the kindness of strangers
I'm reading Studs Terkel's Hard Times now.
I've been on a binge of personal historical narratives these days. Last week it was Jarhead, one Marine's memoir of Gulf War I.
This week it's the Great Depression. You know, light stuff.
Told by the people who lived it.
It has all the details you might expect -- stories of a labor movement just born, rum-running during Prohibition just as a method of survival, stories of socialites becoming social workers and leaving Park Avenue behind, jazz, Freud, railing against that communist Roosevelt, the Hooverville riots (which began not as a protest against economic conditions generally but as a protest by veterans of WW1 demanding bonus pay -- Hoover called in the Marines, including Douglas MacArthur, who put down the marchers with tear gas and fixed bayonets), and, above all, desperation and survival. All pretty much expected.
One common thread, though, that I didn't expect: story after story about people who had nothing left sharing what little they did have. People struggling for each other and total strangers, because each other is all they had.
A lawyer who represented strikers, eventually the model for the attorney character in Richard Wright's Native Son, telling a story about how he was the only one with any money out of his social circle of attorneys. They would all sleep in the park nights, each one using the ass of the person next to them as a pillow.
A jazz musician who never really lacked for work -- he and the rest of his bandmates would play speakeasies -- but there was never any money to be had, so his band would be paid in booze. Bandmates would have to borrow from each other to pay for food.
A socialite who eventually became an actress in Cecil B. DeMille productions as a chorus girl -- and joined the nascent Screen Actors Guild.
A homeless man riding boxcars, telling stories of how he and other homeless men had a man, his wife, and their new baby, obviously not used to losing everything, join their little group on the train. The baby was looking sick, so the men got together and collected what pennies and goods they had to trade in town for a baby bottle, nipple and milk. The husband refused it -- like for many others, the humiliation was unbearable and simple human charity meant that you had failed completely.
The baby asphyxiated during the night from the train's smoke -- although the hoboes tried to warn the family and offered a blanket to help with the baby's coughing, the husband's pride got in the way.
Many of the interviewees in the book (written in 1970) take time out from their narratives to say that there is no "community spirit" like there was then, when they had the WPA, labor unions, community organizations, or simply each other.
Communities born out of necessity.
I remember when I was about 6, when my best friend, his little brother, and one of our other friends would play "guns", where we would run around the neighborhood, hide in our "foxhole" that we'd spent many days and hours digging in his backyard, sneak around neighbors' backyards, make explosion noises, complain about the rules of death not being observed, and occasionally hurting one another such that one of us would eventually say "my mom says you have to go home now."
I remember the birthday parties, the ones that my mom still shows on filmstrips to an unappreciative, bored audience that includes myself, where my mom is in flower-print polyester, and where I'm still trapped in my 6-year-old body, making stencils on the cardboard refrigerator boxes my dad would scrounge from behind Sears stores. I still see the film, and there I am in all my dork happiness, as I practice possessives to the enjoyment of no one else but my parents, and stencil like a demented Army quartermaster: BRIAN'S HOUSE. CHUCK'S DOOR. STACY'S WINDOW.
I remember the pool at the house down the street, and all the cannonballs I did, in Bakersfield, in July.
Halloween, where my sister is in heaven as a fairy princess, and I'm running around in a bunch of leaves (literally, fig leaves from our tree) that have been pinned to my swim shorts. Madam, I'm Adam. Gimme some candy.
My friends at that time ostracized me once high school hit; birthdays, these days, remind me of my parents' frailties in addition to my own; I avoid Bakersfield in July (or Bakersfield, period); I haven't dressed up for Halloween (my favorite holiday) in quite a long time, since that's really something only kids do, right?
You've really got to fight against growing up. Yes, you grow up, and your growing awareness of the world invites the world back inside. There are still little bits, though, fragments of purity that armor you against what your parents can't protect you from. Or the bits that you remember along with the realizations of your parents as real people. The bits that don't necessarily define you as an individual, but tell you this is where I come from.
Communities born out of necessity. Neighborhoods where the necessity is each other's well-being.
I remember when my dad taught me and my best friend how to drive.
We had a late '70s beater Caddy, silver, with maroon leatherette interior and a broken hood ornament that my dad drove out to the sticks, late afternoon in Bakersfield, stale sweat in the air, dust in the air, cotton fields, apple trees, row upon row of fields, wooden telephone poles, flat earth and flat sky.
He got out, told us to get out, and then he got in the back seat with a beer and a bag of potato chips, told me to get in and start driving.
There it all is: a nervous teenage son out with his dad, who is having a fatherly bonding moment as only a father can have with his son in a beat-up silver 1978 Cadillac; with a beer in his hand on a late afternoon, my dad is acting a little drunk but he isn't really, because he's drunk on the moment when his son and his son's friend are there in the front seat, learning to drive, and he's got his beer and chips in the front row, and it's time for these far-from-gentlemen to start their engine.
I drive a while, prompting loud boisterous laughter from the back seat at little mistakes, gentle loving ridicule as my father is awash in late afternoon, beaming in his stained T-shirt after the day's yardwork in 101 degrees.
My friend takes the wheel for the drive back to town, definitely the more dangerous assignment, which becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy when he reads a left turn signal as a protected left turn but it really isn't -- prompting more laughter from the back seat after the initial panic. This is Bakersfield, after all, where people take a while to do things, including making turns at lights. "Did you see that guy's face? I think he was going to crap his pants!" This is Bakersfield, where if the five feet of Detroit iron doesn't protect us from anything, the summer evening and our laughter will.
Years later, I moved to San Leandro and lived in the house my great-aunt and uncle lived in before they died. It was a really nice neighborhood, with my aunt's house, built in 1927, on a corner of the street surrounded by other houses of around the same age.
The Fourth of July in this neighborhood was something like those memories you pick up and hold on to -- it was amazing, and made you proud to be an American, because people were taking care of each other. Giving each other some sort of quiet joy that went all the way down to their children, all of them running around with each other and wheeling away on tricycles.
They blocked off the street, baked pies for each other, set up a little stage for neighbors who had formed a band to play oldies tunes on a beat-up amp, painted their kids' faces, flew modest American flags from their gables, asked about each other, had barbecue and corn for the entire neighborhood, passed out flyers inviting people to take part in citizen committees, flyers for party planning, sparklers for the kids, and through it all, that summer-evening sound of lazy insects, the look of lazy sunlight, and the complacency of living a bizarre Norman Rockwell painting, because everyone there has absolutely welcomed me and the new woman in my life.
A community, in all that great sense of the word. People taking care of each other's kids. People growing old on the same street.
We're still outsiders in this place, though. It's our own fault, really, because we've lived for so long in fear of our neighbors, or simply moving from place to place as transient students or transient job-hunters that we really don't know how to act when we come across an Americana out of myth, something we thought didn't exist, where the interracial couple's kids get their faces painted by the gay couple around the corner, and everybody's handing us corn and hot dogs, and we're wondering what happened to us on July 4 where we turn a corner and we feel cared for by strangers.
It's unnerving. We take a nice walk around the neighborhood and hole up in the house after a while. There are flyers in my mailbox the next day, based on some hopeful things I said when my armored cynicism briefly left me under the influence of barbecue sauce and pie. (I can generally be counted upon to say anything to anyone or do anything if I'm given a piece of pie.)
I make hopeful noises about it, but throw the flyer away after a while.
Someday, I hope to return to that state of being, where I have a neighborhood of people I can call my own, and our level of trust is such that we do things for each other -- not necessarily closing down the street. But it would be nice.
Someplace where I can laugh myself to death in the back seat of a shitty car while I teach my kid, and someone else's kid, to drive. Or maybe where I can be a hammy actor to the end, reading The Fellowship of the Ring to a group of spellbound children, including my own.
And life would be full of summer afternoons then, or as many as the real world will allow before everyone, including adults, grows up.
I'll make time, I think. I can't flake -- because then I'll be an adult.