Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

Okay, I accept that you can’t step in the same river twice, but if I want to go from Manhattan to New Jersey I’ve got to trust that the bridge is going to be there, and that the same bridge will be there when I need to get back. It’s still Washington Heights, even though there’s more Dominicans and Jamaicans than when I grew up. Is it the same bridge, O Chevrolet, O Mercedes Benz? I’m not going to write this any more. I won’t show off my ignorance any more. I refuse to embarrass myself this way. If you want to understand it, you write it. I’ll wait.

The door to Henry’s lunchroom opened and two men walked in. I can’t write that NOW. I haven’t got the rhythm, I haven’t got the jazz, I haven’t got the stuff that Hemingway has. What am I saying and why am I saying it? Why don’t I shut my trap? How can the life of a writer be so exhilarating and so boring in the same moment, and that moment is NOW which immediately becomes then, god bless it?

So in these Memoirrhoids I try to inscribe the past onto the present, onto NOW, which is everything that is, and that all there is constantly flows away. Yipes! I can’t write it. I have to go back to New Jersey. Maybe this writing is the bridge. A bridge from NOW to then. I trust it will be here, the same words, whenever I need to return. What a fool’s spree this writing be.

It was simply A-BOMB, the headline that announced what my world would be as I grew up. I spotted that printed on The New York Post on the kitchen table in our Washington Heights apartment, and though I didn’t yet know exactly what was what this hit me like a shock wave from the bomb itself. I staggered out of my building and crossed the street into Jay-hood Wright Park. This little park was a big part of my world, a small landscape designed in the style of Frederick Law Olmsted, who did the great Central Park, without which all of Manhattan would be dreary as a suburb. I stumbled into the park and walked the path that circled the territory, then climbed the granite outcrop that was my neighborhood mountain. It was a thrust of rock left bare in some accident of wisdom to remind us that Manhattan was a rock first of all. It was on that rock that we had only parked our ephemeral economies.

I squatted in the monotonous breeze and stared at the apartments across the street. One blink and the buildings shattered; blinked again and they were whole. The pressure of that headline laid me down, crushed me into the rock. The hazy sky, opalescent and vast, was fixed to digest me. I was only young. It was August and I was ten, just three months into the double digits. I stood back up and stretched. Behind me the graceful arc of the single roadway of the George Washington Bridge extended from Manhattan Island to New Jersey, with roads beyond to Chicago, and on to San Francisco. I was too small. I didn’t know the world. The Hudson River was great. It flowed below without complaint. All the creatures inhabiting my system had gathered around below my mountain. They had come to me as if I had the answers. I was too young even to know the questions. I scanned this multitude of multitudes, and tried to understand who I was. I couldn’t begin to name all of them. The squirrels were there, curiously silent, mingled with their brother rats, and a bordering heap of mice. Roaches occupied an ominous territory, with earwigs and centipedes. Just the representatives sent by each ant colony filled a substantial space. The ant lions came in peace. Grasshoppers, crickets. There were fireflies, darning needles, yellow butterflies, all the moths including the wretched little clothes moths from the closets of the people. Worms peeked out. Crows circled, as did their cousin starlings, and chicken-hawks, and jays, and a city of sparrows, and the pigeons at the fringe, that strutted and cooed. The Japanese beetles so reviled, so shining and metallic, accumulated with ladybugs and other beetles that were their brothers and sisters. Mayflies returned for a reprieve, buddied with the houseflies. The shad rose up from the river below, and the perch, and the river crabs so prized by the Chinese with their wire traps, and the eels that some will eat, all were there around me. Some that I didn’t even know how to name were present. One cat was as big as a motorcar. A shadowland of white bears appeared, and then dispersed. Garter snakes braided and unbraided with the snakes I didn’t know. The legendary fox of the park was so long that you could measure a mile from the tip of its bush to its snout; in fact, they say this was how the mile was invented in New York City. All of these surrounded me, waiting calm as a lake around an island. They waited like actors for my notes.

I was so young. I was diminutive, in fact. I had nothing to say, but finally I spoke. I can’t remember everything I told them. I said, Brisk Lipton S Tea . I said, You’ll Wonder Where The Yellow Went If You Brush Your Teeth With Pepsodent . I said, LSMFT, Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco . The words blew from my mouth in a spray of fire. I tried to apologize. “The humans,” I cried. “The humans!” This I said in simple words: “From now on nothing will be the same.” Of course I was naive. I was inexperienced. I was only a kid. I was wrong. Eight Great Tomatoes In An Itty Bitty Can . Everything is the same. Everything has changed. There is more of it now, and more of us to smother in it. We never stop killing the other people and we keep killing ourselves, and that is what happens till the brightness overwhelms, and that keeps happening until quitting time.

Rockefeller Center rises out of the heart of Cape Breton Island. I made that discovery in the early Seventies. While visiting Phil and Rudy on their first summer of residence in their place in Cape Breton, I realized I might be able to afford a piece of land by the shore myself. I became obsessed with this. The landscape, the seascape, I was overwhelmed by it, and was struck with the people, friendly, kind, mischievous. It was 1971, but it could have been 1871. Some still got around with horse and buggy. Old timers, like John-Dan MacPherson and Joe Kennedy and Dan-Huey MacIsaac loved to tell sea stories, fishing stories, bootlegging stories, stories of the mysterious old days in Cape Breton, long before the causeway linked the island to the mainland. People still were tough. There were few automobiles. They hitchhiked, or walked long distances. It was a place that seemed to connect me to a rich old world of continuity and survival.

Land for sale was generally posted on a bulletin board at the county seat in Port Hood. There were no real estate agents. Phil and Rudy had bought their place from a Mrs. Gilbert of Gilbert Oil, a Rockefeller sister. Their place, a fishing and hunting camp that had never been used, had been built as a tax write-off as the company explored for oil off the coast. They abandoned that effort, leaving a few parcels of land Gilbert Oil was unloading. The one I wanted to look at was managed by Ranger Hamilton, an American sexologist who ran a camp at the end of Sight Point Road, outside of Inverness. This road is a spectacular route through the woods and on cliffs along the shore. Ranger Hamilton wasn’t around, but I was told I could get a gentleman, a fisherman, to come down from Pleasant Bay to show the property.

He took us up the dirt road, stopped after a mile or so, and we got out. He pointed towards the sea. “It’s the ten acres by the shore,” he said. “There was once a road down to it, but I don’t know where it is. It’s all grown in.” From beyond the spruce forest, under the rush of small clouds, the ocean, grey-blue and white-capped, assaulted my heart. We could actually own such a place.