Inheritance

 Parallel Lines

 

 

 Most of my adult life, I never really thought of myself as having much in common with my Dad. Though, we often don’t want to be like our parents. After 9/11 he became more conservative. Caught up in the anti-Muslim hysteria, he excused a bunch of local kids who beat up a Sikh gas station owner in Pennsville thinking he was Muslim: “They didn’t know any better.” When he found out that I was going to a demonstration against the upcoming bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, he called me “a goddamn liberal!” “Dad, I’m a Marxist.You know that. I’m not saying that the people who attacked the US shouldn’t be brought to justice. But attacking a whole nation and punishing its citizens for the act of a few makes no sense.”

There were other differences too: I’m not really into guns, head cheese or dressing like a cowboy. But there are a lot of parallels in terms of disposition, temperament, and even interests. Maybe those interests stem from the two former, but also come from exposure. My Dad was a pretty good artist, was into music, and always seemed to be reading books on history, metaphysics, anthropology, and even lay guides to the new field of quantum physics (he thought it tied in with metaphysics). He was a smart guy but wasn’t immune from weird, irrational shit like nationalism and witchcraft.

My Dad hated his job and was happiest when down at Bay Lanes campground, right on the Delaware Bay near  Green Creek, NJ. We had a seasonal site there where we would park our pickup camper on cinder blocks, had a full size fridge under the overhang, and a screen house which served as our outdoor kitchen and dining room. We could head down the Bay anytime, set up my sister’s and my military surplus pup tents, and be good to go. This was my time, as well. I loved being outdoors, in nature. I still do. Bay Lanes is also where I had my first kiss, sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree with a girl from Philly. She had red hair and went to rock concerts. I remember going down to the site late in the season and scanning the sandy campsites for the tracks of her Converse Chuck Taylor’s. Longing for another kiss with arms wrapped around. The comforting feel of flannel.

I like my Dad, loved being outdoors. I also learned camping skills, which I honed in my adult life. I’m a good person to take on a camping trip. I won’t even attempt to light a fire until I’m sure it will light on the first try. But unlike my Dad, I’m not going to be throwing a paper cup of Coleman fuel on it. Though as kids we loved seeing the big yellow fireball that would make. My fondest memories were sitting around the fire with my Dad and Sister, toasting hot dogs or hot links, the cheap kind, while my Dad drank cans of Reading Premium and threw his peanut shells into the fire.

We were both artistic. I would sit at the kitchen table for hours drawing: cartoons with a Weiner dog as the protagonist, spaceships, post apocalyptic landscapes. My Stepmother would chide me, “What is the use of that? It’s a waste of time.” To which my father responded, “If people thought that way, we’d all still be living in caves.” He elevated the creative act as something important: part of what drives human progress. At that time he was doing political cartoons against Richard Nixon, dressing him a Nazi. For him, that was code for “authoritarian”, and he would often portray bosses and managers at his job as such. He always came back to doing art over the course of his life. Even exhibiting his pen and ink drawings and getting an award for his drawing of a kitten. His cat, Frodo. And, yes, my Dad got me into the Lord of the Rings.

One of my favorite things was going to the Cumberland County Library with my Dad. It was a new, clean modern building. Well lit inside, with a mezzanine. I’d never seen a mezzanine.  Besides books, they had all kinds of records: Switched on Bach, Morton Subotnick, Pink Floyd. I loved the weird electronic music, especially Subotnick: Silver Apples of the Moon and the Wild Bull. I had no idea how those tones were made, but it was otherworldly. Around this time, my Grandmother got me an 80-in-one electronics set from Radio Shack, and soon I was making my own weird noises. And “Animals” by Pink Floyd blew my mind. Besides the music, the guitar solos, the synthesizers and the dogs barking, there was the social critique in the lyrics, which I understood to be about class. This played some small part in the formation of my political consciousness. That and the awareness of the Vietnam War which was always on the news, and which at that point my Dad opposed.

And books. We’d get stacks of books. I liked science fiction and space stuff. Big picture books of what the future was going to look like: monorails, tube trains, space stations like giant gyroscopes orbiting the earth, robots. What a disappointment the future turned out to be! Like my Dad, I learned to read well pretty early. My Great-grandmother, who was a school teacher, taught my Dad. Before kindergarten, I was told. I struggled with formal English classes, finding diagramming sentences to be confusing and frustrating. I didn’t do well in school but was really smart and read voraciously. It was also my escape. My life had been pretty horrible up to that point (and it would continue). I never truly felt safe, loved, secure, and cared for. And I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Reading took me away. Far, far, away. Beyond my Stepmother, beyond the bullies at school, beyond my home, Bridgeton. Even beyond the solar system, the galaxy, and time and space. 

And I started to write as well. I wrote a short story about an encounter with the Jersey Devil (which my Great Grandfather saw when driving his taxi in the1930s!). I think it was 12 pages long, handwritten, single-space on ruled paper. And I also wrote a story of crash landing in a plane on an island with dinosaurs, with only two survivors, me and a girl! I used what I learned from the hug and kiss with the girl from Philly. As it turned out, we were in a created environment being observed by aliens. The dinosaurs were robots and the horizon offshore was holographic. The last thing I was working on, around 14 years old, was a science fiction novel. I mapped it all out. There would be space travel and time travel, and we’d finally find out who really built the pyramids!

I think my Father and I had a lot in common when it came to disposition and temperament. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how much I hate work and resent other’s benefiting from my life energies while also using them up. It was obvious to me that my Dad hated his job too. But, for better or worse (I have no pension/retirement, for example), I could walk away. At least after I saved up some money to make some sort of transition. And for part of my adult life, between 25 and 35 years old, I’d save up money (thanks to SF’s once cheap rents), pack it in, and travel in Mexico for 3–4 months. Alone. By bus, train, and ferry. Loved someone. Saw ancient ruins. And jungle, pine forests, beautiful beaches, stretched out in a hammock, palm trees swaying in the breeze. I made this happen for myself. And all those hours alone, looking out of bus windows, over the vast landscape for thousands of miles, deserts, winding mountain roads with steep ravines just below the window, or standing beside a dust blown highway waiting for a replacement bus, all the plastic bags stuck to the barbed wire fence rustling loudly in the wind. All that solitude shaped me, made me a better person. Me, alone venturing forth in the world, confidently. That is not something I got from my Dad.

So, I try to imagine, with my temperament and disposition, and my high sensitivity, which I believe my Father also possessed, how would I have turned out? If I had four children to support and had to work at a poison factory, a job I hated? A job which was also extremely dangerous (more on that later). Knowing that this is it. This job would consume the greater part of your life. I understand why he would stop at roadside bars and drink for hours after work. I have done the same. Quitting to travel, that was not an option for him. Outside work there was drinking, camping, fishing, being outdoors. Solace and solitude. In the simple things.

I sometimes wonder how I might have turned out if I had followed in my father’s footsteps. But, at eighteen years old, I made a choice. On my 18th birthday I left the residential school I’d been sent to by the courts, Chelsea School, run by the State of New Jersey, Department of Health, Division of Narcotic and Drug Abuse Control. I hadn’t yet graduated. But I was Eighteen!  Like the Alice Cooper song. I’m free! To do what I want to do! So I put all my stuff in a couple pillow cases and caught the New Jersey Transit Bus to Atlantic City then hitchhiked to Millville. I’d get a job, my GED, practice art, then go to art college… No. That definitely was not going to work.

After being there a couple of weeks, I packed my shit back up in those pillowcases and headed back to Chelsea School to get my diploma and apply to college, harassed by some plainclothes cops while hitchhiking back. They let me go with a warning.  Millville was a fucking wasteland, and all my friends were going to be victims of it. A depressed town with no opportunities and plenty of meth. I knew if I stayed, there was nothing for me. I saw how unsatisfying my Dad’s life was. So, if my Dad and I were parallel lines, at the moment those lines may have begun to converge, I chose to diverge.

Wilmer Vernon in Grade School