was heading out to take son Steve for a lesson in the lost art of driving stick shift. Something seriously more harrowing than teaching him to drive automatic a year or so ago. If Steve stops for any reason on a hill while driving stick, we’re roadkill.
I’m coming out of the house and down the street a mammoth white tractor-trailer is attempting to squeeze onto Owl Road. Must be 30-40 feet long, high enough to break tree limbs. Owl Road has no sidewalks and is probably 30 feet wide, enough for two cars to pass. This massive tractor-trailer is like some spaceship gliding through the neighborhood. Completely alien.
What the hell? Is someone moving? No. Furniture being delivered? There’s a round fellow in a white tee shirt going door to door. Maybe he can’t find the address. I motion him over. “I’ve got a permit,” he yells, waving a laminated piece of something or other. “From the township. So we can go trying to sell this furniture.” He points back at the truck. “We got stuck with this load. Came up from North Carolina and the place we were to drop it at is out of business.” He’s got thick southern drawl. The tired eyes of a long distance hauler. “We’re selling High Point, North Carolina furniture right off the truck. Go see for yourself. Side doors are open.”
This guy is lost in more ways than one. First, he fails to realize in our little neighborhood any stranger coming a knocking at your door will scare the shit out of folks. That southern accent just makes matters worse. You simply don’t come across southern accents on Owl Road. In fact, Owl Road is absent of accents. Neighbors are peering out their windows, drawing the blinds, locking doors. What kind of con is this?
One neighbor down the street is out in his driveway when one of the good old boys approaches him. “Got real good furniture here. Sofas. Take a look.” My neighbor, a Long Island transplant and inherently suspicious New Yorker, keeps his distance like the guy’s carrying the H1N1 virus. “No, no, no thanks, not for me,” he shakes his head. Is this stuff hot? Possibly, but doubtful. This is a pretty damn clumsy scam if that’s what it’s about
I hop up to take a look inside the trailer. Steve is back in the house. So is everyone else. Batten down the hatches. No one ventures out to see what’s up. Sure as hell isn’t the ice cream man. There is some fine High Point wood furniture packed tight inside the trailer. Large, over-stuffed sofas and leather chairs. A grandfather clock. Some elegant wood carving. “This stuff is nice but too damn big for my house,” I tell a guy who says he’s from Winston-Salem. “We got another truck,” he says. “Selling it wholesale. Spread the word.”
How this whale of a trailer ever got from the turnpike to little old Owl Road I’ll never tell you. But they picked the wrong neighborhood for peddling, that’s for certain. Owl Road homes are tidy stucco ranchers from the mid-‘50s. You’d never get their big-ticket furniture through a front door. They should be up in one of the new developments with all the sprawling decks and cathedral ceilings. First came the pharmaceutical companies out this way, then the old farming families around Valley Forge sold out to the developers. Next came scientists and engineers from around the world. Accents abound up in the developments.
In contrast, Old Road is a throwback neighborhood. It’s proven to be sturdy and resilient in the 23 years we’ve been here. The neighbors on either side of us moved in more than 50 years ago, original settlers when this old pig farm was bulldozed into Birdland. It’s Birdland because the short, curvy streets have names like Owl, Sparrow, Thrush, Cardinal, Lark, Pheasant. You see, the first American home of John James Audubon, built in 1763, sits only a mile down the road.
Ten homes sit along Owl Road, each on a half-acre lot. Developers today would put 20 or 30 up. Of course right now nothing is going up anywhere, except “For Sale” signs. Not on Owl Road, though. Like I said, folks here are resilient. It’s probably 17, 18 years since someone new moved to Owl Road. That’s not counting the very quiet, almost invisible black man, Ben, who rents at one end of the street. A Mexican family moved in around the corner a couple of years ago. A small shrine to the Virgin Mary, with a mound of stones, pinwheels and a concrete statue sits square in the middle of their front yard, lit at night by two small spotlights. Soon as they moved in with their flaming red pickup the guy to their left planted a “For Sale” sign in the middle of his front yard.
On Owl Road today live a couple of widows, couple of grandparents, a divorced fortysomething father, a husband and wife who own a barbershop in the mall, an office products sales manager, a programmer for a defense contractor. Then there’s me. I write and edit from my home office, that sagging carport long ago enclosed. Right off of the kitchen, the office has been operational since 2002.
Owl Road provides the solitude for sustained concentration. Neighbors keep to themselves. If a police car drives by it’s unusual. Houses are sealed tight, central air in the summer, so you hear nothing, really. Even the youngest kids are in middle school or high school now.
One topic that does draw the neighbors out some, at least the moms, has to do with the notion of how much damage has been inflicted on the kids by growing up in the dwarf houses of Owl Road. Any number of their friends in this sprawling school district of ours live up in the developments where the sidewalks have no end, and no purpose, really. In the far reaches of the district, there are brick castles that would not be out of place in Beverly Hills or Bel Air.
It can be tricky talking to eight-year-olds about materialism. They are already consumers, of course, they just don't know it. Only a few times over the years have I heard Kate and Steve complain about living in confined quarters. Mostly when they were denied a sleepover because “there’s just not enough room; we’re all on the same floor and the TV will be too loud.”
Somehow they’ve managed. How their parents did is another story.
Now after 23 years the kids are pretty much up and out. That storm door has been replaced once. Maybe. Gutter guards never have been replaced. Never worked in the first place. I planted a pine sapling out back that Osborne gave me; the thing is now a good 30 feet high. Got two dogs, a five-pound thing with one eye, and a 50-pound cross between a polar bear with white fur and black, blank eyes, and a wolf. Don’t believe it’s a dog at all. We keep the grounds trim enough to avoid being shunned by the neighbors.
A couple of nights ago, Monday night, about seven, I was heading out to take son Steve for a lesson in the lost art of driving stick shift. Something seriously more harrowing than teaching him to drive automatic a year or so ago. If Steve stops for any reason on a hill while driving stick, we’re roadkill.
I’m coming out of the house and down the street a mammoth white tractor-trailer is attempting to squeeze onto Owl Road. Must be 30-40 feet long, high enough to break tree limbs. Owl Road has no sidewalks and is probably 30 feet wide, enough for two cars to pass. This massive tractor-trailer is like some spaceship gliding through the neighborhood. Completely alien.
What the hell? Is someone moving? No. Furniture being delivered? There’s a round fellow in a white tee shirt going door to door. Maybe he can’t find the address. I motion him over. “I’ve got a permit,” he yells, waving a laminated piece of something or other. “From the township. So we can go trying to sell this furniture.” He points back at the truck. “We got stuck with this load. Came up from North Carolina and the place we were to drop it at is out of business.” He’s got thick southern drawl. The tired eyes of a long distance hauler. “We’re selling High Point, North Carolina furniture right off the truck. Go see for yourself. Side doors are open.”
This guy is lost in more ways than one. First, he fails to realize in our little neighborhood any stranger coming a knocking at your door will scare the shit out of folks. That southern accent just makes matters worse. You simply don’t come across southern accents on Owl Road. In fact, Owl Road is absent of accents. Neighbors are peering out their windows, drawing the blinds, locking doors. What kind of con is this?
One neighbor down the street is out in his driveway when one of the good old boys approaches him. “Got real good furniture here. Sofas. Take a look.” My neighbor, a Long Island transplant and inherently suspicious New Yorker, keeps his distance like the guy’s carrying the H1N1 virus. “No, no, no thanks, not for me,” he shakes his head. Is this stuff hot? Possibly, but doubtful. This is a pretty damn clumsy scam if that’s what it’s about
I hop up to take a look inside the trailer. Steve is back in the house. So is everyone else. Batten down the hatches. No one ventures out to see what’s up. Sure as hell isn’t the ice cream man. There is some fine High Point wood furniture packed tight inside the trailer. Large, over-stuffed sofas and leather chairs. A grandfather clock. Some elegant wood carving. “This stuff is nice but too damn big for my house,” I tell a guy who says he’s from Winston-Salem. “We got another truck,” he says. “Selling it wholesale. Spread the word.”
How this whale of a trailer ever got from the turnpike to little old Owl Road I’ll never tell you. But they picked the wrong neighborhood for peddling, that’s for certain. Owl Road homes are tidy stucco ranchers from the mid-‘50s. You’d never get their big-ticket furniture through a front door. They should be up in one of the new developments with all the sprawling decks and cathedral ceilings. First came the pharmaceutical companies out this way, then the old farming families around Valley Forge sold out to the developers. Next came scientists and engineers from around the world. Accents abound up in the developments.
In contrast, Old Road is a throwback neighborhood. It’s proven to be sturdy and resilient in the 23 years we’ve been here. The neighbors on either side of us moved in more than 50 years ago, original settlers when this old pig farm was bulldozed into Birdland. It’s Birdland because the short, curvy streets have names like Owl, Sparrow, Thrush, Cardinal, Lark, Pheasant. You see, the first American home of John James Audubon, built in 1763, sits only a mile down the road.
Ten homes sit along Owl Road, each on a half-acre lot. Developers today would put 20 or 30 up. Of course right now nothing is going up anywhere, except “For Sale” signs. Not on Owl Road, though. Like I said, folks here are resilient. It’s probably 17, 18 years since someone new moved to Owl Road. That’s not counting the very quiet, almost invisible black man, Ben, who rents at one end of the street. A Mexican family moved in around the corner a couple of years ago. A small shrine to the Virgin Mary, with a mound of stones, pinwheels and a concrete statue sits square in the middle of their front yard, lit at night by two small spotlights. Soon as they moved in with their flaming red pickup the guy to their left planted a “For Sale” sign in the middle of his front yard.
On Owl Road today live a couple of widows, couple of grandparents, a divorced fortysomething father, a husband and wife who own a barbershop in the mall, an office products sales manager, a programmer for a defense contractor. Then there’s me. I write and edit from my home office, that sagging carport long ago enclosed. Right off of the kitchen, the office has been operational since 2002.
Owl Road provides the solitude for sustained concentration. Neighbors keep to themselves. If a police car drives by it’s unusual. Houses are sealed tight, central air in the summer, so you hear nothing, really. Even the youngest kids are in middle school or high school now.
One topic that does draw the neighbors out some, at least the moms, has to do with the notion of how much damage has been inflicted on the kids by growing up in the dwarf houses of Owl Road. Any number of their friends in this sprawling school district of ours live up in the developments where the sidewalks have no end, and no purpose, really. In the far reaches of the district, there are brick castles that would not be out of place in Beverly Hills or Bel Air.
It can be tricky talking to eight-year-olds about materialism. They are already consumers, of course, they just don't know it. Only a few times over the years have I heard Kate and Steve complain about living in confined quarters. Mostly when they were denied a sleepover because “there’s just not enough room; we’re all on the same floor and the TV will be too loud.”
Somehow they’ve managed. How their parents did is another story.
Now after 23 years the kids are pretty much up and out. That storm door has been replaced once. Maybe. Gutter guards never have been replaced. Never worked in the first place. I planted a pine sapling out back that Osborne gave me; the thing is now a good 30 feet high. Got two dogs, a five-pound thing with one eye, and a 50-pound cross between a polar bear with white fur and black, blank eyes, and a wolf. Don’t believe it’s a dog at all. We keep the grounds trim enough to avoid being shunned by the neighbors.
Solving the world's problems
“Look at Randy over there putting clothes on the line. He’s been trained good. Hey, Randy, man, you are trained.”
From across the backyards: “Heh, heh.” Randy’s loud even chuckling to himself. He’s wearing shorts, a yellow tank top and leather high-top work boots. He’s a builder. Don’t know how much building he’s doing these days. Which might explain why he’s hanging wash.
It’s Suze’s birthday. It’s also 70 degrees in the sun this afternoon. Such is March. I had to get outside, so I went to bust up twigs and shove them into Home Depot bags. The branches, accumulated winter debris, are nested in and piled up above our cinder block fireplace, what remains of it, which sits alone in our half-acre backyard. We live atop what once was a pig farm and has been known for decades as “Birdland” (Owl Road, Lark Lane, Pheasant, Thrush, Sparrow… it is part of Audubon, Pennsylvania, after all, with John James’s first home in America, 1762, a mile down Pawlings Road). In 1955, a developer built 1,000-square foot stucco Cape Cod and ranch houses with carports and large living room picture windows on half-acre lots; each had a fireplace on a cement pad in the back. Ours is the only one left. We were also the last to enclose the carport. Now a developer would put 2,400-square-foot boxy moving cartons, no windows on the sides, on lots half our size. Actually, with no buyers, no lending and no construction these days, the pigs would still rule.
“Hey Dominic.”
“Hi Dave.”
Dom ambles over from his driveway. (Two things I’ve always liked about Birdland: few fences and no sidewalks.) Appears he neeed to get out of the house as much as I did. We’ve been neighbors for a quarter century, 26 years this Labor Day. Dom and Loretta, his wife, are one of a handful of neighbors who have lived in Birdland since the beginning. Tina and Allen across the street. Helen next door on the other side from Dom. He’s been retired as long as I’ve known him, permanent disability after a heart attack almost finished him in his early 50s.
“How was Kentucky?”
“You know what, it’s boring down there.”
I haven’t talked with Dom up close all winter. Haven’t talked with him at any length in several years. He’s older, frailer, voice huskier, skin whiter, slower walk, a kind of hunched shuffle. He’s been put through it. Close calls with his ticker, clogged arteries, emergency trips to hospitals. Rode a helivac to a downtown hospital once. Lost his first wife to cancer, and his first son Donald only a day old. His sweet daughter Lori lives not far in a home for the mentally disabled. Dom must be pushing 80 now. He’s the dapper little Italian today, with black slacks, black and gray shirt, and black sports coat. A slight man with thinning hair, large ears, and a large, crooked nose. Big heart, glint in the eye, wide grin. Tough. Carries old-time Norristown prejudices he voices without giving them a thought. Excellent cook. Hard worker around the house. Always pushing it, worrying Loretta. He’s not pushing it like he used to, nowadays.
“What’da people do down there, anyway?”
“You know old ma and pa on the front porch? Just sittin’. That’s about what they do. My sister-in-law hates it down there. Her husband wanted to move out of Orlando because, you know, it was getting too crowded. So they moved to the wilds. They like it. Or he likes it.”
“Can’t imagine a lot of jobs there.”
“No. There’s a Corvette plant near. But not much. It’s mostly farming.”
He says “Corvette plant,” something hard for me to picture. They still roll out ‘vettes in the states? I think of Dodge Chargers, Gran Torinos, Mustangs, eight-cylinder, 351-cubic-inch engines, muscle cars to go with a pumped-up mid-century America, Ali in his prime, Gunsmoke, Mercury and Apollo programs, steel mills, the Big Three networks, the Big Three car companies, union rule, cheap gas. My kids call it the black and white days, before color came to TV.
“So, what’da think, Dom, we gonna come out of this recession?”
Dom frowns, shifts his feet, looks down at the grass clumps starting to sprout, and shakes his head.
“I don’t think so. This guy (Barack Obama) is just throwing our money away. It’s bad. And our kids, like your Kate or my grandkids, what are they going to do?”
“Dante (his son) has three boys, right?”
“That’s right. Dominic is getting out this year. Wants to teach fourth grade. But he fooled around beginning of this year and has to go to summer school to get credentialed. Benny is two years behind him at Del Valley up in Doylestown, taking turf building.” Dom pauses. Smiles. “Then there’s Chris. He’s 12. He wants to go to Yale,” Dom says with emphasis.
“A brain, huh?”
“Oh yeah, he’s smart. But his dad’s going to pay for Yale?” Dom shakes his head, looks up at the rich blue sky and cloud puffs, and laughs.
“I don’t see things getting back to where they were,” I say. “I’m as bad as anybody, just spent and spent, never thought about it. Took a lot great vacations. Now… it’s something how fast you can turnaround and look at thing so differently.”
“I think it’s going to get worse,” says Dom. “People aren’t going to be able to get jobs. Some may be able to buy a house, but are you going to be able to meet the monthly mortgage? There are going to be people out on the street.”
“Watch out. Then you hear people talking about riots and marches.”
“I remember coming out of the depression, in ’36 and ’37. It was bad. People trying to sell you all kinds of stuff. Everything. Just to make a little. Come dinner time people’d come over and try to get something to eat. I mean, a lot people were barely making it.”
“In Norristown?”
“Yeah.”
Norristown is a half-empty, dangerously poor shell of its former self, a lively county seat in the first half of the 1900s. A mural on a brick wall in town says, “History reborn,” but it’s faded and peeling.
“How’d your family make out?”
“My dad, he managed to keep food on the table for us. We did alright.”
“He’d have to hustle? Different jobs?”
“He worked for Lee Mills. He was a machine operator. He did alright. Then, you know, they moved. To North Carolina. He lost his pension.”
“How’s that?”
“They said they were moving and he had to move or lose his pension. He was 61. You know Helen moved down there until she retired.”
Helen’s husband Louie, who was disable by a stroke before we moved in, spent those days in Carolina watching Braves’ games and walking the dog. A real gentle man, Louis was.
“Suze heard somebody on the radio yesterday say fairness has been thrown out the window.”
“Was a long time ago. Happened to my dad 50, 60 years ago. Happened to me, too. I was working in a sweater mill in Lansdale. I was ready to leave. It was a good business, they were selling sweaters all over the country. Jewish family owned it. But I could see it ending. Then they said, ‘Oh, Dom, we’ve got plans for you. You can’t leave.’ So stupid me, I stayed. Then two months later my supervisor comes to me, ‘Dom, I got something to tell you.’ I said, ‘Don’t even tell me. You’re doing me a favor.’ He was crying, feeling bad he had to let me go. I wanted to leave. I wasn’t going anywhere there. Mill’s been gone a long time.”
“There aren’t even mills down south anymore.”
“No, they’re in Mexico.”
“A lot of people are getting screwed.”
“It’s not right for our kids. We’re leaving a mess.”
“Where’s Dante work?”
“He works for the sewer authority.”
“That sounds safe.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty good. It’s like at the courthouse. Once you’re in, you’re in. How’s your business?”
“Publishing, it’s like you at the mill. It’s not going anyplace. It’s going down. Advertising will never be like it used to. You know, it’s all going to the Internet. I was talking to an advertiser this morning. Sales manager asked me, ‘You talk to a lot of people. Do you see anybody who’s… doing normal?’ I said, ‘In a word, no.’ President of this company, they make gloves, says, ‘I know the recession will be over when we get back to sales levels what they were before the first two weeks of last October. That’s when we started to go off the cliff.’ We’re not gonna get back to those old times, I don’t think.”
“You gotta be worried,” Dom says, looking straight at me. “Newspapers are folding all the time. I used to get the Times-Herald four or five times a week. Now, I’m not going to pay seventy-five cents for something this thin.” He holds his thumb and forefinger together. “All I get it for is the obituaries.”
“Well I’m in too long to get out. I would if I was younger and didn’t have this.” I motion back to our rancher, with the enclosed carport that turned into my office and in addition in the back to give us more breathing room from the kids.
“Yeah, you got too much time…”
“It’s something how publishing’s changed. I did a job on a newsletter on the side not long ago. This company, down in Virginia Beach that’s doing the newsletter, they used to have their own designers. Well, they laid ‘em all off.”
“Sure, they didn’t want to spend the money.”
“So they shipped out the design to the Philippines. They sent me the first draft of the newsletter, I looked at it. It was all wrong. Like they did it backwards. I said, ‘This looks like it was done by someone who never saw a newsletter before.’ They said, ‘You’re probably right’.”
“Yeah, they don’t have proofreaders anymore. Don’t want to pay for them either,” says Dom. He’s evidently given more thought to publishing than I ever would have given him credit for.
“You’re right. I got the final newsletter emailed to me today. There was a typo right on the first page.”
“People won’t notice. They’ll go right by.”
“You’re right. It’s like everyone’s ADD or something. Nobody concentrates on anything. Driving around with cell phones stuck in their ear all day.”
Dom smiles. “Well, I guess I better be getting back.”
“Yeah, I gotta take these bags out front. See you, Dom.”
“See you.”
From across the backyards: “Heh, heh.” Randy’s loud even chuckling to himself. He’s wearing shorts, a yellow tank top and leather high-top work boots. He’s a builder. Don’t know how much building he’s doing these days. Which might explain why he’s hanging wash.
It’s Suze’s birthday. It’s also 70 degrees in the sun this afternoon. Such is March. I had to get outside, so I went to bust up twigs and shove them into Home Depot bags. The branches, accumulated winter debris, are nested in and piled up above our cinder block fireplace, what remains of it, which sits alone in our half-acre backyard. We live atop what once was a pig farm and has been known for decades as “Birdland” (Owl Road, Lark Lane, Pheasant, Thrush, Sparrow… it is part of Audubon, Pennsylvania, after all, with John James’s first home in America, 1762, a mile down Pawlings Road). In 1955, a developer built 1,000-square foot stucco Cape Cod and ranch houses with carports and large living room picture windows on half-acre lots; each had a fireplace on a cement pad in the back. Ours is the only one left. We were also the last to enclose the carport. Now a developer would put 2,400-square-foot boxy moving cartons, no windows on the sides, on lots half our size. Actually, with no buyers, no lending and no construction these days, the pigs would still rule.
“Hey Dominic.”
“Hi Dave.”
Dom ambles over from his driveway. (Two things I’ve always liked about Birdland: few fences and no sidewalks.) Appears he neeed to get out of the house as much as I did. We’ve been neighbors for a quarter century, 26 years this Labor Day. Dom and Loretta, his wife, are one of a handful of neighbors who have lived in Birdland since the beginning. Tina and Allen across the street. Helen next door on the other side from Dom. He’s been retired as long as I’ve known him, permanent disability after a heart attack almost finished him in his early 50s.
“How was Kentucky?”
“You know what, it’s boring down there.”
I haven’t talked with Dom up close all winter. Haven’t talked with him at any length in several years. He’s older, frailer, voice huskier, skin whiter, slower walk, a kind of hunched shuffle. He’s been put through it. Close calls with his ticker, clogged arteries, emergency trips to hospitals. Rode a helivac to a downtown hospital once. Lost his first wife to cancer, and his first son Donald only a day old. His sweet daughter Lori lives not far in a home for the mentally disabled. Dom must be pushing 80 now. He’s the dapper little Italian today, with black slacks, black and gray shirt, and black sports coat. A slight man with thinning hair, large ears, and a large, crooked nose. Big heart, glint in the eye, wide grin. Tough. Carries old-time Norristown prejudices he voices without giving them a thought. Excellent cook. Hard worker around the house. Always pushing it, worrying Loretta. He’s not pushing it like he used to, nowadays.
“What’da people do down there, anyway?”
“You know old ma and pa on the front porch? Just sittin’. That’s about what they do. My sister-in-law hates it down there. Her husband wanted to move out of Orlando because, you know, it was getting too crowded. So they moved to the wilds. They like it. Or he likes it.”
“Can’t imagine a lot of jobs there.”
“No. There’s a Corvette plant near. But not much. It’s mostly farming.”
He says “Corvette plant,” something hard for me to picture. They still roll out ‘vettes in the states? I think of Dodge Chargers, Gran Torinos, Mustangs, eight-cylinder, 351-cubic-inch engines, muscle cars to go with a pumped-up mid-century America, Ali in his prime, Gunsmoke, Mercury and Apollo programs, steel mills, the Big Three networks, the Big Three car companies, union rule, cheap gas. My kids call it the black and white days, before color came to TV.
“So, what’da think, Dom, we gonna come out of this recession?”
Dom frowns, shifts his feet, looks down at the grass clumps starting to sprout, and shakes his head.
“I don’t think so. This guy (Barack Obama) is just throwing our money away. It’s bad. And our kids, like your Kate or my grandkids, what are they going to do?”
“Dante (his son) has three boys, right?”
“That’s right. Dominic is getting out this year. Wants to teach fourth grade. But he fooled around beginning of this year and has to go to summer school to get credentialed. Benny is two years behind him at Del Valley up in Doylestown, taking turf building.” Dom pauses. Smiles. “Then there’s Chris. He’s 12. He wants to go to Yale,” Dom says with emphasis.
“A brain, huh?”
“Oh yeah, he’s smart. But his dad’s going to pay for Yale?” Dom shakes his head, looks up at the rich blue sky and cloud puffs, and laughs.
“I don’t see things getting back to where they were,” I say. “I’m as bad as anybody, just spent and spent, never thought about it. Took a lot great vacations. Now… it’s something how fast you can turnaround and look at thing so differently.”
“I think it’s going to get worse,” says Dom. “People aren’t going to be able to get jobs. Some may be able to buy a house, but are you going to be able to meet the monthly mortgage? There are going to be people out on the street.”
“Watch out. Then you hear people talking about riots and marches.”
“I remember coming out of the depression, in ’36 and ’37. It was bad. People trying to sell you all kinds of stuff. Everything. Just to make a little. Come dinner time people’d come over and try to get something to eat. I mean, a lot people were barely making it.”
“In Norristown?”
“Yeah.”
Norristown is a half-empty, dangerously poor shell of its former self, a lively county seat in the first half of the 1900s. A mural on a brick wall in town says, “History reborn,” but it’s faded and peeling.
“How’d your family make out?”
“My dad, he managed to keep food on the table for us. We did alright.”
“He’d have to hustle? Different jobs?”
“He worked for Lee Mills. He was a machine operator. He did alright. Then, you know, they moved. To North Carolina. He lost his pension.”
“How’s that?”
“They said they were moving and he had to move or lose his pension. He was 61. You know Helen moved down there until she retired.”
Helen’s husband Louie, who was disable by a stroke before we moved in, spent those days in Carolina watching Braves’ games and walking the dog. A real gentle man, Louis was.
“Suze heard somebody on the radio yesterday say fairness has been thrown out the window.”
“Was a long time ago. Happened to my dad 50, 60 years ago. Happened to me, too. I was working in a sweater mill in Lansdale. I was ready to leave. It was a good business, they were selling sweaters all over the country. Jewish family owned it. But I could see it ending. Then they said, ‘Oh, Dom, we’ve got plans for you. You can’t leave.’ So stupid me, I stayed. Then two months later my supervisor comes to me, ‘Dom, I got something to tell you.’ I said, ‘Don’t even tell me. You’re doing me a favor.’ He was crying, feeling bad he had to let me go. I wanted to leave. I wasn’t going anywhere there. Mill’s been gone a long time.”
“There aren’t even mills down south anymore.”
“No, they’re in Mexico.”
“A lot of people are getting screwed.”
“It’s not right for our kids. We’re leaving a mess.”
“Where’s Dante work?”
“He works for the sewer authority.”
“That sounds safe.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty good. It’s like at the courthouse. Once you’re in, you’re in. How’s your business?”
“Publishing, it’s like you at the mill. It’s not going anyplace. It’s going down. Advertising will never be like it used to. You know, it’s all going to the Internet. I was talking to an advertiser this morning. Sales manager asked me, ‘You talk to a lot of people. Do you see anybody who’s… doing normal?’ I said, ‘In a word, no.’ President of this company, they make gloves, says, ‘I know the recession will be over when we get back to sales levels what they were before the first two weeks of last October. That’s when we started to go off the cliff.’ We’re not gonna get back to those old times, I don’t think.”
“You gotta be worried,” Dom says, looking straight at me. “Newspapers are folding all the time. I used to get the Times-Herald four or five times a week. Now, I’m not going to pay seventy-five cents for something this thin.” He holds his thumb and forefinger together. “All I get it for is the obituaries.”
“Well I’m in too long to get out. I would if I was younger and didn’t have this.” I motion back to our rancher, with the enclosed carport that turned into my office and in addition in the back to give us more breathing room from the kids.
“Yeah, you got too much time…”
“It’s something how publishing’s changed. I did a job on a newsletter on the side not long ago. This company, down in Virginia Beach that’s doing the newsletter, they used to have their own designers. Well, they laid ‘em all off.”
“Sure, they didn’t want to spend the money.”
“So they shipped out the design to the Philippines. They sent me the first draft of the newsletter, I looked at it. It was all wrong. Like they did it backwards. I said, ‘This looks like it was done by someone who never saw a newsletter before.’ They said, ‘You’re probably right’.”
“Yeah, they don’t have proofreaders anymore. Don’t want to pay for them either,” says Dom. He’s evidently given more thought to publishing than I ever would have given him credit for.
“You’re right. I got the final newsletter emailed to me today. There was a typo right on the first page.”
“People won’t notice. They’ll go right by.”
“You’re right. It’s like everyone’s ADD or something. Nobody concentrates on anything. Driving around with cell phones stuck in their ear all day.”
Dom smiles. “Well, I guess I better be getting back.”
“Yeah, I gotta take these bags out front. See you, Dom.”
“See you.”
Friday, May 1, 2009
Welcome to New York bleepin' City
Father and son spend six hours in the city of eight million stories
Hanging from the awning of a cramped clothes shop on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village is this black tee shirt with white block lettering across the chest: “New York Fuckin’ City.” It caught my eye and the closer we (Steve, my 17-year-old son and I) got to it the more I wanted to buy it. It sums up the city in a word. You won’t find a “Los Fuckin’ Angeles” tee shirt or a “Fort Worth Fuckin’ Dallas” tee shirt or a “Phila-fuckin’-delphia” tee, a “Washington Fuckin’ DC” tee or even a “Las Fuckin’ Vegas” or “New Fuckin’ Orleans” tee. And those last two towns are harsh, sleezy and slimy. What “fuckin” means to me in the sense of a metropolitan area is this: New York is the most emphatic city in the country. No doubt. It comes down hard on you. The natives talk loud, talk fast, emphatically, assertively, declaratively. They don’t much care what you happen to think. In other words, they’re fuckin’ edgy, opinionated people.
Then I thought, no, I can’t buy this shirt. First, I couldn’t wear to the mall, to the Y or to Barnes & Noble, or to mow my lawn. And then, what message am I sending my kids? I don’t particularly like them dropping the f-bomb in the house. Finally, I’m 54 years old — today — and a rebellious adolescent is still down deep somewhere, but the neighbors don’t need to know. Of course they’d shun me out of the ‘hood when I walked the dogs ‘round the block with a “New York Fuckin’ City” tee shirt on.
So we walked past the tee. We were searching for a CD store in the Village. If there was a vintage CD shop to be found anywhere, it had to be in the Village. But we had no luck and were wandering around aimlessly. At the NYU bookstore I asked a coed wearing NYU purple behind the cash register if she knew a CD store nearby. After a prolonged silence it seemed evident I was some old archeologist to her on an expedition irrelevant to her world. She was at a loss what to say. Steve was getting impatient with this expedition, I could tell. On East Fourth Street I ducked into Rivington Guitars, “NYC’s Best Little Guitar Store,” figuring if anyone knew where a CD store could be found, it would be musicians. This fellow Howie by the door shakes his head. “They’re all gone. Used to be two across the street, they closed.” That’s what I was afraid of. I have a four- or five-year-old street guide that lists CD stores on St. Mark’s like Mondo Kim’s and St. Mark’s Sounds. Gone. Then he says: “Wait. There’s Rainbow CDs over on First Avenue by Eighth Street. Go down Fourth to First Avenue, turn left, go four blocks and it’s across the street. Tell ‘em I sent you. They’re good guys.”
Rainbow Music 2002 Ltd. must be where all CDs go to die. A tiny, narrow slip of a shop, you can’t open the front door fully without hitting the first floor-to-ceiling tottering stack of random CDs. Rainbow is only 15-20 feet wide. Perhaps, what, ten thousand CDs could be inside. It’s impossible to guess. Along the sidewalls, which extend to the back 40 or 50 feet, piles of CDs climb until the top ones are jammed right beneath the ceiling. Four or five people were in the store and we had to turn sideways to slip past each other, like walking through a submarine. I’m knocking CD jewel cases to the floor, and that’s even after I took off my backpack. Steve seems mortified. This CD junkyard or graveyard is as far from his orderly world of iTunes as could be.
Rainbow Music, mess that it is, would seem to be under the ownership of a three-year-old, or a couple of college dorm mates. But no, Mel, the wizen, stooped proprietor, greets every customer coming through the door the same way: “Hi. Whatcha interested in? I got country along the side here. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash. Got blues in the back. You like blues? Jazz along that wall. You like jazz? Art Pepper? Got a lot of Art Pepper back there. You like African? Gotta lot rap, you probably don’t like rap,” he says to me. Actually, I like steel guitar players, I say. Got any? Mel looks at me blankly. Maybe in the back with the blues.
Mel cannot stop gabbing. Used to be 20 CD stores in the neighborhood, now it’s down to his and one other. He’s getting flooded with CDs coming in almost every day from Wall Street guys selling their CDs for a couple of bucks because they can’t afford their 5,000-square-foot homes. Mel played Wall Street since he was 12, 13, if I’m to believe him. Now stock prices are coming back to what they were when he started, Mel grins. But he’s doing all right, he says, has stock in food and pharmaceuticals. People still got to eat, got to take their meds in this recession. I ask him if he thinks the economy will ever be what it used to be. The economy will come back he says. But it will never be like it used to be. Of that he seems certain. “There are more than 80 stores closed around here,” he says. “Too many of ‘em were selling the same thing.”
“What do you do?” he asks me. “I’m a writer, a journalist,” I tell him while I’m down on my knees, craning my neck to read CDs on the floor. “Newspapers… Jesus,” Mel just about moans. “I remember when newspapers used to be cash cows. Can’t believe what’s happened to newspapers.”
Steve seems, no, it’s clear, he’s ready to bolt this cramped chaos of CDs where you could easily spend an afternoon trying to find titles, what with CDs upside down, sideward, on the floor, up to the ceiling, stacks blocking other stacks, stuff in boxes. The whole place seems a house of CD cards ready to collapse. As we check out, you hardly see Mel ringing up the sale. He’s hidden behind a wall of CDs on the counter. There’s but a small opening to see his head and hear his constant patter. Behind me a young man and woman speaking German try out CDs on an old boom box. I’m blocking the front door from people who want to come in. “That guy, he’s a good customer of mine. Comes all the time,” says Mel. But they open the door and see us jammed by the cash register, like elevator doors opening and finding no place to slide in. “Pretty soon it will start getting busy,” Mel says. Friday night. After the workweek guys like to go out drinking, and once suitably buzzed, they come into the Rainbow for impulse buys. “I’m open seven days a week, twelve to ten on Sunday and Tuesdays, twelve to eleven Wednesday and Thursday, twelve to nine on Monday” Mel tells me. “Friday and Saturday it’s twelve to twelve.”
OK, NYC is obviously so vast I have no idea where we are when we step outside Rainbow Music. The cabbies are your guides, unless you’re a city regular or can decipher the subway numbering and lettering system and navigate the maze of tunnels, stairs and turnstiles. We are somewhere down in the Village, in a neighborhood I haven’t been to before. But all one needs to get around the Big City is a destination. We hop in a cab, say, “Pennsylvania Station,” and we’re off, watching the small TV monitor with grainy newscasters and rolling headline text. With luck we’ll catch the 5:39 p.m. to Philadelphia. These screens are embedded in the back of the cab’s front seat. It’s been years since I took a cab in New York, and they weren’t wired like this. I rely on Steve to push the touch-screen buttons and read about Tiger Woods muddling through the second round of the Masters. Simultaneously, video shows a lost whale somehow turned around in the Hudson River and making its way back to the ocean.
Earlier in the day, after a tour of Madison Square Garden and a peek inside the Knicks and Rangers’ locker rooms and standing cramped in a super suite with other tourists, mostly foreigners, watching — the last thing I expected — the grand finale of the Ringling Brothers Good Friday matinee performance complete with the train of 16 elephants trundling out the tunnel along with the tumbling clowns and acrobats and trapeze artists, the elephants coming to a lumbering halt with each raising a front leg and placing it on the back of the elephant in front, after the loud crescendo of the live band and the ringmaster concluding, “Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you, thank you very much,” Steve and I got in cab to find a spot to eat lunch. “Steve,” I said, “there are few things weirder than seeing 16 elephants in a room, I don’t care how big the room is. Elephants aren’t meant to be indoors.” Sure enough, protesters outside the Garden hold posters claiming the circus kills baby elephants. “Wait a minute,” a mother tells her young daughter, “I want to ask a question,” she says, pointing to a protester.
A foreign cabbie, perhaps from Eastern Europe, looks at me blankly when I ask if he knows where The Mean Fiddler sports bar is on the Upper East Side. OK, how about Mickey Mantle’s sports bar? I might as well been chewing a huge wad of bubble gum my mouth. He can’t make sense of me. How can anyone drive a cab in New York and not know Mickey Mantle? OK, just drop us at 57th and Madison and we’ll wing it. I had written the address of The Mean Fiddler and Mantle’s and other spots to hit from Internet searches I had Googled this morning before we took the 10:37 a.m. Acela up from Philadelphia, but damn, the paper slipped out my back pocket somewhere.
We wandered 57th Street heading west not knowing what we were after, and came upon Shelley’s Tradizionale Ristorante di Pesce; it seemed as suitable as anything. Steve took a look around and asked, “Isn’t this a little fancy for us?” The maître d was dress in an impeccable suit and crisp tie, hair greased, the tables were draped with thick white linens, ten-foot mirrors lined the walls, chandeliers hung from the high ceiling, but what the hell, they had hamburgers on the menu. At the table to our right two overweight young women talked about Florida, Palm Beach, the former FedEx chairman who has a plane and a hanger on his property somewhere, just like John Travolta, one of the woman said. Yeah Steve, we are a bit out of our depth here. Two tables to our right slouched a thin, red-haired, middle-aged woman by herself, who kept eyeing her Blackberry for messages at least several times every minute.
We have better luck with a knowledgeable cabbie who drove us from uptown to NYU. Konte from Mali. Came to New York to live with an uncle after graduating from high school. He is two semesters away from getting his degree in finance and investment from Baruch College. He absolutely hates driving a cab, which he’s been doing for four months. “Too risky, too much risk,” he says. He starts in on his arch nemesis, the bus driver. “This I don’t understand. The buses, they go where they want. They block me. They go across lanes. A bus runs a red light, the police do nothing. I run a red light, I get a $350 ticket. I stay away from the buses. Too big. Once a bus smashed my window.”
Today Konte’s been driving since three in the morning. It’s now past three in the afternoon. Yesterday a passenger puked in his backseat. Couple of days ago he got tricked into pulling over to pick up a young girl in front of a restaurant at night. He stopped his cab, the girl disappeared, and four very, very large men squeezed in. “Any one of them could’ve eaten me. Eaten me,” Konte says. They want to go to Brooklyn. Konte says he is not moving, not taking them anywhere. “But you have to, it’s the law,” they say. “I will call the police,” says Konte. “See, over there, the police. Get out. Get out of my cab now.”
I knock on the Plexiglas panels that shield Konte from the rear and right side passenger seat. “Don’t these protect you?” He laughs. “These, these mean nothing to some of the bad people I pick up. Sometimes I drop them off in places I don’t even want to wait to get the fare. I just want to get out of there. Too much risk. This job, too risky.” Not long ago Konte picked up two young women, so gorgeous that if he met them on the street, he said he’d be too embarrassed to talk to them. The beautiful girls wanted to go to Brooklyn. “I don’t know Brooklyn well,” says Konte. “That’s all right, we’ll guide you,” say the girls. They get to where they want in Brooklyn, a $40 fare plus tolls. The girls open the doors and dash down the street. Konte wants to run after them, grab their purses and get his fare. But he remembers what his uncle told him. Do something like that and the girls will say you were trying to rob them. The media, the police, who do you think they will believe? Konte tells a story of a cabbie who took a man and four girls to the Staten Island Ferry. The girls skipped out, too, running away. The guy, who maybe picked the girls up in a bar, ran after them to get his fare money. The cabbie ran after the guy, thinking he was the one who should pay. They got into a fistfight. Two months later, the guy, the customer, is still in a coma. The cabbie, he lost his job.
“What about your good customers?” I ask Konte. “What are they like?” Ah, the rest of the story. “Ninety percent of my customers are good people,” says Konte. “They ask about my life, tell me about their life, they encourage me to keep studying. They talk. Only ten percent are bad people. This is a good country. People can be nice, very nice.”
Before Konte drops us off by Washington Square he mentions a shooting that happened a few blocks away a few weeks ago. “You know, everybody in this town has a story,” I say to Steve after we get out of Konte’s cab. “Yeah, even if you don’t want to hear it,” Steve says.
Steve and I make our way across Washington Square, buzzing with students and neighbors on this cloudy, mild early April day, a day to be outside. The cherry blossoms are a wild riot of white, along with the striking yellow Forsythia. Bare trees are just starting to show a tinge of light green. “I don’t think I’d want to go to a city school,” says Steve. “You can’t get away. It’s not relaxing.” No, you don’t come to New York to unwind. “I know one thing,” I say. “My idea of four years at a college is not sitting around talking about who got shot a couple of blocks away.” New York Fuckin’ City indeed.
Hanging from the awning of a cramped clothes shop on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village is this black tee shirt with white block lettering across the chest: “New York Fuckin’ City.” It caught my eye and the closer we (Steve, my 17-year-old son and I) got to it the more I wanted to buy it. It sums up the city in a word. You won’t find a “Los Fuckin’ Angeles” tee shirt or a “Fort Worth Fuckin’ Dallas” tee shirt or a “Phila-fuckin’-delphia” tee, a “Washington Fuckin’ DC” tee or even a “Las Fuckin’ Vegas” or “New Fuckin’ Orleans” tee. And those last two towns are harsh, sleezy and slimy. What “fuckin” means to me in the sense of a metropolitan area is this: New York is the most emphatic city in the country. No doubt. It comes down hard on you. The natives talk loud, talk fast, emphatically, assertively, declaratively. They don’t much care what you happen to think. In other words, they’re fuckin’ edgy, opinionated people.
Then I thought, no, I can’t buy this shirt. First, I couldn’t wear to the mall, to the Y or to Barnes & Noble, or to mow my lawn. And then, what message am I sending my kids? I don’t particularly like them dropping the f-bomb in the house. Finally, I’m 54 years old — today — and a rebellious adolescent is still down deep somewhere, but the neighbors don’t need to know. Of course they’d shun me out of the ‘hood when I walked the dogs ‘round the block with a “New York Fuckin’ City” tee shirt on.
So we walked past the tee. We were searching for a CD store in the Village. If there was a vintage CD shop to be found anywhere, it had to be in the Village. But we had no luck and were wandering around aimlessly. At the NYU bookstore I asked a coed wearing NYU purple behind the cash register if she knew a CD store nearby. After a prolonged silence it seemed evident I was some old archeologist to her on an expedition irrelevant to her world. She was at a loss what to say. Steve was getting impatient with this expedition, I could tell. On East Fourth Street I ducked into Rivington Guitars, “NYC’s Best Little Guitar Store,” figuring if anyone knew where a CD store could be found, it would be musicians. This fellow Howie by the door shakes his head. “They’re all gone. Used to be two across the street, they closed.” That’s what I was afraid of. I have a four- or five-year-old street guide that lists CD stores on St. Mark’s like Mondo Kim’s and St. Mark’s Sounds. Gone. Then he says: “Wait. There’s Rainbow CDs over on First Avenue by Eighth Street. Go down Fourth to First Avenue, turn left, go four blocks and it’s across the street. Tell ‘em I sent you. They’re good guys.”
Rainbow Music 2002 Ltd. must be where all CDs go to die. A tiny, narrow slip of a shop, you can’t open the front door fully without hitting the first floor-to-ceiling tottering stack of random CDs. Rainbow is only 15-20 feet wide. Perhaps, what, ten thousand CDs could be inside. It’s impossible to guess. Along the sidewalls, which extend to the back 40 or 50 feet, piles of CDs climb until the top ones are jammed right beneath the ceiling. Four or five people were in the store and we had to turn sideways to slip past each other, like walking through a submarine. I’m knocking CD jewel cases to the floor, and that’s even after I took off my backpack. Steve seems mortified. This CD junkyard or graveyard is as far from his orderly world of iTunes as could be.
Rainbow Music, mess that it is, would seem to be under the ownership of a three-year-old, or a couple of college dorm mates. But no, Mel, the wizen, stooped proprietor, greets every customer coming through the door the same way: “Hi. Whatcha interested in? I got country along the side here. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash. Got blues in the back. You like blues? Jazz along that wall. You like jazz? Art Pepper? Got a lot of Art Pepper back there. You like African? Gotta lot rap, you probably don’t like rap,” he says to me. Actually, I like steel guitar players, I say. Got any? Mel looks at me blankly. Maybe in the back with the blues.
Mel cannot stop gabbing. Used to be 20 CD stores in the neighborhood, now it’s down to his and one other. He’s getting flooded with CDs coming in almost every day from Wall Street guys selling their CDs for a couple of bucks because they can’t afford their 5,000-square-foot homes. Mel played Wall Street since he was 12, 13, if I’m to believe him. Now stock prices are coming back to what they were when he started, Mel grins. But he’s doing all right, he says, has stock in food and pharmaceuticals. People still got to eat, got to take their meds in this recession. I ask him if he thinks the economy will ever be what it used to be. The economy will come back he says. But it will never be like it used to be. Of that he seems certain. “There are more than 80 stores closed around here,” he says. “Too many of ‘em were selling the same thing.”
“What do you do?” he asks me. “I’m a writer, a journalist,” I tell him while I’m down on my knees, craning my neck to read CDs on the floor. “Newspapers… Jesus,” Mel just about moans. “I remember when newspapers used to be cash cows. Can’t believe what’s happened to newspapers.”
Steve seems, no, it’s clear, he’s ready to bolt this cramped chaos of CDs where you could easily spend an afternoon trying to find titles, what with CDs upside down, sideward, on the floor, up to the ceiling, stacks blocking other stacks, stuff in boxes. The whole place seems a house of CD cards ready to collapse. As we check out, you hardly see Mel ringing up the sale. He’s hidden behind a wall of CDs on the counter. There’s but a small opening to see his head and hear his constant patter. Behind me a young man and woman speaking German try out CDs on an old boom box. I’m blocking the front door from people who want to come in. “That guy, he’s a good customer of mine. Comes all the time,” says Mel. But they open the door and see us jammed by the cash register, like elevator doors opening and finding no place to slide in. “Pretty soon it will start getting busy,” Mel says. Friday night. After the workweek guys like to go out drinking, and once suitably buzzed, they come into the Rainbow for impulse buys. “I’m open seven days a week, twelve to ten on Sunday and Tuesdays, twelve to eleven Wednesday and Thursday, twelve to nine on Monday” Mel tells me. “Friday and Saturday it’s twelve to twelve.”
OK, NYC is obviously so vast I have no idea where we are when we step outside Rainbow Music. The cabbies are your guides, unless you’re a city regular or can decipher the subway numbering and lettering system and navigate the maze of tunnels, stairs and turnstiles. We are somewhere down in the Village, in a neighborhood I haven’t been to before. But all one needs to get around the Big City is a destination. We hop in a cab, say, “Pennsylvania Station,” and we’re off, watching the small TV monitor with grainy newscasters and rolling headline text. With luck we’ll catch the 5:39 p.m. to Philadelphia. These screens are embedded in the back of the cab’s front seat. It’s been years since I took a cab in New York, and they weren’t wired like this. I rely on Steve to push the touch-screen buttons and read about Tiger Woods muddling through the second round of the Masters. Simultaneously, video shows a lost whale somehow turned around in the Hudson River and making its way back to the ocean.
Earlier in the day, after a tour of Madison Square Garden and a peek inside the Knicks and Rangers’ locker rooms and standing cramped in a super suite with other tourists, mostly foreigners, watching — the last thing I expected — the grand finale of the Ringling Brothers Good Friday matinee performance complete with the train of 16 elephants trundling out the tunnel along with the tumbling clowns and acrobats and trapeze artists, the elephants coming to a lumbering halt with each raising a front leg and placing it on the back of the elephant in front, after the loud crescendo of the live band and the ringmaster concluding, “Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you, thank you very much,” Steve and I got in cab to find a spot to eat lunch. “Steve,” I said, “there are few things weirder than seeing 16 elephants in a room, I don’t care how big the room is. Elephants aren’t meant to be indoors.” Sure enough, protesters outside the Garden hold posters claiming the circus kills baby elephants. “Wait a minute,” a mother tells her young daughter, “I want to ask a question,” she says, pointing to a protester.
A foreign cabbie, perhaps from Eastern Europe, looks at me blankly when I ask if he knows where The Mean Fiddler sports bar is on the Upper East Side. OK, how about Mickey Mantle’s sports bar? I might as well been chewing a huge wad of bubble gum my mouth. He can’t make sense of me. How can anyone drive a cab in New York and not know Mickey Mantle? OK, just drop us at 57th and Madison and we’ll wing it. I had written the address of The Mean Fiddler and Mantle’s and other spots to hit from Internet searches I had Googled this morning before we took the 10:37 a.m. Acela up from Philadelphia, but damn, the paper slipped out my back pocket somewhere.
We wandered 57th Street heading west not knowing what we were after, and came upon Shelley’s Tradizionale Ristorante di Pesce; it seemed as suitable as anything. Steve took a look around and asked, “Isn’t this a little fancy for us?” The maître d was dress in an impeccable suit and crisp tie, hair greased, the tables were draped with thick white linens, ten-foot mirrors lined the walls, chandeliers hung from the high ceiling, but what the hell, they had hamburgers on the menu. At the table to our right two overweight young women talked about Florida, Palm Beach, the former FedEx chairman who has a plane and a hanger on his property somewhere, just like John Travolta, one of the woman said. Yeah Steve, we are a bit out of our depth here. Two tables to our right slouched a thin, red-haired, middle-aged woman by herself, who kept eyeing her Blackberry for messages at least several times every minute.
We have better luck with a knowledgeable cabbie who drove us from uptown to NYU. Konte from Mali. Came to New York to live with an uncle after graduating from high school. He is two semesters away from getting his degree in finance and investment from Baruch College. He absolutely hates driving a cab, which he’s been doing for four months. “Too risky, too much risk,” he says. He starts in on his arch nemesis, the bus driver. “This I don’t understand. The buses, they go where they want. They block me. They go across lanes. A bus runs a red light, the police do nothing. I run a red light, I get a $350 ticket. I stay away from the buses. Too big. Once a bus smashed my window.”
Today Konte’s been driving since three in the morning. It’s now past three in the afternoon. Yesterday a passenger puked in his backseat. Couple of days ago he got tricked into pulling over to pick up a young girl in front of a restaurant at night. He stopped his cab, the girl disappeared, and four very, very large men squeezed in. “Any one of them could’ve eaten me. Eaten me,” Konte says. They want to go to Brooklyn. Konte says he is not moving, not taking them anywhere. “But you have to, it’s the law,” they say. “I will call the police,” says Konte. “See, over there, the police. Get out. Get out of my cab now.”
I knock on the Plexiglas panels that shield Konte from the rear and right side passenger seat. “Don’t these protect you?” He laughs. “These, these mean nothing to some of the bad people I pick up. Sometimes I drop them off in places I don’t even want to wait to get the fare. I just want to get out of there. Too much risk. This job, too risky.” Not long ago Konte picked up two young women, so gorgeous that if he met them on the street, he said he’d be too embarrassed to talk to them. The beautiful girls wanted to go to Brooklyn. “I don’t know Brooklyn well,” says Konte. “That’s all right, we’ll guide you,” say the girls. They get to where they want in Brooklyn, a $40 fare plus tolls. The girls open the doors and dash down the street. Konte wants to run after them, grab their purses and get his fare. But he remembers what his uncle told him. Do something like that and the girls will say you were trying to rob them. The media, the police, who do you think they will believe? Konte tells a story of a cabbie who took a man and four girls to the Staten Island Ferry. The girls skipped out, too, running away. The guy, who maybe picked the girls up in a bar, ran after them to get his fare money. The cabbie ran after the guy, thinking he was the one who should pay. They got into a fistfight. Two months later, the guy, the customer, is still in a coma. The cabbie, he lost his job.
“What about your good customers?” I ask Konte. “What are they like?” Ah, the rest of the story. “Ninety percent of my customers are good people,” says Konte. “They ask about my life, tell me about their life, they encourage me to keep studying. They talk. Only ten percent are bad people. This is a good country. People can be nice, very nice.”
Before Konte drops us off by Washington Square he mentions a shooting that happened a few blocks away a few weeks ago. “You know, everybody in this town has a story,” I say to Steve after we get out of Konte’s cab. “Yeah, even if you don’t want to hear it,” Steve says.
Steve and I make our way across Washington Square, buzzing with students and neighbors on this cloudy, mild early April day, a day to be outside. The cherry blossoms are a wild riot of white, along with the striking yellow Forsythia. Bare trees are just starting to show a tinge of light green. “I don’t think I’d want to go to a city school,” says Steve. “You can’t get away. It’s not relaxing.” No, you don’t come to New York to unwind. “I know one thing,” I say. “My idea of four years at a college is not sitting around talking about who got shot a couple of blocks away.” New York Fuckin’ City indeed.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
No more papers
It’s been two to three weeks now without a paper waiting in the driveway in the morning darkness. I can’t remember a time without the daily paper, the “Inky,” the Philadelphia Inquirer. Before home delivery out here in the ‘burbs, I used to pick up an Inky every day at 30th Street Station when we lived in the city. We’re talking a daily fix for a quarter century, at least.
But what with the recession and a substantial decrease in my salary, the family accountant, my wife Suze, red-lined the $136 twice-a-year payment for the Inky. I agreed without much thought. The Inky has been backsliding for years with less original and shallower reporting. Just yesterday it filed for bankruptcy. Also, the news is so relentlessly downbeat you need some distance from it. “The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” “Millions forced from their homes.” Consumer spending down. Food spending, housing prices, the Dow, corporate earnings, all down, down, down. “The U.S. Federal Reserve said this week that the recession could last five years.” “A healthcare crisis and the planet on the brink of incineration.” This recession is absolutely accelerating the great migration from print; it certainly forced the issue in our household. Gone, too, are magazine subscriptions, one by one as they expire. Lost to attrition in the last few years have been The New Yorker, American Cinematographer, The Oxford American, The Progressive, The Sun, Newsweek, ESPN, Adbusters, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, and surely others I can’t recall.
Gone also are the days, just about every day, when I’d get a turkey or tuna sandwich at the Valley Forge Deli and with it two or three papers, usually The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Philadelphia Daily News (aka the Daily Nuisance). Last time Sean at the deli rang up The Wall Street Journal it was $2.25. Even he did an exaggerated double-take. “$2.25? Is that right? Is that what it’s up to now? You know, we only make two or three cents per paper. The papers aren’t a good business. They’re dying.”
Join the funeral procession, Sean. It’s a long line mourning the passing of papers, and to a lesser extent, at least so far, magazines. I didn’t imagine it coming to this, myself and thousands of other journalists. But I’m referring here to giving up my addiction to print. I’ve been a newspaper and magazine junkie my entire adult life. Newsstands, the old school wooden sheds and narrow stores crammed with cigars, water bottles, post cards, lottery ticket signs and the kind of quirky, in-depth variety of papers and magazines usually only found on big city street corners or in college campus towns, always have been one of my guilty pleasures. That’s where, if you’re fortunate, you’d find The Times of London, London’s Guardian and Observer, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror, the Financial Times, the weekly Variety, and expensive and often short-lived dazzling niche mags like Beach Culture (long gone) for surfers and Doubletake (long gone) for photography and essays and 4c — color, couture, curiosity, culture (which I’ve only come across in southern California). And maybe, if the racks are long and deep enough, there will be a section for small personal “zines” like Survivalism by an Iraqi vet, Four-Hundred Word, a square little digest of short non-fiction, Reality Ranch, “a forum for humor writing,” and Sufism, the issue I bought containing a letter from the editor titled, “Intention and Expectation in Pursuing a Mystical Path.”
I bought all those zines at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, which takes up an entire city block and bills itself as the world’s largest independent bookstore. I can’t tell you most hotels I stayed at or the restaurants I ate at when on the road for business or vacations, but I clearly can picture favorite newsstands in Santa Monica, Princeton, Boulder, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Toronto, Manhattan, Newark, Delaware and Penn’s campus in Philadelphia. At any airport I’d search out the nearest newsstand before coffee or checking my flight. Always purchase the local paper. Far preferable to the free, homogenized, sanitized USA Today lying in the hotel hallway in the morning. Give me local color, local columnists, classic Herb Caen, god rest his soul, in the San Francisco Chronicle and Steve Lopez in the LA Times to name two, local heroes and villains, high school sports scores, the Chicago Trib and Sun-Time’s sports pages, the Dallas Morning-Herald’s sports, the Boston Globe’s sports, exotic LA Times coverage of Malibu brush fires and show biz, The Washington Post’s political reporting, even the crap, bland papers in Vegas, Orlando and Miami. Always good for passing time in trains, planes and nights propped up on pillows in hotel rooms.
Now magazines and newspapers fall under the miscellaneous category in our suddenly scrutinized family budget, a surely bloated monthly number ripe for spending cuts. And so it’s time for print withdrawal. Surrendering the print habit is somewhat disorienting at first (Sunday mornings with time on your hands is a test), but actually easier than I would’ve thought. Which has to be another nail in the coffin of “old media” publishing, because if a dedicated addict who mainlined black ink like me can give it up almost overnight, I can’t see who wouldn’t be able to.
It’s the alternate universe of the Internet that allows the transition from print to be as painless as I’ve found it. Of course there would be no transition from print if not for the Internet’s endless offerings. I’ve simply bookmarked many of the aforementioned newspapers and magazines and click on them for a quick look-see at the end my day in front of the computer. I know more about what’s going on in the Swat Valley in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province than in my own backyard now. I’m too lazy, or my eyes are too strained by five o’clock, to look up the local papers’ web sites. And I’m not all that concerned about sewer expansion plans, another accident on Route 422, a bomb threat at a middle school or a small-time meth ring.
No doubt dropping the morning Inky has made me a less informed citizen. I have more knowledge of the fortunes of the British Premier League football team Everton than my son Steve’s Methacton High basketball conference standing. I know more about California’s budget crisis than Philadephia’s. I can delve into more detail describing to you why the Tennessee Vols’ new football coach is pissing off every Southeast Conference opponent in recruiting wars than what the Phillies manager is saying about spring training and the upcoming season. And I have no idea what times movies start at the mult-plex five minutes from my front door. Suze tells me the Oscars are on tonight. I had an inkling but that’s all. Suze listens to NPR all day and then gets 22 minutes of news read to her by Katie Couric at 6:30 in the evening. I can listen to music but not NPR speak while I work, and I can’t stomach all the drug ads that break up Katie’s teleprompter recitation.
I’ve retreated from print, but not paper. Due to the strain and uneasy ergonomics of reading more than a hundred words on the screen, I waste good timber and run through ink cartridges printing out articles to read later in the evening on a couch. The “Net enables me to come up with my own custom newspaper each day, lets me be the editor and select or censor stories. I read what I want to read. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.
But what with the recession and a substantial decrease in my salary, the family accountant, my wife Suze, red-lined the $136 twice-a-year payment for the Inky. I agreed without much thought. The Inky has been backsliding for years with less original and shallower reporting. Just yesterday it filed for bankruptcy. Also, the news is so relentlessly downbeat you need some distance from it. “The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” “Millions forced from their homes.” Consumer spending down. Food spending, housing prices, the Dow, corporate earnings, all down, down, down. “The U.S. Federal Reserve said this week that the recession could last five years.” “A healthcare crisis and the planet on the brink of incineration.” This recession is absolutely accelerating the great migration from print; it certainly forced the issue in our household. Gone, too, are magazine subscriptions, one by one as they expire. Lost to attrition in the last few years have been The New Yorker, American Cinematographer, The Oxford American, The Progressive, The Sun, Newsweek, ESPN, Adbusters, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, and surely others I can’t recall.
Gone also are the days, just about every day, when I’d get a turkey or tuna sandwich at the Valley Forge Deli and with it two or three papers, usually The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Philadelphia Daily News (aka the Daily Nuisance). Last time Sean at the deli rang up The Wall Street Journal it was $2.25. Even he did an exaggerated double-take. “$2.25? Is that right? Is that what it’s up to now? You know, we only make two or three cents per paper. The papers aren’t a good business. They’re dying.”
Join the funeral procession, Sean. It’s a long line mourning the passing of papers, and to a lesser extent, at least so far, magazines. I didn’t imagine it coming to this, myself and thousands of other journalists. But I’m referring here to giving up my addiction to print. I’ve been a newspaper and magazine junkie my entire adult life. Newsstands, the old school wooden sheds and narrow stores crammed with cigars, water bottles, post cards, lottery ticket signs and the kind of quirky, in-depth variety of papers and magazines usually only found on big city street corners or in college campus towns, always have been one of my guilty pleasures. That’s where, if you’re fortunate, you’d find The Times of London, London’s Guardian and Observer, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror, the Financial Times, the weekly Variety, and expensive and often short-lived dazzling niche mags like Beach Culture (long gone) for surfers and Doubletake (long gone) for photography and essays and 4c — color, couture, curiosity, culture (which I’ve only come across in southern California). And maybe, if the racks are long and deep enough, there will be a section for small personal “zines” like Survivalism by an Iraqi vet, Four-Hundred Word, a square little digest of short non-fiction, Reality Ranch, “a forum for humor writing,” and Sufism, the issue I bought containing a letter from the editor titled, “Intention and Expectation in Pursuing a Mystical Path.”
I bought all those zines at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, which takes up an entire city block and bills itself as the world’s largest independent bookstore. I can’t tell you most hotels I stayed at or the restaurants I ate at when on the road for business or vacations, but I clearly can picture favorite newsstands in Santa Monica, Princeton, Boulder, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Toronto, Manhattan, Newark, Delaware and Penn’s campus in Philadelphia. At any airport I’d search out the nearest newsstand before coffee or checking my flight. Always purchase the local paper. Far preferable to the free, homogenized, sanitized USA Today lying in the hotel hallway in the morning. Give me local color, local columnists, classic Herb Caen, god rest his soul, in the San Francisco Chronicle and Steve Lopez in the LA Times to name two, local heroes and villains, high school sports scores, the Chicago Trib and Sun-Time’s sports pages, the Dallas Morning-Herald’s sports, the Boston Globe’s sports, exotic LA Times coverage of Malibu brush fires and show biz, The Washington Post’s political reporting, even the crap, bland papers in Vegas, Orlando and Miami. Always good for passing time in trains, planes and nights propped up on pillows in hotel rooms.
Now magazines and newspapers fall under the miscellaneous category in our suddenly scrutinized family budget, a surely bloated monthly number ripe for spending cuts. And so it’s time for print withdrawal. Surrendering the print habit is somewhat disorienting at first (Sunday mornings with time on your hands is a test), but actually easier than I would’ve thought. Which has to be another nail in the coffin of “old media” publishing, because if a dedicated addict who mainlined black ink like me can give it up almost overnight, I can’t see who wouldn’t be able to.
It’s the alternate universe of the Internet that allows the transition from print to be as painless as I’ve found it. Of course there would be no transition from print if not for the Internet’s endless offerings. I’ve simply bookmarked many of the aforementioned newspapers and magazines and click on them for a quick look-see at the end my day in front of the computer. I know more about what’s going on in the Swat Valley in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province than in my own backyard now. I’m too lazy, or my eyes are too strained by five o’clock, to look up the local papers’ web sites. And I’m not all that concerned about sewer expansion plans, another accident on Route 422, a bomb threat at a middle school or a small-time meth ring.
No doubt dropping the morning Inky has made me a less informed citizen. I have more knowledge of the fortunes of the British Premier League football team Everton than my son Steve’s Methacton High basketball conference standing. I know more about California’s budget crisis than Philadephia’s. I can delve into more detail describing to you why the Tennessee Vols’ new football coach is pissing off every Southeast Conference opponent in recruiting wars than what the Phillies manager is saying about spring training and the upcoming season. And I have no idea what times movies start at the mult-plex five minutes from my front door. Suze tells me the Oscars are on tonight. I had an inkling but that’s all. Suze listens to NPR all day and then gets 22 minutes of news read to her by Katie Couric at 6:30 in the evening. I can listen to music but not NPR speak while I work, and I can’t stomach all the drug ads that break up Katie’s teleprompter recitation.
I’ve retreated from print, but not paper. Due to the strain and uneasy ergonomics of reading more than a hundred words on the screen, I waste good timber and run through ink cartridges printing out articles to read later in the evening on a couch. The “Net enables me to come up with my own custom newspaper each day, lets me be the editor and select or censor stories. I read what I want to read. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.
Monday, February 9, 2009
"Space Available"
There’s a stretch of Trooper Road heading north, beginning beyond the stop light off 422, past the Harley dealer’s “No Money Down” sign and the gas station abandoned years ago, where on the left-hand side alone I counted five “Space Available” real estate signs in less than a mile.
Space isn’t all that’s available these days. Many homes are available, of course, with foreclosures and owners relocating for better jobs, maybe any job. “For Sale” signs are planted on front lawns wherever you go, more than few with “Reduced Price” attached.
Shuttered and decrepit Bud’s Tavern, about two hundred years old, plaster chunks continually falling off and orange barricade fencing encircling it, is available, and has been for probably more than a year. Whippoorwill Works, Mark and Xenia’s cramped little arts and crafts shop will be available shortly. The friendly counter-culture couple fought Target and K-Mart and Wal-Mart for decades, holding on, but now with Mark sick and their kids long raised, they’re moving their framing business back home. The glass-paneled corner store of the strip mall ten paces from Mark and Xenia’s is available once again. Years ago, when the strip mall still had old man Hillman’s Hardware store, Baskin & Robbin’s ice cream was sold out of that corner space. A plant and flower shop with a German Sheperd always loose inside made a run at it for a number of years before folding. Last up was a Beltone hearing aid center, which didn’t last long at all. The far end of the strip was long anchored by an under-sized supermarket, then Rite-Aid moved in. That space is available, too. Along with one or two other storefronts along the strip.
Five-hundred-and-ninety-eight thousand people laid off from their jobs in the month of January are available for work. Most of them, anyway. Some will retire if they can. Others will sulk and put their search. According to the government, about 3.6 million people have been put out of work since the recession started officially in December, 2007. There exists now a huge pool of nervous, struggling and available workers. My wife is available to start work immediately, full or part-time. Untold numbers of stay-at-home moms like her are diving into the pool.
Pass by any automobile dealership and you see row upon row of available vehicles, especially wide-assed chrome and metal pickup trucks and hulking sport utility vehicles too long for the garage door to shut. Farm land is available to build on. More parking slots are available at the mall. More seating is available at restaurants. More seats are available on Broadway, where shows are shutting down after both long and short runs. Empty seats beckon at basketball and ice hockey games and English and Italian soccer matches. You see it every night on cable. Physicians have more hours available for appointments. So do hair stylists. Hospitals have more beds available as people put off what they don’t have to do. Almost 100 million people in this country watched Super Bowl XLIII, a record-breaking number. Why? Because, well, it was cheaper to sit home and watch the game than go to the mall or a flower show or a boat show or to dinner or a bar. Commercial time for the Super Bowl in the end was not available, sold out, because, well, it was a one-time expense and there was this enormous captive audience.
Millions of Americans feel trapped, held hostage by an exhausted, bankrupt economy with the perverse strength to tie down millions. This experience is opposite of the promise implied by all things available. Something available is something to be had. Grab it, quick, before someone else does. Of course that’s not the way it works now. The drum beats daily sounding new layoffs and salary freezes, salary cuts and businesses disappearing, factories deserted, libraries and fire departments darkened, bus and subway lines running less often. The president talks of a possible catastrophe if we don’t get our house in order, and fast.
But there are tempting deals. Off 202 a black man bundled in layers against the cold has been standing for weeks holding one sign after another, “Going out of business,” first for Linen N Things. Then for Circuit City. The latest it is for Oskar Huber, the furniture store. It hasn’t been the same black guy for the past month, I’m sure. But wrapped against the weather, stamping his feet, shaking his hands, it looks like the same guy.
A strange contrast for sure, hunkering down when so much is there for the taking. We’re not used to it, of course. For years and decades leading up to 2007 or 2008, millions of us scooped up what was available without thinking twice. Anything seemed within reach. Maybe a house at the shore. Moving up to a larger home. Enclosing the carport, finishing off the basement. Adding a basketball court. A third car. A roomier car. A Harley. A floor-to-ceiling flat screen. Flat screens for the kitchen and the bedroom. Trips, repeated trips, to Vegas and Disneyworld. Biking in Baja. Vacations to Mexico or Portugal or Greece, who knows where. A night at the Ritz. During Christmas week a few years ago we spent surprise bonus money on a family night at the Ritz-Carlton downtown. Another Christmas we blasted the heat and tested the plumbing in two newly-constructed log cabins, one for the kids and one for mom and dad, outside of cold and empty Zion National Park. A few days later we were living large at the grand Bellagio in Vegas, ice skating on a temporary rink right on the Strip. A couple of good moonlighting gigs had come my way.
I come from the Ralph Kramden School of Money Management. “You see, Alice,” the rotund Ralph would bellow with gusto and satisfaction, in his bus driver’s uniform, holding court in the middle of his bare-bones ‘50s apartment in an episode of “The Honeymooners.” “You see, when I had it, Alice, when I had it, I spent it.” Business-minded people put a lasting value on money and so they work with it differently; they stretch it, manipulate it, multiply it. For me, it’s been a way to get to Zion or Crater Lake in the winter. Santa Monica in the summer. Or to The Blue Man Group show in New York or it is the means to build the CD library my kids can’t believe in the age of iPod. This philosophical difference helps explain why my bro is skiing in Vermont this week and I’m sweating renting three movies from Blockbuster.
Ah, if we had only known. If we had seen signs of this sudden, jarring crash in business and personal fortunes coming. No bonus. A sizeable salary cut three weeks into the new year. “I just kick myself,” said a coworker a few days ago. “Thinking about what I spent money on. Now I comb every expense and I go to bed at night thinking, ‘OK, what test don’t I know about that will come next?’” Her husband, who works independently painting blue skies and puffy clouds on the ceilings of children’s bedrooms in wealthy homes along with other unique custom paint jobs, says he is booked up for February but the phone’s not ringing and he’s concerned about March. A lot of contractors and consultants and salespeople are waiting by their phones. Or calling everyone they know.
“You’ll tell me if, you know, you find out, you know, that things might get worse,” asked my coworker, full of hesitation. When you are cornered and scared you think hard about who you can trust, what you can say, and who might cause you trouble. I assured her I would. “You would do that?” asked my wife. “If you were told in confidence?” This woman and I have worked together for more than ten years. She works extraordinarily hard when she must, which is often, and she’s very talented. “Yeah, I would, “ I said. “What could happen, really? They’d never find out probably.” “They” — the owners or managers who sign the paycheck to keep you going — have morphed into inscrutable and unpredictable figures. With one hand on the TNT plunger, it seems.
Many of us haven’t the slightest idea if and when HQ will rock us with the next blunt email announcement. Next week. Next month. Who knows? If sales keep falling across almost all markets in my industry, and right now our store is $80,000 off for March billings, will the owners be able to pay off the bank loan for last year’s acquisition negotiated just after the unofficial recession became official, only no one knew it yet?
It’s impossible to predict with any confidence how deep the recession will go, how long it will last. Any sense of confidence is but a whiff. People are dropping out of jobs like Mother Nature’s victims who fell from the sky in M. Night Shyamalan’s so-called eco-thriller “The Happening.” My wife’s sister emailed Saturday that her son got laid off from an investment house where he wasn’t happy anyway; said son and his fiancé lost their jobs in a bar that closed and they have moved in with her and her husband in Roanoke “to get their life straightened out.” A brother-in-law lost his job before the holidays. Her best friend’s husband got laid off this week from a auto dealership. Her daughter’s company got bought out and there is talk of lay-offs and relocating to Minnesota. “All in all we are thankful for what we have,” she concluded, rather abruptly. Still, amen to that.
She’s got the best perspective, but one hard to hold on to. Today I drove around thinking how office space, retail space, land, houses, autos, boats, motorcycles, tickets to this concert and seats that game are all abundantly available at the moment. But in a recession, to be “available” is too often a tease and a taunt. Six months ago, three months ago, heck, maybe three weeks ago I wouldn’t have thought this way at all.
Space isn’t all that’s available these days. Many homes are available, of course, with foreclosures and owners relocating for better jobs, maybe any job. “For Sale” signs are planted on front lawns wherever you go, more than few with “Reduced Price” attached.
Shuttered and decrepit Bud’s Tavern, about two hundred years old, plaster chunks continually falling off and orange barricade fencing encircling it, is available, and has been for probably more than a year. Whippoorwill Works, Mark and Xenia’s cramped little arts and crafts shop will be available shortly. The friendly counter-culture couple fought Target and K-Mart and Wal-Mart for decades, holding on, but now with Mark sick and their kids long raised, they’re moving their framing business back home. The glass-paneled corner store of the strip mall ten paces from Mark and Xenia’s is available once again. Years ago, when the strip mall still had old man Hillman’s Hardware store, Baskin & Robbin’s ice cream was sold out of that corner space. A plant and flower shop with a German Sheperd always loose inside made a run at it for a number of years before folding. Last up was a Beltone hearing aid center, which didn’t last long at all. The far end of the strip was long anchored by an under-sized supermarket, then Rite-Aid moved in. That space is available, too. Along with one or two other storefronts along the strip.
Five-hundred-and-ninety-eight thousand people laid off from their jobs in the month of January are available for work. Most of them, anyway. Some will retire if they can. Others will sulk and put their search. According to the government, about 3.6 million people have been put out of work since the recession started officially in December, 2007. There exists now a huge pool of nervous, struggling and available workers. My wife is available to start work immediately, full or part-time. Untold numbers of stay-at-home moms like her are diving into the pool.
Pass by any automobile dealership and you see row upon row of available vehicles, especially wide-assed chrome and metal pickup trucks and hulking sport utility vehicles too long for the garage door to shut. Farm land is available to build on. More parking slots are available at the mall. More seating is available at restaurants. More seats are available on Broadway, where shows are shutting down after both long and short runs. Empty seats beckon at basketball and ice hockey games and English and Italian soccer matches. You see it every night on cable. Physicians have more hours available for appointments. So do hair stylists. Hospitals have more beds available as people put off what they don’t have to do. Almost 100 million people in this country watched Super Bowl XLIII, a record-breaking number. Why? Because, well, it was cheaper to sit home and watch the game than go to the mall or a flower show or a boat show or to dinner or a bar. Commercial time for the Super Bowl in the end was not available, sold out, because, well, it was a one-time expense and there was this enormous captive audience.
Millions of Americans feel trapped, held hostage by an exhausted, bankrupt economy with the perverse strength to tie down millions. This experience is opposite of the promise implied by all things available. Something available is something to be had. Grab it, quick, before someone else does. Of course that’s not the way it works now. The drum beats daily sounding new layoffs and salary freezes, salary cuts and businesses disappearing, factories deserted, libraries and fire departments darkened, bus and subway lines running less often. The president talks of a possible catastrophe if we don’t get our house in order, and fast.
But there are tempting deals. Off 202 a black man bundled in layers against the cold has been standing for weeks holding one sign after another, “Going out of business,” first for Linen N Things. Then for Circuit City. The latest it is for Oskar Huber, the furniture store. It hasn’t been the same black guy for the past month, I’m sure. But wrapped against the weather, stamping his feet, shaking his hands, it looks like the same guy.
A strange contrast for sure, hunkering down when so much is there for the taking. We’re not used to it, of course. For years and decades leading up to 2007 or 2008, millions of us scooped up what was available without thinking twice. Anything seemed within reach. Maybe a house at the shore. Moving up to a larger home. Enclosing the carport, finishing off the basement. Adding a basketball court. A third car. A roomier car. A Harley. A floor-to-ceiling flat screen. Flat screens for the kitchen and the bedroom. Trips, repeated trips, to Vegas and Disneyworld. Biking in Baja. Vacations to Mexico or Portugal or Greece, who knows where. A night at the Ritz. During Christmas week a few years ago we spent surprise bonus money on a family night at the Ritz-Carlton downtown. Another Christmas we blasted the heat and tested the plumbing in two newly-constructed log cabins, one for the kids and one for mom and dad, outside of cold and empty Zion National Park. A few days later we were living large at the grand Bellagio in Vegas, ice skating on a temporary rink right on the Strip. A couple of good moonlighting gigs had come my way.
I come from the Ralph Kramden School of Money Management. “You see, Alice,” the rotund Ralph would bellow with gusto and satisfaction, in his bus driver’s uniform, holding court in the middle of his bare-bones ‘50s apartment in an episode of “The Honeymooners.” “You see, when I had it, Alice, when I had it, I spent it.” Business-minded people put a lasting value on money and so they work with it differently; they stretch it, manipulate it, multiply it. For me, it’s been a way to get to Zion or Crater Lake in the winter. Santa Monica in the summer. Or to The Blue Man Group show in New York or it is the means to build the CD library my kids can’t believe in the age of iPod. This philosophical difference helps explain why my bro is skiing in Vermont this week and I’m sweating renting three movies from Blockbuster.
Ah, if we had only known. If we had seen signs of this sudden, jarring crash in business and personal fortunes coming. No bonus. A sizeable salary cut three weeks into the new year. “I just kick myself,” said a coworker a few days ago. “Thinking about what I spent money on. Now I comb every expense and I go to bed at night thinking, ‘OK, what test don’t I know about that will come next?’” Her husband, who works independently painting blue skies and puffy clouds on the ceilings of children’s bedrooms in wealthy homes along with other unique custom paint jobs, says he is booked up for February but the phone’s not ringing and he’s concerned about March. A lot of contractors and consultants and salespeople are waiting by their phones. Or calling everyone they know.
“You’ll tell me if, you know, you find out, you know, that things might get worse,” asked my coworker, full of hesitation. When you are cornered and scared you think hard about who you can trust, what you can say, and who might cause you trouble. I assured her I would. “You would do that?” asked my wife. “If you were told in confidence?” This woman and I have worked together for more than ten years. She works extraordinarily hard when she must, which is often, and she’s very talented. “Yeah, I would, “ I said. “What could happen, really? They’d never find out probably.” “They” — the owners or managers who sign the paycheck to keep you going — have morphed into inscrutable and unpredictable figures. With one hand on the TNT plunger, it seems.
Many of us haven’t the slightest idea if and when HQ will rock us with the next blunt email announcement. Next week. Next month. Who knows? If sales keep falling across almost all markets in my industry, and right now our store is $80,000 off for March billings, will the owners be able to pay off the bank loan for last year’s acquisition negotiated just after the unofficial recession became official, only no one knew it yet?
It’s impossible to predict with any confidence how deep the recession will go, how long it will last. Any sense of confidence is but a whiff. People are dropping out of jobs like Mother Nature’s victims who fell from the sky in M. Night Shyamalan’s so-called eco-thriller “The Happening.” My wife’s sister emailed Saturday that her son got laid off from an investment house where he wasn’t happy anyway; said son and his fiancé lost their jobs in a bar that closed and they have moved in with her and her husband in Roanoke “to get their life straightened out.” A brother-in-law lost his job before the holidays. Her best friend’s husband got laid off this week from a auto dealership. Her daughter’s company got bought out and there is talk of lay-offs and relocating to Minnesota. “All in all we are thankful for what we have,” she concluded, rather abruptly. Still, amen to that.
She’s got the best perspective, but one hard to hold on to. Today I drove around thinking how office space, retail space, land, houses, autos, boats, motorcycles, tickets to this concert and seats that game are all abundantly available at the moment. But in a recession, to be “available” is too often a tease and a taunt. Six months ago, three months ago, heck, maybe three weeks ago I wouldn’t have thought this way at all.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
