Anarchy 101: Death Takes No Holiday, Chapter 10
Coming of age in the golden era of cultural bullshit
Philosophizing about Luck, Music and the looming specter of Death are not the only themes running through my consciousness during this infrequent and wholly inadequate spate of self-examinations of my existence. Any proper analysis, for example, would include the concept of Anarchy. After considerable reflection, I have to face the fact that I am something of an anarchist in political, societal and legal temperament. That would be “anarchist” with a small “a,” as in one who engages with the world and his fellow humans as a single, non-aligned entity, looking askance at the ongoing circus from a distance and taking occasional literary potshots, as opposed to trying to join forces and plot with other like-minded big “A” “Anarchists” to fuck shit up and foment some sort of bullshit revolution.
The idea of crowds, of commonality of purpose, of communes, of “movements,” of the “hive mind,” of opinion polls, committees, festivals, political parties, mass marketing and social engineering … all of that gives me a feeling of claustrophobia crossed with a sickening, hair-raising sense of vertigo.
If you haven’t figured it out by this point: I don’t like or trust most people very much, and that goes triple for groups of people. My closet anarchism comes with a not insignificant dose of closet misanthropy. Not misogyny, let me be very, very clear. It’s the human race I have issues with, not specifically women. In fact, if reincarnation turns out to be an actual thing, I’d like to come back as a Swiss, Scandinavian or South Pacific Islander lesbian film director, if the position of sea otter isn’t available.
However, in this current life, odds are that four out of every five people you randomly lock in a room will turn out to be assholes, including yourself. One on one, you can usually figure out how to negotiate things and get along, at least for an hour or two. More than two and there’s bound to be trouble. More than three and you’re starting to get into situations requiring written agendas, to-do lists, meeting notes, contracts, lawyers, police, armies and maybe even bibles to keep things from getting out of hand.
One nagging mystery is how I seemed to instinctively suspect all of this the moment I squirted out of my mother’s warm, comfortable womb onto the cold, nightmarish delivery table at Brady Hospital in Albany, NY (RIP, along with many other key venues and residences of my pre-millennial existence), surrounded by assholes in hospital masks, all salivating to whisk me away and stick me with needles before I got the chance to suck on a tit. From a very young age, pretty much uniformly through every era and circumstance of what has turned out to be an improbably long-ish life, I have felt strongly disinclined to join in any organized group of Homo sapiens larger or more complicated than a shared apartment, pickup basketball game or working funk band. While I was browbeaten by my 1950s Mad Man of a father into acquiescing with short, hellish stints in the Cub Scouts (I failed to make Webelo) and YMCA’s ridiculous “Indian Guides” (for two forgettable weeks), and managed to letter in varsity swimming and, of all things, football (for some reason I was noticeably adept at running backwards), I was at heart a genetically contrary introvert of the sort who could easily have morphed into a manifesto-spewing Unabomber or black-hoodied Luigi Mangione figure, skulking around and targeting duplicitous politicians and corporate criminals … if something had gone more seriously awry than me failing my senior year on purpose, skipping college or marrying a sharp-tongued Irish/Italian woman the first time around.
Which was all bad enough.
My introversion was not total. By the time I slouched reluctantly into high school, I had managed to ingratiate myself — through humor, raw intelligence probably inherited from my mother, musical proficiency and a bit of knee-jerk physical competitiveness — with a diverse enough cross-section of the public school clique-osphere to achieve a sort of B-list popularity. I largely avoided getting beaten up, robbed or bullied, as well as beating up, robbing or bullying anyone. By 10th grade I had conquered my shyness and figured out how to notice when a girl was flirting with me, and how to not completely screw up the majority-approved teenage courtship ritual. A seething surge of hormonal activity and a couple of very lucky, lovely and gentle initial liaisons made me temporarily forget how much I disliked people, and I was able to develop sexually and socially into someone temporarily kind and giving and, to the untrained female eye, potentially worthy of recruitment as a life partner.
Naturally, what no female suitor could see right off was what a hardhearted sack of ungovernable meat I was going to turn out to be. In retrospect, more than one mystified ex has retroactively wondered aloud to me: “What the fuck happened to you? Why are you so emotionally stunted? Why do you hold back? Why did you leave?”
To the best of my apelike knowledge, I think it’s because, like old dead Ernest Becker said, I’ve been busy building an internal wall between my ego and the abyss. It’s a pretty fucking tall, well-built and painstakingly maintained wall. And the abyss, sorry to say, includes all of you. Once in a blue moon that wall is breached, and somebody remarkable worms his or her way in — usually for a short time, and rarely for the long haul (my four offspring, two grandchildren, my current wife, some of my extended family and a very few close friends being exceptions).
My home life was a typical baby boom mixed bag: a grasping, acquisitive, morally suspect businessman of a father who drunkenly blustered his way into and out of your heart with some regularity; a highly intelligent, stoical but nonetheless severely overwhelmed mother whose quiet acceptance and even encouragement of my increasingly rebellious endeavors I failed to properly appreciate until very late in both of our lives; four sisters and a much younger brother to amuse, manipulate, pester and ignore; and an occasional dog.
Along with the Ice Storm-like behavior of my parents in the late stages of their doomed postwar marriage, my own early attempts at love no doubt contributed to my jaundiced view of heterosexual relationships. After one particularly galling breakup with a social climbing young woman I had rashly imagined having fallen in love with, I began building that internal barrier with some gusto. Never again, I promised myself. The sturdy remains of that wall, not unlike the ancient battlements still standing as restaurant district rear walls in present-day Rome, continue to guard against total surrender, even as any reason to resist has faded.
Also during my late teens, perhaps related to all of the above, I experienced a radical transformation in spiritual cognizance. As I may have mentioned earlier, I was from birth groomed to be a practicing Episcopalian. My father was a deacon in St. Michael’s church, and his best friend growing up, David Ball, was on track to become the bishop of the Albany Diocese. I had, through my parents’ urging and with their priestly friends’ support, been excelling in religious studies with an eye toward someday becoming a priest. I was studying the crap out of the old and new testaments, was a lead acolyte at the cathedral, and had even lost my virginity at 16 on an overnight camping trip during a week at the diocesan summer camp in Cooperstown, which was aptly named Beaver Cross.
At about the same time I was entering “manhood,” I also had begun voraciously reading existential and other decidedly non-religious literature. Camus. Sartre. Hesse. Conrad. Kafka. Twain. Mencken. Vonnegut. Orwell. Kazantzakis’ “Last Temptation of Christ.” Having soured on Santa Claus when I was five for failing to bring me the reciprocating saw I had requested for carving an escape tunnel through my bedroom closet wall, it was a short literary journey to re-reading the Old Testament in a new and more suspicious light, eventually determining that religion was most likely just as big a crock of manipulative shit as secular Christmas.
The looming horror of the Vietnam war, and the internal resolution that I would never, ever allow myself to be conscripted into killing to support some asshole’s “domino theory,” also helped further my steady plunge into the arms of anarchism. Yet I continued to resist joining any movement, or even publicly expressing my anti-war sentiments.
As I ease into the disappearing phase of my life, I notice in the mainstream zeitgeist quite a bit of misplaced nostalgic pablum for the late 1960s and early 1970s of 50-odd years ago, which was ostensibly my generation’s formative era. This was allegedly the “dawning of the age of Aquarius,” when human consciousness would undergo a sea change from “me” to “we.” This myth was as big a crock of bullshit as anything else ever foisted on the dumb-ass masses, including religion, and my 16-to-20-year-old half-developed anarchic brain realized it. As my family unwittingly accommodated my quiet rebellion in the waning moments of 1969 by moving to Florida and leaving me alone and unsupervised for 8 months in a rambling house in upscale Loudonville, I became a sort of Ferris Bueller on steroids, skipping school — particularly eschewing a stultifying English class I had begun boycotting at the beginning of the year — and luring impressionable fellow “students” into unprofitable behaviors. While committed to avoiding the draft at all costs and prepared to abscond to Canada upon turning 18, I was nonetheless radically uninterested in the Hippie movement, in communing or protesting, or anything to do with mind-altering drugs. Although I was attracted to the music of Hendrix, the Doors, the Electric Flag, Paul Butterfield and others, I was mystified as to why anyone would want to subject themselves to a massive clusterfuck of filthy drug-addled humans frolicking in mud for three days, and passed on going with friends to the wilds of Sullivan County for a music festival that August. I’d already seen the Doors at Saratoga.
During a rare appearance in English class early in the semester with the dreaded Mrs. Edie, everyone present was interrogated as to what they’d like to do with the rest of their lives. The answers were mostly the expected from the upper middle class audience: doctor, lawyer, designer, banker, stockbroker, architect … my answer in the spur of the moment was somewhat prophetic, at least in the short term: “I want to go into the woods and find a hole to live in, and see how long I can make it without starving to death.”
For the meantime, though, until the family took off and left me to my existential tinkering phase, I had been staying the course as the entitled coming-of-age scion of a budding real estate dynasty. My dad had quit the insurance business and was building vast, shittily constructed middle class neighborhoods in Colonie, Clifton Park and North Troy. I had worked summers for him as a roofer, mason and utility driver. I had learned to drive at 14 in a 10-ton rack truck, which one had to double-clutch to downshift. By the end of each summer I was baked as brown as the underpaid Mexican and Italian laborers I worked with. In August of ‘68 and ‘69 I would start two-a-day football practices, where they tortured our young bodies into proper form for sacrificing ourselves for questionable glory.
Having finally gained some muscle weight over the summer of ‘69, I had improved from third-string bench-sitter to second-string defensive cornerback, occasionally getting to make a big play. During the big win against number-one Burnt Hills, I knifed in on an audible blitz and tackled the biggest, strongest, most unstoppable motherfucker in the league, Eric Torkelson, an eventual Green Bay Packer, for a 12-yard loss, stopping a drive that would have won them the game, and giving us a three-way tie for the championship. Dangerously spurting adrenaline into my bloodstream during all this, I broke out in hives after the game and barely avoided going to the emergency room. My short-lived heroics were, along with a Regents Scholarship and nearly perfect SAT scores, enough to get me a partial football ride to Ithaca College, which I ended up denying myself by skipping classes, failing English and thus the entire senior year. As my parents had fled to Clearwater with my younger siblings and were busy ruining their own formerly cushy lives, any disappointment they may have felt at my spectacular flameout (I had once been a straight A, “accelerated” student and a designated “golden child”) went unremarked-upon.
I was, tacitly, an emancipated minor. By June of 1970 I had devolved into what I would become for the next two years: a surly, homeless societal dropout, and someone Hunter S. Thompson once coined a “non-student,” hanging around dorms and classes of northeastern colleges and universities to which I did not belong.
Sometime during my long springtime absence from high school academia, my peers anointed me “class clown” and “class artist” (both also three-way ties) in the 1970 Shaker High School yearbook. I was not present for graduation, and had no plans to pursue a career in either comedy or fine arts. If anything, I imagined myself someday making music, or possibly writing the great American fuck-you novel. But first, I had to rent a big U-Haul, pack up all the family’s remaining shit and our dog and drive it all down to Florida with my alcoholic, upper-popping, allegedly incestuous dirt bag of a maternal grandfather. I had made plans with my friends Jack Maeby, Billy Ringwood, Bob Perillat and John Blood to meet up in Clearwater, rent a place out by the beach, and start a band.
Things only went partially according to plan.
Note: A song I wrote while still a youngster, about coming of age. Click the photo and it will bring you to SoundCloud.
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Well im gen x. Australian and extroverted but i really resonated with your feelings of Anarchy which only intensified with Covid.
Great writing. I wont bother linking my music.
I rap.
Thanks human.