“It is rough, Franky,” Arnie mumbles, wanting me not to feel as bad as I feel about whatever he thinks I feel bad about (being hugged). Clearly he’s here for me (also on the inventory). A harsh shiver caused by the ocean’s chill rattles my ribs — though Arnie may think I’ve shuddered, possibly even sobbed. Why would I? My house hasn’t been ruined. I try to pull away. My back is against the metal door frame so that if I try any harder I’ll hurt my neck even more; or worse, fall back in my car with Arnie on top of me, drive the shifter into my C-4 so that the next thing I know the EMS will have me on a board, hauling me back across to Toms River Community, where I’ve been before and do not ever want to see again. There’s nothing I can do — the familiar dilemma for people my age. So what I do — an act of pure desolation — is hug Arnie back, clap my arms around his leathery shoulders and squeeze, as much to save myself from falling. It may not be so different from why anybody hugs anybody. Arnie’s hugging me way too hard. My eyes feel bulgy. My neck throbs. The empty space of car seat yawns behind. “Everything could be worse, Frank,” Arnie says into my ear, making my head vibrate. He is surely right. Everything could be much worse. Much, much worse than it is.
Everything Could Be Worse
LAST TUESDAY I READ A PIECE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES about how it would feel to be tossed out into airless space. This was a small box on a left-hand inside page of the Tuesday Science section, items that rarely venture into the interesting, personal side of things — the stuff a short story by Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury would go deeply into with profound (albeit totally irrelevant) moral consequences. These Times stories are really just intended to supply lower-rung Schwab execs and apprentice Ernst & Young wage slaves with oddball topics to make themselves appear well-read to their competitor-colleagues during the first warm-up minutes in the office every morning; then possibly to provide the whole day with a theme. (“Careful now, Gosnold, or I’ll toss that whole market analysis right out into airless space and you along with it…” Eyebrows jinked, smirks all around.)
Nothing’s all that surprising about being tossed out into airless space. Most of us wouldn’t stay conscious longer than about fifteen seconds, so that other sensate and attitudinal considerations become fairly irrelevant. The Times writer, however, did note that the healthiest of us (astronauts, Fijian pearl divers) could actually stay alive and alert for as long as two minutes, unless you hold your breath (I wouldn’t), in which case your lungs explode — although, interestingly, not your skin. The data were imprecise about the quality of consciousness that persists — how you might be feeling or what you might be thinking in your last tender moments, the length of time I take to brush my teeth or (sometimes, it seems) to take a leak. It’s not hard, though, to imagine yourself mooning around in your bubble hat, trying to come to grips, not wanting to squander your last precious pressurized seconds by giving in to pointless panic. Likely you’d take an interest in whatever’s available — the stars, the planets, the green-and-blue wheel of distant Earth, the curious, near-yet-so-far aspect of the mother ship, white and steely, Old Glory painted on the cowling; the allure of the abyss itself. In other words, you’d try to live your last brief interval in a good way not previously anticipated. Though I can also imagine that those two minutes could seem like a mighty long time to be alive. (A great deal of what I read and see on TV anymore, I have to say, seems dedicated to getting me off the human stage as painlessly and expeditiously as possible — making the unknown not be such a bother. Even though the fact that things end is often the most interesting thing about them — inasmuch as most things seem not to end nearly fast enough.)
TEN DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, AS I PULLED INTO MY driveway on Wilson Lane, I saw a woman I didn’t know standing on my front stoop. She was facing the door, having possibly just rung the bell and put herself into the poised posture (we’ve all done it) of someone who has every right to be where she is when a stranger opens the door — and if not every right, at least enough not to elicit full-blown hostility.
The woman was black and was wearing a bright red Yuletide winter coat, black, shiny boots, and carried a large black boat of a purse, appropriate to her age — which from the back seemed midfifties. She was also wearing a Christmas-y green-knit tam-o’-shanter pulled down like a cloche, something a young woman wouldn’t wear.
I immediately assumed she was a parishioner-solicitor collecting guilt donations for the AME Sunrise Tabernacle over on the still-holding-on black trace of Haddam, beyond the Boro cemetery. In later years, these tidy frame homes have been re-colonized by Nicaraguans and Hondurans who do the gardening, roof repair, and much of the breaking-and-entering chores out in Haddam Township, or else they run “Mexican” restaurants, where their kids study at poorly lit rear tables, boning up for Stanford and Columbia. These residences have recently faced whacker tax hikes their owners either can’t or are too wily to afford. So the houses have become available to a new wave of white young-marrieds who work two jobs, are never home, wouldn’t think of having children, and pride themselves on living in a “heritage” neighborhood instead of in a dreary townhouse where everything works but isn’t “historic.”
A few vestigial Negroes have managed to hold on — by their teeth. Since my wife, Sally, and I moved back to Haddam from The Shore, eight years ago, and into the amply treed President streets—“white housing,” roughly the same vintage and stock as the formerly all-black heritage quarter — we’ve ended up on “lists” identifying us as soft touches for Tanzanian Mission Outreach, or some such worthwhile endeavor. We’re likewise the kind of desirable white people who don’t show up grinning at their church on Sunday, pretending “we belong, since we’re all really the same under the skin.” Probably we’re not.
Snowflakes had begun sifting onto my driveway where I saw the black woman at my door, though a raw sun was trying to shine, and in an hour the sidewalk would have puddles. New Jersey’s famous for these not-north/not-south weather oddities, which render it a never-boring place to live — hurricanes notwithstanding.
Every week I read for the blind at WHAD, our community station, which was where I was just then driving home from. This fall, I’ve been reading Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (thirty minutes is all they or I can stand), and in many ways it’s a book made for hearing in the dark, in a chill and tenebrous season. Naipaul, despite apparently having a drastic and unlikable personality, is as adept as they get at throwing the gauntlet down and calling bullshit on the world. From all I know about the blind from the letters they send me, they’re pissed off about the same things he’s pissed off about — the wrong people getting everything, fools too-long suffered, the wrong ship coming into the wrong port. Despair misunderstood as serenity. It’s also better to listen to Naipaul and me alone at home than to join some dismal book club, where the members get drunk on pinot grigio and go at each other’s throats about whether this or that “anti-hero” reminds them of their ex-husband Herb. Many listeners say they hear my half hour, then go off to sleep feeling victorious.
Across the street, my neighbor Mack Bittick still had his NO SURRENDER ROMNEY-RYAN sign up, though the election’s long lost for his side. It sat beside his red-and-white FOR SALE BY OWNER, which he’d stationed there as if the two signs meant the same thing. He’s an engineer and former Navy SEAL whose job was eliminated by a company in Jamesburg that makes pipeline equipment. He’s got big credit card bills and is staring at foreclosure. Mack flies the Stars and Stripes on a pole, day and night, and is one of the brusque-robust, homeschooling, canned-goods-stock-piling, non-tipper, free-market types who’re averse to paying commissions on anything (“It’s a goddamn tax on what we oughta get for fuckin’ free by natural right…”) and don’t like immigrants. He’s also a personhood nutcase who wants the unborn to have a vote, hold driver’s licenses, and own handguns so they can rise up and protect him from the revolution when it comes. He’s always eager to pick my old-realtor brain, sounding me out about trends and price strategies, and ways to bump up his curb appeal on the cheap, so he can maximize equity and still pocket his homestead exemption. I do my utmost to pass along the worst possible realty advice: never ever negotiate; demand your price or fuck it; don’t waste a nickel on superficial niceties (your house should look “lived in”); don’t act friendly to potential buyers (they’ll grow distrustful); leave your Tea-Party reading material and gun paraphernalia out on the coffee table (most home buyers already agree with you). He, of course, knows I voted for Obama, who he feels should be in prison.