PT I
Headlines trumpeting the alleged situation that world governments far across the planet were taking undesirable people up in planes up to a height of thirty-five thousand feet and then murdering them in smaller groups. The bodies of these victims never showing up again to public view as they were promptly dumped over the middle of the ocean. Someone who said that they knew me and invited me down to the appliance store where they worked tried to sell me two models, one a washer and a dryer, each with provided separate a television thrown in gratis at no extra charge.
I then was traveling internationally, maybe in Europe where I go involved tagging around with a small group riding in a bus. A collection of ‘rah rah’ type guys that had their fun ogling girls and doing that sort of crazy kind of thing. Along the way I soon gave up any hope of hotel rooms and began sleeping with the rest of them on the bench seats of the bus while figuring that I would do this for another few days. Then after coming back from this journey my father had a heart attack in the middle of the street right before my eyes. There was a medical doctor visiting right next door and I saw him quickly sneaking past with his paraphernalia making for his Range Rover SUV. I being out of his earshot dialing my mother to call him back over to attend to my dad. But the bastard was too busy putting his crap in his vehicle before getting in same and just taking off. My father now unconscious and not moving, just left there to die. Everyone indifferent to that fact being only aware of what was in front of their own noses.
Then being cast as a junior member of a special para-military team of EMR experts which were sent into the midst of Chicago’s South Side to aid in a covert negotiation with one of the local neighborhood warlords. This was in a ‘special’ section of town that was doubly encumbered with all sorts of ‘gang-banger’ types. Somehow something had happened that left us having to walk out with only our own. At one point being on a roof needing to climb over to another upon two horizontally posed ladders rested side by side with each other. The regular members going underneath with on in a ‘hand over hand’ while I cautiously crawled on top upon the other. The other guys being way ahead of me while I was left to haul all sorts of heavy gear lagging ever further behind them. The load being so heavy and tiring that I was soon left all on my own. It being murder to carry forth until I was able to stop just south of where the ghetto ended. There was a little boy who showed up out of nowhere that was folding one of the sleeping bags trying to make it not so hard to carry. Other little black boys showed up, one of them asking for money if he gave me a shine and I saying, “No. no, no!”, as I reached in my pocket and pulled out twenty-five cents in change. I guess that they looked at the amount and they must have thought that I was a bum or something? A miserable bum! The fact that I at least gave them some money made it OK to pass through their neighborhood. So I get walking until I reached downtown. I was told on the radio that I was the junior partner and that my performance was on the bottom of the totem pole. This making me feel perturbed that I was being dissed by one of my own compatriots.
I once long ago got a job on the Westside working for this old guy who ran a trucking company. He was a tough old bird who had done alright. The neighborhood gang types had painted tags all over the sidewalk and on the wall of one side of his building. He went out to look at it and talked about the relative merit of simply leaving it alone in terms of how it would affect his relations without he surrounding neighborhood. My mother and father having earlier mentioned that they would be down that way and then having parked in his parking lot, I suddenly having an impossible time recalling my bosses’ name. My father and mother introduced themselves and they seemed to get on like old Chicago street kids trading stories. My boss was the sort who was ruthless in having occasionally entered in competition with others while carrying a white plastic coated pipe. He saying that if anybody gets ahead of him in some what that he would use this item to smack down hard on their toes with its sharpened edge to cut a few of them off. “Then you will always win the competition!“, he beamed. Quite a piece of work, this guy! In hindsight, his appearance back then not too much difference to the way that I look now? Maybe his character back then not now being too much unlike my own now, many years later.
Tonight’s roster of characters as introduced including both my mother and my father appearing as they once were in the nineteen-eighties which would be thirty years ago or more, when I was in my thirties. “Thirty, thirty, thirty!” “Huh?” I guess that world that I still to this day remain nested in that might be called a ‘penchant or a phenomena for those seventy and older are said to so often embody. One where they tend to remember a number of former incidents or general trivial atmospheric details of those times that passed so very quickly in earlier life. I not knowing is because this seems to be that they remain eternally familiar? Or because they embody a unique golden age unimaginable to those lock within this present? Maybe it has much to do with unresolved issues, or unrequited feelings, or unfulfilled inner desires that still seem to viably percolate as they linger within the interior of one’s psyche? But there I had been! Not quite sure of the veracity of some of those characters as had been remained. That old bird who was dreamed of this time seeming too vaguely familiar as if he was somebody that I had in actuality once known. I recall an old client that resembled him being an old Greek with a full mustache that seemed uncannily similar to his. Gray haired with tons of hair on the top of his head for Christ sakes! .
So I wonder what people’s outlook must be based upon their daily views? From those places that they live? And in terms of those place where they spend their lives going to work? Speaking about those dreams one has of worlds that are now lost in the decades of the past while living at a location within a building that is at least sixty years old. Others living in myriads of smaller residential structures of a hundred years or more that have been renovated many times. Consider the many neighborhoods composed of the same! Sure there are a lot of other dwellings that are absolutely brand new construction, but then so many of those seem to follow along a more generic simplified floor plans of others from the past. Their main differences being an implementation of architectural brutality incised with modern version plumbing and electrical standards as well as electronic cabling installations for better connectivity to the Internet. Style and visual uniqueness being sacrificed to easier salability by offering lower building costs. Space allotted to the average occupant being reduced so as to compact more into existing cities into more densely packed human jungles. A world that depending on one’s views about the viability of humanity in general is outmoded. How much more efficient for the release of a major plague to swiftly do its worst whether it be embodied medical or simulated strictly within the hive mind! An ongoing pruning in the new paradigm of asynchronous methods of modern war where very few shots need be fired or standing real estate has to be destroyed. Allow those proverbial fertile fields of the larger economy to fall fallow for a while killing off many of those compacted within until those few remaining have been re-trained into citizens compliant with the brand new. The idea of expansive dormitories full of ‘the many’ then superseding single individually owned properties of the un-enfranchised few. A prison by any other definition compared to the past in which the human condition becomes closely monitored in real time with no one included entitled to any privacy or personal property.
Old Watkins had a grandfatherly look about him. Something that many would have been likely to see within an old “Mr. Chips” movie if they had been of that generation. Or maybe, a little later out of the nineteen-eighties, in yet another sequel celebrating yet another knock off Hollywood iteration of Charles Dicken’s “Scrooge” That old charming reprobate dressed in a checkered vested suit snickering away with the younger lads elongating old tales and tattling out time worn ‘whopper’s’ with his arms generally filled with presents sitting before tables of complementary aperitifs offered to all. His expansive techniques of persuasion was so successful that he seemed able to snooker any unsuspecting ‘client’ happening along out of their suspenders at will. No one could have ever suspected that he too had once endured the many vagaries of a slowly declining youthful appearance leading to the diminishment of disappearing prospects as the rest of us often endured. He remained unapproachable to all in any other guise beyond what he immediately appeared to be. Someone who could unexpectedly poke you in the ribs with a sharply honed elbow at the conclusion of yet another overused joke gone stale long ago in the past. One that you would end up laughing at despite anyhow.
Being within the company of a small collection of Italians by descent who were now found to be visiting within another older neighborhood that was of a stricter Italian tradition which was hosting a funeral for some notorious mob personality. All of us sitting in one of the more notable hangouts of their restaurant crowd, making sure not to order the wrong sort of dish that might be misinterpreted as disrespect for the fact of this local luminaries’ passing.
PT II
A sedan going down a lonely stretch of road being one of many other similar lanes lined with on each side with empty suburban houses and then summoning up a sense of uneasiness as it unexpectedly gives way to a route beside a now disused elevated byway. One though now empty once supported a well-frequented set of commuter rail tracks. Small doors periodically incised at intervals into the sides to this snaking mound undulating overhead. A walkway near the snaking summit allowing access to these infrequent portals. A Sunday family gathering walking within that open gallery visiting each of the entrances and testing the doors to see if they could all gain entry. The ‘uncle’ of these children seeming new to them as he bustles them along trying to find an open chamber that will give them faster more direct access to the other side. The kids at the opening of one rescued by other members of their extended family that have just shown up not allowing any to enter. This impromptu reunion all turning their eyes to that ‘uncle’ as if to suggest that it was a doubtful proposition to continue to deal with him. A conversation ensuing that transfers custody of the children to these others. The man being left alone in the dankness of one of these empty chambers alone silhouetted by the light of day spilling past the open metal door.
‘Everyone having their problems’, the man thought to himself. “I sure do!“, his voice echoed. ‘But optimism isn’t one of them.’ The more optimism the better! Though some others tend to describe it being one’s own worse enemy. ‘Sometimes it might be better if I didn’t open my mouth and kept my mouth shut and just played the role!’, he opined quietly within. ‘Why start a conversation that may not be the most appropriate that tells it like I feel by telling it the way I see it?’
Michael Kay, my old high school chum, had invited me to go up to Wisconsin with him to make a movie. His techniques of capturing small parts of acting from people that might be available here and there, and then cutting them together by the guide of his own sense of mental continuity, being a fascinating process that I thought to experience. Early in the morning just outside town, I foraged out into the rain then quickly descending into a quagmire of mud walking unadvisedly forth through it in my flip flops. The overhang of clouds above giving the impression of the midst of dark night with me turning frequently to see if oncoming traffic was about to overtake my in the middle of the road. My friend soon catching up with me as we headed together all the way to town to its local cafe to seek out some breakfast. The two of us in a back booth where he ordered food and I only a cup of black coffee. The cost of same totaling sixty cents of more than the two single dollars that I possessed. Having borrowed some change I stood at the counter niggling the coins suddenly no longer possessing the mental facilities to determine the exact total in that small pile of silver that I had just deposited upon a card table by the door that served as the restaurant’s front counter. I stood there with my head pounding while counting, counting, counting, as each time I seemed to lose count? The two matrons sitting across from me judging me incompetent to the task. Totally frustrated, I simply pushed the small pile forth and left in complete distress.
Our subsequent destination was the small town library where Michael had secured some space for the afternoon filling it with with a rendezvous of potential actors to serve as extras for the shots he had in mind. A room filled with a whole variety of people in different costumes sporting electric looks of the sort one could only guess that he could properly organize much later within the editing suite. The way he started shooting within that crowd ensure that the angle of his camera was posed in a manner to be oblivious to all the others waiting for their own turn. A rough cut playing in the corner at the opposite end demonstrating his craft in being able to get so much from so few in such a confining setting. The overall effect essentially no different than any other ‘B’ movie product from a Hollywood styled production company enjoying a bigger budget with much better resources. Some of the twenty-five or more other people not before the camera quietly milling about behind the camera awaiting their turn to be called. Subdued conversations from small groups or twosomes being carried on in a barely audible manner. One guy, ‘so and so forth’ in particular, being his special effects expert employing a rudimentary bag of tricks on certain shots. And then my own part came! One where I stood there for ten or twenty seconds with some futuristic toy rifle, waving same around loudly croaking out my lines, “More power!“, as my pretend weapon loses its glow. Some several minutes later seeing my bit on a monitor screen laughing at the absurdity of my performance as some overplayed movie monster character. That terrible headache of before now tempered by the levity.
The art of telling a story demands one key element, patience. Patience to sit back and be once with the tale to be told. To task one’s self to summon to mind every significant detail and not to rush them to risk missing any significant part of the story that might just pop into one’s head as if by magic. Not to be afraid of embellishing it by improvising off the top of one’s head. I can think of one story wherein every night when it is time to sleep one’s constant bed companion is a hewn block of cold steel in the guise of a dormant semi-automatic. A habit of some thirty years in duration in most nights being at one’s fingertips just out of reach all for the sake of a measure of added security in an otherwise unstable world. It seeming to be foolish to have a firearm but not keep it at the ready just in case on the outside chance that uninvited entities might unexpectedly come to visit at the foot of one’s bed harboring some malcontent. The intervening episodes of the sharp pain of slowly advancing infirmities slowly coming to harangue once youthful existence a harbinger of some future point when one might possibly consider an escape from becoming totally debilitated by the same. Always the available option to simply raise this instrument to the temple or breastbone and hurry the story along to its final conclusion. The fact of possessing same bringing an element of drama to light. Something lethal, and yet comforting in the same breath. A reminder to keep one fully cognizant about the seriousness of their life and the all too easy but irrevocable choices that they had at hand. A constant process of review in terms of which ones to follow, and which others to recklessly avoid. This long association with that bedfellow seeming over the long haul, ironically nostalgic.
It is a dark and lonely existence when devoid of human companionship when in the coming weeks or months the direction of big events may not leave much left as far as a recognizable direction of a solitary lifetime. The endless collection of bone-headed mistakes of previous eras making one wonder if the journey has been all that fruitful? Or just another proof of how empty and meaningless that this modern life has become. Magically it seems, a few appear to escape this land of nowhere as if by a surprise. Those that get beyond the simple default of being voyeurs and graduate into a daily habit of risking all for the sake of enjoying something new.
One of my friends picked me up in her sub-compact care and drove me over to her trailer park that amounted to a collection of outhouse sized shacks enclosed within a barbed wire enclosure surrounded compound. She parked the care under an eave the one side a series of four closed doors. The rank smell of one quickly evidencing to the entire area that it was a poorly attended to toilet. I stood outside the back of the car with foodstuffs in my arms waiting for her to open one of these entries. I followed her inside through to the the well-ordered matrix of those similarly sized shabby looking vertical structures. The entire compound totaled some thirty to forty units. Though it was not quite a concentration camp, it did leave one with a malevolent air. The entire place inside appearing completely deserted.