christmas weather

 

My sister lives out on the island

And her husband takes the train

He’s big and he’s fat

And he doesn’t even have a brain

Don’t you know you have to kill

Kill your sons

Don’t you know you have to kill

Kill your sons

Then you run run run run run

Run away

 

-Lou Reed, Kill Your Sons

 

I went to a 30 something reunion of my alternative school over the weekend. I have been dreading this for so many months it’s hard to let go of it now that it’s finally over. Dread anyway easily mutates into regret. Regret is the retrospect of dread. People prone to this kind of thing will know what i mean. It is like christmas weather. Autumn is a vortex terminating in the dark final days of december, with its sleet and sidewalk santas. At least we are still in a recession. A recession exposes the underlying desperation implicit in any holiday, and depressives take heart in that.

The alternative school i attended was open from about 1971 to about 1983. I graduated in 1978. It died for lack of interest on the part of students. I won’t go into what a tragedy that is. The school was a suite of five classrooms in the regular high school, a Roosevelt era building on the Post Road in Mamaroneck, NY. There were 5 teachers and 125 students with a variety of motives for being there.

Most high school reunions in the rich suburbs take place at country clubs. I guess a reunion is a school prom for 50 years olds (though i wouldn’t know, never having attended either). My comrades, true to our contrarian tradition, elected to hold the reunion at an art space in an area of NY formerly known as The South Bronx and now politely referred to as ‘The Hunts Point Section of the Bronx”. You know, where Jimmy Carter stood in 1976 promising to do something about poverty in america. We all know that America is poorer today, with a bigger disparity between rich and poor, than it was then, or at any time since the 1920’s.

Thanks to ACORN and other community organizers, the South Bronx is not the war zone it was in those days. But it reminded me of the Lower East Side in the late 70’s and early 80’s. At that time I would not have gone to the South Bronx. You didn’t even want to be stuck at a red light heading from the Third Avenue Bridge to the Bruckner Expressway. But I did wander the Lower East Side, warily. A friend and I were remembering a trip we undertook in 1980 from my apt. on First and 1^st to a beer distributer on 2^nd between C and D. We got as far as Avenue B where a guy stood in the street, a Yute, beating the ground with a burning two-by-four and screaming.

Anyway, it was with considerable irony that I rode the 6 train up through East Harlem, across the river and into the Hunts Point Section of the Bronx. I would like to report that after 125^th Street I was the only white person on the train. Some things don’t change. But the train was also free of Yutes. I did not feel the fear americans know to fear when they are a racial minority. Nor did I feel the hard thumping of the heart in the chest when I got off the train and wandered in the wrong direction. The neighborhood did not strike me as a likely place for an art loft, but the street was also free of Yutes, so I continued my way. I’m not an idiot, i didn’t want to consult my Google Maps printout openly. There is nothing worse in this world than being a sucker, except being a lost sucker. So i ducked into a bodega, reread the map by the beer cooler and bought two pint bottles of Guinness Stout. There were no six packs. I asked a man where Berretto Stret was. He, and the cashier behind the bullet proof glass, looked at me like i was from mars, but I felt no hostility. The fact is, if america is a meaner, poorer place than it was 30 years ago, it is also less divided racially. I think that is actually amazing. The constant undercurrent of murderous violence was just not there, though I’m sure I could have easily found it if i had wanted to.

The party itself was fine and awkward. The gallery was like a 70’s tribeca loft and was located on a street of row houses locked up as in the 3^rd world behind boards, chainlink fencing and barbed wire. I stayed late, got drunk, and talked to people I didn’t know, as well as old friends. No one had changed at all. Now i’m planning on moving back to australia, which is where i went the last time i felt like this, only discovering too late that it wasn’t far enough away. Trying to run away from people is like trying to run away from a fart.