Notes from Bizarroland 5: Nearing One Month

Ma and I descended upon the homeland yesterday. Homeland in two senses: the house and the neighborhood. The house in which I grew up, in which the vast majority of my parents’ life together played out. The neighborhood is a humdrum borderland that we always called Forest Hills but that is apparently within the bounds of Rego Park. It may have been considered part of Forest Hills decades ago. The problem is that the house in which I grew up, which before it was my parents’ belonged to my maternal grandparents – a Slavic immigrant couple who met in New York during the depression – resides right near the boundary separating Rego Park and Forest Hills, these neighborhood designations in Queens that may or may not have significance now but that linger on as reminders of the collection of towns that made up western Long Island before the consolidation of the five boroughs. So I spent the earlier part of my youth saying I was from Forest Hills, and then sometime during my adolescent years I acquiesced and admitted I grew up in Rego Park – a name that for those in the know carries considerably less cachet.

            In any case, the “homeland” – this neighborhood that contains buildings I’ve looked at since infancy, this place I still call “home” in spite of increasing feelings of alienation I feel at the changes in the local landscape. Where there is now a mall containing Sears, Marshall’s, and other stores there used to be a monolithic branch of the old NYC department store Alexander’s. Before there was a discount dollar store of some sort on Queens Blvd. there was a Nobody Beats the Wiz. Before the Wiz there was…I can’t remember now… Ben’s Best Delicatessen is still there, serving classic New York Jewish deli fare.

            Within the neighborhood there are streets I walked hundreds of times with both grandmothers, my mother, my father. Over the past few years, each time I’ve visited my parents’ house I recognized fewer and fewer of the neighbors on the block – a block like many others in Queens, made up of red-brick connected row houses, these a bit larger and admittedly nicer than similar blocks elsewhere in Rego Park, Astoria or Sunnyside. Last year the next-door neighbor Helen died at a ripe old age of…hmm, don’t know…shortly after my grandmother Jean did. Her daughter still owns the house next to ours, and I guess that makes her and my mom the longest-term current residents on that block.

            Something about Rego Park – my section of it, started to annoy the shit out of me since I moved out in 2005. The increasingly chintzy storefronts, the motley folks bumbling around, the disappearance of restaurants and stores that should have remained, if only for my sense of continuity. Yet as much as the damn place annoys me, I can’t loathe it. It’s too much about me, so when I look at it and feel disdain for it I’d be feeling disdain for myself too.

            The house itself is now a large brick-and-mortar ellipsis for me, the gradual process of my parents’ move out of it and fully into their new house in Tucson having been interrupted by the revelation of Dad’s terminal cancer. Of course walking through it yesterday there were memories. Of course. While my mom sorted through mail, I found myself looking for artifacts proving Dad’s existence. I knew where to find his notebooks from about ten years ago – artist journals, I guess you’d call them, into which he pored out all kinds of mental activity, some insightful and beautiful, some morose and tiresome. The red-and-black ink drawings still strike me as brilliant: garish caricatures of people both real and imagined. I slowly read through some of his writings, laboriously deciphering his horribly messy hand. It occurred to me that I might be eavesdropping, invading his privacy by reading these jottings, but somehow I didn’t feel any guilt of trespass.

I won’t lie; a lot of the writing conveys a keen feeling of depression, of anxiety about how to go through life. Not only did Dad mull over his own tribulations, he wrote out his sympathy, sometimes pity, for family and friends – a piece describing his observations on the neglect of his half-sister by other relatives, an entry pondering the bullshit of the W. Bush regime via worrying about my oldest friend’s being called to duty for the Iraq invasion of 2003. My friend, and my dad sat there scribbling out his worry for him. Well, sure, why not. I mean he treated the guy like a fucking nephew since sometime in high school, and the guy came out to see the old man, full well knowing it might be to say goodbye before Dad kicked it.

Then there were the photographs. I just started to look around through the many MANY photos my mom took over the years, knowing I was looking for images of Dad. I found a good deal – photos from the late 80s and early 90s, photos of trips to Vermont, Florida, pictures of my dad’s 50th-birthday celebration in 1992 with some of our Czech relatives with us in Queens. Photos of both of my grandmothers, Anna (my mom’s mother) already suffering the symptoms of Alzheimers’ in 1990, though you can’t see it in the images. Anna, looking healthy (as she physically was) at age 78; Jean with a head of almost all-brown hair at age 74. Photos of Dad looking spry at 45, 48, 50. Photos of Dad and me – he a slim man in early middle age, thick dark hair on his head; me an incredibly dorky 10-year-old, with baggy pants and a baseball cap the diameter of which fit my head but still looks outsized on me. I had read some stuff in his journals from 1999, stuff about how he realized he needed to let me live my own life, about how at age 19 I was grown up (I’m sure he later realized that I was anything but grown up, even if I thought I was), about how he still wanted to help prevent me from making the mistakes he had made. Quintessential concerns of a father, perennial hopes for the good fortune of his son. 

So I spent a couple hours being an archaeologist of my own past, of my father’s life and past, of my family’s past, of the house, the neighborhood. Whatever.

The thing is, with all the feelings of futility and fatigue brought on by this archaeology, this recollection, there is so much I want to tell you…

There’s so much I could tell all of you out there about the crazy and hilarious interactions Dad had with the neighborhood freaks and goons: Chester, the homeless guy who gradually went more crazy over the course of a few years, who started to bend the windshield wipers on peoples’ cars, whom our neighbor Abe wanted to pulverize with the help of my dad; “FBI,” the fucking maniac who walked the streets of Rego Park screaming out “I’m FBI, don’t mess with me!” or things like that, and who then actually got shot by a Central-Asian Mafioso (they started to pop up with the influx of Bukharian Jews into Rego Park during the 1990s) for yelling his bullshit, a mobster paranoiac who actually thought “FBI” was yelling it at him, warning him that he was in trouble; the bizarre conversations Dad had with The Late-night Streetwalker, a neighbor on the block who will remain nameless, who spewed vitriol about his family and about the revenge he would exact upon anyone who dared block his driveway. These people all existed.

There’s so much I could tell you, so much I want to tell you, about how I remember all those games of catch, how I too remember the time you played basketball with me and my teenage friends, when I made that one basket that won the game – that game you scribbled about years after it happened; about how much I enjoyed watching those Marx Bros. movies for the first time with you, how it opened up whole worlds of laughs and ideas when you showed me the Marx Bros., the Pink Panther movies, W.C. Fields, how even though you annoyed the shit out of me at times in Tucson this past year I still wanted to laugh with you at the Marx Bros. and Louis C.K.; about how I remember that you taught me how to understand baseball and basketball, these rituals of fathersonhood, these rituals of Americana, those hours we looked up all kinds of shit in the huge baseball encyclopedia you bought in probably 1993, the year the Mets sucked more ass than we thought possible, the year the Knicks were great but not great enough, the year the Phillies caused you agony when Mitch Williams completely blew it, “CHOKED” as you talked about at length, fucked it all up and gave up the Series to the Blue Jays…

Now, and for the past four weeks, I have so much to tell people about, so much to tell you…so much to tell…

And I wonder who it is I’m telling, and, for that matter, who’s really doing the telling.

Some Thoughts on Lateness

In the natural cycle of plant life, the middle of summer could be considered the moment of fulfillingness, the zenith of an arc that begins its ascent with the buds of early spring. In New York City, this zenith comes at about the middle of August. The days are not as long as they were in July, and they seem overripe. On a recent afternoon, the August sunlight made the red bricks of buildings especially deep. The green of leaves on trees, now no longer the sprightly, lush green of late May, looked more burnished. The sun, humidity, and lack of wind conspired to produce a stillness of atmosphere. Owing to concerns which had produced in me a certain mood, it only took a slight shift in my perception, a minute adjustment of my interpretation of the information conveyed through my senses, to feel in this August afternoon not the muggy but pleasant laze of summer in full swing, but a certain fatigue in the atmosphere. It was as if the balminess of mid-summer was revealed to be a facade with a depth of torpor lying underneath.

* * *

The news of Rashied Ali's passing on August 12th hit me with eerie force. Death had already been on my mind, as at that point I had been attempting to mentally and emotionally prepare myself for my grandmother's passing. The news of Ali's death felt like metaphysical print-through, a pre-echo of another death that my family knew was imminent.

* * *

The common link I could find between the deaths of Rashied Ali and Jean Somoroff was that each inspired in me feelings of regret. As Ali had been a close friend of one of my research informants (whom I consider a friend), I immediately thought of the encounters and conversations that might have been. I would never get a chance to tell him, in as composed and graceful a way as I could muster, that Interstellar Space, his album of duets with John Coltrane, was a reference point in my life, an example of what I love about and why I can believe in "free" jazz. I would only be telling half the truth if I didn't admit that I also thought about how it wouldn't be possible now for him to add his own memories, knowledge, and wisdom to my dissertation research - a selfish kind of regret.

Some of my first thoughts after learning of my grandmother's death could be seen as regrets about my selfishness. Jean Somoroff had a life-long (as far as I knew) love of dogs. Since my wife and I got our dog in early 2007, she had heard about him. Once she moved into a nursing home in March of 2007, I began promising her that we would bring Bobo with us during one of our visits. I told her we would bring him when the weather was warm, so that she could sit with him outside the home for a while. Since we were living in North Carolina, there admittedly were not many chances for us to bring Bobo along for a nursing home visit, as we usually left him in NC when traveling north to see family. When I moved back to New York City in late 2008, I assured her that now, when the weather was a bit better, we'd bring Bobo so she could finally see him. But I never got around to it.

* * *

Jean Somoroff was, in general, not a woman who felt a need to sugarcoat her views. When my parents brought her down to North Carolina to celebrate her ninetieth birthday in the fall of 2006, she said with a smile, "Now I'm old, too old." It was the first time she had seen my apartment (before it became the home I shared with my then-girlfriend/now-wife). The number "90" brought home the idea that my grandmother was born in a different world, and I teased her about that, knowing she could take it. I seem to remember her admitting that she didn't quite understand the world any longer, that it had more or less passed her by. Perhaps this is only an apocryphal memory.

Whether or not she voiced the opinion, I'm pretty sure she did feel a bit like a stranger in the early 21st century. She remained, until her last two years in the nursing home, a fairly avid follower of current events. She never took much to technology, and I think I might have briefly tried to explain the Internet to her. I wouldn't have asked or expected her to understand what I was doing in graduate school (it only makes sense to me half the time), though coming of age as a Jewish American in South Philadelphia (back when South Philly was an Italian and Jewish ghetto) during the Great Depression, she had an inherent respect for higher education for its own sake.

I realize how different our worlds were when I think about how baffled she would be had she ever listened to Interstellar Space. Even if she would have been able to hear or understand my words during her last week, it would have meant very little to my grandmother to know that a great jazz musician from her neck of the woods who was some eighteen years her junior had passed away.

* * *

On days I spent with my grandmother during the summer, we would often walk over to 108th Street, the commercial thoroughfare that was one long block from her apartment building. From the age of about five to nine or ten, these walks would combine a number of activities: she would run errands at the supermarket, the cleaners'; we would stop off for me to get lunch at a pizzeria; sometimes we might stop in the toy store where she would spoil me and buy me a Matchbox car or action figure of my choosing.

Looking back, I feel fortunate to have grown up near two pizzerias that both served great New York pizza. I associated Joe's, the one on 108th Street, so strongly with my grandmother that the few times during my childhood when I might stop in for a slice with my father the whole situation felt a bit odd - not bad or disconcerting, but just notably different than usual. During one of my visits with my grandmother, when I was perhaps six years old, she told me, "You're getting old enough to order the pizza and pay for it yourself. Go ahead, you can do it! You know what to say." And, sure enough, I did. I asked for "one slice to stay, please" and handed $1.10 across the counter to the cook whose face I knew so well. It was my first monetary transaction.

* * *

If I reach very far into the recesses of my mind, I can touch one of my earliest memories of being with my grandmother. I must handle it carefully, lest it flit away like a frightened bird. I cannot force it to the surface of my consciousness, but if I reach slowly and gently and then wait patiently, the memory fades in. Typical of early-life memories, it is not so much of an event as it is merely an image. But this is a memory-image whose visual contours are invested with other sensory information and with the weight of emotion, which itself seems outside the boundaries of sense. I'm lying on her bed with a bag of ice held up to my lip. I see the dresser in her bedroom, the quilt on the bed, the plain white of the walls. I'd been running around in the playground just across the street from her building and had fallen on my face, bruising my lip. I was perhaps three years old at the time - the tears came freely, and my fall seemed like a catastrophe, the injury to my lip a major setback. The context, the story, is bolstered by only the faintest of images. It is the image of myself on her bed that remains more vivid. The pink of her bed and the blond wood of her dresser feel safe in my mind's eye. I cannot recall her words of comfort that afternoon, but their feeling, their resonance, is somehow contained in these colors in a kind of mnemonic synesthesia.

* * *

It's been eight days since my grandmother passed. It was two days after her death before I could really cry for her. I cried for the minuscule geography to which her life was limited at its end, confined first to a building, then to one floor, and finally to one small room; I cried for the loss of verbal ability in a woman who knew nothing if not how to talk; I cried because the woman who had an almost never-ending supply of food and snacks whenever family visited her (and this well into her eighties) lived with barely any appetite during her last two years. It was two days after her death. Earlier the same day I had noticed the exhaustion at the edges of a mid-summer afternoon.