The Aftermath of Damage and My Life as a Lawn Chair

Couldn’t tell you why I decided to cut through the Chenango River Valley and up and through the Catskills on my way back from Trumansburg. I wanted to be alone with the odd mood I was in.

(I suppose I would have been alone in the car whatever route I chose, but being part of an automobile convoy, leapfrogging ahead of all those slower moving trucks, engenders a sense of collectivity whenever you drive the Interstate, whatever the reality.)

It was raining very hard. The roads were badly maintained, and some of them were quite steep. I wasn’t entirely sure that I wouldn’t run out of gas during the longest, most isolated part of the drive. Still, I think this might have been the first time I actually enjoyed being behind the wheel of a car since I was reincarnated as a Saturn Ion driver.

“In Britain, they still manufacture them, and they’re called Vauxhalls,” Ben noted mildly. “That’s why they put the dashboard assembly in the middle of the car. So they can put the steering wheel on the left or the right.”

This is the kind of random detail that appeals to me, and one of the reasons why I enjoy talking to Ben so much. He’s chock full of all these odd little random details.

###

First time I’d seen Ben since I left Ithaca. Now that the girlfriend isn’t around anymore, I can crash on his couch. Originally I’d planned on crashing one night but the one night stretched into two because of the passport drama and the fact that RTT was typically disorganized planning the retrieval of his Syracuse stuff. He’d gone back to Syracuse Wednesday night with two of his pals, Jason and John, thereby obligating me to give the two pals rides back to Ithaca, which, of course, cut down on the amount of stuff I could transport since the Ion-cum-Vauxhall is not what you’d call a commodious hauler.

It was odd to see Jason and John. Sort of grown up.

Jason is Justin’s younger brother. Four years ago Jason, Justin and another kid were mooching a ride with a pal when Jason calmly produced a gun from his knapsack, waved it around, and demanded the driver’s money and marijuana.

Justin asked the driver to pull over so he could get out of the car.

Ben – who heartily disliked Justin, considered him a ba-a-a-ad influence, blamed him for all of RTT’s erratic behavior – seized this as yet another example of Justin’s supreme fucked-up-ness.

“I mean what kind of a kid – when his brother announces his intention to commit armed robbery – doesn’t try to stop his brother? Asks to be let out of the car?”

A kid who’s seen it all a thousand times before and doesn’t want to see it again, I thought. But did not say. Unlike Ben, I always rather liked Justin. I knew Richmond, the mean streets where he'd grown up. I understood how Ithaca had always seemed like Never Never Land. I knew how heavily all those expectations weighed upon him; why it seemed to him like he had to do something, anything, to get out from under them.

Jason had assumed that since pot is illegal, and the driver had come by his cash through some underhanded scheme that the kid wouldn’t call the cops on him. But he miscalculated. Jason was picked up and sent off to juvie. There was some question as to whether he would be tried as an adult, but in the end he wasn’t.

Justin and Jason were both living with Janet, their grandmother, at the time. Fifty years or so ago, Janet became the first African American woman to graduate from Sarah Lawrence College. She’d had two daughters. One of them went on to become a professor of something-or-other at Cornell University; the other – the boys’ mother – got deeply into crack cocaine and eventually ended up in Richmond. Janet McDonald describes something of the same phenomenon in her excellent memoir Project Girl – how, as a Vassar student, she began sneaking back to the projects on the late night train to score heroin, something she’d never done while growing up in the projects, because the whole immersion into white-dominated educational privilege felt so… inauthentic to her.

I wouldn’t actually judge Justin and Jason’s mother except for the fact that there were children involved. Six of them all told. All boys. All different fathers. Kids put a different spin on the question of Life Choices. When you have kids, it’s fucking immoral not to make responsible Life Choices.

Her life tilted so far out of control that finally her mother swooped down, snatched up two of boys – Jason and Justin. Took the boys back to Ithaca. I wonder how she happened to choose Jason and Justin? I wonder how the four boys she didn’t choose felt?

###

Janet was in and out of hospitals Justin’s entire senior year. Jason got out of juvie after five months, spent another six months with an ankle bracelet on house arrest in Janet’s little downtown cottage.

After Justin committed suicide, Janet’s health fell apart entirely and she ended up moving into an assisted living home. Meryl, the Teen Whisperer, who’s the closest thing to a saint I know, took Jason in and she seems to have done an excellent job turning him around. These days, Jason’s a soft-spoken young man who recently completed his GED and will be starting TC3 in the fall. He’s an assistant manager at a local Starbucks. I suppose that means his juvenile records were sealed. Meryl would have expedited that – she’s a lawyer.

###

Spacey John trails memory penumbra too. He’s the kid who tried to commit suicide during Robin’s junior year. I remember how giddy and excited RTT got the few times he went to visit John in the hospital. Like Crispin Glover in one of my all-time favorite movies, River's Edge.

Jason was personable enough, meaning that while he didn’t exactly initiate conversation, he replied politely enough when spoken to. But John barely registered my existence at all. If I asked him something, he didn’t seem to hear it. If he answered, it was with sarcastic intent.

“Do you still live in Ithaca?” I asked.

“Uh. Sure,” he said after Jason elbowed him. “I live in Ithaca. I mean. Sometimes. I like to travel.”

“Where do you travel to?”

“Oh. Uh. To places. To places that aren't Ithaca.”

O-kay.

I mean, I get it. I’m old. This gives me roughly the equivalency of a piece of lawn furniture in John's universe. If John lives long enough -- by no means a given -- it’ll all come around full circle. After all, I distinctly remember being similarly oblivious to conversational attempts my grandfather and other members of his generation aimed at me when I was roughly John’s age. Nothing they said, nothing they could possibly ever say, could ever be even remotely interesting to me. Intellectually, I understood they must have been young once. But, it seemed to me, that theirs must have been a sapless youth. Wasn’t the world black and white when they were young? Like an old camera snapshot? How boring was that?

‘Course this is just the tip of the iceberg, and not at all what I intended to write about. Quite a lot has been going on:

Indian music festival
Walking around the upper West Side
Brooklyn parrots in the Green-Wood Cemetery
Internet pix of Maria
Vivian Maier
Ben
RTT passport

Hopefully, I’ll find time to catch up. Not now, though.