Skinned goats, phantom love and the providence of prostitutes
Joe Bageant -- World News Trust
-- A
fellow expatriate told me recently when I left Belize, Central America,
which I now consider my home: "America is a sticky place, Joe, hard to
get out of again, even from a short visit. The everyday money and
business stuff alone will trap you like fucking flypaper." And that
keeps ringing in my head during this current return to sell my house
and fulfill my promotional obligations for the book I just published
here. Which could take months.
But
it's sticky in other ways too, some of them rooted in the hearts of its
working class people. Last week I found myself in Philadelphia, a
working class town if ever there was one. In this sprawl-and-mall age,
it's surprising for non-metro people like me to run into whole
neighborhoods of folks who are not full of suburban self-important
horseshit and three-car garages, and when you do they always seem to be
immigrant or working class neighborhoods. But then, maybe I was just
around too many bland American "sluburbs" for too long before I skipped
the country.
Old
men see a lot of phantoms when they revisit the scenes of their youth.
Philly is like that for me. I was stationed at the now-defunct South
Philly Naval Base in 1965. And it was in roaming that city during
off-duty hours that I experienced my first intellectual awakening,
or at least the first one that had other human participants. I hung out
at places like the Artist's Hut or the Guilded Cage off Rittenhouse
Square, learned of the folk music and peace protest movements and heard
poetry read live by real poets for the first time. The people
introducing me to those things had a strange similarity, one I couldn't
quite put my finger on. So one night during a very stoned conversation
with Rachel, my newly acquired girlfriend, I asked just what the hell
that similarity our circle of friends had was. "We're all Jewish,
silly!" she replied. Until then, I'd thought Jews were some extinct
people from the Bible. And so an intellectual life and scene was opened
up for a country boy who was used to reading and thinking alone in a
musty small town library, wondering if people like Marcuse and Genet
were for real. But in 1965 America still offered my generation a world
full of promise and growth. We drank cheap Chianti by candle light,
then stuck candles in the empty bottles and talked of Bertrand Russell
and world peace and played Odetta and Charlie Parker records. And I got
my first blowjob. Not in her student artist's apartment, but under an
alcove of Penn Center on a warm night in June. There was no telling
just what might happen, even to a fundamentalist Christian-raised
redneck kid in 1965, in a sensual world so full of art, belief and
promise.
Anyway,
it is early April 2007 in Philly and I am copping a smoke in Philly's
Italian Market with 66-year-old Fredo "Freddy" Vento. Freddy, like
about half the older menfolk of the Italian Market, resembles Danny
Aiello, but in work clothes. A butcher, Freddy sells everything from
veal to "turkey parts" and whole skinned goats with the eyeballs still
in the sockets. "The Latins like it that way and the tourists always
stop to stare at 'em," he laughs as he spits the stub of his filterless
Camel onto the sidewalk. We are talking about the fight game because in
places like Philly and Kansas City you can still do that with no PC
police to jump your ass. Philly is a real fight town. I've always liked
boxing (though I watch the Latin American lightweights these days on
Belizean TV, fighters with real moves, combinations and artfulness,
none of the heavyweight tanks crashing together stuff) partly because I
learned to like it from my dad, partly because it was the only athletic
thing in the U.S. Navy I seemed to be good at -- I'd watched a lot of
combinations, footwork and moves with my dad, and practiced in the coal
shed behind our rented dump in Winchester, Virginia. But also because
it distills the most primal human struggle, skill under pressure, and
sheer graveyard will. Boxing is life in the raw, and yeah, yeah, I know
it causes brain damage. But so does nearly everything else I've enjoyed
in my life, drugs being one, but divorce being the worst.
It's
never a good idea for a writer or reporter to open a conversation with a
serious question. So I bait Freddy for conversation with the most
cliché question I can come up with.
"OK, who's the best fighter to come out of Philly?"
"Well,
no matta whatcha think of the guy, Sonny Liston was right up there,
until he took that dive for the mob in the Clay rematch. Made a lotta
mob bookies big dough. But Smokin' Joe was the best this town ever saw.
Frazier took on Clay three times, beat him in the first bout and woulda
beat him a second time if they'da let the fight go on. Even Ali said
Frazier fuckin' near killed him in that fight, and Ali didn't give
nobody credit fer nothing. But now we got Chazz Witherspoon over in
Sout' Philly. So look out!"
The
Ventos have been living upstairs in the row houses over their shops or
pushing carts on Ninth Street since the turn of the last century, when
Tony Palumbo first brought Italian immigrants to what was then the
outskirts of a city of brotherly love, which much preferred Quakers to
wops. Freddy still lives in a condo a few blocks from where he was
raised and went to St. Paul's school, and claims he has no beefs about
the way America has treated him. He can remember when South Philly
vocal recording groups practiced in the tile bathroom of the rec center
for their appearances on American Bandstand, and even sang on one that
never made Dick Clark's cut. "We came outta St. Paul's and went to work
makin' maybe $55 bucks a week. On Friday you paid your bills, and then
took your girl out for a date. It was a good enough life. Nobody was
complaining about not getting a contract."
And
today? "It's just about the same except that it's more fuckin'
expensive and I don't get laid as much. But who does? I got two kids
through college; I sold my house and moved into a condo. So what the
hell?" Guys like Freddy don't festoon the American marketplace with
moral pieties about "ethical" capitalism and such crap. He says, "This
country's been good to my family." He figures the war in Iraq is just a
war in Iraq. "If they blew up Penn Center I'd'a felt the same way as
New Yorkers." He was all for the war until we started losing. Now he
has his doubts. "We got Soddom Hoosane. So let's just pull out and let
'em kill each other off."
He
considers himself and his family among America's hard working small
businessmen who helped, and continue to help, build this country, and
he is right about that part (but then, so did slaves and so do Mexican
ditch diggers.) But he is also an important prop for the Republicans'
tax cuts for the rich and the elimination of the estate tax for wealthy
elites. Freddy doesn't want to see the government take away the family
business for taxes after he dies. Which was never likely anyway because
even if his meat business were worth a million bucks, which it ain't,
the tax would only have been on anything above that million and he
would have 14 years to pay it off anyway. Nintey-eight percent of small
businesses were exempt from inheritance taxes even before the tax was
repealed, and you can guess who the non-exempt two percent were and
still are. In fact, if I am reading the chart right, the two top
brackets are now effectively eliminated from estate taxes. Freddy
understands none of this; he just wants to pass the family business on
and so, remains a staunch member of the Republican base on a "better
safe than sorry" basis. The truth is that Freddy's business is the same
as it was when his grandfather was whacking up veal cutlets on the same
street: modestly profitable and unstable as hell during many years. But
pure Italian Catholic guts and survivability (and I'd guess no few
under the table dealings) along with the DNA of the immigrant dream of
owning one's own business, keep vendors like Freddy getting up at 4 a.m. to work like dogs to keep the Italian pork roasts moving along Ninth
Street on a cold morning such as this one.
Conservative
as Freddy is though, he figures global warming is real: "Fish are
expensive because they must be getting scarce," and he's "pretty sure
it ain't because we ate 'em all. There's a lotta fish in the ocean."
Then too, his daughter is a marine biologist. And on morality and
capitalism, "Hey, you make money, you spend money. The big guys get
first cut. What's left you get a little piece of after the crooks are
done counting. Same as ever. But there's still plenty of oppatoonity
for anybody who wants to work. Look at the Vietnamese and the
Dominicans around here. They ain't hurtin' none."
Brokedown Moon Over the Nelson Algren Hotel
After
a cold day at the Ninth Street market, I called and asked one of the
town's literati to suggest an old hotel with some character. On her
advice, I ended up at the Lowe's, a gorgeously restored art deco period
place -- at $200 fucking dollars a night, plus $10 a day for a wireless
connection. How much money do such people think writers make, for
Christ sake? Anyway, it was too late to be probing Philly by cab for a
different hotel. So, with the idea of knocking down a stiff belt before
bedtime, I hit the lounge at Lowe's, where a bunch of the Empire's
manicured Hugo Boss drones were buying $12 martinis and seducing perky
blonde corporate bean counters on their expense accounts to the
accompaniment of a fake jazz ensemble, whose every song sounded like
Guantanamera, either speeded up or slowed down. Oh yes, now I remember
why I left this country -- unstomachable blind affluence.
Next
day my luck changed. While freezing my cod off in Love Park trying to
find a wireless connection on my laptop, I asked a Nation of Islam
brother just where a poor writer might stay for under a hundred bucks,
under fifty if possible, preferably close to downtown. He sends me to a
hotel on Spruce Street, a mostly black place, a real Nelson Algren wet
dream. Forty-five a night for the best room in the place, check out
time is officially noon but as long as you don't stay into the next
night no one cares. And if you do nobody will probably notice because
they only clean the rooms after you've signed in and paid up front. A
couple of old jazz men share a room here permanently; they played with
Philly's own Trane and have the record jackets and clippings to prove
it. Hookers run in and out day and night. A big mama cooks pigs' feet
and red beans on a hot plate, and a sad-eyed a fortyish white woman is
stuffed into a crummy little room with her two kids, piles of blankets
and toys and pizza boxes and a TV that actually works. She's dressed
nicely in that cheap way of a working class woman either looking for a
job or trying to pass for middle class at some workplace with no idea
of her story, which, whatever it is, can't be very damned pretty. Then
there is the gay couple living on the top floor jointly writing a
romance novel, and whose wireless connection runs my laptop for free.
Despite the crackheads screaming at each other outside on the street
all night -- I saw two of them kicking the living shit out of a guy
just before I crapped out for the night, but he managed to get up and
run before they finished the job -- the hotel is completely safe
inside, thanks to a 300-pound black dude in the lobby who keeps order,
patrolling the halls all night with a baseball bat and a cell phone.
Too bad there is no heat in my room.
So
now it is 3:30 a.m. during my second night at the Algren, after more than
a few drinks at the Pen and Pencil Club, Philly's oldest and only real
press club. The old school kind of club that's open until 5 a.m., where
Danny, the P&P's bartender, doesn't get that concerned look when
you knock back your ninth shot of vodka and your voice raises a dozen
decibel points. "Hell," he says, if you're still around at 4 a.m. you'll
see everybody here turn into werewolves." Nevertheless he has a guy
stationed at the front door to see that you get a cab home if you need
it, which I did. But until then I experienced more journalistic
camaraderie than I've had since I was a reporter in the 1970's.
Unfulfilling as our low carb, meatless media is today, there are
plenty of real reporters and photogs, both old and young, who agree
with you and me and the rest of the world about what is happening to
America. They just can't get the truth into print these days and the
only reason they still have jobs at all is because of their unions. As
in: "I shot all day, froze my nuts off and got some really good local
stuff, just so my 30-something boss could dump it and buy a generic
photo from the AP for fifteen hundred bucks!"
Which
is exactly why I got out of the newspaper business -- because of its
phantom objectivity, the digitized and telephonic ghost coverage
(almost no newspaper reporters get out of their desk chairs nowadays),
all those cloned photos of real events digitized into empty holographic
commodities, then sold to the public as the truth about society and the
world. Is it any wonder the American public doesn't have a fucking clue
about reality? Given the sheer crushing density of the mass
hallucination assaulting our brains twenty-four hours a day, we're
lucky we can even tie our own damned shoes in the morning.
But
I did manage to do so, and when I checked out of the Algren I rode down
the elevator with the guy who got the shit kicked out of him by the
crackheads. He was dressed in what appeared to be a neatly pressed
hotel doorman's uniform, or maybe a chauffeur's, and really didn't look
too bad, considering what I'd seen happen to him the night before. "How
ya doing, my brother?" I asked. "Fine. Happy to be alive on this great
day our Lord has given us!" And I'll bet he was. But still, it ain't no
way to live in what is supposed to be the richest, safest country in
the world, the one that Freddy says has plenty of opportunity for a guy
willing to go to work every day.
Providence and prostitutes
Now
I look in the mirror and see myself for what I am in this declining age
where the virtual passes for the vital and Oprah is the national
arbiter of American literature and morality. I'm a fucked up old guy
from a generation caught between the Beats and the hippies. So I
over-romanticize the gritty side of life. But Algren is dead, Bukowski
is dead, Kerouac didn't hold up as real literature, and providence
doesn't smile on America or Philadelphia like it did in 1965 when a
lonely hillbilly sailor was introduced to live, fire-breathing poets in
Rittenhouse Square and shared cheap wine and Trotsky's vision with an
artistic Jewess on a June night. I never loved my country more than I
did in those times of utter belief that change was possible, inevitable
even.
And I still I love my country and the very soil
presently beneath my feet that hold the bones of my Virginia ancestors,
who came here believing in an agrarian-based liberty that would
eventually become my inheritance as artistic freedom.
But
I'll tell ya right now and I'll tell you straight up. If I could get a
divorce from this country I would. And I've tried. But an American will
always be an American, even if he or she escapes what is proving to be
our terrible undoing, learns to be an honest citizen of this crumbling
world which we alone did not destroy, and even learns to care with all
his heart for the rest of humanity, starting with our own people. It's
like loving the most cutthroat whore on the planet, one whose tits are
bunker buster bombs and whose heart is in the Chase Manhattan bank
vault. Her high crimes may have driven me to a foreign shore, but even
from the grave I expect to be scanning God's black canopy for the
ghosts of dead poets and Jefferson's dream of peaceful oat crops.
***
Joe
Bageant is the author of "Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from
America's class war," a book about working class America published by
Random House Crown, scheduled for June 2007 release. A complete archive
of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans
on the subject of class may be found at http://www.joebageant.com. Feel free to contact him at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Copyright 2007 by Joe Bageant