Chevrolet convertible with the red leather interior up onto the train tracks and got stuck, in the middle of Santa Monica Blvd. How embarrassing! I was trying to impress my buddies.
One late August night, Jimmy, Sue, and I decided we would rob this Seven Eleven of some candy and Seven-Up. We had planned to distract the cashier, and since it was so bright inside at night and no one was around, we decided to make some noise and start laughing and pretend to tell a joke, a Polish joke or a Jewish joke or some ethnic joke. And then we were too loud, and the manager started to get upset and asked us to leave, so we didn’t get a chance to take any bubble gum or Mars bars or M&M’s, or anything, maybe a Three Musketeers. We ran out of there and hopped onto our Flexi’s and didn’t stop till we were home. We climbed up into our treehouse the next day and had some potato chips up there, looking out onto the neighborhood below. We were only thirteen and exploring the excitement and limits of life, ever so innocently. It was after the war, the Eisenhower fifties, living the good life, trying to “keep up with the Joneses.”
8.
ONCE UPON A TIME . . .
Just who is this Jesse, this guy who is asking these things, and writing and thinking up these questions from the inception of thought, unwilling to bare himself, hiding inside, while he cried for his lost son, the finite one, the child inside, the wordsmith, the programmed writing style, the poet deep within, the Rilke look-alike inside Western shoes, the Miami connection, illicit Hispanic traditionalist circumventing the government in patriotic fervor. There is this transition compulsion to avoid the pain and to run, shifting winds, confusing the mind and de-focusing what the psyche/mind wants to forget and face the music. You know what I mean, Bunkie. Jesse boy . . . don’t call me “man” . . . the arrogant rebellious younger son.
The grandfather from Odessa, not Texas, the socialist, freemason, postmaster, speaker of seven languages including Yiddish, English, Russian, Spanish. This mandolin player, Yiddish theater actor, clothes designer, gentle one. The roots are there for the artist not to despair.
Doing tai chi so far away from “home,” wherever that is, piecing together the cobwebs, the spider-made silk threads across the oceans from Jerusalem to Rome, Bombay, Calcutta — let ’em rip, let out those true confessions.
I wish for the insight to become the new contemporary man, in touch with the dreams, the wild one inside, the feminine and masculine sides, balanced brain polarities, the holistic hemispheres. We play at wordplay, the dice are loaded, and they’re coming up cat’s-eyes. Tell the truth, Jesse, about who you are.
Weave a story of romance and trance, sex and no violence, the host of avenues open to today’s man, the “spaceship Earth” and its inhabitants. The “Global Village,” as McLuhan called it (talking with him once in Toronto) and the immediate hook-ups connecting and sometimes disconnecting the less wealthy, the Third and Fourth Worlds, the pre-literate and starving, the children and women, the oppressed inhabitants fighting in wars, whether they be just or unjust wars, wars sanctioned by governments or of the terrorist/guerilla/freedom fighter/peoples’ war orientation. Billions are made in trying to win the economic gravy train of the “arms trade.” We continue to “create to destroy and destroy to create,” as someone well known in one of the larger cults may have said.
My brother Harris, though, is the exact opposite. He is about making money, or the whole family is geared to that, as in the great American Dream, the simple gift of making money. Printing your own? Must be hard work! Harris is older and wiser and more mature, responsible, successful in fulfilling the promise of the working man, the Horatio Alger story, the self-made man, running, on the run and not knowing this, caught in the fast lane, on the fast track, eating the Big Mac. The idealistic dreams were what we were taught, at whose expense? And Mother Earth feels all and knows all, can’t fool around with our mother. The egalitarian politics, the so-called upper classes of people looking down onto the huddled masses with false compassion, and this is a little of Harris. I have a sweet sister, Sarah, who is the oldest, and lives with her family near Boston.
The father was stern and serious, a former businessman adrift in the scheme, the Shalom Aleichem stories, the army makes men and discipline and time and motion study, the following of orders, the military fitness, the inner discipline, the lust for life, the former drill sergeant, the immigrant parents, the story takes a turn and what is truth and fiction, who is to discern? Daddy is adrift in the story line, in the seas of the capitalistic success dogma in America, the Promised Land, the daily dinner table propaganda party line, as I recall. Business and only business as usual.
Momma came from the Midwest and was the antithesis of the solemn father. She provided stories and jokes, a counterpoint to the ever ups and downs of life’s more serious side, a little respite for the young tin-soldier boy. There was a certain melancholy that life’s circumstances can’t often hide in the romances and friendships formed over the years, and now cultivated into old age. She tried to smooth it over, fix it all, life’s nooks and crannies.
9.
MIDDLE AGE
IN THE NEVERLAND . . .
NOT IN MIDDLE AMERICA
BUT MIDDLE EUROPE . . .
Jesse now is walking down the street, in the heat, or maybe even in heat. The spring day pushes him into the woods, the Vienna Woods. He thinks he hears an orchestra. Who was here before? Is this colorful enough, the language matching the real scene? The book The Waves by Virginia Woolf is a good illustration of this. “Hey, yo, boy, are you talking to me?” Jesse is a little crazy, caught inside society’s blues, the madness of life in today’s impersonal world. The focal point in living in the here-and-now is ever-present in creating our mutual reality, in unison with the waves, magnetic and electronic, the techno-beat of the final scene of a Saturday in Vienna and the shopping street where art and fashion and design and music and color and fabric and people play, lying awake at the feet of prospective buyers. It’s really a large, quiet village, with the age-old and modern interplaying something mauve.
The shops are full, and a Swedish fashion store buys and sells, puts the beat in the air ear via speakers, even opens your purse for you. It’s a never-ending string of stores and coffee in open-air cafes, the oranges and intense greens this season’s rendition by whoever it is who decides what colors people are wearing each year. Variations on a theme, with the blacks and whites still in. The advertising keeps time to the photographer’s click, the upscale layout and black and white images looking everyday, and yet slick and inviting . . . buy, buy, buy . . .
This is the first time this god forsaken new technological machine is put to good use, this invention of the human mind designed to confuse all the fools into thinking they’re so smart and no longer have to interact with nature.
Begin to type the story of the history of Western civilization: the secular humanists and the born-agains, reigning over their next of kin as the neo-nazi world plays havoc on the internet, much of it coming from America, proclaiming freedom of speech while often espousing hatred and xenophobia, racism and bigotry. The fundamentalists of the world, uniting in restricting freedom and espousing their dogmatic gospel as The Truth for all to see and act upon, or else. The network of men rebelling with glee, the rape of the Earth, all of the work the money-man madness has begun and shipped overseas, the Islamic revolution/terrorists and the billions of Chinese and Indians wanting the “capitalist pot,” the Italians’ ever-changing their new governments for more than sixty years. Will there even be another millennium? No, says Stephen Hawking.
I suggest we get down to business and be friendly to each other . . . Will we allow ourselves to open up and play?
