God Bless Cantankerous Old Men
By Christopher Ketcham
When Michael Jackson died a few years
ago, my father, who is 72, called me to complain. “What the hell is
this Max Jackoff business?”
“Dad, what are you talking about?”
“It’s all in the news. Never heard of him
before. Some sort of man-boy. Singer. Runs around on stage making
chirping sounds. He apparently died of plastic surgery or some such.”
“Michael Jackson, dad.”
“Can you believe the time and trouble being spent on this weirdo?”
My father is an engineer and city planner
and tends toward the macro view of things, looking at the life of cities
over time, much the way geologists look at rock. In retirement, he’s
been reading about the coming collapse of the United States due to debt
and waste and war and greed—the books pile up on his shelves—and is
increasingly radicalized by the macro conclusion that the country is
screwed.
“Why aren’t the young people out
protesting? Why aren’t they going nuts over what’s happening? Why aren’t
they going after these fucking CEOs?”
“Busy thinking about Max Jackoff,” I offered.
I’ve been lucky enough to have old people
around me, mostly my parents and their friends, who are growing more
cogently contrarian in mind every year their bodies grow more infirm. If
Michael Jackson was beloved and continues to be mourned by tens of
millions of Americans, then my father is sure to disagree. I might
venture to craft a probability equation of his thinking: The more people
gathered around any one totem in the zeitgeist, the more likely my
father is to consider it a waste of time. This thought process is not
out of spite or fury or disgust, but born, I’d guess, of the simple
reckoning that most popular culture these days, being popular, isn’t
worth shit on a stick.
I’ve been thinking recently of another old
man, a friend of the family named A.J. Centola, who went homeless a few
years back—the garret he lived in was the top floor of a brownstone
converted to condos during the real estate bubble—and ended up sleeping
in my dad’s Brooklyn basement for six months. A.J. and I used to sit
around gabbing on afternoons, walking around the old neighborhood,
Carroll Gardens, where he grew up during the last Great War, when it was
an insular little place of Irish and Italians who hated each other, and
merchant marines in boardinghouses, and dockworkers, ironworkers,
grocers, and freelance laborers like him.
Losing his garret, losing the context of
the place where he’d worked as an electrician and carpenter for 60
years—he’d never left Carroll Gardens—was agony for the guy, and it was
made worse because he was a smart man, he’d read his history, he knew
what was happening was part of a transformation of class throughout the
neighborhood, the wiping away of the class without money. At that time,
in the spring of 2002, all sorts of new and expensive bars and
restaurants were going up, places that sold pain aux raisins in the morning.
And in the summer evenings the restaurants filled with well-dressed crowds of
the young.
A.J. lived on cigarettes and vitamins, ate
maybe once a day, a pizza or a chicken roll or a cheese roll at Sal’s
Pizzeria, which had been at the same spot since the war. He walked with a
pained-looking half-hunch and he suffered tremors—he said he was like a
Jack Russell terrier, too much unused energy. It shot through his limbs
and made him shake, but I thought it was the onset of Parkinson’s.
I’d see him sometimes pacing Court Street,
the main stretch of commerce in the neighborhood, without him seeing me.
His short, slow, ginger steps in front of restaurants. Glancing with
his heavy neck into the windows at the crowds with a look of infinite
suffering. The only eatery he would step foot in besides Sal’s was
Josie’s Java, a closet-sized, ancient-looking dinette that had a bench
outside with signs posted, “Buy a cup and get a free video!” Which
prompted A.J. to ask, “Yes, free video – but of what?” He liked Josie
because she was old and mean and refused to ingratiate herself with
customers.
“She won’t make it in the new Brooklyn,”
A.J. said one day. “And I dunno if there’s anything new about it. Same
fools nearly ruined France, nearly ruined England. You have one class
now in Carroll Gardens, the mono-class of the rich. No industry, no
trades, no jobs for the average person to pull himself up. Now it’s all
restaurants on Court Street that the old-timers can’t afford. People
live their whole lives in the same place, and then this is not their
place.
“Now we got the Television Watchers, the
Cellphone Talkers. Whole class of men and women who watch TV or some
version of it, like this Internet thing—stay attached to little machines
all day long. A lifetime. Sad. Free-thinking goes in the toilet. The
Television Watchers start thinking alike, looking alike, buying alike,
and they don’t know why. I’m harsh. I don’t forgive the TV for lying so
much. Some people do. Ever thought of the rise of the television and
that funny little coincidence of the Cold War and the national security
state? National Security Act is signed in 1947. OSS becomes CIA. Five
years later—less—first televisions go into mass production, mass
distributed. The Television Watcher is born while the state expands.
Enormous increases in defense funding, war funding. A standing army is
built unlike any you ever seen in the history of the country. Expansion
of the secrecy of affairs: The things that can be held from people now
include billions of dollars, all that black spending. State grows and
grows and grows, and so do the Television Watchers. Cold War was the
worst thing to ever happen to this country.”
When A.J. was thrown out of his little
garret in July of 2001, he did not exist on paper. He was an unknown
quantity to the earmarkers of the state, and he liked this fact. But it
posed a question: The owner of the building, an old man who happened to
realize in the bubble economy that he had a pile of money in the four
floors of his brownstone, offered A.J. a cut of the proceeds from the
sale. The owner had known A.J. most of his life and felt bad about
evicting him. Total cut was $50,000—for A.J., an enormous sum. But to
receive the gift, A.J. would have to acquiesce to an existence on paper;
the money couldn’t just be handed over in cash; it would wait for him
in a bank account, and to claim the account, he needed identification.
So how to get the money? A.J. had never paid taxes, never voted, never
been fingerprinted or had a credit card or a driver’s license or a
Social Security card or any other official identification.
“I lived under the radar, and it’s going to
stay that way,” he said. “I’ve seen enough of what the government can
do when it gets its hands on your identity. You give that up, you might
as well march down to the police station and tell ’em to get it over
with and arrest you now, and they’ll say, ‘Well, why?’ and you’ll say,
‘You got my identity. You’ll find a reason to arrest me soon enough.’ ”
“You need I.D. to live in this world,” I
told him. I had the odd feeling, saying the words, that I was actually a
tape-recorded message, and I immediately apologized.
“This world,” he said. “Which world? I’ve
known people my whole life and we never knew each other’s last names,
and we were good friends and kept it that way. The people who weren’t
your closest and most intimate didn’t want to know those things and I
knew there was something as knowing too much about a person, and that
could get you killed. There were people whose faces I knew, and that was
it. And they knew my face, and that was it – it was the trust between
us.”
A.J. spat on the sidewalk and said, “Now
it’s all about getting your identity down to a science. Devices to track
you down and track you out. Everywhere now. The cellphone? Tracking
device. This Internet thing? Tracking device. Credit cards, Metrocards,
EZ-Passes, bank accounts, saving accounts, mortgages—all keeping a
record.”
I laughed at him as paranoid, but this was
years before the country learned about the government’s data-mining of
exactly those kinds of records.
A.J. never took the $50,000. The price of
going on the radar was too much. When he finally parted from my father’s
basement, he ended up finding another basement, this one in the
Brooklyn brownstone of an old drunkard lady, happy and cursing, who puts
him to work keeping the house from falling down.
Christopher Ketcham, a freelance
journalist in New York City, writes for Harper’s, Vanity Fair, GQ and
many other magazines. Find more of his work at
www.christopherketcham.com or contact him at [email protected].
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/god_bless_cantankerous_old_men_20110801/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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