The Adventures of Wild Dog continues up the East Coast. 1992.
You’ve doubtlessly heard tales of the Swamp Fox, legendary Revolutionary War hero Francis “Maid” Marian. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great uncle, one and a half times removed, was the relatively lesser known Delta Dog, Lafayette Ajax. Caught behind enemy lines with his pants down, about to be hung on many trumped-up charges, and some not so trumped, it was the Swamp Dog who said, “Give me beer and whiskey for my horses.”
Charleston. This was my first visit and I was very impressed.
It’s the strangest thing. I’ll be walking around here and I am struck by, hey, this feels just like the way Pennsylvania used to feel when I was a kid. Then, I remember, I am ACTUALLY in Pennsylvania. Seems like only last week I was parked in the front lot of the Kitty Hawk Hampton Inn. The Federal government was charging ten dollars to pitch your tent on a sand dune on public lands. During a storm with winds gusting over sixty knots. So, we coasted into the side entrance of a big motel and made ourselves invisible.
The National Park Service wanted three bucks to go inside the Wright Bros. Display Area, which wasn’t even open at seven a.m. So, we contented ourselves with racing the same one hundred and twenty feet Orville and Wilbur, two bicycle mechanics, flew less than ninety years ago. Don’t see what a big deal that was. With this wind, just get Stephen Hawking airborne and he’d fly fifty yards. But I digress.
For the present, right now, I’m sitting in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. Imagine the little town in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” At the home of a couple of old college friends. Who have a cat. To which of course Hiawatha is allergic. The weather turned terrible moments after our arrival, alienating most of the population. We’re sleeping in the van in forty-two degree rain. (Meanwhile, the WINTER OF CONTENT continues, climate-wise, in the Pacific Northwest.)
Went to THE SWEETEST TOWN IN AMERICA yesterday. Hershey, PA, is located around the homestead of a poor boy, one Milton S. Hershey. Grew up, bought the entire town, gave it his own name. Now that’s a dream come true. He “brought quality affordable chocolate confections to the masses.” Left his gadzillion dollar estate to an orphanage, centered in his own mansion. The largest chocolate factory in the world is managed by executives, men and women, who were once boys and girls at the school. The entire community, planned by Uncle Miltie, seems to be working extremely well in these trying times.
IT MUST BE SAID, I’m doing fairly well. As a man. My back stopped hurting about 50 miles away from my parents. Managed to live on the road for a month without mishap.
Things are looking up. Things are looking up.
Personally, I am homeless, penniless, jobless, and clueless. But hopeful
I think, in the past, I drank too many drinks, misspoke too many times, went out the window when I should have just come in the door. I know, I know, you’re thinking, that’s not the sensitive lug I remember. Who knows how these rumors get started.
Outside the picture window of my parents’ home, I saw a gator, maybe six, six and a half feet long, stuck in the water, snagged on some debris. Dead and bloated in the sun.
Poverty’s child can eat stale cake.
Think we’ll just take the interstate for a change, all the way to Long Island. Doesn’t seem like we’ll be missing much by scooting around Newark.
I have noticed you can tell almost everything about a home simply by checking the food supply.
Happy people have full refrigerators. I’ve done some powerful visiting in the last year, and that’s my observation.
***
A twenty-four hour foray into the heart of Yonkers. When a New Yorker tells you they have an hour-long commute, you simply have no idea, none whatsoever, what they’re talking about. Unless you’ve done it yourself.
Which we have.
Three lanes squeezed onto two, sixty miles an hour, made more interesting by the failure of our turn signals. Had the opportunity to visit with Natalie and her husband of forty-seven years, Hal.
“I’m so nervous in New York City,” Hiawatha admitted. Hal laughed. “Everybody is nervous in New York City.”
He’s a drummer who took a day job with the NYC Housing Authority some twenty-seven years ago. “I told my wife,” I take this job, we will never get rich.” He never has envied another man’s money.
Natalie took up watercolors as an older woman. Her portraits of flowers are compelling and artful. “Do you paint from photographs or do you use real flowers as models?,” I asked her. She looked at me, her eyes locked into mine and she said something very slowly I will never forget.
“You have to have the flowers.” That’s all I know about painting, but I think it’s important.
Natalie is a kick. She’s been sick. “Sick? I’ve seen so many doctors, I’ve been on more table tops than any other white woman in the city. A better looking body you bury.”
Her looks have changed. Once a head-turning beauty, now she describes herself as “a big piece of meat with eyes.” It doesn’t help that Hal, several years her elder, looks like Frankie Avalon and is aging slower than Dick Clark.
He’s lucky to have her.
They had a couple of stories to tell us. About a heroic pig with a wooden leg. “A pig like that you don’t eat all at once. There was also the one about “you can believe the horses, you can believe the cows, but don’t believe a thing the sheep say.”
On our way north on Interstate 684, we came upon the Brewster Rest Area. Which was closed.
We stopped anyway. Rule here is you can’t park for more than three hours in a night.
Drove through the middle of Brewster, remembering the time I marched in a parade blowing on a heavy brass tuba. Didn’t know how to play but I was big and the parade was long. Came by the pink house where the mother sprayed the back of her head onto the wall by pulling the trigger of her shotgun with her big toe. That impressed a ten-year-old. Saw the place where we got our Welsh Terriers, Mac and Scooter a year earlier.
When we drove into Carmel, on the shores of Lake Glenida, Springsteen was singing MY HOME TOWN. Merry Miler wouldn’t shut down when I turned the ignition off and put the key in my pocket. four p.m. on a Friday. Texaco couldn’t help and the Chevy dealer on Main Street didn’t even want to hear about our problem. He was rude. Probably my looks, Merry Prankster meets Long John Silver.
We ended up with some Italian grease monkey in a Sunoco dealer at the bottom of Brewster Ave. Across from the strip mall. He disconnected our RV equipment and broke the ignition, so he just charged us for a new one.
(The problem is the new solenoid which NOKOMIS RV RIPOFF replaced on our fourth visit. To fix the same problem.)
Actually saw a sign, kinda official-looking, said: SPEND IN PUTNAM. Cost us one hundred dollars to visit Putnam County. Can’t keep the food cold now, but we did make our getaway.
My car didn’t want to stop in my home town; what kind of omen is that?
36 Kelly Ridge is for sale. Asking price is $189,900. Roughly four times what it cost to build forty years earlier. Nearly three times the price Top Hand sold it for just a dozen years back.
So, I knocked on the front door.
Mr. Adorno has some one-in-million brain disorder that’s going to kill him momentarily. Boy, is Mrs. Adorno depressed. She doesn’t want to leave, but if she doesn’t sell the house she’s going to lose it. Can’t pay the mortgage and the real estate market is the pits..
My old home has finally become the house it always should’ve been. Mother-in-Law apartment in the basement, remodeled kitchen, and a finished attic. Two bedrooms, no bath.
On the wall across from the bathroom, just to the left of the stairs down to the basement, there is a painted plain wooden plaque. It was a gift from Mrs. Adorno’s two daughters.
THERE IS A TIME FOR LAUGHTER,
AND THERE IS A TIME FOR TEARS.
FOR EACH OF US HAPPY HAPPY DAYS,
AND DAYS WHEN GRIEF APPEARS.
BUT WHEN WE HAVE OUR TROUBLES,
JUST AS WHEN WE’RE GLAD AND GAY,
WE SHOULD ALWAYS REMEMBER,
THAT THIS, TOO, WILL PASS AWAY.
“I read it a lot,” Mrs. Adorno said. “It’s so true.”
Fuck deja vu. The entire neighborhood remains unchanged. Exactly as I remember it.
Only smaller. I had no idea the place was so modest.
Only difference? Most of the names on the mailboxes look to be Sicilian or Calabreze. Even the last two vacant lots are still empty, a maze of thin elms and oaks which don’t appear to have grown much in twenty years.
For some reason I haven’t yet pinned down to my satisfaction, sometime around the fourth and fifth grades, somewhere around ten or twelve years old, I went from being a happy-go-lucky skinny kid who got perfect grades to being a sullen fat underachiever who suddenly couldn’t handle mathematics.
Maybe it was just a stage I was growing through, maybe it was something else. Seems to me, something happened that changed my life.
I don’t know what. I know it happened then when we lived on The Farm. Mom was in charge when she wasn’t chasing college degrees. Back when folks took care of folks who had no one else to take care of them. Kind of like the Humane Society. Mostly for old, stinky men nobody wants any more.
Standing near the site of the old County Farm, I was driven to tears by an overpowering sense of loss. Like something had been taken from me.
I always dreamed the government would turn my boyhood home into a park and charge admission. I just never figured they’d tear the house down and put in public restrooms.
In which ghastly posters warn of Lyme Disease and the local tick hazards. Have a nice day.
Carmel, New York, was a much nicer town than I thought it would be. At least on the outside.
Which is where I didn’t want to sleep.