pt. 20 - doctor visits and death

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 20)

Any number of things come to mind (and well they

should) about my first forays into Avenel life. Drinking

water right out of a hose. I'd never done that before, 

but we had a hose hook-up that was always at the ready.

It wasn't the coldest of water, in fact, in the sun it started

out warm, with some sort of nasty rubbery taste from the

hot hose, until the water ran out enough to at least seemed

chilled. It worked. The hose was a lifesaver. Down towards 

the end of out street, the Route One end, early on, one of

the kid's fathers dropped dead; died in the yard, right there,

after working outside in the heat all day working on fixing

and cleaning up the new yard. As my mother's always

inflammatory reports went, this was typical. As she put it : 

'Don't be outside all day, getting all hot and worked up, and 

then come in here and start gulping ice-water. It will kill you.

That's how Wally's* father died.' The thing was, we were all

told he'd been outside working, all sweated up and hot, came

inside for ice water, and was drinking it right by the refrigerator

when he keeled over. Of course, it was that but more 

than that it wasn't  -  he was, after all, an adult and most 

probably had other medical issues, either being treated or 

being ignored. But she always took things, the most particular, 

and drew it out to the most general and broad cover statement 

she could. I was on to that. It was overkill, always. So, tepid 

water from the hose, which she never knew about anyway, 

and which was probably a bacteria-laced mine field of fetid 

kid-water, that was OK. My mother's medical stuff, anyway, 

was always out in the forefront  -  she herself was a bit of a 

hypochondriac, and quite self-motivated in that regard. Later 

on, about 1962, she underwent  -  having had both rickets (a 

poverty disease, she said), and rheumatic fever as a child  -  

heart surgery to repair a bad valve. It was really early on for 

open-heart surgery. I was away already, in seminary-school, 

but it was quite the nail-biter. Deborah Hospital, Browns Mills, 

NJ; some sort of public-good Jewish heart hospital. I don't know 

the ins and outs, but I think it was cost-free, as long as you agreed 

to be the main attraction that day for the open seating training 

balcony in the operating theater. Training hospital, I'd guess, 

while others, as students and teachers, observed. It worked; she

did have a second such operation, same thing, this time with a 

pacemaker implanted, again at Deborah, about 15 years later 

too. Repeat performance, I guess. 

-

Back then, too, a guy named Dr. Homer, from Green Street,

Woodbridge, he was still making house-calls. Whenever we, or

anyone in the family, were sick (my father seemed never to get ill)

Dr. Homer would eventually be summoned. My sister or myself 

would be kept home from school, put in our parents' bed for the

day, and the room would be darkened. Chicken Pox, Measles,

Mumps, Whooping Cough, Strept Throat (which I always thought

was 'stripped' throat, 'til later), and anything else. He'd pull up in

his black '49 Ford, and then later a '55 Ford, and walk up to the 

house. He had a little round-topped doctor's bag, or whatever it 

would be called. He'd talk pleasant, check the patient over, diagnose

this or that, while flipping open the two tops of his doctor's bag.

It was filled with little bottles, needles, tongue depressors, alcohol, 

thermometers, all that sort of stuff. It always ended with a needle,

arm or ass, one or the other, and then he'd walk out  -  chatting with

my mother. It was, back then, really another, much simpler world.

No real complications, until you died. That was that. Once I got

hit by the train, all my doctor stuff changed  -  I had to go to them,

they were all in Perth Amboy, or Newark. I never saw Dr. Homer

again. I guess I'd 'graduated'. Two or three years later anyway, it

was all over, I was fine, and all my doctor needs ended. It never

really stopped me in my heedless abandon towards freedom and the

liberty as a boy to shuck everything and run wild. Hell, the world

called, 'we don't need no stinking doctors'; so to speak.

*name has been altered.

pt. 19 - three characters

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 19)

You know how one day you just wake up and 

find yourself somewhere  -  there you are  -  all

conditions in place and ready for acceptance. Well,

 that's the way it was for me, just rolling off age 4, 

and finding myself on this place called 'Inman Avenue.'

It was much different from Bayonne  -  where as a tyke

I lived on the water, right on the waterfront of a very

busy, and always so, 'Kill Van Kull'. Sounds ominous,

but it's an old Dutch seafaring/maritime word ('kill'),

meaning a flow or body of water that eventually, and by tides,

(estuary) flows to, and back from, the ocean  -  in this case

with the intermediate step of New York Harbor. Crazy ship

traffic  -  tugs, cargo, barge, tankers, freighters, everything.

There were, across the water, on the State Island side tug-boat

repair yards, tugboat junk yards, and a tug boat graveyard too.

Rattling, noisy hulks, the slaps of water-on-hulls sounding, all

hours, the horns and toots and bells and claxons of river traffic, 

river traffic here with an oil-sheen topper. Rainbow-like,

sometimes wondrous, glinting off sunlight. Who knew. 

(There's a lot more of this info in 'Leaving It All Again',

my book posted here, to accompany, somewhere).

-

When I got to Inman Avenue, just about ready to be age 5, I 

knew immediately I'd done a Columbus  -  discovered a whole 

new world, wild and entire, and different; and if - like Columbus  

- the whole  discovery of it was by a mistake, it little mattered. 

I was ready, without much reflection, to give it all a go. I'd never

seen a possum before, let alone families of them, hanging upside

down from huge oak-tree limbs. That's the way it was now -  Inman

Avenue housing ended at John and Joanne Wolchansky's house and

after that (where now, long since, they've built houses anyway  -  Mark

Place and Doreen Drive) it was woods  -  right out to Route One and 

trailer court in that direction, and the junkyards and a truck yard and

railroad tracks in another. 'Para-fucking-dise', let's say. There were

rivulets, shallow streams, a pond, fallen huge trees affording shelter

and cover, paths and all the rest of the things which go with wildness.

even a junk-heap of the usual shit people throw out. The local dumping

grounds : tires, rims, bicycles, car parts, toasters, I even found a watch 

once; it worked until it stopped working, about a year later. Before

our house was completed, during its construction, I remember my

parents and my sister and myself, in Dad's '47 Plymouth, driving 

down from Bayonne, on a weekend day, to check on progress, see

how things looked, how it was all going. We'd get off Rt. One

here, at what turned out to be the ass-end of my street, and I see

all this as we drove  -  the thin sliver of rutted roadway through

the woods, past the trailers, etc., until we came down to the end of 

our block. Gravelly road, yet still an entry and exit for those who's

short-cut through the woods to get to Rt. One, north or south.

Great stuff. I never knew, yet, what it fully involved, but in its

raw and wild state, I already sensed it's unique greatness  -  and a

very different greatness too, from the Bayonne - Kill waterfront,

which I never really wanted to give up, but did. Once the house

was completed  -  the structure, not the yards or the roadways

or anything else  -  we moved in. Everywhere around us (me) was

still rubble and uprooted dirt and trees and the general disarray

of a monumental construction job. I guess  -  though I do not

really remember  -  it all got cleaned up and cleared over time.

One day, I just walked around, looking to see if and who else had

by then moved in. I crossed the street, one house over, knocked

on the front door, and just plainly said, 'Hi I'm Gary, I live across

the street.' As it turned out, the mother there was quite helpful and

wonderful  -  she had 2 boys, Richard and Donald Florio. Donald, 
being my age, and Richard, maybe three years older. Fast friends,
 right off, mostly with Donald, that was my first acquaintance 
with anyone on the street. Everyone is different, we're all 
the same  -  the variations, never really lethal, 
mark who we are. So be it.

-

There will be a lot more of this. But for now, the purpose of this 

little chapter is to relate the story of three people I met, and who  -

growing up together  -  I became friends with. Curious little tales.

The first was Jim Yacullo. I've already mentioned him. He was a

tough, broad-beamed, powerful kid. Not the sports or baseball type

as were some of the others, but with a different concentration. Hard

to say. Anyway, his trait  -  astounding to me  -  was his habit (and I

have no idea where this came came, how or why). Whenever Jim said

something  -  any sentence, most any statement  -  you could see, after

it, his lips moving silently. (Eventually we talked about this, as I'd just

asked, 'what are you doing?'). Whatever he'd just uttered, say, 'this cake

is good', he would repeat again silently, mouthed, to himself, back, as

a replay  -  as he put it, 'just to be sure it was said right.' Totally weird

to me  -  it was like rehearsing the play, but AFTER the final 

performance! I couldn't figure out why  -  if he had to do that  -  he

just wouldn't do it first, in the reverse sequence. It seemed more

sensible. Another friend, Kenny Kaisen, previously mentioned, would

smell everything. No matter what he touched, or passed, or what it was

that caught his attention, it was first brought up to his nose and sniffed.

Just like I said  -  no further explication needed. He just smelled 

everything, from the TV Guide to a candy wrapper to a knick-knack.

That one, I never asked about or commented on. And, lastly, another

friend, a bit older, but a friend and neighbor no matter, named Barry

Wynne, later on, when I was like 15 or so and doing art and painting 

stuff out on the front steps area of my house, he'd come over, always,

and ask to use colors or crayons or whatever, and he'd spend time there

with me always, as he did, always, trying to re-design the American

flag. True stuff, and I have one of his attempts here, somewhere. 
Hoping I can find it, I'll eventually add it to this post. His only goal,
 ever, artistically, was in attempting a satisfying version, for himself, 
of a re-designed flag. He'd play around with stripes, stars, triangles 
and alternating formats, but he never got there, and he never 
stopped. It was very cool  -  Barry is the one who introduced me, 
by records, to the Lovin' Spoonful, the Beach Boys, and others; he'd 
bring a record or two over to listen to, each time, as we doodled. 
(Never called it that, no, it was 'serious' artwork we were doing, to us). 
So, such are memories.

pt. 18 - the big UFO scare

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(PT. 18)

One time, out behind my house on Inman Avenue, probably 

about 1959, we kids found a small encampment of drifters or 

hobos or bums, whatever the word would be. There were 

maybe three or four of them and they'd clumped together in 

a little encampment around a small fire-spot they'd worked. 

There were a few bundles of clothes and things, as well as a 

few pots and pans on a string of some sort - they carried 

these things around with them. We were young kids, unsure 

of what to make of this - it was still the days of the many 

acres of cornfields and the cover and protection from being 

really seen that the old cornstalks provided. These guys took 

advantage of the cover and, were it not for our usual traipsing 

around and bungling about, we'd not have seen them. I guess 

we were easy to flummox or push off - we never told anyone 

about them, or at least I never did - no police or anything ever 

came that I knew of. We were always told, as well, to be aware of 

and watch out for railroad police, referred as 'railroad dicks' 

somehow, but we never saw any of them either. Whatever 

occurred, or didn't, these fellows disappeared after a few days - 

presumably they just kept going along their way. They never 

bothered us or scolded us for finding them out, just talked 

regular small talk - probably the same way they'd done a 

hundred times before to annoying kids who'd found them out. 

On the tracks, in the section out behind my house, there was, 

in those days, a railroad call box on one of the electric-power 

poles. It was for rail workers or conductors or whomever, to 

use for emergency calls into the railroad dispatch or nearest 

station yard. 'Emergency phone', it was labeled. I never saw 

it in use, though I admit a few times we kids pranked it - 

once you lifted up the phone it was live, into some station 

or another - as we'd picked it up, make wild noises, or say 

something horrible, and then run off. Lucky, in our way, I 

guess to have never been caught doing that. But, anyway, 

if they really wanted us they could have posted a train dick 

there, watching for us. By the way, being kids, the idea of 

railroad cops being called 'dicks' was a hoot. Another time, 

a friend two houses over, Barry Wynne (more coming on him, 

in the 're-design of the flag' episode) claimed in all earnestness 

that he'd seen a UFO land - in those little woods, pretty 

much right where the hobos had been. We all believed him, 

and it caused quite a stir amongst us kids - sweeping the 

woods, claiming to have found burned rocks, landing rubble, 

weird piles of things. It was funny, and it went on for two or 

three Summer days and evenings at least. Then it was just 

over; as we'd decided they must have packed up and lifted 

off again, when we were unawares. You need to remember 

again that this was the farmland of the Rahway Prison yard 

- a veritable bucolic and agrarian playground for us all. 

Bows and arrows, slingshots, treehouses and forts, hollowed 

out cornstalk tee-pees. The place was littered with boyhood 

anarchy and, if we followed the tracks and the lanes or paths,

it all led to the junkyards and the trailer park in one direction 

or, in the other, the lumber yard (all open and unfenced, easy 

to access) and the train station. One direction was Rahway, 

and the latter direction took us towards Woodbridge. I think 

I should probably mention another direction as well - for it 

loomed always - nearby and never far enough away, always 

too coyly enticing and insincere for all concerned, what I Iiked 

to call 'the Rackets' - these rackets being school and church, 

those two ever-looming sewers into which all of our waters 

were being sucked. I want to say drawn, but I say sucked.

-

It was funny to me then, and still sticks now, how easily it went 

for us, as kids, boys, to credibly make a case for the appearance 

and presence of that UFO thing in the rear of our yards. We'd 

been able to both casually and with some credulity convince 

ourselves of the 'evidences' we found - scorched rocks; flattened 

and burned ground area where, we swore, the craft had settled; 

little pieces of this or that left behind. We had everything but the 

little green men, or the one they'd forgotten to pick up. For the 

remainder of my life I've found, since, most of the rest of reality 

(or what it's so-called) has the same traits - we harbor faith and 

find truth in things we're told, without any real evidences at all. 

From that, we garner and bind up our operative sets of beliefs 

and notions with which we pass the rest of our emotions and 

judgments upon the life and the days we lead. Until Death do 

us part. Fanciful stuff; glimmers of hope, foundations of 

satisfaction. Essential notions of 'Freedom' and 'Salvation'. 

It all becomes very firm and very simple because of each 

interlocking piece which we ourselves have finely connected. 

It's easy to say it was just kids' stuff, but, remember, it was 

President Richard M. Nixon (the 'M' stood for 'More of an 

asshole you could never find') who so profoundly said (and 

the press picked it up) 'you need to treat the American people 

as children, for that is what they are and how they think.' 

Astutely fiendish, coming from a brittle politician, yes, but 

in ways very true too. Much of that was present in this entire

episode. A crafty political type knows soon enough, as if dealing 

with a child, just how much to 'suggest' or plant the 'idea' of 

something and let the hearers do the rest - 'change', 'tax-reform', 

'military reduction' and the rest. It's a perfect slide game - slide 

in, never really touch the bag, just let them think you did - and 

they'll deal with the rest for you,

-

One last thing - dealing with this UFO or alien thing. In the same way 

I've presented it with Barry Wynne as balderdash, there are thousands 

and thousands of others, nationwide, who would believe this story in 

an instant - because it would buttress and bolster their already 

prevailing beliefs in dead aliens, government cover-up, and the rest.

[July 7, 1947, Area 51, Roswell, NM Roswell UFO incident - The 

Roswell UFO incident took place in the U.S. in 1947, when an 

airborne object crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, on 

July 7, 1947. Explanations ...]. Now however, I am here myself to 

refute my own just-reported disbelief. What I just described really 

did happen. There was a landing, and visages and beings appeared. 

They spoke to me, and implanted in me some further knowledge 

and awareness, from which I still source things. In addition, let me 

add, the appearance of those hobos was no accidental thing - they 

had been brought there, without their own awarenesses of what was 

going on nor of what was happening, or about to be, happening to 

them, they had been grouped and drawn to the location they were 

found at, and were, in a few days time, gathered and taken up from 

that location I just related, as swiftly and surreptitiously as the 

landing itself had occurred. A long time ago, in a galaxy far 

away - except it was no 'Galaxy', which is where the UFO'ers 

get it all wrong. They are still thinking in earthly, provincial, 

rational and scientific terms. It's not place, or galaxy or space 

or location. It's dimension; and you can't get there from here, 

as the old Vermont farmer would have said. Let me add, 

'not on your own anyway.'

pt. 17 - breather talk

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 17)

For the moment, I'm taking a breather on the small and

specific things about my Avenel growing up, and going 

'general' for a page or so - so please bear with me, we'll

get back in a minute. These are broader comments, about 

the larger picture around me back then. Probably unique

and twisted, nonethless, my own views then as well as now.

-

I'd have to say, without compromise, that what it was like 

for me was : 'oddity', things never adding up, a coarse fix.

A combination of a straight-up false reality and illusion,

mixed with crankiness and endearment, if you can. The 

elementary school principle, a Mr. Lund, who quite specifically 

and almost perfectly resembled Dwight Eisenhower, our

(2-term) President. His authoritative status came partially 

from that and from his tall, commanding position as head of 

the local school into which we'd been unceremoniously dumped 

at age 5. Cast-offs, as it were, onto a sinking raft but told to, and 

managing to, somehow stay on and remain afloat. Life was a

big, sidewinder dream, listing and falling off. How is it that 

such adults regard these roles as their natural right? What 

ungainly creature of thought could this Mr. Lund have been 

to assume that his role above us was predicated upon the idea 

that all his opinions, outlooks, acts and attitudes were correct

and absolute? Where did he live? Where was he from? One 

of those old-line big houses around? Or perhaps not even 

here - instead some nearby, older town with grand, 

higher-class habits and livings and homes? We never 

knew; nor were we ever 'introduced' to anything about 

him at that level. He had one presence and one role in Avenel, 

and that's how we saw him, and got him. In a military sense, 

early on, he was to be - we were told - our 'commander in

chief' and no questions asked. It wasn't a 'maybe' world we were 

presented, to be given and shared. It was, by contrast, the

first of many 'absolutes' which would be forced upon us.

-

You need to remember that much of this was 'class'. In a 

supposed classless society, we were, indeed and anyway, 

classed with the riff-raff. Avenel was a low-class town - 

place, actually, never even a 'town' to speak of. Instead it 

was a sort of 'shoreline' onto which any and all sorts of 

arrivistes and castaways in those years washed up - the 

grinning ex-soldier types, perhaps with yet a piece of 

shrapnel lodged in the thigh or back; the heavy hand-laborers, 

building cars in Linden, or working at the airport, forging 

steel or molding glass bottles. Mechanics. Carpenters. The 

laborers at Merck or Union Carbide. Township workers, 

plow-drivers, gas-station guys. That was the world there 

and about at first - and only slowly did it change, and even 

then never much. Society changed first - there came a time 

when - instead of single-family homes - rows of apartments, 

garden-apartments, meaning horizontal stacking of people 

instead of vertical - began cropping up on the swamplands 

and fields of my youth. They'd fill up, slowly but eventually, 

with a different sort of person, a more temporary presence. 

One the way to something else. Asians and people from India, 

white coat lab-guys, medical technicians, more scientific types, 

working in labs and offices in still those very same places - 

Union Carbide, Linde, Merck - and probably with quicker and 

better wages than any of our local fathers were working for. 

Teachers as well moved in - the Andes Brothers, local 

high-school teachers, lodging with Mr. Wintergrass - also a 

teacher, a crazed and notorious one - they became legendary for 

their visible presence in Cloverleaf Gardens. Plain and bland enough 

to pass right by you, they could be seen in that passing, sitting 

out on lawnchairs or on their tiny, concrete stoop. Where once 

before the teacher's only presence was in the classroom, now 

they shared real life as well. Mr Calvin, I recall, used to live in 

Woodbridge in a rather squalid and large 'rooming' house, 

with probably 16 other tenants, on the very corner where now

St. James Catholic Church has its once-modern monstrosity of

tax-exempt, overblown church and parking. It was a large, rambling,

dark-brown structure of many rooms. An official 'rooming house',

for teachers and professionals. Across from it there was a bakery, and 

from there one could sometimes glimpse stern Mr. Calvin, in a wicker

chair, on the full-length, wide-upon porch; as if it were a vacation home

Seeing him, out of school, was always a complete surprise, something

odd-by-contrast. You didn't speak, nor acknowledge. Back then, if

you indeed 'saw' Mr. Calvin outside of school, you grimaced. 

-

Somehow the world as presented to us was a vertical stacking of 

possibilities, rights, ranks and privileges. We were supposed to 

know our places and the schools and churches were only there to 

reinforce that. Early on, as things were kept to scale, I'd say it 

worked to an extent that was considered passable. Only later, 

as society itself grew and its things began encroaching upon us, 

was some mystery and meaning first subtracted - the process 

had begun. The local meat-market guy, about 1956, with his business 

partner, decided to close up his little, independent grocery outpost 

in the middle of Avenel Street and open instead a 'Shop-Rite' - 

a newfangled, then, idea of supermarket grocery store where 

ALL categories of foods and such were kept and sold under one 

large roof. The 1957 American had emerged. After that, it didn't 

take long for the rest. I can well recall, on Boy Scout meeting 

Wednesday nights, with my friend Larry Walker (dead now), 

stopping by choice at this Shop-Rite along the way to another friend's, 

house to pick him up for the scout meeting in the old, now unused, 

church - it had become a social hall of sorts for basketball stuff and 

scout meetings while the bigger, fancy 'new' church held (or was 

'thought' to hold) all the sacredness and church rites - and waiting 

for Larry - a master-thief of sorts evidently - to exit the supermarket 

a few minutes later, pockets bulging with stolen candy, enough for the

rest of our evening, during and post-meeting (merit badge for 

thievery!). Go figure that out for societal change and the premise 

behind the new world. Where once before the meat-market proprietor 

would nab you and slap you down for the theft, now it was all 

becoming as easy as it could be. Somewhere in there we all 

were able to supposed to be able discern all about this life.