rock on, maiden lane

a week ago my mom and i went down to bridgeport, CT, about a two hour drive away, to pay our respects to her father's grave, and to see if we could figure out where he used to live. as a young priest who had recently emigrated to the US, he had parishes in new york, new jersey, chicago, and, finally, bridgeport, an industry town that used to prompt me and my siblings, on the occasions that we passed through on our way to new york city, to plug our noises and yell about the oh how stinky. it doesn't smell like that anymore, or at least not that i notice. maybe almost ten years of exposure to that special san francisco sewage smell has inured me to such things.

or maybe it's the development. we learned about that when we decided to check out maiden lane first, the address in my grandfather's early bridgeport diaries. after a near-comical turn of events, in which our car was caught on the wrong side of a police barricade, a grumpy cop told us we were going the wrong way. he turned us back in the other direction, towards downtown, and we turned our map upside down. a few blocks later we found ourselves on a straight shot to sky scrapers, the immediate area around us consisting of fenced off weeds and trash, one remaining house crumbling amidst the wild growth on each side of the road. our directions had us befuddled (damn you, google maps!) so we turned right. the wrong way. after thirty blocks or so we realized it was the wrong way. so we turned around, again. crossing back over the main street, we landed on a spit of land, ending in a large, industrial wasteland of some sort or another. the waste of weeds and fence grew up all around. the only street around ironically named california. maiden lane seemed to have disappeared.

on returning home, after an amazing tour of my mother's old neighborhoods, i wrote the city of bridgeport to find out what the hell. i was told: "This section of the Steel Point Peninsula is the site of a Major Development project called Steel Point. Any homes in the area were leveled to make way for the development project ... you will see Maiden Lane has been cleared." apparently completely. there is no evidence that there was ever a street there.

we have since found out that while grandpa jacob lived on maiden lane, his church was on that very same california street, around the corner. it seems everything there has been torn down, as well, since all we found was ramshackle boat clubs and shacks. added to the surprise we got in nearby stepney, where we found one of my mother's childhood homes is now a vacant, overgrown field with a no trespassing sign hanging from an ineffectual gate, it kind of made us more than sad.

yeah, i know, been a long time. things get torn down. but i guess we're feeling the weight of having put off this research until now. if we had gone to poland just a little bit earlier, we could have met some of my mother's cousins before they died. if we had started looking into my grandfather earlier, we may have been able to see where he once lived. hell, if we had looked into family history back when we lived on the same coast as each other, we may have been able to talk to my great aunts and uncles before they passed away. not that they would have said much. they were known for being taciturn.

this is all in my brain because today we went back to bridgeport and spent four hours in the history room of the bridgeport library, trying to find the exact timeline of jacob's residences, and to fill in some holes in my mother's memory. those history rooms are amazing, awe-inspiring things. aside from finding the addresses and neighbors and best friends of my grandfather, i was able to get copies of ship's manifests, listing the departure and arrival of so many of my relatives. my great-grandfather was only 16 when he made the long sea voyage to new york city. we haven't figured out, yet, how he met my great-grandmother. or even how my grandfather met my grandmother. he, like my own father, was married once before, to a volatile woman who threw his clothes out the window. my grandmother was born in america, brought back to poland before she could talk, and moved back to the US again at the age of 22. somehow their paths crossed.

we have shreds of evidence. ideas of how they felt about each other, how long they knew each other. like the picture of my grandparents, standing in the side yard of the house in stepney that has now been returned to nature. there is a note on the back, in his hand, that loosely translates to "me and my old lady." we're beginning to realize the depths of his sense of humor. that picture has been to poland and back. he sent it to his brother, in torun, poland, who's daughter gave it back to us. crazy.

so, maiden lane is gone. and the house on garder road is gone. and so many relatives are no longer around. and the history room can only tell us so much. not to mention that i only have about 6 weeks to help my mom with this and all the other things i'm here to help her with. she goes in for surgery soon. and there are still so many things to get in boxes.

but it helps, this research. we're learning so much. because while we're researching the history of others, we're writing her story. and maybe mine.

in the meantime, tomorrow is my day off, to hang out by myself and write letters and get my head together. i've only had one of these since i've been here, and i ended up squandering that on episodes of laying about, squooshed between bouts of doing things for my mother. and i'm not counting the three days i was wicked sick, and just lay, immobile, watching the first season of 24. awfully entrancing piece of propaganda, that 24. so now i'm going to get the fuck off this computer and go do something completely unproductive, to celebrate. hello, playstation.

jeeeezus christ ... whatever

Current mood: drunky-face

i'm currently sitting in the dining room of my mom's house, a wee bit drunk, thinking about time and space. like how this town feels almost like sandpaper on my skin, but also not. i was talking to my oldest friend in the world a few days ago, trying to explain our difference of opinion about this place. and i realized the heart of the difference. he lived here as an adult, as a person with a job and a car and a girlfriend that wasn't me, able to drink in all of the bars that card too strictly to let the likes of us in a few years before. i left this place an 18 year old bag of emotion and fear, very rarely to return. and i realized the problem i have with this here and now stems from that. i almost don't know who the hell i am here, as if the person i was erases the person i am, as if the emotion and angst and unbridled joy and deepest of sadnesses of the past negate the experiences i've had afterwards the minute i cross the town lines. does that make sense? i hope so. at the very least, it does to me.

so it's important, to me, that he is here, this oldest friend in the world, a person who knows me inside and out, who can see through all the bullshit i spin, but also knows when the hell i am dead dead serious. it's important to have someone that is so close so nearby. he didn't understand, at first, when i was trying to explain this phenomenon. he said, "but everyone you knew is pretty much gone. close by, yes, but not where they were. the people are not the same, so what is the problem?" but it's not the people. it's the physical space that sets me back. granted, the people make a slight difference. but i know now that even if the buildings were switched all around, even with graves street gentrified instead of full of house parties, even with joe's pizza so overrun with customers, and even with downtown even more crowded with boutiques, this place does something to me. it takes me back, to a place i'm not sure i want to be.

but, really everything is ok. i'm just glad to put a diagnosis, of sorts, to the uneasiness i have about this place. and i'm overjoyed that there is someone here to hold my hand, to take me for drinks, and to tell me to stop being so damn emotional. that it's all going to be ok, after all.

old friends are very often the best.

new occupation = feeling sorry for myself

Current mood: foggy and tumbled

now if only someone would really pay me for it.

it's almost one am, and i'm feeling that sort of frustrated that seems like invisible arms firmly squeezing your appendages, so even flailing about to get rid of that excess energy is difficult work. somehow i can't get warm, either. the heat's on, i'm wearing so many layers that it may explain my inability to flail about, and i even found my hat.

guess i shouldn't have opened that last beer.

i spent the evening cleaning slides of my parents' honeymoon. my photographic obsessions have collided with my need to save every last bit of history having to do with me or anyone i've ever been affiliated with. so, cleaning dirty, thirty-year-old slides, and putting them in archival sleeves. i have a bit of a fixation on these slides. as a young'un, my mom asked us please not to mess with them. i remember that clearly, mostly because forbidden things are the most interesting. i assumed, when i got to the age that i needed to formulate an explanation, that it was because they are fragile, and young fingers like to touch everything they can. now i think she said such things to spare us the spectacle of seeing my most-probably-naked father, reclining, wrapped in a sheet, holding a can of budweiser on his bare belly. such is the stuff of nightmares.

my father holds an almost mythic position in my mind at this point. the mythic position of a hydra, that is. or a murderous, gigantic cyclops. i haven't set eyes on the man for something like 23 years, a fact that i never cry over. i almost wish i had never known him. but when i come across him in images, like i have so often tonight, i experience a shock of recognition and disappointment that throws me. it's almost like seeing someone in person that you have grown used to through the mediated images of television or film. up close, they are just people. and usually surprisingly short.

pictures of my father as a young man are even more shocking. clean cut, in suit and tie, overcoat thrown over his arm, pipe clenched in his teeth, he seems so unlike the small bit of actual person that i remember. and most definitely not the person my mind and so many years of absence have redefined him to be. how can that be the same person? what the fuck's going on here?

i get the added shock, now, of knowing that one of the boxes of slides i cleaned are actually shots of him with his first wife, in somewhere like morocco. i don't know if i knew before that my mother was his second wife. perhaps. but when she told me a few weeks ago, maybe for the second or third time, it totally surprised me. my memory is not what it once was, but i'm pretty sure i didn't know that.

i guess the marriage didn't last long, and the divorce was quick. but it adds fuel to the fire of that surprise perception, that my father was (is) just a guy. a really, really fucked up guy.

these are the thoughts running crazy circles around my head tonight, as i wander back and forth, frustrated by, well, everything. i'm afraid the winter has gotten to me, despite its persistence in being a surprisingly "warm" winter. snow has fallen exactly twice in the month and a half that i've been here, the first time dusting the air for about a half hour, the second time calmly falling for hours, with only a thin layer of white on the highest points of things to show for it.

nothing is really as it is supposed to be.

ass-backwards

Current mood: phlegm-y
jesus christ. i spent an hour last night constructing an intelligent update to this space, filled with literary genius and subtlety of tone and, yes, enough drunken angst to choke a good-sized horse. not that i would want to choke any sized horse. i'm a pacifist, and a vegetarian to boot.

but, anyway, i hit post, the button that would send my words into the aether of this interweb, and it did, alright; so far into the aether that they will never to be seen again.

dammit.

but it was all about how all the letters i've been meaning to write have been writing themselves in my head, while my body runs around doing everything else and i can't seem to get enough time to myself. it's a little frustrating. and it was all about tough new england women, and perceptions of regional loyalty, and how i miss san francisco. particularly, how i miss the queers and the perverts and the nellies. but, at the same time, it is good and important to be here. if only i can find some time to sit down and write letters.

cosmo found an old typewriter up in the house in blandford, the house where i spent the first five or so years of my life, on and off. we can't tell who it used to belong to, my uncle charlie, or my great uncle tony, or any number of other relatives who have recently passed on or moved away. cosmo fixed it and oiled it and bought me a ribbon. he's a good egg. so, i have this beautiful old typewriter at my disposal while i am here. typewriters don't erase your words while you're still composing them. they don't hurt your eyes, or annoy you with their incessant hum. so, what the hell am i still doing here, online?