Notebooks part 6 by Ron Steinman

• Posted by Roger on September 3, 2008
• 65 comments

It’s easier to take disappointment, a failure, defeat, censure, when you are pessimistic. Praise is more heartily felt when in that state of mind. Praise is the unexpected and it means much more under those circumstances. When you are too optimistic you are hurt and disillusioned if everything doesn’t go the way you want it. Naturally, being too much of the one and not the other causes its own problems. There must be balance between the two states of mind. Realizing that both exist is necessary. Try and strike a mean between the two for one’s own well being and for the sake of others in your orbit. Otherwise, nothing is any good for anyone.
    Add xenophobia.

This date is impossible to read on this page. Maybe it is at the end of February. Wilderness rears its prolific head, loosens a yawn, rolls itself around, awakens. Spring is here, so says the almanac. I ask, why don’t we call it winter because the cold lingers? Derived from use, probably some ancient and fanciful term. It comes, anyway, like a breath of something newly born. Call it a rebirth. Once a year. Here we have the second coming enacted every year on schedule. Do we really need anything else? Do we need more?

Easton, Pennsylvania. Early March, 1955. Promulgated. Juxtaposed.
    “Our society is not harmonious. It is antagonistic and the state will always be the ultima ratio.” So says Newman sounding a great deal like Hobbes.
    Charismatic.
    More grad school thoughts. From now on I’ll prepare for a position in formal or informal education. Or. I’ll prepare, from now on, for a position in the area of formal or informal education directed primarily toward audiovisual aides.
    Objectives: What position do you want?
    What position would you like to hold ten years from now? Columbia wants to know this. Also, get advisement sheet for Master’s Candidates.
    So again I sit and wait for something to happen. Why must things always happen? Unless things happened there would be no truth and unless things did not happen as things do . . . It’s inevitable. Pick an answer. Assuming I can. March is nearly finished.

It feels different. It’s not central. It’s only peripheral to the center and part of my core. It’s also obviously my massive insecurity. We are all insecure. Few of us are willing to admit it and fewer of us when we do realize it do anything to alleviate the omnipresent situation which presses its incessant self forever inward and, conversely, thence outward. Maybe I should burn all the notebooks. Burn these most revealing thoughts of my most intimate nature. Out of selflessness or selfishness? Maybe out of the realization they are worth very little, hardly worth the paper I’m  scribbling on. But I guess I’m chicken to let a part of me go so soon, considering how little I’ve written. For now I’ll continue at the pace I’m recording.   
    An idea floating in my head is something I call, The Education of a Pagan. Early life. Later life. Once dead or the afterlife. Balls. If only I had more time, some more decent time.

Finished reading James Jones, “From Here to Eternity.” I can’t call it a great book. Very little is great, really, and that’s my critique for the day, especially over a glass of beer. Parts of it moved me but the total impact was tough and compelling.

March 26, 1955. Though I have started writing fiction I am unhappy with most of what I put on paper. I like the ideas but the execution is poor. I don’t know if I can become a writer of value. The act of writing is important to me. Do I continue these notebooks after I graduate? Do I get bigger books? I want to keep filling pages with ideas. Someday they will come back to free me. My thoughts work faster than my ability to write them. My thoughts are many jumps ahead of the mechanics of writing. I suspect the process works the same with everyone. If nothing else, I must find out if I can write. Do I burn these notebooks when I am older? Is that selfish or self-protective?

Notebook entry early April 1955. Easton. I smudged the date and time. I am sitting in a hovel in Easton on the hill, near the college. It’s a dive serving terrible food, bottled beer, mostly Rolling Rock in its green skin. The room, smelling from stale hops has too many sloppy, nondescript people. I refuse to count how many are sitting in here on this early spring day. I, too, am sitting and waiting for what I call some strange, hoped for inspiration. Someone is playing pinball. Bells ring. Buzzers buzz. Greasy American cheese sandwiches are sizzling on a small grill. The television set blares. Voices blather beneath the sounds in the bar. Everything in this place is moving forcefully and with a strange, stark strength. All are in contrast with me, a man not moving, going nowhere fast.

Shave every day. Drink no beer during the week. Eat light and eliminate starch. Drink beer on the weekend. Go to bed early. Sometimes. I must get up early because I have an eight o'clock class. Or is it at seven fifty-five? Try for confidence and not insecurity.

April 5, 1955. Easton, Pennsylvania. A memory of Brooklyn. Real? Imagined?
    They caught up to them earlier and wiped them out, neatly. Again they beat me badly and left me for dead. I staggered up from the ground, wandered around, then passed out. My lips were like pulp, my nose demolished, my eyes like slits, bloody and a mess, when I walked into the pool room over the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue. A few guys dropped their cue sticks. Others could hardly move. They were in shock. After their brief agony, they ran to me. They carried me over to a pool table and roughly swept the balls aside to make room for me. They laid me out and started working to clean me. I could hardly move. I didn’t protest. I said nothing. Yes, I still lived. Go figure. They didn’t ask what happened. They knew. They lived there with a grapevine more wonderful and efficient than any set of jungle drums. After they managed to piece me together, they got me very drunk, took me to my parent’s home, rang the doorbell, propped me against the door, ran around the corner and watched me fall inside the house as they heard the stunned and terrified scream of my mother. 
    The next day, word went out to the pool halls and pizza joints to stay far away from me. Anyway, the shape I was in,  I couldn’t retaliate for some time.
    Meanwhile, things were happening in the neighborhood. A leader of an opposing gang, the gang that beat me, was found almost dead. I had nothing to do with it. His girlfriend had been gang raped; her face slashed. My bunch stayed out of it. To make sure we kept some kind of peace, we signed treaties with just about every clique we found. We were safe if we walked in groups of at least four. We still had to worry about the cops so we started being good boys. The heat was on and for good reason. Many joined the army. It was the easy way out. Two got married. Several got hooked on drugs. Others were caught breaking the law and some went to jail, their lives stretched out in an endless stream of empty days and nights.
    As for me, I returned to school.
    Far fetched? Don’t be too sure. All of this did take place on the streets of Brooklyn: Foster Avenue, Newkirk Avenue, Ocean Parkway, Ocean Avenue, the numbered streets and the side streets. It happened in the cheap, rundown bars that served minors because they seemed to have most of the money. It happened in the dimly lit pool halls along dying Coney Island Avenue. It happened in the school yards surrounded by chain-link fences deserted by teachers the minute the sun went down. It happened in the movie theaters with their back rows deep in used condoms, bloody, sanitary napkins, the smell of old popcorn, discarded gum and heaps of crushed cigarettes.
    It took place one way or another, and it will continue taking place. It’s happening all the time now, only worse, with new twists, new inventions, new fears, new thrills. The past continues to repeat itself.

April 7, 1955. New York. The Chi-Chi Club is in a midtown Manhattan hotel. What the hell was I doing there? How did I get out of there and eventually home? On the subway, yet.

Idea. A car starts. End of idea

Nothing. Nothing. I wished there would be something else in my life. A car starts. Again. A car starts. A plane drones its lazy way across the sky. An excited cat screams its terrifying howl. A door slams its last slam. I walked into my apartment. The trip made me tired. It had been a long trip, too long for so short a distance. I was more than visibly upset. Kings and queens. Fops: Damn them all, each of them. I looked at the guests seated for dinner and smiled politely. Hellos flew, bounced off the walls, settled comfortably in the overstuffed chairs and onto the people like lichen. I knew I was home. 
    Was it for the last time? Maybe. Though probably not. I went upstairs with my one small bag, threw off my traveling clothing and washed. I went downstairs to eat. Crap. The same junk. Sure it was holiday, whatever that meant, though I knew its meaning, but so what. Where was the steak? No steak. It is holiday. Oh, yeah. I almost forgot where I was. Lose all track of time up there, I guess. A question. An answer. Glasses clink. Go to hell---silently. They couldn’t even make it up there where I spend most of my time. Reason my way out of destiny. Fate. Ordered system. Tension. Stress. Strain, pull and tug. Exit, entrance, entrance, exit. Circles, squares. Up and at them! My mother called for the sixth time. Be polite. Answer directly and quietly. Yes, the trip was lousy. The weather, worse. Note---the well-matched company had no choice but to end hating each other by the end of the line. But cramped buses are always like that.

The crowded room I entered had all sorts of faces: big ones, medium ones, black ones, yellow ones, white ones, brown ones. But mostly they were white faces. I couldn’t imagine how they all got inside that one tiny space. What were they doing there, together, all mixed up, not noticing each other, separated by a kitchen between two big, overstuffed rooms? Each room was the same as the other, yet they were different. One room had the drinks, one had dancing, both had people. Both really had people. Both had dancing. Both had drinking. Both had dining, dabbling, dames, devils, demons, dears, dilettantes. The rooms became so crowded with crowds of people I could hardly move from one to the other.
    I heard incessant talk. Hello. Come over here. So what’s new? You don’t really say. No. I don’t, as a matter of a fact. Flowing beer. Cheap whiskey. No water anywhere. I didn’t want to pay the high price for staying. The sexes presented a problem to each other. They played the bar-game called guess who I am, catch me, hold me, keep me, fool, me, etcetera me. Roaring. A ball. A regular, overstuffed incinerator type ball-thing, which, well, you just had to be there to believe. Music in the modern mode advertised in bold neon at busy nightclubs along Flatbush Avenue. The lights were low. Pick your dance: Mambo, the calypso, the rumba, the tango, Lindy hop, jitterbug, waltz, the two-step. Conventional? Yes. Dance? Not necessarily.
    Doormen collected money when you entered. You had no money when you departed. I wondered if my foot covered by my sock holding my carfare home would stay covered by my shoe? I had it when I left to return to the listlessness of everyday life and my home. I gasped for air. With floating fingers I struggled fitfully for reality. The wet, fresh winter air slapped me gently in the face on Second Avenue as I tumbled from the loft. Down the steps I went and the soaring cold night hit me squarely on my cheeks and made me blink my eyes in surprise. I checked my balls to see if they were in place. I had two, my most prized possessions, firmly in hand. My right hand, I might add. From habit I looked behind me as I walked and saw nothing but an empty street. I slowly raised my head and whispered inside my clouded mind, never again. I am a great one for kidding myself. I walked away alone, the dark street bathed in pools of light falling behind me as I searched for the nearest BMT entrance.