An American Nightmare
A True Story, as told by I© 1999
I was born in 1961. In the year of their Lord, not mine. I came into the world in a time and a place they said didn't exist. It was a town situated on the shore of the Great Stormy Water where the sun lived day by day, creeping above the horizon only to sink behind the hills on the other side night after night. Life passed by there without complaint or restraint. It was a place where thunder rolled in to frolic with the rocks in the sun's laughing light--a time when lightning was revered, not reviled and death was a thing of the present, not the past. And we--we rode in and out on flotillas of clouds: wind and water crystallized by cold and suspended by sky, frozen in time, but not preserved. Still, they said it didn't exist. We didn't exist. Not here, not now. In the year of our Lord and the land of sky blue waters. God's Country. The Bay of Pigs. Fiasco. The Indians, they said, had been removed. A final solution had been found.
In the wake of the Korean Conflict, I crashed headlong into the Cuban missile crisis, the tragedy of bullets ricocheting off the concrete at Dealey Plaza and the threshold of the cold war. The Kennedy's lived the American Dream, but for families from coast to coast, dreams have been deferred, deployed and dismissed in an American Nightmare. Some bombs don't burst in the air - they just go down, silent and unseen. To me, these decades have not been a dream. They've been a nightmare.
Every coin has two sides and the same is true of any story. In that version of his-tory which begins with the Greeks and ends with "God," tragedy and comedy take center stage and the tragic-comical truth of the matter is sandwiched somewhere in the middle.
Today, three dead bodies are dredged from the floor of the Atlantic and a nation hangs its heart at half staff. The newscasters report that every culture has a need to re-cover its dead--to bring them ashore and bury them at home in their soil. He doesn't mention the graves that have been robbed. On the night before his son is set to be buried at sea, JFK senior speaks from the grave, "We are tied to the ocean and when we go back to the sea, we are going back from whence we came," and I find myself just wishing they'd never come in the first place.
My uncle Frenchie was a veteran of domestic wars who lost his legs fighting for his life while his comrades in arms marched off to faraway places defending a country that was never theirs in the first place. Seems everyone here next to God and Jesus has an ax to grind, but for me and my clan, the hatchet isn't ours to bury anymore. It doesn't matter whether the occupying forces are red, white, blue-blooded or black: This United States is occupied territory.
I imagine that's how my uncle Frenchie felt confined to his wheelchair after gangrene set in and they had to amputate. We've got the Kennedys to thank for the Medicaid that footed the bill, but financial debt never meant much to my uncle Frenchie--as a kid growing up, I saw his bills stacked so high, I thought he was a "bill collector."
The first thing to go was just his big toe, but it wasn't long before they took the rest and before long, he was sitting there making cheap costume jewelry for my mother to sell to the barflies down at the Harbor Lights tavern across from the coal yards on the shore of Lake Michigan in Sheboygan.
They say Sheboygan's got more taverns per capita than any city in Amerika, and judging from the list of seven-digit numbers we had scribbled on the back of the quarter-inch thick phonebook in the busted drawer in the kitchen of the downstairs apartment the social services lady found for us on the corner of thirteenth and Pennsylvania Avenue after we moved out of the tenements when they got condemned, I'd say that was probably true.
My mother liked to call it Sin City, but none of us has ever been good with geography and that's probably how we ended up scattered from one end of the country to another. Nonetheless, while we may have gotten lost along the way, at least we weren't 5,000 miles off course thinking the best thing to do was to ask not what your country could do for you, but what you could do for your country. That's pretty good advice, except when the country you're in isn't yours.
Ma would head out early in the day with a plastic purse full of trinkets Frenchie'd cobbled together from fifty cent pieces clasped into cheap aluminum clamps and Lincoln pennies with hand-drilled holes strung together on chains that gave your neck a green patina if you wore them too long. Sometimes there was a silver dollar called the Eisenhower. The year after Kennedy's death, a silver fifty cent piece was issued called the Kennedy half. Later, it was made of copper clad in nickel and known as the Kennedy half-clad.
Frenchie'd seal each one of his creations in a mini-ziplock bag with an adhesive price tag stuck to it. Mom would pawn off the stuff for chump change to the workers who gathered at the tavern on their way home from the factories in the morning, then spend the day drinking the profit away before she came home to sleep it off. Just about the time the sun set in summer, she'd stumble out of bed, put on a pot of coffee, take a hot bath and perch herself in front of a makeup mirror propped up against a plastic napkin holder on the kitchen table to "put on her face." Then she'd fiddle with the seams of her navy blue polyester pants sticking to the torn vinyl on one of the four matching chairs she'd picked up at the Salvation Army store, smoking menthol cigarettes and waiting for the cab to take her to the third shift at the foundry. Sometimes, she'd undo the settings und use those Kennedy half-clads to pay the taxi fare. She always promised to replace them, but rarely did, so there was a small collection of empty aluminum hoops in the bottom of the junk drawer in the bathroom.
Sometimes, mostly in winter, she wouldn't come home in time, and we'd take turns calling all the bars in town to track her down so she wouldn't get fired from her factory job. We didn't care much for the commodity cheese and the corned beef hash we got from the AFDC, and, as much as it turned our stomachs to think of the way Mom's feet swelled after lifting foundry casts from their moulds all night and the burns on her arms from the molten metal, we could stomach even less the steady diet of commodity cheese and corned beef hash. While my mother was away--at the bar, at work or, in better years, attending AA meetings-- my sister and I used to play chicken, leaving a Kool 100 to burn between our arms placed side by side, testing to see who cracked first under the heat. It was an expression of solidarity with the family matriarch, and in this way, the foundry left us scarred much in the same way it left its mark on Mom. Years later, when the social worker came to take us away and I was sent to live with some rich white family on the other side of town who were friends of the factory owners, they never understood why I couldn't "appreciate" the corned beef brisque they served at their gourmet dinner parties or any of the "finer things in life" they tried to give, but which I couldn't take.
Weekends, Mom donned a platinum blonde wig, white faux patent leather boots, a black velvet mini-skirt and a snagged synthetic turtleneck. That's when she took out the "good" jewelry. Her most cherished piece hung from a 14-inch plated metal chain. It was a clear acrylic fob set in a serrated hoop with pictures of JFK and RFK on either side. The brothers' faces spun around inside the hoop and whenever she wore it, my mother talked about moving "to Camelot"--by that she meant the new apartment complex on the edge of town with a mock mortared gate at the entrance that read "Camelot Manor." Mom's Kennedy chain was not something hand-made by Frenchie, it was store-bought--commercial Kennedy commemorative kitsch--and that made all the difference. The thing quickly became something of a family heirloom and there was hell to pay if she misplaced it in a drunken stupor that lapsed into paranoia and she became convinced someone had stolen it. The treasure was kept in a cardboard jewelry box from Walgreens we'd bought for her 38th birthday in 1969.
So, the Kennedy legacy, with all its tragedies and triumphs, touched our lives too. We grew up grieving, just like everyone else.
My mother died in 1993, at the age of 62. Cause of death: cancer, complicated by diabetes, alcoholism, single parenthood and poverty. But the way she actually died was by slow and steady suffocation. Economic asphyxiation was a way of life in the trenches of this New Frontier. But, really, it was a manner of death. And my mother was not the first, nor the last to have succumbed, nor was hers an uncommon case. There have been billions more--and millions to come. We will spend lifetimes recovering our dead. We will spend lifetimes divebombing the wreck. But there will be no burial at sea to bring us home again because we are already there.
I alone survived the American Nightmare that swallowed five generations of my family. I am a writer, teacher and performing artist: published in two languages and on two continents. My mother didn´t live to see my name in print and couldn't have read half of what I've written even if she had. I am in graduate school at a prestigious private university. My tuition is three times what my mother made at the foundry and twice what I earn today as a teacher in the inner city. What worries me more, though, is that it's also twice one of my clients' annual income from working 12 minimum wage hours a day to feed and clothe seven dependent minors--that's about a fifth of the cost of one single engine Piper Saratoga-bought used.
If it weren't for my habit of constantly calculating the comparative costs of living, you'd probably never know I wasn't born into privilege. Everyone knows that people who have it don't talk about money. The same is true of poverty: people who have it don't talk about it.
In the newspapers I read that today's been declared a day of respect for the dead. For me, though, every day--not just this one--is a day of respect for the dead. Every day is a search and recover mission, every day a day of mourning, a search for the dead.
I am a person of poverty, not of prosperity, and here, in the US of A, my name is legion.
Culturally, I am an Indigenist, but my colors are many. My dead are unburied. The losses at Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge, Black Churches burning--the bodies of these brave men, living and dead--have not been recovered or rescued, simply dismissed.
We should appreciate all the Kennedy family has done for us--the poor, the downtrodden, the unburied dead--the Black and the Red. Yellow menace? Commie threat? The red scare and dammit don't you dare…Salt in our blood, sweat in our tears? I'd rather have salt in my bread and blood in my tears.
"No respect for the dead," you said?
It's respect for the living that makes me wish today my mother hadn't spent those half-clad Kennedys on cab fare. Tomorrow, they'll be worth a million. And in a million years, worth nothing again. But it's respect for the dead that makes me suspect there's more than one dead Kennedy turning in his grave at the spectacle being made on this day.
Sifting through the death certificates in my drawer--this memorial to my family, five generations long, a genealogy of genocide--I find myself wishing I'd hung on to the empty aluminum rings in the bottom of the junk drawer in the bathroom. I'd probably place them in the jewelry box my students presented me on my 38th birthday this year--a box made of cedar with a price penciled in on the back that says eleven-dollars-and-ninety-five cents.
Those girls are living in a shelter now that the landlord sold the house they were renting and they had to move out. I'm hoping the lady from the social services will find them a nicer place soon. Kids in crisis. We're moving up in the world: It could have been worse, the jewelry box could have been cardboard and the Saratoga custom-built, costing twelve times my tuition this year, not ten.
The truth of the tragedy is that the American dream could have cost me five states, not fifty. The nightmare is that it cost me and many others a hell of a lot more.
[Postscript, 2006: About those girls living in the shelter who bought me the jewelry box...My policy for professional performances with youth is to split the revenue from gigs with the children. My farewell performance with that group was at the University of Chicago. Four girls from the same family were in the group. Each of them received a stipend of $150. It was enough (with change to spare) for their mother to apply as a down payment to a Habitat for Humanity home: $500. For everything else, there's Mastercard, right?;-)]
No comments:
Post a Comment