A dent in the noggin
I'm back home after a trip to, well, the place that used to be home. It always makes me laugh when people say "I'm going home for Christmas," which is of course silly unless you are going to your house for Christmas, which hardly sounds like a place you really have to "go," at least in the more extended sense of the word. Home is the fucking place you live, not where you used to live, OK?
As some of you know, 2005 has been the year from bloody fucking hell for me for a bunch of reasons. And in this case, I have to report that the reason for the trip was a sad one. My mother died, and I had to go down and do the whole family thing. It is always great to see my family, since I live more than four hours from my closest relative. Seems like when I lived close to them I wasn't really that thrilled to see them all the time, but now it's a treat. Or something.
But going home to that little town in southern New Jersey, out in the Pine Barrens, is a trip. There is a great book by George Orwell called "Coming Up For Air," in which the narrator wins a few bucks on a horse race and proceeds to sneak away from his shrewish wife and go back to his hometown, which he hasn't visited in 30 years or so. Of course, when he gets there he finds that everything has gone to fucking hell in a three-pound brown paper bag, and that everything he remembers fondly is either gone or transformed into something horrible.
I can't say that was quite how I felt when I walked the streets of this little town, but it was different, and different enough to annoy me in some ways. Main Street used to have cow pastures at both ends. The cows are gone, and some overpriced homes are there now. Land values have shot up tremendously; the old pig farms on the outskirts of town have been sold and tony housing developments filled with mid-six-figure homes are on those pig farms now, which means all the smelly kids whose parents owned the pig farms are now no doubt richer than God if he hit the trifecta and the lottery. Is this a great country or what? And those homes are owned by professional athletes who play for the Philly and New York teams. And one of the houses right outside the town limits is owned by Beetlejuice, that weird-ass guy on the Howard Stern show. My brother even ran into him at the local convenience store.
The town post office is gone; there's actually mail delivery now. The post office has been turned into apartments or something. The liquor store is gone; I remember how kids used to go in and distract the old woman who owned the place while their friends would load up their pockets with pints of booze. Of course, I only heard tell of such awful behavior.
The market where I had my first job at age 12 is now a pizzeria. But worst of all, the malt shop, or luncheonette, or whatever you want to call those soda jerk-type places that had 15 kinds of milkshakes and a pinball machine that cost a nickel to play but always tilted, has become gentrified. It now has some stupid "cafe" name and is supposed to be fucking "quaint." Quaint, of course, means overpriced and dog-assed corny, and don't ever let anyone tell you that isn't the case.
Also gone was the "department store." What a bizarre place that was. It was owned by an old spinster and was a one-person operation. She was notorious because, and I am not kidding, she was the only middle-aged woman in town who'd never been married. You may remember me telling you that the Bible school teacher who insisted on hearing all our masturbatory confessions was not married, but she was "still young enough," in the words of the townsfolk. This may be hard for you to believe, but that is how it is in some of those weird rural places.
The store was about the size of two large bedrooms and consisted of shit thrown hither and yon, in boxes and out of boxes, men's shirts, women's blouses, undergarments of the sort that hadn't been worn in years, yellowed brassieres that looked like armor breastplates, dingy-looking curtains. And, worst of all, she sold candy that was way, way past its expiration date, and it was always a good idea if you actually were brave enough to buy a candy bar there to break it open and look for bugs. It was not unusual to buy a Clark bar and find a maggot or two in it, which earned her the nickname "Maggot Allen" among us kids, since her real name was Margaret and calling her Maggot was just too damned perfect.
One thing that is constant in town is that Mr. Zelley is still there. Of course, Mr. Zelley will always be there. There's an old graveyard just half a block away from the house I grew up in, and the grave closest to the road was some guy named Ridgway Zelley who died in 1873. His wife and kids are there, too. I always said hi to Mr. Zelley when I was a kid, because I must've walked past his damned bones 10,000 times. So I said hi to him again when I walked past him the other day, and asked him to say hi to my mom, if it's indeed possible to do such a thing. I doubt it, but no harm in asking, right?
Seeing Mr. Zelley prompted me to walk to the other boneyard, which is down the street the other way. They were never really competing for customers, mind you; the one Mr. Zelley is in was the old, scary graveyard that hadn't had a new resident in years, even when I was a kid.
But it was interesting to walk past the damned church where that "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" tune (see my prior blog, "That's Nice, Cheeks" with comma) used to blast from the belfry every evening and go to the newer cemetery. I think it's pretty well full, but there were people there I didn't know were in there, and there were people I hadn't thought about in a long time.
Remember the guy I told you about in my entry "I'm With Stupid" who was killed in a car accident while speeding with his lights off on a winding country road in the middle of the night because he thought that was an exciting and interesting pastime? He was in there. So was my fifth-grade teacher, a guy who was never seen without his big, black glasses on, and I had to wonder if he got planted with them on his face.
Old Tom, the perfectly named town Peeping Tom, all 6 foot 6 of him, is there. I worked with him in the dog food factory, and he was kind enough to buy me my first bottle of hard liquor. Thanks, Tom. So were a few friends that I'd had no idea had gone onto their reward, if there is such a fucking thing as a reward in this life or the next one..
There are now three fucking schools where there used to be one. Even the town dump is gone. I guess everyone's garbage gets toted off somewhere now. It sure was better when we would just burn it, except for the occasional fire that would result. My brother and I used to roast crickets while burning the trash, and I have felt guilty about that for 40 years now.
But I couldn't help but stop in the fru-fru "cafe" that's where my favorite pinball machines used to be and where I once drank an eggnog milkshake that gave me the shits for four days.
I ordered scrapple and eggs because you can't get scrapple where I live. In fact, you can't get scrapple in most places. If you don't know what it is, well, basically it's breakfast meat formed by pushing a pig headfirst into a grinder.
There is one thing about that place that hasn't changed. Even when I was a kid, there was always some mildly retarded or "slow" older guy hanging out in there for some reason. I don't mean one guy; there seemed to be a succession of them, as if it was the Pope of the Luncheonette and that when one would die or be committed or whatever, a new one magically appeared within days to take up the cudgel.
So it turned out that the new occupier of this odd throne was a guy a couple years younger than I am. Since this is a tiny town and one that does not see a lot of outsiders stop by, of course this guy had to ask who I was when I came in, and he identified himself as a former neighbor kid whom I had not seen in something like 35 years. He was all gray and snaggletoothed and simple-minded, but he had a good heart and I enjoyed talking to him, up to a point. That point was when he said "Do you remember when I fell out of your hayloft onto my head?" (We had a hayloft, but no hay.)
I don't remember that, to be honest, but it made me wonder if this tragic fall had anything to do with the fact that he'd attained the position of being the weird guy who hangs out at the local eatery.
Great. Something else to feel guilty about.
As some of you know, 2005 has been the year from bloody fucking hell for me for a bunch of reasons. And in this case, I have to report that the reason for the trip was a sad one. My mother died, and I had to go down and do the whole family thing. It is always great to see my family, since I live more than four hours from my closest relative. Seems like when I lived close to them I wasn't really that thrilled to see them all the time, but now it's a treat. Or something.
But going home to that little town in southern New Jersey, out in the Pine Barrens, is a trip. There is a great book by George Orwell called "Coming Up For Air," in which the narrator wins a few bucks on a horse race and proceeds to sneak away from his shrewish wife and go back to his hometown, which he hasn't visited in 30 years or so. Of course, when he gets there he finds that everything has gone to fucking hell in a three-pound brown paper bag, and that everything he remembers fondly is either gone or transformed into something horrible.
I can't say that was quite how I felt when I walked the streets of this little town, but it was different, and different enough to annoy me in some ways. Main Street used to have cow pastures at both ends. The cows are gone, and some overpriced homes are there now. Land values have shot up tremendously; the old pig farms on the outskirts of town have been sold and tony housing developments filled with mid-six-figure homes are on those pig farms now, which means all the smelly kids whose parents owned the pig farms are now no doubt richer than God if he hit the trifecta and the lottery. Is this a great country or what? And those homes are owned by professional athletes who play for the Philly and New York teams. And one of the houses right outside the town limits is owned by Beetlejuice, that weird-ass guy on the Howard Stern show. My brother even ran into him at the local convenience store.
The town post office is gone; there's actually mail delivery now. The post office has been turned into apartments or something. The liquor store is gone; I remember how kids used to go in and distract the old woman who owned the place while their friends would load up their pockets with pints of booze. Of course, I only heard tell of such awful behavior.
The market where I had my first job at age 12 is now a pizzeria. But worst of all, the malt shop, or luncheonette, or whatever you want to call those soda jerk-type places that had 15 kinds of milkshakes and a pinball machine that cost a nickel to play but always tilted, has become gentrified. It now has some stupid "cafe" name and is supposed to be fucking "quaint." Quaint, of course, means overpriced and dog-assed corny, and don't ever let anyone tell you that isn't the case.
Also gone was the "department store." What a bizarre place that was. It was owned by an old spinster and was a one-person operation. She was notorious because, and I am not kidding, she was the only middle-aged woman in town who'd never been married. You may remember me telling you that the Bible school teacher who insisted on hearing all our masturbatory confessions was not married, but she was "still young enough," in the words of the townsfolk. This may be hard for you to believe, but that is how it is in some of those weird rural places.
The store was about the size of two large bedrooms and consisted of shit thrown hither and yon, in boxes and out of boxes, men's shirts, women's blouses, undergarments of the sort that hadn't been worn in years, yellowed brassieres that looked like armor breastplates, dingy-looking curtains. And, worst of all, she sold candy that was way, way past its expiration date, and it was always a good idea if you actually were brave enough to buy a candy bar there to break it open and look for bugs. It was not unusual to buy a Clark bar and find a maggot or two in it, which earned her the nickname "Maggot Allen" among us kids, since her real name was Margaret and calling her Maggot was just too damned perfect.
One thing that is constant in town is that Mr. Zelley is still there. Of course, Mr. Zelley will always be there. There's an old graveyard just half a block away from the house I grew up in, and the grave closest to the road was some guy named Ridgway Zelley who died in 1873. His wife and kids are there, too. I always said hi to Mr. Zelley when I was a kid, because I must've walked past his damned bones 10,000 times. So I said hi to him again when I walked past him the other day, and asked him to say hi to my mom, if it's indeed possible to do such a thing. I doubt it, but no harm in asking, right?
Seeing Mr. Zelley prompted me to walk to the other boneyard, which is down the street the other way. They were never really competing for customers, mind you; the one Mr. Zelley is in was the old, scary graveyard that hadn't had a new resident in years, even when I was a kid.
But it was interesting to walk past the damned church where that "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" tune (see my prior blog, "That's Nice, Cheeks" with comma) used to blast from the belfry every evening and go to the newer cemetery. I think it's pretty well full, but there were people there I didn't know were in there, and there were people I hadn't thought about in a long time.
Remember the guy I told you about in my entry "I'm With Stupid" who was killed in a car accident while speeding with his lights off on a winding country road in the middle of the night because he thought that was an exciting and interesting pastime? He was in there. So was my fifth-grade teacher, a guy who was never seen without his big, black glasses on, and I had to wonder if he got planted with them on his face.
Old Tom, the perfectly named town Peeping Tom, all 6 foot 6 of him, is there. I worked with him in the dog food factory, and he was kind enough to buy me my first bottle of hard liquor. Thanks, Tom. So were a few friends that I'd had no idea had gone onto their reward, if there is such a fucking thing as a reward in this life or the next one..
There are now three fucking schools where there used to be one. Even the town dump is gone. I guess everyone's garbage gets toted off somewhere now. It sure was better when we would just burn it, except for the occasional fire that would result. My brother and I used to roast crickets while burning the trash, and I have felt guilty about that for 40 years now.
But I couldn't help but stop in the fru-fru "cafe" that's where my favorite pinball machines used to be and where I once drank an eggnog milkshake that gave me the shits for four days.
I ordered scrapple and eggs because you can't get scrapple where I live. In fact, you can't get scrapple in most places. If you don't know what it is, well, basically it's breakfast meat formed by pushing a pig headfirst into a grinder.
There is one thing about that place that hasn't changed. Even when I was a kid, there was always some mildly retarded or "slow" older guy hanging out in there for some reason. I don't mean one guy; there seemed to be a succession of them, as if it was the Pope of the Luncheonette and that when one would die or be committed or whatever, a new one magically appeared within days to take up the cudgel.
So it turned out that the new occupier of this odd throne was a guy a couple years younger than I am. Since this is a tiny town and one that does not see a lot of outsiders stop by, of course this guy had to ask who I was when I came in, and he identified himself as a former neighbor kid whom I had not seen in something like 35 years. He was all gray and snaggletoothed and simple-minded, but he had a good heart and I enjoyed talking to him, up to a point. That point was when he said "Do you remember when I fell out of your hayloft onto my head?" (We had a hayloft, but no hay.)
I don't remember that, to be honest, but it made me wonder if this tragic fall had anything to do with the fact that he'd attained the position of being the weird guy who hangs out at the local eatery.
Great. Something else to feel guilty about.
posted by Fiddler at 9:30 PM
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