See Walt Run

Momma finishes her guitar lesson with Walt. They play and sing all Elvis, all session, and laugh a lot, too. Father and Momma never laugh. Walt works for Father in his lamp factory and belts Elvis throughout the workday. When Momma fell in love with Elvis, Father asked Walt to teach her guitar, not noticing Walt’s crusty similarity to Big E.

After the weekly lesson, Momma often asks Walt to stay over for supper with us, my parents and me and my little brother.  And our little mongrel dog Spot who whines all the time ever since he was clipped by a truck out on the highway. Today, when Momma routinely asks Father if it is o.k. to have Walt stay, he grunts “maybe once more” with a little look of enlightened apprehension on his face. 

Throughout supper Spot whines outside the backdoor. Finally Father pushes away from the table, strides to his shop next door and gets his German Luger from the back of his desk drawer—he brought it back from the war. He grabs Spot by his collar and drags him around back of the shop. 

We hear a single pop and a squeal and silence. Walt lets out a little squeal, too. He gets up from the table, walks out the back door and keeps going—guitar lessons are over.  

from a 50’s primer—

see Spot run

see Walt run, too  

Laura and Harry

Laura Norcross and Harry Baum grew up on almost adjoining homesteads along New Brooklyn Road—a rural community just outside of Williamstown, New Jersey. In the garden county of the garden state, with a fame for tomatoes unchallenged. There was a bond, born out of proximity. 

The Norcross family had been around for decades by the turn of the last century—maybe centuries according to some legends. And with current internet ancestry can be traced back in Britain to the Battle of Hastings, and by some accounts to the Holy Land b.c.e. People of prominence seem to take good stock of themselves over the eons.

On the other hand, there’s Harry. Father Johanne and mother Caroline deposited on the migrant docks along the Delaware River in Philadelphia in 1883. The middle-est of all middle children, Harry was probably conceived in the middle of the Atlantic. Newly pregnant Caroline had four urchins in tow at the landing, and four more born in South Jersey after Harry. 

The Baums settled into a small German enclave in Williamstown, even started a German-speaking Lutheran Church there. Johanne refused to learn English, and got by in his small world. Actually, he never really wanted to come, and broke down at the docks in Hamburg, blaming "Jewish money lenders" for taking his small farm. When the U.S. entered the Great War, Harry’s youngest brother, named Johanne after their father, went off to the trenches. It probably nearly killed Johanne senior for the junior to fight against the “Faderland.” 

Thus, we have the “roots” of the Baum tree in America—a name that actually means tree. 

both dark and bright

attitudes crossed the sea—

some homegrown here 

The Friday Night Fights in Black and White

 I spend many Friday nights with my PopPop watching the “Gillette Friday Night Fights” on his little black and white television. The “Look sharp, feel  sharp, be sharp” theme song and the Gillette parrot flitting across the screen. 

After several weeks, I am sure I have all the rooting rules down. Negro versus Negro: “may the best boogie win.” A white boxer and a Negro: “kill the boogie.” White on white: “root for the Irish.”

Well, in 1957 the big Swede Ingemar Johansson is defending his world heavyweight crown against the American Negro challenger Floyd Patterson, from whom he had taken the crown the year before. Throughout the bout I notice PopPop becoming more and more enthusiastic for Patterson. It turns my boxing world upside down. I challenge him, “PopPop, why are your rooting for the boogie.” 

“Well Bobby,” he explains with puzzled, hurt eyes, “he’s our boogie.” Simple as black and white—well, sort of.

when everything seems dead

a fern sprouts from the soil--

a dark shadow passes

 Transition

at the church with the rainbow banner, Lee 

pulls his 10-year-old Honda Civic off the road, 

parks at the back of the lot

40 minutes before the morning service.

only the most deligent choir members mill about.

still in the driver’s seat

he slips off his jeans and khaki shirt,

 throws a green print dress 

over his head and pulls it down,

 kicks off his sneaks, 

and dons a pair of low-healed pumps. 

she retrieves a bob-cut black wig 

from the glove box,

 long out of style,

positions it just so. 

make up, 

overly done 

in an adolescent way. 

this one hour a week

Lea is welcome—

 it will do for now. 

jazz cacophony

juxtaposition of notes— 

someone’s music    

Earl

I learn to read with the "See Dick run, see Sally run, see Spot run" reading program. Earl, the only "Negro" in my first-grade class, learns that way, too, and much more. 

see colored boy color

see colored boy look confused—

see pink crayon labeled “flesh”

The Haircut and the CIA

After supper, Father, my little brother Howie, and I march over to Uncle Larry’s for our haircuts. Uncle Larry bought a pair of electric clippers about a year ago and has been giving us all haircuts ever since. Well, not exactly giving—he charges us each a dollar.

    Uncle Larry and his family live just down the highway on the other side. The orchards behind his two-story farmhouse run all the way to the Puerto Rican migrant-labor camp that houses the workers who come in the summer to pick crops on the farms here about.

    I am the first in the chair on the concrete slab behind the back kitchen door. Uncle Larry starts in on me. He is unusually talkative this night. “Just about finished my bomb shelter, Henry.”

    “I can see,” I say, but I really can’t tell this hole in the backyard is going to be a bomb shelter. It is about eight feet deep and ten feet across. Uncle Larry wants me to share his vision of an elaborate shelter able to sustain lives for up to three months.

    “We had an air-raid drill in school today,” I proclaim. I know he will be interested in that.

    “That’s good for when the Russians drop the big one on us,” says Uncle Larry.

    “Drop and cover against an interior wall—that’s what Mrs. Warner made us do,” I say, trying to sound like the official government brochure we read. “Oh, yeah. All the major cities have a ring of Nike bases around them. So the chances of  the Reds’ missiles ever getting through is pretty slight.”

    “Well now there’s the rub, Henry. The commies are wily, and they can count. They know that they only need to get a few missiles through our defenses to take out Washington, New York, maybe Los Angeles and Chicago, just for starters. They’ll throw hundreds at us, maybe thousands, figuring we can’t knock them all down. And that’s why I have this bomb shelter.”

    Uncle Larry must have noticed the surprised look on my face each time he calls this hole his bomb shelter. “Well, I know there’s some finishing work to be done,” he says.

    Just then a dark car out on the highway slows down. “See that car, Henry?” Uncle Larry says in a hushed tone.

    “Yup, they’re curious about your open-air barber shop. You might have some new customers, Uncle Larry,” I kid him.

    “Curious like hell,” says Uncle Larry. His voice becomes gravelly and his demeanor turns dark. “Those two are CIA looking for me. Or maybe FBI.”

    I can’t see two people in the car. I can’t see anybody because Uncle Larry’s house sits too far down a lane to tell how many people are in the car. It drives off.

    “Oh yea, CIA, I think.” Uncle Larry goes on. “They’re still pissed about Korea. It wasn’t my fault. They know that.”

Later at home I ask Father. “What did Uncle Larry do in Korea during the war there?”

    Father says. “He never went to Korea. He was in the Coast Guard right here in New Jersey. What did he tell you?”

    “When I was getting my haircut, a dark car drove by slowly. He said CIA agents were inside looking for him. It had to do with something he did in Korea.”

    “Oh boy, he’s talking that way again. The last time he got this way he started digging his bomb shelter. Just don’t pay any attention. He’s confused.”

    Later in the summer I heard Father tell Mama that Larry would have shock treatments in the hospital where he has been sent. It sounds like the electric chair. I hope it doesn’t kill him.

a river of silence

grows wider every night—

cold sliver of moon

Walt Fields

He manhandles the polishing machine at the back of my father’s little lamp factory. A felt disk as wide as a hubcap whines at tremendous rpm. A human should not get anywhere near it. But Walt does, as his strong hands and hairy arms guide brass lamps, candlesticks and the like against the disk. A glossy finish is coaxed out of the surface of the metal.                                                                                        

    Walt regularly glances at his image in the greasy paned window. He shakes loose his shaggy locks of dark hair like Elvis. He doesn’t see the three-day beard, dangling Camel cigarette, or wragged plaid shirt missing two buttons. He sees the king of rock-n-roll on the Ed Sullivan Show. He wiles away the polishing hours belting the hits, “Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” “Jail-house Rock,” and the list goes on. His fellow workers yell, “Knock off that bellowing,” but for the most part they tolerate his show, maybe even enjoy it.              

    And Walt loves the chippies. Saturday night he calls and tells Father—the closest he’ll come to having a real father—that the band at Lakeview Inn is  having him sit in with his guitar. By the time Father gets there, Walt is nowhere to be found. Monday morning he claims one of the groupie girls got real cozy and took him out to the band truck.       

    At 19 he’s four years older but still badgers me to set him up with girls that I go to school with. He describes his sexual escapades, some may even be real. I am intimidated and pretend to understand. Years ago he stops going to school, somehow avoids the Vietnam War. And dies a decade or two later from lung cancer.

dark forboding— 

pitty of the 

workshop milieu