Chapter 2

            Taco vendors dared not ply their trade on our end of Belmar Boulevard (lest they receive a hefty summons.) The people (all white) in our neighborhood would have issued a shriek worthy of Donald Sutherland at the very suggestion of a portable concession stand (let alone a Mexican one.) 

            Though as far as I know, not one person in our wealthy yet sparsely-populated ‘hood looked like the version of Donald Sutherland pictured above. Here he looks too urban, Jewy, and eccentric (though I do not believe Donald Sutherland is a Jew.) His appearance in this picture bears a resemblance to the hateful New York City child-killer Joel Steinberg (and most of the people in my neighborhood agreed that it was wrong to murder children, even for the sake of money or convenience.)

            This Donald Sutherland looks like the sort of guy who lives in a tiny apartment cluttered with used books, maybe even academic socialist tomes like Lukacs’ “History and Class Consciousness” or something boring yet obnoxious like that. Books were not (as far as I know) popular in our neighborhood. They were more desirable than black neighbors (at least books didn’t bring down property values if properly stored) but there was no great demand for any volume more sophisticated than Stephen King’s “It” (with “The Tommyknockers” a close second.) And only the smartest and most bookish people bothered with Stephen King (what was the point of wasting time reading if they turned all his novels into movies anyway?)

            I’m not being snobbish (though some of our non-reading neighbors were snobbish toward me.) It is the duty of any romantic artist child-of-the-bourgeoisie to criticize said bourgeoisie (I’m just being hackneyed is all, so please forgive me.)

            But I also do not wish to portray the white people in my neighborhood as one-dimensional, though many of the dads did look like the famous porn cuckold Jimmy Broadway: 

            

            Not all of them looked like yuppie cuckboys. Wall Township was more “old school” and rednecky back then. Small ranch houses and pockets of 1970s split-levels dotted the margins of the Boulevard and the very few side streets. Dwellings like this:

               Or like this: 

   The stand-alone houses asserted their Being as chipper-looking versions of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer”: 

            Schopenhauer was right! Caucasians do not enjoy the company of others (at least not as much as their black and brown brethren do.) Schopenhauer blamed it on our intelligence and individualism, but what the fuck did he know? Was it worth being separate from the human race for the leisure of contemplating Platonic Ideals? Did he not know that all art, all achievement is for the purpose of bringing others (especially beautiful women) closer? And in the name of highest love?

            And many of the people in my neighborhood were miserable despite not even knowing what a Platonic Ideal is! Their closed-off-ness was racial and therefore instinctual. At least Schopenhauer was conscious and deliberate in his unsociability.

            The only nearby neighborhood proper was the Mayflower Court cul-de-sac, one of the wealthiest and most densely populated developments in the Glendola section of North Wall (but far enough away from my house that I could not spot a single Mayflower Court chimney from the upper right corner of my front yard.)           

            The photograph below is of a Mayflower Court house, one which is humble and tasteful by today’s monstrous standards:

            The daddies there (like my dad) earned handsome paychecks.

But how often did they fuck their blonde wives? (I often pondered this question and spent much of my adolescence wishing to fuck almost every housewife on Mayflower Court.) I doubted if any Mayflower Court dads hunted or fished, though all of them were rabid sports fans. Go Big Blue! Maybe some of them fished. Sometimes. Those white pussy dads were more likely to surf! And any one of them could have played for a hobbyist football league (a trade of their white collars for a muddy jersey.)

This “lowbrow white privilege” (and we are talking solely about socioeconomic privilege) separated them from the sort of people who smoke reds and watch NASCAR.

            Yet packs of redneck families (the sort of New Jerseyans who would go on to fly Trump flags from the back of their pickups – not that there’s anything wrong with that) rode rough-hewn quad trails through the virgin, primeval woods that abutted the circled immobile wagons, the cul-de-sacked island chain of middle-class to upper-middle-class homes, bubbles of safety and luxury in a chaotic world (somehow Mayflower Court would survive an atomic blast.) At least those yuppies (a small number of whom were actually pleasant toward my family and I) had one another, a neighborhood, a community of honkey devils; devils happy to partake in the devildom of calling the police on anyone or anything suspicious or bothersome.

            Like taco trucks.

            Not that our “neighborhood” (if, with the possible exception of Mayflower Court, you could even call our scattered collection of outposts a “neighborhood”) was a good market for taco trucks anyway.

            Not because we didn’t like Mexican food. Everyone loves Mexican food. Even the hot housewives ate Taco Bell (if one can call that dog slop Mexican food – imagine how good their bourgy asses must have tasted after that.)

            Rather, a taco truck would have failed in our neighborhood for a total lack of foot traffic. In 12 years, not a single pedestrian had ever walked parallel to our front yard. Not a neighbor walking his or her dog. Nor a stranded motorist, a sweaty, frustrated mess of a man, a muttering voice of vexation covered in tire grease and cursing inconvenient misfortune. Not a drunk, a no-good teen, or any other kind of trouble. Prowlers prowled in their Plymouths. A dogmatic version of God passed over the Boulevard (he would have wearied of our long, winding stretch of asphalt.)

            Our “hood,” except for Mayflower Court, lacked sidewalks. How I envied the “Boyz N’ the Hood,” the activity (legal or illegal) on their streets, the sense of community, the constant presence of friends and neighbors. And the hoods in California looked nice as hell, no less! At least from what I saw in the popular “gangsta” movies of the time! Some of the homes in South Central looked just as ritzy (or more so) as many of the rednecky homes in my cracker-ass neighborhood!

            Exhibit 1: A home in South Central:

            A beautiful Southwestern-style gem (I sound like a realtor now!) And they had neighbors and community and sidewalks. Privileged bastards!

            The shoulders of our street stretched a minimum width of 3 inches and a max of 12. If a rumbly gasoline truck barreled down on a youthful cyclist, the kid would be wise to make a sharp turn toward the feral grass even if the wild greenery was overgrown by barb-like brambles. Life is precious (even self-isolated white lives) and thorn-ripped OP tee-shirts (all anyone ever wore back then) could always be replaced.

            Who would buy a taco in such a desolate wilderness? The deer? The possums? A rabid skunk? Rabid skunks don’t like cilantro!

            In a lonely neighborhood, our house stood most forlorn of all. Not in its disrepair but in its outward tidiness. An acre of treated, sprinkler-watered, professionally-mowed grass stood between the 3-inch shoulder of Belmar Boulevard and our double dead-bolted front doors. Leafy trees (at least trees had sex) bracketed the much-weedier backyard (sometimes dad mowed the backyard with his riding mower and forced all of us to watch as a tribute to his Sunday martyrdom.) In fall, the leaves fell, and the surrounding forest was reduced to an army of the undead as gothic, skeletal, and lugubrious as the virginal aristocrat of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. But even then, a Christmas or late winter neatness belied the Gothicism of the family life – my family life – that daily took place behind the dead-bolted doors. Money without wisdom wreaks ruin on families. Ask Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, or William Faulkner!

            Our house did not look like a crumbling Victorian mansion inhabited by the scions of past glory or an antebellum masters’ quarters obscured by moss and sun-tinted miasmic haze.

            It looked like a tan-stained Frank Lloyd Wright (had Frank Lloyd Wright studied basic trigonometry and made himself accessible to the masses.) A minted architectural coin commemoration of dad’s success (a numismatic house if ever there was one.)

            To misquote Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from “Full Metal Jacket,” it was "a postmodern art masterpiece" (but not ugly by any means; aesthetically acceptable all the way; much more tasteful, in fact, than today’s proliferated McMansions.)

            Like a volcanic islet on the remotest coordinate of the South Pacific, our house was cut off from the closest archipelago. Our shiny penny of a house was a cold-subtropical gem surrounded by an acre of front lawn, three acres of flat backyard, and two acres of dense woods.

            Our only company on Summer mornings and afternoons (“summertime and the livin’ is lonely”) were the single-engine prop planes that took off from nearby Allaire Airport. The ad planes tugged banners that read “Come to the Headliner - $2 Miller Lites ALL NIGHT!!!” Or “Bar Anticipation Drink Specials: $3 Coronas!!!”

The planes churned toward Alisa’s West Belmar bungalow (in that much more crowded part of town) and onward a block or two to Belmar Beach, the Staten Island Riviera. At least the planes connected me (by the extension of my lurid imagination) to fun and alcoholized hooking-up with hot, dumb Italian girls.

Alisa lived right behind Bar Anticipation. “Bar A” to locals and Bennies (“Bennies” being the locally-hated tourists from North Jersey and New York.) Sometimes confused amateur drunkards mistook her family’s little hut for one of their summer rentals and fell fast asleep on her crumbling front steps.

Drunk strangers (usually Bennies) on Alisa’s front porch! She was so unisolated (enjoy my neologism!) Lucky motherfucker! Unisolated!

Had a confused drunk passed out on our front porch (with whom would he have been drinking, the deer and raccoons?), my mother would have pressed the panic button on the burglar alarm and the police would have arrived, no questions asked. And my mother, tolerant and forgiving woman that she was, would have added a “trespass” charge to supplement the public intoxication misdemeanor.

Mother, cruel and cowardly, would have also blared the siren feature upon the arrival of a police vehicle. Just to scare the booze-saturated sot into the waiting arms of a burly policeman.

She loved the siren feature, which emitted an ear-piercing whine, a banshee wail that outperformed the megaphones of the local firehouse by several decibels. She directed this sonic blast at any and all unwelcome visitors, including Jehovah’s Witnesses (though a lot of people wouldn’t blame her for aurally assaulting that particular group!)

My mother’s attitude toward outsiders was very simple and libertarian: “We have ours, so stay the frig off our property!”

And we had ours compared to Alisa and her family.

The square footage of Alisa’s perfectly square house was roughly equal to that of our inground swimming pool (though our pool might have been bigger – I’ve never been good at practical geometry.)

Alisa’s home looked like a one-story toadstool pagoda, the sort of place Mr. Miyagi would have lived had he cared less about material things like Bonzai trees and meditation cushions. A layer of St. Patty’s Day green moss and lichens coated the roof tile like an extra layer of insulation (did the spores help to keep them warm through a cold, damp, sometimes snowy East Coast winter?)

Black and green mold streaked the white siding of her house like skid marks on the white briefs of a spinach-eating vegan.

Our pool stretched twice the length and width of Alisa’s dustbowl backyard, a fenced rectangle dotted by a Fred Flintstone kidsmobile, a Radio Flyer wagon, and various Barbie Dolls and G.I. Joe toys. The casualties lay recumbent on their wounded sides after a battle of the sexes, a miniature Armageddon that raged between the intermittent tufts of brown grass. Pieces of papery trash provided cheap cover for the outgunned Barbies.

The shameless messiness of her house and yard horrified all good Americans of Aryan descent. Shock at the sight of such a “prideless” backyard must have prompted verbal expressions of the cutting and now racist and macro-aggressive phrase “Don’t these people have any pride in their homes or their community?” Her filthy (and I love filthiness – I’m not being racist here) backyard resembled the set of an East L.A. gang movie, perhaps the site of a Tecate-fueled pow wow between Edward James Olmos’ character and a junior shotcaller. (Though according to my pop culture research, many of the homes and yards in East L.A. appeared to outdo Alisa’s in size, luxury, and general upkeep.)

And so, the white people (not me) must have asked and asked again and again if it would have been too much cost or effort for Mr. and Mrs. Alvarez to apply a fresh coat of paint to the chipped, weather-beaten, mold-covered exterior. How much time or expense would it have taken to plant a few layers of backyard sod? No wonder the lawnmower rusted away in the shower stall (though without the deleterious effects of the water used for daily showers, the mower might have sat there unscathed by the effects of oxidation.)

Not that I ever cared about such “white people shit.” I cared nothing for keeping up with the Joneses, the McCormicks, or even the Espositos. I might have been better off with a ghetto life, a loafing on the front porch, the sweet taste of a Country Club 40 and the salty sting of a Kennedy-fried chicken wing (my burbly gut later soothed by the mentholated coolness of a Newport.) I’ve never cared about scrubbing windows or painting doorbells. I’d rather be a philosophy-reading bum, a good-for-nothing street philosopher. Love and sex meant more to me than anything at all, including and especially “white people shit.”

But my parents certainly cared about “white people shit.”

Our summer lifestyle might have resembled a David Hockney painting:

Less stark, but also lonelier. No palm trees. And no preppy James Spader-esque drug dealers stopping by for lunch and premium blow at friend prices (though James Spader characters never really had friends, just those they hurt and exploited for fun and profit.) But at least someone would be stopping by. Our pool might as well have been on Saturn’s watery moon Enceladus (except more hypothetical life thrived on Enceladus, even if it was microbial.)

Was even a sociopathic James Spader character better than no visitors at all?

Not that we were a bunch of jaded-asses or Bret Easton Ellis characters. Jaded-asses or Brett Easton Ellis characters had more friends despite their repugnant personalities.

We were not sophisticated or cosmopolitan in the way of Ellis’ privileged characters. My mother’s favorite book was not “American Psycho,” but Anne Rule’s true-crime account of working in the same office as Ted Bundy (perhaps she related to Ted’s psychopathy.) Mother’s favorite movie was not “Bright Lights, Big City,” but “Back to the Future.” No critically-acceptable zeitgeist art decorated our walls.

We were not urbane, but suburban. Even Mommy Psycho had a folksy optimism and “salt of the earth” hopefulness to her character, a product of and from our local culture. Beverly Hills was 3,000 miles away and about as alien to us as the dark matter twin of Saturn’s moon Iapetus. Few people from our town had ever visited Los Angeles County, especially the Brett Easton Ellis sections thereof. We had a philistine innocence compared to them (and like philistines, the deep fear in our guts – the fear of the post-narrative vacuum - was buried deeper and was therefore just as dangerous, if not more so.)

We’ll see – as we go through this narrative – how effective privilege was at warding off cosmic terror or what Heidegger might have called “guilt.”

By the way, I did some online research for this chapter. Our house was worth $600,000 more than Alisa’s house.

But the deconstruction of “privilege” has just begun!

(Cue evil laugh!)