There have been a lot of changes to Lowell, Massachusetts, my birthplace, since I left; the city has embraced native son Jack Kerouac, it has a Single A baseball team, and it has finally gone ahead and christened a thoroughfare Crack Street.
"High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell" is a 1995 HBO documentary that follows three likeable and engaging crackheads through a year of half-hearted detoxes, breakups, reconciliations, and the daily drama of their lives.
Co-directed by Richard Farrell, an ex addict and Lowell native, "High on Crack Street" shows a side of Lowell's culture that doesn't jibe with its boosters' plans for urban renewal.
As a former National Park Ranger in Lowell, I was happy to see my former co-worker, Warne P. Nelson, in a featured role, standing by a canal and delighting tourists with stories of the city's industrial past. It was also a pleasure to see the late, lamented Eat A Donut, where my family would get a dozen excellent doughnuts every Sunday after church.
More than anything, though, "High on Crack Street" contains the best examples of the Merrimack Valley accent. Massachusetts natives know that people from Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont talk differently than each other, and people from South Boston speak differently than people from Cambridge. Very few people pahk theya cah in Hahvid Yahd, and if ya did yid get a fuckin' ticket, ya retahd.
The Lowell/Lawrence accent is distinct from any in New England. I hope it never goes away. And even Brenda the pregnant crackhead has moments in which her North of Boston accent makes her sound genteel.
Thanks to Youtube, you can watch the whole thing.
Update: Brenda went missing after the documentary and there are reports that she has died. Gary "Boo Boo" Giuffrida is still around. Dickie Eklund was released from prison and is now the subject of David O. Russell's "The Fighter," a film in pre-production starring (as of this writing) Christian Bale as Eklund and Mark Wahlberg as his half-brother, "Irish" Micky Ward. Melissa Leo plays their mother.
Here is Dickie Eklund fighting Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978.
Here's Eklund's younger half-brother, Micky Ward, in his first, legendary fight against Arturo Gatti. You can see Eklund as his cornerman. This fight is considered by many one of the greatest televised fights ever. It was the first of three. Ward won this fight and narrowly lost the next two, retiring after the final fight in 2003. He and Gatti remain good friends.
And while we're at it, here's the Dropkick Murphys' ode to Micky Ward, "The Warrior's Code":
In all, "High on Crack Street" reminded me of "Grey Gardens" without the landscaping.
I don't know who they voted for, but a group of needlessly belligerent homeless people I met the other night reminded me that hope is once again stirring in America.
"The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" is one of Barack Obama's books. I feel confident that I don't need to read any more than the title to get the gist.
Does every president and presidential candidate write a book? Yes.
I spent 30 minutes on Amazon.com typing in the names of candidates from Mitt Romney to Ernest Hollings. Every major presidential candidate from as far back as I can personally remember has written a book (including George W. Bush and Dan Quayle - 744 copies new and used from .01), and I have a feeling that most of them are only used for reference material by reporters and the opposing campaign looking for spelling errors.
I have collected these books in an Amazon wish list only for convenience. Do not buy them for me.
Anyway, "The Audacity of Hope" is itself a hopeful thing. Obama has hope that people will know, or at least look up, the word "audacity." A candidate has not put that much trust in an electorate in a long time. And I see things changing already.
1. It was dark and I was walking from my office on the other side of Wilshire Blvd. toward the venerable bar The Prince. As I approached a a group of three vagrants, two male and one female pushing a shopping cart, they began muttering, and I had a feeling it was about me.
"Kill you," the first man said.
"I got a gun," the other man said.
"Hi," I said.
As I passed these two men (without incident, and without speeding up or slowing down) and approached the woman, I could smell her despite my long history of mouth breathing (usually on phones).
She did not say anything but one of the other men said, "Go get your own woman, motherfucker, that one's mine."
"OK," I said, filled with good feelings.
The Audacity of Hope: In this new America, you have hope that I want to mate with, and perhaps marry, your foul-smelling, cart-pushing, crack-addicted life partner.
2. Last week Newsweek announced that it would publish behind-the-scenes accounts of the Obama and McCain campaigns. Newsweek reporters agreed to not publish any of this material until after the election was over, and have now begun releasing tidbits, such as Obama's opinion of his debate performance and several Sarah Palin anecdotes dealing with her lack of preparedness for the vice presidency.
When it was reported that Palin thought that Africa was a country and that South Africa was the southern region of that country, and when I mentioned this at my office, a co-worker accused me of liberal hysteria.
"But what about all the stupid things Dan Quayle said, or that George Bush said," I said. "Things that pointed to a dangerously incomplete education - ?"
"You selected those things," he said, "because you didn't like those people anyway. I'm sure all the candidates you liked said stupid things, but you gave them slack because they might have been misquoted or they had an off day."
Not true. I'm still holding a grudge against Joe Biden for plagiariazing a Neil Kinnock speech in, I think, 1987.
"Just like every conservative wants to believe that Obama is an Arab and a Muslim, you want to think that Sarah Palin is retarded," he said. "If she doesn't know that Africa is a continent, she's retarded."
The Audacity of Hope: In this new America, people want to believe the best of each other, even hoping that campaigns won't run retarded people to make other retarded people feel better.
3. To prove that one doesn't have to be retarded to not know that Africa is a continent, I called someone I lived with for 17 years.
"[name withheld]," I said, "Who did you vote for this week?"
"I didn't vote for Obama because he's into the abortions," the person said. "And I didn't vote for McCain because he's too old. [name withheld 2] told me to vote for the Libertarian. I forget his name."
"His name is Bob Barr," I said. "And the Libertarian party says the government shouldn't have the right to interfere in that matter. It's in their platform. I would have voted Libertarian, too, if I thought they had a chance."
"You mean the Libertarians say yes to abortions?" [name withheld] said.
"They don't say no, which is slightly to the left of where Obama is," I said. "So you didn't try to get any information on the Libertarians, you just asked [name withheld 2] and believed what (he) said?"
"[name withheld 2] is really up on things," [name withheld] said.
"By the way," I said. "Africa: continent, country, or city?"
"It's a country, Marty. You should have studied that in school."
Then [name withheld] asked me to explain the Electoral College, which I did, saying that it was retarded.
The Audacity of Hope: In the new America, you will vote for someone just because someone else told you to, even if you don't know the candidate's name, because you hope the other person knows what he's talking about.
A friend of a friend threw a birthday party for her and, as I walked through the unfamiliar house in California, looking through closets, rifling drawers, etc., I was pleasantly surprised to see this picture as the desktop pattern on a computer. (I have modified it from the original.)
It was taken from the Bridge Street Bridge in Lowell, MA, my home town. The camera faces up the Merrimack River toward the blue chimney of Saints Memorial Hospital, where I worked at age 16 incinerating amputated body parts (I still do this now, but only as a hobby).
The photographer grew up in Lowell and left there before I would have met her in high school, but there the picture was, 3100 miles away from where it was taken.
You might notice the graffiti on one of the mill buildings.
Today I was driving my family home from church. My daughter was singing a song with her class, and we got the fuck out of there once she was done lest a god I don't believe in suddenly manifest himself just to strike me down for hypocrisy, which I wouldn't put past him.
We were all in Sunday finery and traveling a road that is packed on weekdays when I drive my daughter to school. Today I was going 84 in a 70 zone, and got pulled over.
The California Highway Patrol officer was very polite, asked me why I was going so fast, asked me the meaning of my license plate, and let me go with a warning. I still can't believe it and think I'll need to be hospitalized.
In the two other times I've been caught speeding (both going 84 m.p.h., by the way), in New Hampshire and Arizona, I was driving either alone or with a group of guys and was made to pay hefty fines. Had it not been for the presence today of my uncharacteristically well-scrubbed family, I would have been toast.
Which leads me to California Proposition 8, which on November 4 will decide whether same sex marriages can be outlawed in this state. Proponents say that the continued legality of same sex marriages will force innocent people to tolerate them, will require churches to perform them, and will lead to roving gangs of gays force-gay-marrying people in the streets. "No on 8" supporters say stop being stupid.
Proponents also point to the tumult same-sex marriage has pushed Massachusetts into, similar to when it was declared illegal to burn people suspected of witchcraft there.
All I know is that in the place of my birth, people still expend a great deal of energy climbing mill buildings carrying three shades of paint to declare someone else's alleged homosexuality (I don't think Con painted that sign) and that, had today's CHP officer found me speeding without my adorable female wife and two children, I would be looking at a $474 fine right now.
But, as much as anyone deserves to be ticketed for the victimless crime of enjoying America's roads, I deserved that ticket. And same sex couples should be allowed to marry.
As you know, it's hard to be Pope. But the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, today's Pope Benedict XVI, is not a feel-good pontiff like his predecessor; some of his recent official remarks have been interpreted as cantankerous.
There's his pronouncement that all forms of Christianity that are not Roman Catholicism are in fact perversions of and subservient to it (take that you Catharist punks).
And then there was the motu proprio, or formal direction, that it was OK to bring back the Latin mass, the one celebrated prior to the opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, or Vatican II, or v. reloaded, in 1962.
The Latin mass was not for several years delivered in "High Latin" but instead the vulgate, or "church" Latin, the form that was more palatable to speakers of the Romance languages from which English is partially derived, characterized particularly by pronouncing Vs like Vs instead of Ws (Elmer Fudd never liked church Latin).
Allowing the Catholic mass to be performed in a parishioner's native language would, you'd think, open up the experience to billions more people who didn't have access to Latin teachers Don Bailey and Grace McDermott of Lowell High School, like I did.
But Pope Benedict XVI, who was there at Vatican II's opening ceremonies in 1962, said that things got lost in translation.
"...in many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity (emphasis added), which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear," he said.
For me, taking Latin was one of the most beneficial choices of my life, and I almost realized it at the time. The structure of the language was even a back door to the structural rigors of math, which I'd always had trouble with.
Around the time I was learning to love Latin I was learning to distrust the Catholic church. For various youthful indiscretions I was made to read the Bible, which I'm sure to my parents' regret made me distrust the church even more. For one, I was surprised to find that most Catholics of a certain age had never read the Bible themselves, but instead were content to have parts of it spoon-fed to them.
My elders finally admitted to me, defiantly, that "the priests know what they are talking about so we don't have to read the Bible."
The reason for this is that many Bible passages are contradictory to Catholic dogma, and that actually reading the Bible lays bare those contradictions. The only people allowed to interpret the Bible, then, are the professionals. And even they might get it wrong in the myriad translations of the mass, hence the call for a return to form.
In the Catholic tradition there are several "Holy Days of Obligation" during which the faithful are required to go to church. These include Christmas and Easter, of course, but also feasts like the Assumption of Mary, celebrating (on August 15) the assumption, body and soul, into heaven of Mary, mother of Jesus.
This event was not mentioned in the Bible, which I was taught was the entirety of the Word of God. The veneration of Mary came about much later, when there arose a need for it, and the Assumption was folklore until it was infallibly decreed as a genuine event by Pope Pius XII in 1950.
I remember being shocked by this as a teen, and equated it to my infallibly decreeing that my invisible bear, George, was the one who had eaten all the fudge when I was two.
"George ate the fudge," I remember saying, and sort of believing it, fudge all over my face in my crib, a box denuded of fudge nearby.
What's more, when I mentioned the Assumption assumption to the people most invested in making me go to church in those years, I was told that Yes, the Assumption was in the Bible, and that I just hadn't read the Bible closely enough.
That about wrapped it up for me and the church. I suppose if I had been forced to read "Jaws" and then got shot down when I said that Amity was a town on Long Island and not an island unto itself like the movie portrayed it to be, I'd also be a lapsed ichthyologist.
My hometown was an early ground zero for the scandals that have recently rocked the Catholic church in America and Ireland. Luckily for me, I was an unattractive child.
But I remember the words of my Literature of the Beat Movement professor from the University of Lowell (now the University of Massachusetts at Lowell), Charles Jarvis. He had known Jack Kerouac as a boy and I guess that was the reason the University gave him a course to teach. Because of his class I got great discounts on a lot of books.
It's a line I think of when anyone introduces himself as a "lapsed" anything; it's hard to forget what you grew up with and part of you still wishes all of it was true. It's big trouble when everything is open to interpretation.
"(An) insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires," the pope has said. Better to have someone else check your thoughts for you (this also applies to the Electoral College).
It's not surprising that the first thing kids learn in Sunday school is the story of Adam and Eve, bottom line: Don't ask questions. Bringing back the Latin mass not only ensures that more people will just take the priests' word for it but also, I'm sure the thinking goes, will keep the priests from getting too "creative".
It is hard to contemplate. The imposition of a language in this way is a means of restricting deviant or parallel thinking. It is similar to the way the church discouraged people from reading the entire Bible.
But for me, Latin encouraged critical thinking. I don't know what to believe anymore.
It is quaint to upload these pictures three whole days after I took them. While I could have done this instantaneously with my iPhone, I preferred to let the content, a dusty Mojave Desert offramp that was 112 degrees at 6 p.m., influence the medium. Also, I don't own an iPhone.
Here is Zzyzx. Nothing much was happening. There were no bleached cattleskulls, tumbleweeds, or rattlesnakes. I did not take peyote with an Indian, neither casino nor call center. I did not go mad.
I was roughing it, however. I didn't turn my air conditioning on the entire trip. I am purifying myself and taking myself off the grid. I was not even able to shuffle the songs on my iPod, because it is three years old. I had to listen to them alphabetically. That's hard core.
I was supposed to be driving with someone but he flaked. That is the Hollywood Way. But I was in Zzyzx, where the Old Ways are best.
In the end I returned to my car and drove toward Primm, which begins exactly at the Nevada border, where everything starts again. The same guy who flaked on the drive would flake on the hotel on the Strip, which reinforced my belief that Las Vegas is the Pheasant Lane Mall to Los Angeles' Lowell.
I went back to Lowell, where I was born and lived the first 17 years of my life (I'm 19 now) for about :30 this past weekend.
I haven't spent any time visiting the city's historic areas since I was a National Park Ranger there, so on my way to my Uncle Frank's birthday party I took a self-guided tour, not hitting nearly as many places as I would have liked (or visiting with anyone not related to me).
These are the Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River. It's nice to see a river with water in it now and then.
There have been a lot of changes to Lowell, Massachusetts, my birthplace, since I left; the city has embraced native son Jack Kerouac, it has a Single A baseball team, and it has finally gone ahead and christened a thoroughfare Crack Street.
