NY Beer Party 092201

Saturday we went into lower Manhattan for a reality check. I had been
there last Thursday in the rain to wander around on the roof of Federal
Hall. Yes, there is a big pile of building rubble where the WTC used to
be, National Guard, police, rescue workers, ambulances, cranes, fire
trucks… but there is also a cordoned off area on Broadway that has been
cleaned of dust and appears ready for sunny Saturday tourists. We very
much need tourists in NYC right about now.

We overheard a fellow on a cell phone saying that the Starbucks was
battered and dirty but that it looked like they could plan to re-open on
Monday.

There was a lot of standing around, a crowd, and amateur photographers.

Two black kids on the subway from Barbados with each a handful of WTC
postcards. For some reason I am proud of them and I hope they make some
good money today.

We walked around outside the crowded area, blocks East of GZ, and looked
at the gray dust. The dust cloud, filed with office papers, flowed down
the canyons of lower Manhattan and deposited itself on windows and
ledges and rooftops. I’m curious if the dust contains biological
material, if human bodies were not pulverized along with the concrete.
At one point on Thursday I wet my finger and rub it on the dust on a
stone on Federal Hall. I was tempted to taste it, but thought better of
the action and did not.

We walked around to City Hall Park to look at the fountain that friends
of ours had recently been involved in the restoration of. The running
fountain lent a restorative freshness to the scene. It is a good
fountain, today it is a defiant fountain.

We then went to Union Square Park where there is assembled a vigil.
Though I appreciate symbolic mourning there was something to the site
that made me uneasy, and it was not for the memory of the dead, it was
more to do with the spirit of the living.

For some time I have been thinking on the archetypal cult of candles and
trying to fathom what is behind it. It started out last year with my
trying to understand how a store at our local shopping mall could
support itself simply by selling candles. I have been purchasing books
on candle magic, but they mainly deal with technique and ritual layout
and do not go anywhere near the mythic psychosis of burning tapers and
smelly wax.

The vigil is a superb example of the cult of candle, though a bit
disorderly. In one concentrated location there are what looks like
thousands of candles, ranging from very small to modestly large. Many
glass container candles. And flowers. Wilted dead flowers that were not
helped much by the recent days of rain and sun. Papers and banners with
appeals for peace. Others for retribution and war. One suggesting
dropping LSD on Afghanistan – though I think they may already have
enough heroin to suffice. American flags in many manifestations. Art
objects of steel with stars. Children’s crayon drawings. Video crews
doing documentary shoots. A Buddhist monk steadily drumming. The
lingering sense of a polyglot god hidden in the trees. Votive candles,
birthday candles. Stinky sweet incense. Melted wax in many colors flowed
out over the granite steps. I think what this mess will be like to clean
up in the weeks ahead.

A girl telling a guy how she fled the WTC collapse. Obviously they have
just met and this is a ritual knowing. Then they start talking about
having lunch together. Indomitable non-native NY’rs returning to life
just like our Mayor has asked.

Clusters of candles like satellites spaced out away from the main group.
People sitting on the benches in the park. A guy strumming a guitar half
bad. Some good looking bodies, some really not good looking bodies. Men
with bellies and beards like water buffaloes. Thin people, the
antithesis of thin people. Kids, in strollers blinking against sunlight
as it filters through overhead leaves. Not understanding what it is that
is painfully blinding them. Older kids fussing with stuff. A bronze
dancing frog. A stuffed Snoopy dog. Drawn a chalk memorial on the
sidewalk. An old man and woman, seeming dazed and blinded by the noise
of the crowd, walk over the middle, dragging their feet. Dogs playing in
the dog pen. Leashe dogs barking at each other. A squirrel jittering in
a jagged path to seek cover. Young long-haired men in ragged clothes
kneeling. Relighting candles. Bowed heads quiet, in public solitude
crying. Young boys winding their way through the maze of wax pathways
--- they upright fallen jars of red or blue or white wax. They look like
they are playing a morning game at keeping the burning flames. Two guys
playing music from a makeshift sound system. They lean against a backhoe
near the street. On the pavement before them is a suitcase with CD’s of
the music played out over the crowd, an aural space.

When we lived in Maryland we would go to the Mall for demonstrations as
entertainment, NOW, the Native Americans, the farmers with their
tractors. Here at the vigil site I feel something incredibly pathetic of
the human spirit surrendering to the mindlessness of being irretrievably
lost. I feel like spitting.

In the late 60’s I attended a war moratorium in Washington. A bunch of
us in High School packed ourselves into a VW bug and drove down from
Ithaca, NY. Kids, excited to be coming down from the vicinity of
Cornell, we were all of us already well acquainted with the SDS and
Black Panthers. I knew Daniel Berrigan well enough to talk casual. I
first met him at a non-violent workshop where I was involved with Quaker
college students. I once picked him up in my car when he was hitching a
ride to go see a movie. At the time I considered myself a pacifist and
did not agree with his theocratic call for violent action. There were
other complicating factors going on in my life that I will not go into.

The war moratorium was a blast. During the day it was a bit boring. At
night all hell broke loose and the DC cops started tear gassing people.
I found myself running a lot. At times I was in the hip melee, at times
I was standing around with the cops. Locals standing on their street
corner and wanting to see what was going on in their city were gassed as
readily as us tourists. They seemd to feel unjustly put upon for their
curiousity. Overweight cops were chasing people around the mall on
mini-bikes. They were relatively easy to knock over; I’m reminded of cow
tipping. I thought I was a poet. I read too many books. I grooved on
Ginsberg whooping and playing his concertina. Many years later I met the
man, we had lunch, he was wearing a suit and tie. I stood around
bonfires and drank from the bottle passed and inhaled. I remember at
night running around a corner with a fellow that had a gas mask, where I
had nothing. He was giving me tips on resistance. I was getting a dose
of raw data. There was a double line of something in riot gear moving
our way. As if a dream. Needless to say I did not stay around to talk.
The best part about being a poet, I thought, is that it is a higher
level of communication of the human spirit than journalism. I thought I
had an invincible Poet’s Pass. It is a childish illusion that I continue
to maintain. I fell asleep in a yard behind a low hedge.

Later that year, after graduation from High School, I had a friend from
Yugoslavia who was returning home. It was the last that I would see of
him. As a parting gift he gave me his most prized symbol of the freedom
that he had found in America, that is, besides some very whacked out
parties and believing that he was a reincarnation of Geronimo and that
the UFO’s in the back yard were come to get him. He had taken an
American flag and cut it up with the intention of making a vest of it.
Well, I was not exactly pleased with the request, but neither did I want
to disrespect my friend who so much wanted to extend this last gesture
of liberty. The one thing that was very clear to us was that his party
was soon going to be different.

I took the flag from him and put it in my duffle and soon forgot.

When I remembered I was in trouble.

I was hitch hiking at 1 AM with an idea that I would go north to a town
where I was told I could get a job in a factory. I don’t know why that
goal appealed to me then, but spending another night sleeping under a
bridge did not quite make it. When the NY State Troopers stopped and
asked me to lay the contents of my bag out on the hood of their car I
thought that they were looking for drugs, which they were. I felt clever
that I knew they would find none. I was not exactly hip to the fact that
for a variety of reasons I had been under general surveillance in the
community. Getting busted a few weeks prior for a minor possession on
the same day that the annual county-wide bust occurred, and meeting all
my buddies in jail, did not give me much to go on.

They stood there with flashlights and orders. So I happily laid out my
possessions on the hood of their car, that is, until I pulled up the
flag from the bottom. Oops! I pushed it back down hoping they would not
notice. No such luck. Caught, I laid out the flag very carefully on the
hood of the car so that there would be no doubt as to exactly what it
was.

This led to step two. We all got into the car and drove off to waken the
local Justice -- Judge Spry, WWII decorated veteran and Grand Master of
the local Masonic Lodge (several years later my stonemason mentor and
employer tried to get me into this same lodge but his white racist
leanings could not get past my insistence that I would not join any club
that was not integrated). I very much liked Judge Spry, despite
everything that the liberals wrote about him in the local newspaper for
the next two months. People so much want things to be black and white,
good and bad. I have learned by experience to hate simplifications in
politics. I am surrounded by dumb people. I see them everywhere. They do
not know that they are dumb people.

At 2 AM the honorable Judge Spry asked me what I thought I was doing. I
explained to him that the cut up flag had been a gift. I explained to
him that I was a poet. Oddly, then and even now, I think this was a very
good defense. Jerry Spence says if you want to always win an argument
you should speak from the heart with passion. They put him on TV, so it
must work.

Judge Spry took me seriously. He explained to me a scenario that at the
time made absolutely no sense. He told me about a friend of his that had
worked at Morse Chain, on an assembly line making timing chains for
cars, for twenty years and had recently written a children’s book about
baseball. He was suggesting that I get a job and then learn to write.
Working on an assembly line to become a world famous poet was not
exactly my strategy.

Judge Spry sentenced me to thirty days in the county jail with a
condition. Each day I was to write a poem about the American flag. At
the end of the day I was to tear up the poem. The next day I was to
start over again. At the end of my term I was to visit with him and read
my poem. I was to have all of the books and paper and writing utensils
that I could obtain. I was incredibly delighted by this sentence and
told him so. He then gave me sixty days. I think at that point my
enthusiasm for incarceration may have been unnerving to his sense of
order and justice. He went no further with the adding on of months. I
shortly found myself residing in the county jail.

What I obtained in the way of books was ten bibles, Crime and
Punishment, a deck of Tarot cards, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I
can understand how new religions are feremented in prison.

County jail is a very busy and interesting place. There was a lot going
on. The first night was a bit rough with the guy that thought he was a
nocturnal ape-man. The second night, on the level where they did not
keep the screwdriver wielding murderers and uncertified loonies, was a
bit more restive, except for my cellmate. He must have been born on a
bad trip. He was convinced that there were all sorts of odd mechanical
things moving around on the floor. If I did not go along with him and
jump up onto my cot with my legs off the floor he would start screaming.
He was moved out after two days. I was left in my own cell. It was
pleasant. I still have a pencil sketch that I made of the urinal.

I quickly became popular in the cellblock for telling fortunes with the
Tarot cards. I learned to split a match down the middle and to make a
candle with butter, aluminum foil and a shoelace. Not that any of this
was a particularly useful skill.

Whenever a minister showed up my cellmates would jump in their cots and
pretend to be asleep. Sometimes I'm slow to adapt to my environment. I
never got away with hiding fromt he cloth as eventually one of my mates
would be found out by the minister and intoning mercy they would say,
“Go talk to the guy down at the end. He has ten bibles.” I admit that I
have listened to a lot of bull crap in my life.

I wrote one poem on one day and have been working on the one poem since
then. I'm a slow writer.

I never seemed to have time in jail to do more than think about writing.
I wish that when I was younger someone had told me that writers spend
most of their time thinking about what they would like to do and then
not doing it. My mother may have told me this, but I was not listening.

Several of my friends got together and solicited a civil liberties
lawyer, who’s son had fled to Sweden. Rich kids got to run to Sweden.
The pro bono lawyer got me out of the county jail after ten days. There
was no law against possession of a desecrated American flag. There was a
law; this was thirty years ago, regarding the public act of desecration.
Though I did finish reading Crime and Punishment, a very memorable
experience in a perfect setting, I felt cheated.

The letters in the newspapers painted Judge Spry as being a bad dude. It
irritated me that so many people had so much crap to say about an
agreement that they knew nothing about. It irritated me that I no longer
had the leisure to do whatever I felt like, as a ward of the county,
fed, sheltered, and allowed to lay on my cot most of the day and read
books. Here I thought I had figured out a perfect situation to
inexpensively extend my education. Everyone in my life but me was
freaking out. There were the hawks, and the doves. I never saw Judge
Spry again. I was led to understand that due to the public ridicule he
drank himself to death. His most vehement detractors called him the
drunken Judge. I felt bad.

As far as I was concerned we understood each other. I spent the
remainder of the year hiding from people in my parent’s basement writing
a poem. It was not a poem about the American flag. I have never been
able to finish writing this one poem. It was a poem about mirages, how
things do not appear in reality the way that we think we see them. I
continue to owe Judge Spry a poem about what the American flag means to
me.

I never had any intention of disrespecting the American flag and it
irritates me no end when I find the flag poorly treated. I had no desire
to go to Vietnam; in turn I have to admit that I never had the faintest
idea what the war was about. If it had not been for a general sense of
being pissed at life and having many Quaker friends, and returning vets
having a tendency to want to beat the shit out of me, I probably would
have enlisted, but for me the battle of my life was closer to home, a
residual effect of the Korean War.

For the last thirty years I have staid out of trouble and worked hard to
make something decent of myself.

If I lived in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime I would long ago have
been shot. In the Soviet state I would have perished walking in the snow
to Siberia, if not sooner. In America I was allowed to be a dreamer, a
reader of books, a citizen, a husband and father, a brother, a son, and
a friend. As I get older I know that I understand less, but there is one
thing that I know that I must care about and that is to resist the
suppression of our individual freedom to be tolerant, creative,
irrational, irreverent, humorous, compassionate and forgiving.

So I have a plan…

On the way home from Union Square Park I suggested that I would feel
better about the vigil if 6,000 rubber ducks were dumped into the
Hudson. I once saw this done on television, I think in the Missouri
River. I was told that ecologists may object, and I agree. I then
suggested that we put messages in 6,000 beer bottles and set them
adrift. Oceanographers like floating bottles. I was told, partly
serious, that I have hoarded enough bottles in the basement to suffice
the mission. Each of us prepares for Armageddon in our own way.

We reconsider on the magnitude of the count of bottles in the basement
and I think twice about the idea as I’m hesitant, with the diabetes, to
make up the difference on my own, then again, I can always be martyr to
a cause that many of us can, sort-of, feel good dying over. Raise ale to
freedom! If half-assed pilots can destroy our lives, then one half-assed
drunk can mend the world? Yeah, right.

It is suggested that I have to do this bottle emptying process alone as
we do not want our friends being arrested for transporting empty beer
bottles in their cars or on commercial aircraft. I remind that people
drive to the grocery to redeem their empties all the time and they do
not always get arrested. Still, there is a suspicion that now that box
cutters are considered lethal, what of the traditional beer bottle
broken, or unbroken and filled with gasoline and a rag? I remember as a
kid having slit my left thumb open with a box cutter while stealing the
seventh-hole flag from the Cayuga Heights golf course. The beer bottles
I had been playing with beforehand may not have helped the situation. I
should have known then where we were going with our small weapons.

I think about printing out 6,000 names on small slips of paper, like
fortune cookie messages in red ink, with a picture of the WTC and
slipping them into a beer bottle with a cork and setting them free on
the Atlantic tides. If War is eminent and even if we are all killed by
bad gas the testimony of the WTC and of our freedom-loving obstinance
would be washing up on the shores of the global village for many more
years. Then I begin wondering about battle cruisers and aircraft
carriers bumping up against beer bottles and million year old fish being
killed off in the darkest depths of the ocean from ingesting broken
glass. Oh my, oh my, what is one to do? Screw it.

Forget 6,000 names, it is too difficult to obtain and print and may
bring back painful memories. Simply save 6,000 fortune cookie messages
and use them instead combined with toothpick appetizer red-white-blue
flags. People who are thirsty and starving may need an uplifting message
of hope and will be more inclined to retrieve the beer bottle if there
is an upbeat fortune in it.

The fundamentalists of the world, theirs and ours, would eventually have
to come to the realization that to get an empty beer bottle someone had
to drink the contents. It will be difficult for the enemy to round up
the resources to comb the oceans and eliminate the evidence. Beer,
fermented water, is such a vital statement of human freedom. We can call
it the NY Beer Party.

Best to all,
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