WHY'D WE DO THAT?

WHY’D WE DO THAT?   (Originally posted August 2, 2012)

an Andrew ramble

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

We spend a large portion of our lives measuring our existence.  We “tally up” and “count out” successes and failures, our victories and defeats.  These totals are essentially meaningless.  In a physical sense, they are only the hard outermost edges of our selves.  Despite this, we all know a Mr. Type A (indecently, the A stands for asshole) or a Ms. Mansworld (forever trying to prove that she can stand shoulder to shoulder with her male professional peers, despite her lack of a pecker) who want us to believe that the things in life, the things that lie just over the horizon, are the only things truly worth having.  What crap!  Achievement and failure cannot be used to define us because most of us really don’t truly achieve or fail at anything.  For the most part, we all just putter around at our jobs, in our homes, through the isles of Target, and on an infinite number of websites.  This “putter” is the gooey center!  This is where life is lived. This is where we follow the fashions, listen to our tunes, style our hair, and play with our toys.  It’s in this goo of life that I find what I want to write about.  Make no mistake; this is not a comprehensive list of goo.  This is just a jumping off point for all the areas in our lives that neither make us nor break us, but cause us to look back with a smile on our faces and say, “Why’d I do that?”

I don’t give a damn about my hair!  I never really could find a style that worked for me.  These days I mostly cover it with cap that says Betty & Nick’s Bait & Tackle above the brim and out the door I go.  Every so often I mess with it, smear in gel or run a vent brush through it, part it, and pat it down.  This is done only when it is absolutely necessary.  Not having to do this “hair dance” daily is a small benefit that working in the trades has to offer.  About five years ago it seemed like a lot of guys were buzzing their heads to the length of a stubbly beard.  At first I thought that this was the perfect meld of style and practicality.  This Paris Island (Marine Corps Basic Training) inspired look could work for me.  After convincing my wife and part-time stylist that this was the way to go, for style, comfort, and practicality, she obliged me.  She sat me down on a folding metal chair in the garage, took out the Champion Buzzer that she purchased to cut away matted hair from below the dogs tail, and proceeded to cut the perpetually un-kept matt off of my head.  When she was finished I reached up and felt my scalp.   It felt like crushed velvet.  I shook my head from side to side.  Wow, did it feel light and sleek!  Then I looked in the mirror and the guy looking back at me was Curley from The Three Stooges.  Nuck-Nuck-Nuck!

STYLE ICON

OPIE SPORTING THE CLASSIC

This was the latest in a lifetime of hair disasters that we all share.  For a time in high school, I wanted to look New-Wave.  I had my head shaved on the sides and spiked on top.  Not very radical these days, but I thought I was a real Punker back then.  Looking back, it only made my 5 foot 11 inch 130 pound frame resemble a Q-tip with a big nose, even more than usual.  Fast forward a couple of years and off to college I go.  This was when the mullet was “the look”.  (Although, I don’t remember it being called a mullet back then.  I think it was a hockey player style?  Maybe?)  Anyway, it was so cool, long hair in the back, to show that you were a rebel and short hair in the front to show that you could conform when you wanted to.  Good concept, but it was a lot to keep in balance.  Besides my hair gets curly (nuck, nuck, nuck) the longer it gets, so for me, and my absentee hair care habits, it just looked like I was dangling a dry Jerry Curl behind my neck.  With college graduation on the horizon I wanted to look grown-up but still youthful and the logical choice was…the wedge.  It was kind of the reverse of the mullet (shaved on sides and long on top) and did nothing but make my head look like a mushroom.  Actually it made us all look like mushroom heads, which is really just a nice way of saying we looked like dick heads!  So back to the little boys regular I went and it is there that I shall stay, at least until it all falls out.

We all like to look good.  Back when J.J. Jackson was the whitest black man on MTV,  ZZ Top sung the praises of the Sharp Dressed Man.  Young or old, we all want to look sharp.  Even house painters and sewer workers have their favorite painters whites or coveralls.  Feeling good about the clothes that cover you is essential.  Kids love jeans with holes in the knees.  Hell, I still love ‘em.  Girls like clothes that make their tushies look small and guys like shirts that make their chests and shoulders look broad.  The sad thing is that when it first came time for me to really pick out and even purchase my own clothes it was 1983!  For some reason the fashion “powers that be” decided that we were living in some future society where clothing had to all be made out of nylon and acrylic and the women had to wear shoulder pads, really fat belts, and disturbingly bright eye shadow.  Now, I’m not saying that I was one of those who fell into the damnable hell of wearing white Capizzio shoes, black parachute pants, and shirts emblazoned with tiny horizontal red and back stripes, although I am not without sin.  I wore many a shirt with strange nylon patches.  Striped jeans were possessed and even worn on more than one occasion.  And here is the piece de resistance, I had a white denim jacket that I proudly wore with a popped collar.  I think this beauty was made by a company named Chamz.   Yes...I was trying to look like an extra from Sixteen Candles.

PERFECT FOR SCHOOL OR INTERSTELLAR SPACE TRAVEL

Fashions came and went and thankfully I bought into them less and less as the years rolled by.  I went acid washed for a short time, but never so far as Z Cavaricci Guido jeans.  When the Gap got cool, I was right there in my cuffed jeans, boat shoes, and white cotton button down.  Grunge was great because you finally got to wear duds that made you look like what my mother would call, a “rag picker” and still be in style.  Then there was the long haul in Dockers.  (Please refer to a previous blog for the time I spent in business casual purgatory.)  Sure we looked silly, and the women often looked sillier than the men, but one lesson endures through all of these now stupid styles.  The clothes make the man; because when you feel like you look good, you truly feel good, and when you feel good you are the closest you can get to your true identity, even if that identity is a dork.

We are beat to death by the songs that we love.  So help me if I have to hear Over the Hills and Far Away one more time, I am going to plotz.  We all listened to the major bands, Zeppelin, Floyd, The Stones, The Who, Yes, The Beatles and so on.  We also listened to a lot of the other major bands, Foreigner, Boston, Kansas’s, ELO, AC/DC, Sabbath, Priest, Genesis and so on.  Turn on any classic rock station and you can’t get away from them today.  But if you really want to get nausested, listen to some of the tunes that were right up there in their day.  Songs we have collectively blocked from our cultural consciousness.  We all sung ‘em.  And they all still pop into our heads with little or no warning.  I’m talking about Clint Holmes rocking to Playground in My Mind, Olivia Newton John getting Physical or Styx punching up a little Mr. Roboto.  (Gotta admit that one is oddly catchy.)  Did I really own cassettes from bands like The Split Endz, Haircut 100, The Fixx, or ABC?  Shoot that poison arrow through my heart, indeed!

DOMO...DOMO

I remember my best friend musing over the future of Men at Work as we walked home from school on the railroad tracks.  Sorry Bill, it never happened.  However, I’m glad that both you and Collin Hey were able to move on.  (I wonder if Collin ever got that freaky eye of his straightened out?)  We all made our mistakes.  Who among us never owned a Depeche Mode disk?  I was never much for what has come to be known as Hair Metal, but a lot of us were.  We rocked to Poison’s Unskinny Bop and might have even given ole Kip Winger a nod when he crooned his ode to seventeen-year-old girls.  Poor bastard, today the FBI would probably smash his door down and drag him away in cuffs.  Can I get a little more current?  Possibly, but the music I like these days comes from a more mature place, my tastes have been honed and refined to reflect a much deeper more meaningful perspective.  Now would anyone like to join me for a little Cupid Shuffle?

I STILL CAN'T DO THE ELECTRIC SLIDE

Down, down, do your dance, do your dance (do the Cupid dance)


Down, down, do your dance, do your dance (Come on)(don't stop) 


Down, down, do your dance, do your dance (We got brand new dance)

Down, down, do your dance, do your dance (hey hey)

I saved our favorite for last.  The Toys!  It’s arguably, the toys, not love that makes life livable.  The great toys focus our collective memories like a new I-Pad Retina Display.  The Atari 2600, the table top Rod Hockey Games, the Nerf Basketball and Football, Mousetrap, Evil Knievel’s Stunt Cycle and GI Joe, when he still had real hair, a beard (was I trying for this look?), and Kung Fu Grip.  We never outgrew our craving for new toys, whether they be a new sound system, a Ti-Vo, a 100 inch wide flat screen TV, an I-pod, or a smart phone.  (Warning:  Smart Phones are not toys.  They are electronic heroine!)

Unfortunately, not all our toys were winners.  Most of the toys I had fell into this group, but I loved them anyway.  Zim Zam, that was my game.  It was tetherball with a tennis ball and a paddle, for Christ sake.  Perfect for playing with one’s self.  Then there were lawn darts.  There’s an ugly story.  Let’s just say; “I had ‘em and against all odds, I survived.”  I wasn’t smart enough to play Dungeons and Dragons so I was given an early electronic version one Christmas.  It truly offered nothing from either a technological or imaginative perspective.  So much for replacing imagination with circuits.  My Planet of the Apes dolls (later to be called action figures, thank you very much!) had a tree house in my room.  Those were great days with Cornellius and Dr. Zaius …did I just cop to that?  It never stopped.  We bought Palm Pilots because we couldn’t live without them.  Should have bought a paper note pad instead.  At least the paper worked and surely would have lasted longer.  The latest is The Kindle.  Funny how happy I was to read on it two years ago, while nowadays I feel like I’m holding a relic from the graveyard of consumer electronics.  Funny thing is, I never felt this way holding a book.

As I said, this is just the jumping off point.  We could question everything from singing along to that Celine Dion Titanic song, to buying a brown suit, to investing in a Betamax VCR, to enjoying your first meal at Olive Garden.  But, why question at all?  To make a bad decision is arguably the most important part of being a person.  Not because you learn from your mistakes.  Most of us don’t and why should we?  Leave that to the achievers, the ones who keep score and try to win at life.  The rest of us can just follow our gut and vote for Barack Obama.

~

THE JUMP

POSTED ON JULY 26, 2012 

THE JUMP

 An Andrew ramble

 “It’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, but few are chosen.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

Andrew Goldman, Asset Manager, ARCO Commercial Mortgage.  Oy Vey!  This is what I had become!  My wife always knew what I did, although she really didn’t “know” what I did for a living.  For that matter, I barely knew what I did.  Let’s just say that I sat in a grey cubicle, looked at a computer screen, and babysat large mortgages for commercial and multi-family real estate and leave it at that.  Any detailed explanation would work like extra strength Ambien on the casual reader.  I had been in this career limbo for too many years and I was in a real panic.  My kids were getting to the age when they start asking the ultimate loaded question. “Daddy, what is your job?”

Years earlier, I had promised myself that I would be able to answer this question with pride.  Sure, I wanted the kids to be able to understand my place in the world, but more important, I needed to fill the void that was my career identity.  I had drawn a line in the temporal sand to make this a reality prior to my fortieth birthday. Now the reality was that I might be answering this question with my usual mumbling nonsensical description of my daily dullness.  Only this time, I was going to have to provide an explanation to my kids. My kids were sure to be glazed over by this description.  Countless adults had previously turned into lobotomized zombies upon hearing my job duties.   Against all practicality I knew the time had come, I had to make “the jump”.

YOUR JOB SOUND TERRIBLY INTERESTING....REALLY!

For some reason I always had a knack for landing jobs that were tough to get regardless of the fact that nobody wanted them.  I made my first “jump” when I was twenty-three.  At that age it really couldn’t be called a “jump”, but being a typically self important 23 year old, I knew I was going places.  If only somebody would tell me where.  The feel good fantasy of my still pending “adult life” was about to get a knee to the testicles of reality.I try to forget how I wasted college with the ultimate “LA Law” delusion of becoming a career litigator.  Like the times, “Regan’s America”, it seemed to matter more how it sounded than how it executed.

Really, a Lawyer?  How do you do that?

Well, I guess I’ll go to college.  

Ok, what will you major in?

I hear Political Science is interesting.

Bad Idea!

So now I have this super cool Political Science degree and I really don’t feel like even applying to Law School.

You’re really screwed!

Maybe I can go to Washington and work as a Page on Capitol Hill or something like that?

You’ll probably just end up getting “bent over” by some slimy Christian Fundamentalist Congressmen from Alabama.

Well thanks, but no thanks, I guess I’ll see if I can work for my Dad until a position befitting a man of my experience, training, and education is thrust upon me.

POLITICAL SCIENCE, NOT THAT'S A MAJOR I CAN GET BEHIND!

Back to the “floor” I went.  (The floor was what carpenters and other laborers called the “work area” when we were remodeling a hospital, school, or some other public building.)  Despite telling myself that I shouldn’t be, I was actually happy in this work.  Dad even let me have a little “grey collar” work by going around to various city agencies for the purpose of examining upcoming projects and picking up blue prints and project specification books.  It was fun to walk around the city on days when I was not on the floor, but the more I ground through the river of “white collars” which ran at flood stage up, down, across, and under the streets of Manhattan, the more I knew one of these “important jobs” had to be for me.  After all, I just had to get into the mailroom and in no time I would have a corner office in one of the glass towers lining every street.  (a’ la Michael J. Fox in The Secret of my Success)

80'S UNREALITY

So what did you do? Now I had a plan.  First, get away from working for daddy.  It didn’t matter that I liked it, only losers worked for their dads.  So after demanding a substantial raise that the old man would never agree to, I walked out.  (Thank God he went along with letting me collect unemployment.)  Now all I had to do was take my newly acquired 386 PC and dot matrix printer (set to fine, of course) and start the Sunday through Tuesday routine of cutting out classified ads and sending along my mass-produced resumes and cover letters.  And whadda know, it worked.  In about 3 months I was working for a Savings and Loan as an REO Manager.  (Don’t ask, it involved foreclosing on people’s homes…truly the Lords work!) As I said, it was hard to get the job, they paid me shit, the work sucked, and my boss was a Nervous-Nelly-Douche-Bag.  It took me all of about two months to completely detest the job.

I stayed there for 5 years. Naturally!

Well at least you learned a lot and got some great experience.

No and…no.

It was during this time that I started to fall back on a little weekend remodeling work.  It was a lot different from what I had learned working on the floor, being residential and not commercial work, but it was similar enough to be in my “comfort zone” and strangely enough, it was work I liked although I still would never admit it to myself.

Now I’m married, my wife is pregnant, and being an REO Manager just ain’t going to feed the baby.  So I take my Compaq laptop, sign onto AOL via my one phone line, and look up The New York Times Classifieds.  (I was pretty cutting edge)  I start the resume flood again, and I got a hit.  A guy named Yogush Yousi calls me.  I can’t understand a word he is saying through his thick Indian accent.  Somehow I decipher that Yogush is based in California, but he has a opening in the Hoboken office of their commercial mortgage company for an Asset Manager position and he wants me to meet a guy named John Hanson.  What the hell, I go.  John was not John.  John was Gilbert from The Revenge of the Nerds, right down to the glasses, Members Only jacket and every pair of his pants being floods, except that John had zero personality to boot.  Perfect for mortgage banking.  So after 3 months and 5 interviews, I am offered the job.  I still have no idea what the job is, or what it entails, but I accept.  At the end of the first day, I realized I hated this job.  By the end of the first week, I despised it.  By the end of the first month I was going to leave regardless of the cost.

I ENJOY PAPERWORK

So you got the hell out of there and found something else?

Not exactly.

You stayed with the company but transferred into a different position?

No that’s not it.

You stayed and got some great experience.

I wouldn’t call it great.

But you stayed?

10 friggin years!

The job was dull, the money was fair at best, the work was nonsensical, and my boss was a passive dweeb.  I went nowhere.  I filled a lot of file cabinets with reports on properties and loans that nobody would ever read.  I analyzed property financial statements, sent deferred maintenance letters, tracked escrow accounts, and “rotted on the vine.”  Life went on, got a house, then two more sons.  Even got a dog and a car I liked for once.  All this time I continued to work on the weekends finishing basements, flooring houses, installing doors, replacing windows and siding, tiling bathrooms, etc.  As always, my gut continued to tell me I was in the right place.  All the while I continued to ask myself,  “What are you going to do for a career?”  This is a tough question to be asking when you start getting into your late thirties.  I couldn’t accept the answer for a long time because that 23 year old moron was still a small part of who I was, and he wouldn’t let me pull the trigger and make “the jump”, but every year my boys were getting older and 40 was getting closer.  It was then that something truly wonderful happened.

One day I was thinking back to the weekly car rides I took with my dad.  (Children of divorce have a lot of weekend commute time when mommy lives in Maywood, NJ and Daddy lives in Warwick, NY.)  I was thinking about all the talks the two of us would have on these Friday and Sunday night rides.  Then one of the conversations jumped out at me, and started playing over and over in my head until I had no choice but to finally listen to what it was telling me.  Its message was the death knell for my 23-year-old moron self.  His death came at the hands of the 10 year old Andrew with the memory of this simple exchange:

Andrew, do you ever think about what you want to do when you grow up?

Yes

Well what is it?  What do you want to do?

I’d like to be a Carpenter.

These days my job is literally backbreaking.  The money is still just fair.  The work is not always steady and I worry more than ever about earning a living.  And yet, I love what I do.  (Only a madman would be a General Contractor otherwise.)   Sure years were wasted, but these years also taught me this simple truth; Do what you wanted to do when you were 10 years old and you will never go wrong.

~

FOLLOWING THE LEADER

POSTED ON JULY 18, 2012 

FOLLOWING THE LEADER

An Andrew Ramble

 “In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man,

Now I’ve reached that age, I’ve tried to do all those things the best I can.”

Led Zeppelin, Good Times Bad Times

Someday when my sons are grown men I am going to ask them “Have you ever had any doubt or confusion about who your father figure was?”  Beyond all prayers, I truly hope they shake their heads, laugh at my old man’s sensitivity, and say “Are you kidding?”  Quickly followed by “You’re the only one we had to follow, so it had to be you!”  Maybe they will follow up this statement with a brief hug around my then narrowing shoulders and slightly compressed spine.  This would fill me with the gratification of accomplishing the primary goal of my existence.  Old men are such a sentimental lot.

 From 1970 to 1990 I was really looking for a candidate to fill the roll of Alpha Male, Roll Model or even Father for my childhood/adolescent self.  I was presented with several candidates, whom were either not interested in the position, interested but only available part time, or available but under qualified and far too young to even recognize that the opening even existed.  Being that I was still in diapers in 1970, I have no recollection of the earliest parts of this endeavor.  I do know that it was an essential position that I truly needed to fill.  The method by which I went about filling it became a principle factor in the formation of the sensitive old man I am yet to become.

Having three sons has revealed a valuable truth.  When a baby boy has an older brother, the older brother is essentially the first father figure that child has.  (This may happen with girls too, but I can only speak to my own experience.)  So it is really no surprise that my big brother was the first person I was to follow and try to emulate in innumerable ways.  From the hours we spent playing on our Coleco Telstar Arcade video game, to the days spent setting up and crashing AFX slot cars, to scary movies we watched, if my older brother endorsed it then it was sacrosanct to me.  Again, there is nothing unusual in this behavior; in fact it is the norm.  Up to a certain point.

70's Tech at it's best

Eeek!

The true father I was bestowed with had all of the capabilities of fatherhood at his disposal.  He truly loved his children.  He was a small business owner, third-time father, highly intelligent, and moderately motivated.  Unfortunately, he was also self indulgent to the point of being egomaniacal, prone to violence, prone to infidelity, and virtually without scruples.  Mixing these factors into a marriage which was on life support from it’s inception, lead to a outcome where this man was only able to play his natural roll of father from 5:30 pm on Fridays to 8:00 pm on Sundays.  Even during this modest commitment, his new young wife, along with a host of personal endeavors, put fatherhood rather low on his priority list, despite his flair for over dramatized behavior that would lead the uninitiated to believe otherwise. As I said, he did love me.

Then there was the man my mother married.  I never accepted the term stepfather for him, because to me this implies an acceptance of responsibility and a commitment to the child on the part of the step.  (Oddly enough I felt this way even before it was possible for me to think this way.  There must be a psychological term for this.)  He was a blue-collar union man with a decent steady income.  He already had 5 children with his first wife, who he had little interest in, and now he had 3 new children living with him who he had even less concern for.  He accepted that we were part of the package that came with my mother and grudgingly did what had to be done to make her happy.  He was tall and loud.  He was sometimes moody and sometimes boisterous.  He was an unrepentant drunk.  He was anti-intellectual in every way.  He was tough and stoic.  And he had a much influence as anyone in shaping me into a person, a man, and a father.

Sure the trinity of men I looked to in my life had their shortcoming when it came to being the father that I needed.  None of them was Mike Brady or Tom Bradford.  Hell, even those guys weren’t those guys.  One died of AIDS and one drove Adam Rich to a life of drugs and crime, so much for the idealized 1970’s TV dads.  The men I followed were not introspective about their role, and for the most part did not even realize they had a role to play.  I simply watched, followed, and took what I thought were essential ingredients for the makeup of manhood.  Looking back I also tried to take as much as I could from Steve Austin, George Taylor, Han Solo, Batman, Indiana Jones, James T. Kirk, and Godzilla.  For good or for bad, not much stuck.

A GAY DAD FOR A STRAIGHT TIME

My mother did not have her kids in rapid succession.  Essentially when one went off to kindergarten, she had another baby.  This resulted in a tidy 4 to 6 year spread between us siblings.  While this is a parent friendly approach, it more or less resulted in three only children for the duration of our childhoods.  However, instead of growing up with my next oldest sibling, I looked to him as a man and a role model.  To a first grader, an 11 year old is almost a grownup.  To an 11 year old, a 17 year old is a man.  And to a 17 year old, a 23 year old is a mentor.  I never realized that he needed a childhood as well, just as children typically don’t believe that their parents have their own human foibles.

Through the years I watched and followed, but I never copied.  I followed in tastes, in humor, in style and in personality.  I was always elated at any show of attention I could gain.  For him to share some playtime with me was a dream come true.  Sitting and watching a movie or Spiderman cartoon together on the old black & white Zenith I had in my little bedroom, was the epitome of an entertainment experience.

We never bickered.  We seldom fought and I always knew whatever he did was right.  I did have to learn through frustration and tears that we were far apart in age.  He was distant to me and through his teen years he had little desire to be a surrogate papa to his lonely little brother.  He was just a kid himself.  In fact, along with my big sister (who truly was a surrogate parent in so many ways) he truly was dealt a shitty hand when my parents marriage went bust.  So let me say it here once and for all.  Thanks for the music; it’s all still great.  I also love that we both laugh at the things that some find disturbing or inappropriate. (e.g. an Upper Decker)  Thanks for showing me that “putting your nose to the grindstone” almost always pays off.  (Sorry but yours is still pretty big!)  Most of all, thanks for a hell of a lot of criticism and ball breaking.  I didn’t always like it, and I definitely didn’t always deserve it, but without it, I probably would be a door greeter at Wal-Mart today.

I think in the early 1970’s many of the boundaries of modern divorce were still unknown to most.  This was a justification I gave myself for my fathers behaviors for many years.  Then again, maybe he acted purely out of selfish emotion and desire preceding and following his divorce from my mother.  Maybe he just didn’t give much reasonable thought to the role he had to play in my development.   This is where I really start ripping into my father’s flawed character.  This is where I attack every aspect of his judgment and recant ad-nauseam his lack of commitment to his family.  The thing is, I’m not going in that direction.  What purpose does it serve?

My dad was the source of all knowledge to me, my own Great and Powerful Oz.  For all of the contrived games of catch that we never had and for all of the cutesy father/son rivalries that never evolved between us, he was a better father to me and I was a better son to him, than either one of us deserved.  He taught me that life is often better when you act first and think later.  This is a guy who purchased a squirrel monkey on the street in Greenwich Village once.  He bought a bunch of glue horses for us to ride and care for, despite the fact that he was a city boy from the Bronx.  He bought a rusting Dutch fishing boat and converted it into a cabin cruiser, despite the fact that he never helmed anything bigger than a canoe.  And through all of his impulse he taught me never to be afraid to aim high and land on my face.

MAKE NICE COCO

Dad was not happy with “a little” he was really a guy who wanted “it all” and he went about this by tackling every opportunity, running business deals into the ground as fast as they could arise.  Taking was all he ever knew.  Shirking his marriage and family for the pretty young blond.  True happiness was something that always eluded him. Fighting to bend the will and thought of everyone around him until he universally drove those away who would not immediately conform to his thinking and vision.  His lack of formal education always haunted him. 

Ultimately, he was left with nothing.  His family would become visitors in a house where he resided, but belonged to someone else.  His wives were enemies, despising him without remorse.  His friends became acquaintances at best, although even the acquaintances seemed to rotate into and out of his life fairly quickly.  I was there and I saw it all.  And again I learned.  I learned that “a little” was probably enough.  I learned to lay back and let things come to me.  I learned that family loyalty is preeminent before all concerns.  I learned that bending to the will of others, then setting off on your intended path, is often the best way to go.  I learned that ego and pride make you who you are but will destroy you when left unchecked.  But the main thing I learned from him was that he loved his children more than anything.  He was closest to true happiness when we were with him.  He taught me that he was an imperfect person and sometimes we love people for their imperfections.  I mean, come on!  Who buys a monkey on the street?

I didn’t truly know my mother’s husband, my otherwise known stepfather.  He wasn’t there for me to know.  Again, we never had any common bond beyond my mother.  Had I been a lion cub, he surely would have devoured me during his brief courtship with my mother.  A real-life battle hardened Marine; he was truly tough.  He worked with steel and showed no fear walking the I-beams over countless cities and towns.  Had another man tried to hug him, as is the practice these days, he would have put the motherfucker on his ass.  Drinking was not a shameful act to him.  In his world, men were measured by how much they could drink and how well they could “hold it.”  His hair was cut in a barbershop, not a salon.  He looked odd to me when he was dressed in anything other than a flannel shirt, Dickies work pants, and rigging boots.  And the smell…washing probably 3 times a week, and smoking several packs of Dutch Masters Panatela cigars daily, truly added to the already alcoholic tinted garlic aroma that his pores emitted constantly.  I never really knew if he was pissed or happy.  I just knew him to be drunk or sober.

REAL MEN DRANK THIS.....

......AND DID THIS

His emotions, dreams, loves, hates, passions, and pities were a mystery to me.  But again, I watched and learned and always followed him when I could.  Beyond all explanation he was a likable S.O.B. I wanted to hang out with him when he chomped his cigars and did some dirty job around the house. He paid me to unload scrap metal out of the back of his pickup when I was six and I loved it.  He let me climb a ladder and nail cedar shakes to the side of our house off of a scaffold.  I was ecstatic!  I eagerly ran for his cans of Schaefer Beer and I never handed him one before I ripped off the tab.  I never saw him go to the doctor.  I never saw him cry and he never complained about anything.  In fact he was probably the most optimistic man I’ve ever known.  And he taught me more than anyone about what it means to be a man.  It was the basic stuff, but as I said, nobody else was really there to teach me character, work ethic, toughness (still working on that one), patience, and discipline.  I prayed for his death on a regular basis.

Two of my three fathers are gone now.  These days the one that remains gets as much fathering from me as he gives.  Maybe that’s what brotherhood is?  They all truly made me the man I have always wanted to be.  Have I become that person?  Hell if I know, but that tale is still being written.  I am eternally thankful to them all for being there for me to follow behind, and pick up the pieces of manhood I needed to collect for latter days.

THIS JEW AND JESUS

POSTED ON JULY 13, 2012  

THIS JEW AND JESUS

THIS JEW AND JESUS

An Andrew Tirade

I am a Jewish man.  Let me say that one more time for people who don’t always get it.  I am a Jew.  (I also like to say it twice because it just bothers some people as well.) I am frequently asked this question; “You’re a Jew?”  I simply answer yes.  Then I get the standard follow-up question; “So…you don’t believe in Jesus?”  I have been presented with these two questions in various forms, and in a broad spectrum that runs from curiosity to outright hostility, for the better part of the last 40 years.  So here at long last I am putting down my PERSONAL views on what it is and means for me to be a Jew and exactly what I feel about Jesus.

First off.  I am not a Jew because I don’t believe in Jesus and Jesus has nothing to do with me being a Jew.  I am a Jew because my parents were Jews.  This is simply the way it works for almost all of the world’s faiths.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, the Catholics and the Christians say you have to be baptized into the faith, the Muslims, Buddhists and Hindu’s probably have their thing, the Scientologists require that you read really bad science fiction novels and the Jews insist that your mommy was Jewish and maybe you had a lovely Bar/Bat Mitzvah.  This is great for anyone under 12 years old, but really, at a certain point you have to make your decision.  I assume this is the reason the faiths have almost universally gotten it right on this one with so many religious rights of passage occurring somewhere around puberty.

I can’t speak for the other faiths or cultures, but I will assume that the need for a religious identity is universal as well. This I have.  I did grow up in a home that was very short on faith, but steadfast in the identity of its religious cultural heritage.  Without getting too academic, what I am trying to say is that I always knew I was a Jew, but Synagogues, Hebrew Schools and Religious observations were not omnipresent in my home.  What was present was semi traditional cooking; a fair amount of Yiddish sayings and statements; an appreciation for our old world heritage, and very strong Zionist support for Israel.  For good or bad, Jesus just did not come up much in our home.  This is probably because Jesus, as a deity, just does not exist in the Jewish home, or the Buddhist home and so on.  With this in mind, I often wonder if other people of non-Christian faith are presented with a lifetime of; “You’re a Hindu?”  “So….you don’t believe in Jesus?”

The Jewish belief or view of God is Universalist in most regards.  (At least it is to me.)  I could try to muddle through what I believe at this point, but the great Jewish Philosopher Baruch Spinoza did it for me over 500 years ago.  So take it away Baruch:

“God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists.”

“Besides God no substance can be granted or conceived.”

“Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be conceived.”

“God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.”

So that’s it in a nutshell.  I don’t believe in Jesus. I don’t believe in Buddha, I don’t believe in Shiva, I don’t believe in magic crystals and I sure don’t believe in L. Ron Hubbard.  Sure I accept that most religious or biblical figures existed at one time or another and I live my life by many of their lessons today, just as I live my life by the lessons of Moses, Job or Yoda.  (Yeah I know Yoda is not real, but his message is real to me.)  Additionally, I don’t believe in pearly gates, angels, reincarnation or an afterlife.  I do believe in recycling though.  For this reason nothing would make me happier than being made into chum upon my death and spread out on equal parts of land and sea, so that I can swiftly reenter the food chain.  At this point the food chain will surely develop severe bloating and gastritis.

Then there is the matter of my religion and the methods of my observation.  This is simple because from a dogmatic standpoint, it simply does not exist.  Again I would try to give a typically long-winded blowhard explanation of this admission but approximately 150 years ago Abraham Lincoln said it better than I ever could, so take it away Abe:

“When I do good, I feel good.  When I do bad, I feel bad.  That’s my religion”

If only I could be as concise as Lincoln. He defined our nation in a mere 263 words in the Gettysburg Address and here he strips away the immensity of all faiths and tells us that his religion is the heart of religion.  Simply to feel good when you do good and to feel bad when you do bad…amazing.  This is not to say that I even remotely feel that the body of the world’s great faiths should be stripped away.  I feel that divinely inspired or man made, they are possibly the greatest accomplishments humanity has ever possessed.  Faith brings us together, it educates, it calls for reflection and introspection and most important, it gives us a Reason To Be.  So for me to be a Jew is to view the world though the filter of banter I have presented up to this point.

But what about Jesus?  I love Jesus!  I feel especially close to him being that we share a faith and a trade. (Luckily for him, he probably never had to help anyone design a kitchen or order windows from Home Depot.) I bask in the celebration on his birth.  It is the warmest most rewarding time of the year.  I love the togetherness that families enjoy as they gather to remember his crucifixion and their belief in his resurrection.  Most of all, I love his simple message of love, charity, and acceptance.  (I would hate to bid against this guy!)

I never deny the existence of Jesus, because I truly believe that this amazing man walked the earth.  I truly believe that he was one of the greatest men that mankind has ever produced.  And above all, I agree with his message from top to bottom.  His greatness is enough for me.  I don’t need deify Jesus but I do understand why so many in the world do.  So to all Christian readers, please understand that my Jewishness is not a rejection or a dismissal of your faith, it is simply a different point of view.

I DON'T KNOW MUCH

POSTED ON JULY 7, 2012 - ANDREW

I DON’T KNOW MUCH

POSTS

I DON’T KNOW MUCH
an Andrew ramble

People frequently tell me how smart I am. They comment on how well read I am and how my analytics and deductions are ever so insightful. I must admit that I do have my moments, and I do believe that I have a superior talent to cross reference small bits of information faster than most. As for the smarts, the knowledge base, and the deductive reasoning, I’m here to state that these just aren’t traits I possess. Additionally, my core-knowledge is virtually non-existent other than a surface knowledge that I skimmed off of my sub par performance as a public school student and the sham that could be called my bachelor’s degree. I do have the ability to put myself “out there” as an aspiring intellect, but as I will reveal in the following paragraphs; I DON’T KNOW MUCH.

Let me start with the medium I am currently working in, the written word. I am often told that I am a pretty good writer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My writing consists of three actions. The first is saying what I would like to write in my head and then writing it down. The second is putting capitals at the beginning of sentences, names, places, etc. The other part is simply placing a comma where I would take a breath and a period at the end of a sentence.

Now on to the things that I am totally clueless about. I really don’t know how or when to use a semi colon. This is really bad considering its preeminent place on the home row of the QWERTY keyboard. As for this thing~ . What the hell is that? And what the hell are these things [ ]? Sometimes I see them placed around words that I think a writer intended to “clear” things up for my dumb ass, but I’m not sure.

Then there are the innumerable grammar rules, constructs, and classifications that I have no knowledge of. Here are some that come to mind in no specific order: (notice the proper use of the colon) prepositional phrases, past and dangling participles, predicate, adjectives, conjunctions, sentence diagraming, the ABA CCDA crap they ruin poetry with, pronouns and last but not least interjections. Maybe I should have paid more attention to School House Rock.

These things are just bumps in the road compared to my real nemesis…..spelling! I never know when to end a word with y or ies. As for apostrophes, do we really need those? Do they go before the s, at the end of a name, of after it? Do they make a word plural or do they show ownership of some kind? I can’t get it straight. I just roll the dice and hope a green squiggly line shows up under whatever I am typing. When it comes to the words that sound alike, I really gotta give some thought to knight and night and right and write. I before e? Why does that never seem to work out for me? (Poetry) My first grade teacher used a mnemonic that said one letter does the walking and one does the talking. I don’t know what letters she was even taking about. I just remember sitting at my little first grade desk daydreaming about one living being that looked like a letter I and one that looked like an E holding hands and going on a date. I think the E was the talker in that relationship. I wonder what ever happened to those two?

Now we come to the Big Daddy. MATH. To say that I have a blind spot for mathematics is like saying that Stephen Hawking has a little trouble tap dancing. Sure, I can handle the pluses, minuses, times tables, and gozintas, but after that I am in in a parabolic free fall that would most likely defy all known laws of physics. Maybe even mentioning physics is getting a little ahead of myself. Lets just start off with a little word problem trouble. You know the ones where a train leaves Chicago heading to New York moving at 85 miles an hour, and another train leaves New York heading to Chicago moving at 65 miles an hour? How long before they pass each other and what time will they arrive? Yeah, my answer to this one isn’t pretty. The Chicago bound train never arrives (all souls lost) and the New York bound train pulls into the station some time during the late Cretaceous Period.

Now we enter the dark realm of FRACTIONS. My trade requires me to carry a tape measure somewhere on my person almost constantly, so basic addition and subtraction of lets say 5 ¼ plus 3 5/8 are right up my alley. Pretty sure that one is 8 7/8. If not, do yourself a favor and never hire Golden Renovations LLC. Now when people start flipping them over and multiplying and dividing them, I just fall off the wagon. As can be assumed, with these “mad” basic skills backing me up, algebra was a real joy for me as well as being the true academic low point of my high school career. I can’t be alone in this. Fractions just suck. I’m pretty sure that the hatred of fractions is what drove Europeans to invent the metric system in the first place. Seems much easier and considering the fact that they can teach it to kids in Nairobi who share their meals of mush corn with the flies that live on their bloated stomachs, I am going to make the bold assumption that learning it is within my grasp.

Back to poor Professor Hawking. This is the place where I am seriously out gunned. This S.O.B. can only move one eye, that’s it! Yet with that one moving eyeball and a super developed mind, he solves how the entire universe works through math; he discovers black holes; (check me out I’m using a semi colon) finds new dimensions; writes a bunch of books and adds up shit that looks like this:

{A+Z -(FX~G)+ 3/4 Space Time> ^47% to the power of Mr. Spock (f) \@velocity of light. {cos})=world domination

You gotta be friggin kidding me!!!

Moving past the three R’s; reading, riting, and rithmatic, the world spreads out before me like a vast grey void of things I can’t seem to grasp. The Stock Market is as good a place as any to start. What is the Dow Jones Industrial and why do I care if it goes up or down? Does it have something to do with the number 10,000 because the radio news guys seem to be in ecstasy when it is above that number? Then there are the simple things like how does the interest rate on my mortgage work and how would a 1% rate reduction save me $300 per month. Good for me, but thank God I don’t have to work this one out. Compounded interest, Uh….huh. Funny thing is that I worked in the mortgage industry for 15 years. No wonder the economy crashed!

The other day I had a couple of guys here to fix my icemaker. The real problem was that it has a bad solenoid. Okay. As usual I nodded to them in false understanding and a knowing smile. I will just assume that it is an integral part of making things cold and leave it at that. At least with this type of guy stuff I can usually keep up. With most guy stuff, e.g., sports, I am really lost. What is an earned run average? Exactly what does a Corner Back do? Is a hat trick 3 goals in a row? I think it is. What is a power forward? (I think I hit the main sports on that one.) Obviously I’m not a “sports” dad, so by genetics (always the easy blame) I don’t have “sports” kids. Now that they are getting older at least I will finally have a few guys to hang out with and talk to at barbeques.

These things are just the very peak of the mountain of knowledge that I don’t possess. Despite my shortcomings with regard to my knowledge of so many subjects, I feel strangely comforted by the realization that I know less and less the older I get. Then I momentarily stop my lifelong panic. I stop trying to bluff my way through all the information that is beyond me because I know that more is “unknown” than is “known” in the world.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HENRY GOLDMAN

POSTED ON JULY 4, 2012 - ANDREW

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HENRY GOLDMAN

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY HENRY GOLDMAN

A tale by Andrew Goldman

Leibisch leaned back coughed slightly then rubbed the growing hematoma just below his fifth left rib. He then gurgled low in his chest, lurched forward on his knees and proceeded to vomit up copious amounts of blood. The receptacle, into which Leibisch was upchucking blood into, was the pail that usually served as the chamber pot for his 6 children, himself and his wife Tillie. Leibish Grubensky, thanks to a name changing passage through Ellis Island 22 years earlier, was now known as Louis Goldman. Louis would be dead in 27 days. Today is June 1, 1933, the day of my father’s birth.

Tillie was no more than 9 feet away from Louis. When Louis started bleeding in their closet bathroom, she was in the family’s only bedroom enduring the natural agony of labor pains. Pains that were further heightened by her untreated diabetes and hypertension. These factors are believed to have contributed to the large size of the son she was currently attempting, albeit unsuccessfully at the moment, to pass through her pelvis.

The bedroom wasn’t really a bedroom and the apartment wasn’t really an apartment in the vision of its creator. The entire dry flat was a subdivision of a much larger apartment that had been created using single sides of packing crates tacked together into something slightly resembling several walls and 2 doors. Again Louis heaved up a lung full of blood and through the packing crate wall Tillie groaned. All things considered, present moment excluded, Louis was really doing quite well for himself.

The North side of 98th street between Second and Third Avenue was a peculiar place in 1933. Dominating the neighborhood a few blocks to the south stood the all but abandoned hulk of the Jacob Ruppert Brewery. Jacob Ruppert, Brewer and Yankee Owner, the man who brought Babe Ruth to New York and the man who put the New York Yankees in their iconic pinstripes. The dormancy of this towering monstrosity, of barley and hop’s processing would continue for another 5 months and 5 days when the 21st amendment to the constitution would be passed repealing Prohibition. Without the industry of brewing yet able to resume, Mr. Ruppert paid a great deal of attention to filling the seats of his stadium just across the river in the Bronx. This was no small feat, considering that during the height of The Great Depression, most people did not have the meager amount of money needed to buy a ticket to any game and those few who did usually went to the nearby Polo Grounds to take in a New York Giants Game. It was to be a championship season for the Giants anyway. Undeterred, Ruppert, flooded the entire island of Manhattan with promotional trinkets and papers in every market front, 5 & 10 and illegal gin mill. It was hard to avoid all of the Yankee Combs, Pins, Pennants and Half Size Bats around the brewery neighborhood.

Tillie’s window faced the back of this quiet factory setting as she continued to labor. As the baby passed out of her and into the world, the landscape to her south with its citadel of cheap beer and low-rise walkups leading up to its gates, faded from her consciousness. The baby boy who would come out with an abandoned brewery on his horizon, a hemorrhaging father in the next room and sickly, put upon diabetic before him, was nearly 11 pounds. This was a very large baby, especially for 1933 standards, even considering that he was the 7th.

The midwife wasn’t overly surprised that Tillie did not make any attempt to hold Henry, in spite of her difficult delivery. It was not uncommon for the poor immigrant women of this neighborhood to have lost the majority of their maternal instinct somewhere around their 4th birth. Being number 7 was already turning out to be anything but lucky for this baby boy. After the midwife finished stitching Tillie, she cleaned Henry and handed him over to his oldest sister, a pretty girl of 11 delightfully named Rose. In a forceful Yiddish voice she commanded Rose to show the baby to her still heaving and bloodied father and instructed the girl to have Louis hand over 5 dollars for her services. Then she was gone. There was Rose, the oldest of 7 cradling and somewhat clumsily rocking a newborn who’s mother was already dead in spirit and who’s father was slowly bleeding to death into a bucket used to hold piss and shit through the night.

“This is anything but a blessing” thought Louis as he lifted his short but solid frame and made his way from the closet to his daughters side. The congealed blood and salvia on the front of his shirt and almost covering his jutting chin disturbed the 3 eldest and terrified to 3 youngest. Of course his ghoulish appearance had no effect on Henry who continued to wale away with the powerful small cry of a newborn. Louis was a self styled Shtarker who had acquired the moniker of Nasty Little Jew around the neighborhood of East Harlem. Had is wife bled to death during her long labor he would not have been overly traumatized and would have given it small account beyond its effects on his modest success and his mostly ignored responsibilities as a father figure. He was in some ways a man on the move. Arriving at Ellis Island in 1911 he was nothing more than another poor Jewish indigent from the rural fields that ringed Bialystok Poland.

Arriving in America in the time of Prohibition had proven to be something of a boon for a Nasty Little Jew who had little fear of laws, especially laws that he viewed as senseless in a land that he never truly felt he was a part of. Money was to be made. Money had to be made. Louis possessed an amazing talent for bottom feeding that would serve him from his arrival through the Grand Hall of Ellis Island until his pierced lung, the result of a splintered rib, would become infected and take Louis from Tillie. In less than a month from Henry’s birth Tillie would be alone with her newborn and her other six children; Bertha age 2, Lillian age 5, Mary age 6, Morris age 8, Frank age 9 and Rose age 11.

Louis sustained himself through his early years in America through a variety of back breaking but none to lucrative unskilled labor jobs. Barrel chested with a broad back, short neck and low to the ground 5’2” height, Louis was viewed as a natural pick and shovel man. This was back breaking, honest work and he despised it more with every plunge of the shovel and every swing of the pick. Luckily for Louis, the United States entered World War I in early 1917. This gave him the opportunity to enlist in the US Army for service in ‘The War to End All Wars.’ With the lure of enlistment bonus’, which at that time was paid at the time of signing, Leibish Grubensky demonstrated his newfound patriotism by volunteering in at least one recruiting station in every state on the East Coast and Mid West. Louis never reported for duty, however he did keep every Enlistment Bonus he procured. Before long it was November 1918 and the Armistice with Germany was signed. The war was over and Louis finally had enough money through some travel, some work, some misdemeanors and some reprehensible ingenuity, to finally bring his child bride Tillie to America.

In early 1920 Tillie joined her husband in East Harlem. Louis had been enjoying the benefits of Prohibition for almost a full year when Tillie arrived. Like so many others of his time, he flaunted the law and worked as a deliveryman to local speakeasies, alehouses and gin mills. Grunt work at any other time, but during Prohibition it was big money especially by the standards of a bottom feeder.

Louis continued making his deliveries, and Tillie continued making her babies. By 1932 they were able to purchase the building on East 98th Street where they occupied one of the 16 cold water and dry flats found in the upper floors of the building. On the first floor was a bar. Louis and his wife ran the bar, which was nothing more that a counter with a few tables. The patrons were all either derelicts and indigents or prostitutes and their John’s. The 15 flats not occupied by the Goldman’s were residents similar to the characters who frequented the bar.

It was the end of May in 1933 and Louis was working his bar alone. Tillie was at the end of a long, uncomfortable and complicated pregnancy marked by poor health for the entire term. Despite the fact that the bar was Louis’s, it was Tillie whom the patrons bonded with. Her sweet, unassuming, put upon nature was a common comfort to the already downtrodden patrons. Tillie brought out the humanity of the people in his bar. Louis was there to make money. Without her presence, the policy was drink or leave. His unofficial policy and general demeanor proved to be his undoing. A small Nasty Shtarker was no match for a few already drunk local derelicts whose money ran out but their thirst did not. Without Tillie present to soften the situation, Louis approached the group with a small bat he kept behind the bar. The bat was one of the Ruppert trinkets that had been given out throughout the neighborhood to celebrate the pending reopening of the brewery now that Prohibition was near it’s end, and to drum up ticket sales for his New York Yankees.

It was very quick. Louis threatened the group in his bellowing Yiddish accent. Instead of retreating, one of the derelicts lunged at him, snatching the small bat out of his hand. He was knocked down, and hit several times with his own bat. None of the blows hurt badly and he was soon able to get back on his feet, blaring out a string of Polish, Yiddish and English vulgarities the entire time. The group scattered and Lewis was able to catch his breath. Besides a few bump and scrapes he felt fine. He went about his business closing up the bar that night and feeling a little short of breath. As the adrenaline drained out of his body a pain was growing in one of his left ribs. He went upstairs to see Tillie and the children.

The metallic taste of blood first became present in his mouth on the morning of Henry’s birth. The pain in his side as well as the mark left by the small bat appeared to be growing since the evening before. He went out to collect any rent that could be had on the first of the month, which was a pointless endeavor considering the nature of the times and the class of the residents. Feeling a need for rest he went back to the flat and was told by Tillie to call for the midwife. The midwife was at the flat by 1 that afternoon. By 3 Louis could no longer comfort his laboring wife or children and had to bring himself to the closet where he could purge the warm metallic taste that had permeated his mouth, throat and lungs by this time.

My father had a father for 27 days. He was born into the worst possible circumstances. Within 3 years Tillie would also be dead due to complications from High Blood Pressure and Diabetes. Six of the 7 children went into the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York. Some died horrible untimely deaths, some found modest success in life, some lingered uneventfully until their own timely deaths and one became my father.