A West Side Story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Elevated_Highway

My family left the city in the late 70s because it fell apart, as captured through many fictionalized movies like "The Warriors" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warriors_%28film%29), "Fort Apache, The Bronx" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Apache,_The_Bronx), and "Escape from New York" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York). While they may seem like gross exaggerations to you, for the millions of displaced New Yorkers forced to leave old established neighborhoods that'd been in the family for several generations, it's hard to describe that feeling of watching your home burn to the ground. It was utterly heartbreaking in its devastation.

I met up with a few other Irish-American "white-flighters" (white people were widely criticized for fleeing bombed-out buildings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight) from the old neighborhoods at the local lavandería here in this Nua Brigadoon we've made our own 'hood, after another tragic ousting in yet another town we helped to build, patrol, and heal. Their impressions were exactly the same as mine and my family. One guy had a brother who was an engineer at Co-Op City, as part of our last stand towards crime and crack in those rapidly de-zoned blocks that created instant ghettos almost overnight, in some of the most corruptly bad urban planning we'd ever seen in a city famous for its intellectual capital. What the fuck happened?

And so we talked about committee meetings held in basements that fought obviously poor building codes with my "new" old friend from around the way, who had to type up a report as former FDNY about an escaped gorilla from the zoo that was killed and burnt to death in a city street, while an entire neighborhood slammed their windows and doors shut in response to such a weird tragedy. We were losing badly, block by city block. It was hard for us to pull up stakes in such a high stakes place that we actually helped to construct, but there were no other choices available for families living paycheck-to-paycheck. It was like nothing we'd ever seen before, a horror we could sense coming with such a power, that it actually left a bad taste in your mouth.

As me, my bud "Brennan", and Paul talked it over, the short Mestizos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestizo) clustered in small groups around us kept a comfortable distance with wide eyes that silently folded laundry, as we talked about roving packs of wild dogs that haunted certain city streets, burning garbage cans roaring out of control on almost every corner, and entire cars lit on fire that stayed that way until they burned out all the way, that we saw with our own wide eyes through the muddy, streaked windows of cars that didn't seem to go fast enough after the light finally turned green. "What, did they change the time on all the lights so we could be 'sitting ducks' here?!", we'd say to each other in fear of the regular carjackings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carjacking) that happened all the time, in yet another part of a rigged game leading to our once-beautiful city's downfall, and no one seemed to give a fuck about it but us.

Certainly not the zoned-out crack zombies, part of the huge packs of drug-addicted hookers who walked up-and-down the West Side Highway every night of the week. We watched our infamous meat-packing district become a den of such evil, that the local S&M club seemed like a funny joke compared to the strange group sex that happened in oddly-named Greek club, yet another stab directly at the heart of the ancient Mediterraneans who had crossed many seas to make a happy life here. It was cruel, a hard slap in the face that we will never forget.

We moved up here in packs of our own, as average but well-educated working class families of every kind that inhabited Gotham back in the day: African-Americans working union jobs they got after their mass migration from the newly desegregated South, Puerto Ricans escaping a poverty so extreme that it sometimes still hurts to look at old pictures of their former tropical beach paradise (like the Haitian boat people and Cubanos who would float to Florida on the backs of flimsy, quickly-built rafts to run from oppression and mass murder like we had), and the Irish who met with famine greatly assisted by many a wealthy Brit with no interest in helping them out at all, in order to preserve the bottom rung of the European ladder just for them. Ditto with my poor Greco-Roman farm folk, without mentioning the mixed horrors neatly hidden behind the distinctive looks of an "Original" Acadian Métis. Who.....? How do you spell....? Huh? What?!

You know, those wily muthafuckas who bought this here island called "Manhattan" ([PDF]The Origin and Meaning of the Name “Manhattan”) from a bunch of Indians for some wampum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), so that we could all cash out on those rapidly-boating Brits and Dutch looking to farm near a convenient seaport town near you....but, no! Wait!! What does that word you just said mean? Which one?! And, how to catch you up on all of our history with your kind of brain, dude? You just don't fucking get it, feel me, turista? That's what it feels like: a stranger in our own strange land to you, and you definitely do not belong here.

So, when my friend Donnel's second-cousin from Harlem, Lawrence, told me his own particular horror story about the west side gone way wrong during the last century, I could totally relate to it. We'd all been through a version of it as immigrants or indigenous people, or both, as the case may be. He told his story to me one night after a few drinks and a couple of tokes, in this native tale of woe. He'd been walking down West Street looking in the cheap juke joints (he's a musician), feeling broke and alone, pushed out of another family home gone "KABOOM!" as tightly-packed tenement apartments with four generations of kids tend to do, when you cram in enough teenage mothers and their illegitimate children living on the minimum wage of one powerful grandmother working as a nursing assistant at the local, run-down, welfare hospital because if she falls down hard, the whole family goes down with her.

Yeah, man. I get it. But, he was also working through a lot of shit that comes with being an angry young black man in the city, and as much as he didn't know about me and my history, I felt that static, too, but I also knew it was his road to walk down and not mine. I wanted him to know that I wouldn't take anything more away from him, as a New York kid who was getting just about everything ripped away from him at the same time. He saw "black and white" in everyone and everything, because that's the steady ghetto diet he was being fed at the time. I got it. Well....what happened, man?

Lawrence was used to presenting a tall strong front on the streets, and this was something he had to work up to. Take it slow, kid. He was nervous. Deep breath....okay. Pass me that joint. Inhale....now, go. He was walking down the street when a friend passed by in a car (a car! WOW! Rare treat for "hood rats" to have moving vehicles that worked right in their possession), and he hopped in. They cruised down West Street with the windows open on a hot summer night, looking to catch a breeze, score some weed, or make some kind of deal....something. You know that feeling on certain warm nights when you're young, right? That was it...waiting, and also moving along with it, which they did.

Suddenly, he saw a young woman walking by struttin' her stuff like working girls do. She was obviously a hooker, but there was something else about her, he craned his neck to look....yo! Turn around, bro! He got out of the car and walked down the block, turning the corner she just passed by. He followed her for a minute or two before she turned around to meet her attacker/pursuer or potential "John", with an expectant look that quickly changed to astonishment. "Larry....! Is that you?!" Unfortunately for him and her both, she was right. He was her former classmate from high school, and they both knew it in that one instantly-recognizing moment. That hooker you passed by in Times Square (now dressed-up in a furry cartoon costume handing out stripper bar fliers on the sly), yeah, that one, man.

She went to school with one of us, yo. Hope you score cheap tickets from the midtown kiosk for the musical, though. And don't answer knocks on your pricey hotel door in the middle of the night, either, bro. Because that hooker there? Yeah, she's a "lady of the night", too. She's also someone's daughter, former classmate, sister, or cousin from the 'hood. I know you only give a fuck about your stupid fucking tourist trip, though, so enjoy the show. I hope it was worth the trip, while you pretend to see and understand nothing about our pain. Asshole. One more time! <jazz hands> Entertaining, isn't it?

Walk On The Wild Side

Lou Reed

Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side,
Said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side.

Candy came from out on the island,
In the backroom she was everybody's darling,
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She sayes, hey baby, take a walk on the wild side
Said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
And the colored girls go,

Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo

Little Joe… Full lyrics on Google Play

The Doll's Wig

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisque_doll

One of my parent's favorite party tricks is retelling their supposedly impoverished childhoods that never really bore up to reality, and how could it? All of my grandparent's provided for their children excellently (and their children's children) for well beyond their years, every one of them going on to college, with the exception of my dad's sister Marilyn, who became an unwed mother and proud Go-Go dancer. Not exactly stellar, but what did they expect? American assimilation was rough for our poorly educated great-grandparents who were "fresh off the boat", back in the days when it was a truly rough ride indeed. My grandparents coped with an economic depression so profound it's infamous worldwide, with parents who may or may not choose to work again, because they couldn't read, write, or speak English.

It made the mundane and middle-class financial deprivations of my parents seem ridiculous in comparison to them and us, which they are. My parents came off the big economic boom that war always seems to bring to winning societies, without them ever really confronting hunger, starvation, or death, except when they did stupidly reckless things with their lives, which they sometimes still do. They were (are) like children to us, and that's how I treat(ed) their woes: like the children of privilege that I know them to really be, because without my grandparents and me, they'd be dead, something they can admit to when they are feeling satisfied, generous, and well-fed, which is all the time.

And so it came as no surprise to me and my brothers when my parents always lined their pockets plushly to over-filling first, questing to fill needs that are much more psychologically-based than true-to-life, severe as their disabilities can be at times. They pout, throw tantrums, threaten, intimidate, harass; they do everything short of murder, and on some days, I could see them in both of those roles, too. My dad used to tell me brief stories about his "Greaser" adolescence in Brooklyn that ended when his best friend was electrocuted for murder, forcing my grandmother to ship him off to the Navy, like she'd sent her husband to war many years ago.

Next to my father's unmarried mother "living-in-sin" and a missing alcoholic for a dad, my mom must have felt performance pressure keenly. And so she mined her roots for scenes that she could use during their resource-based arguments, like two children fighting over a bag of candy. The unfortunate effect for us caught in the middle was always the same result, though: there was way less available for us, and that's exactly what happened as a result of my mom's poverty stories. She told us that they were so poor, that one year the only thing she got for Christmas was a doll's wig for her old doll, and that was it. She used it to justify her tight pocket for each and every year that we presented our Christmas wish lists.

Of course, she neglected to tell me that it was probably one of the finest wig's money could buy, from a store that my grandmother must have pinched pennies to please her bourgeois daughter with the unreasonably pretentious airs, but that was the price my grandparents paid for a fancy parochial school education. They figured it was worth the price if even one of their disordered kids could get a job after college, and it panned out, like all of my grandparents really good plans do, and just like mine do. After all, I learned from the best. 
Life for us is a world of plenty.

Welfare Burger

True punk-rock spirit, as evidenced back in the day. Keep on it, man.

It's hard for our brothers and sisters around the world to tap into our common consciousness, beset as they are in this world by the woes cast upon them through continued war, famine, and injustice. That's why it's so important for us to speak up whenever we encounter wrong, difficult as they may be to do at times, because we often traverse the worst adversities when we are at our loneliest low points in life, but just like that old Christian poem "Footsteps"*, it just seems that way from the outside looking in. It is then when you are carried by The Lord Our G-d, as His Most Faithfully Beleaguered in Faith. As so often happens in my life, outsiders see one reality when in truth, it's the exact opposite of what they presume it to be, and that very deception is what leads them down the wrong path.

I meat a bleary-eyed Ecuadorean the other day on the street while he was waiting for the bus. I'd noticed him from the other side of the street before, because he stared at me like I was levitating across the sidewalk in front of his apartment building, instead of me hatted up and running an errand, sans makeup. In fact, when we crossed paths, I explained to him that I spend zero dollars ($0) on my appearance. But, but...he sputtered, swaying a little on his heels, I'm so pretty! Now that you've gotten to know me better, that sounds funny, right? Like, asking Jesus when he got his last pedicure while he walks around poorly shod in a pair of old worn sandals, but I was charmed by my new friend.

After all, that's what he was raised to believe in. Pretty girl = easy street, just add (+) one man. Done deal! Of course, that's an absurd way to think, because I'm not a prostitute for hire based solely on my looks (not that I mind beauty as a visual artist because it's part of my world) but in many American cultures, beauty is mythologized to such an extent (especially if you're a drunk, divorced, red-eyed Central American grandpa waiting on a cold Northern sidewalk for a public bus that's on slow rollin' country time), that talking to someone like me seems like, how can this be true ?! Oh, it be, brother man. I assure you of that, esse.

You see, when you're out there in the real world, you don't just get a small slice of pie from the same place over and over again (my G-d, the horror of that!), you eat "the whole enchilada" as they say, and that's exactly how me and my crew play this game called life: like it's winning just to be here, because we come across a lot of "walking dead" out there; bombed-out, brain-dead folks just wandering listlessly throughout their days, so unconscious and unplugged from the world as it exists, waiting to die. A nightmare...and so, when we see something we don't like, we say something, because speaking up is an action that leads to other actions, even if at first it's just misguided thoughts (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/06/say-something.html). It's all part of your training.

Most of my peers have already reached the type of early success that puts us in direct proximity to junior staff who need constant mentoring and teaching because we're tradespeople, and giving back to underlings is crafted into our lifestyles. I teach every day that I'm alive, even if it doesn't fit into your misconceptions about relegating learning to some far away classroom staffed by someone else, even though that someone else is probably someone I went to school with, here in New York, and I can also out-teach any day of the week. My creative hierarchies necessitated me into learning many many abilities so well just to stay competitive and on the job, that I can teach you in another language (in your native language, since you can't speak mine), using whatever tools you have handy.

After you do that for many years like we have, you develop a sophisticated routine centered around schooling. And so, when my Coloradan ex-boyfriend decided to take his act on the road by lecturing the Asian liquor store owner down the block from us in our Denver neighborhood, I couldn't have clapped harder for him in appreciation if I tried. It was one of my most favorite characteristics about him: that he used his power and prestige as a high-earning white man in our society to tell people what they avoided hearing through deliberately planned abusive neglect, by feigning continued ignorance about well-known facets of our American lives. On one such afternoon, I guess Kent had enough of the hypocritical bullshit, because he told me that he finally told the Korean owner what was up, and I was enraptured.

Kent liked to buy some booze to put into his little biker backpack that they make just for riders to squeeze liquid into their mouths during a ride (yeah, not the best use of it, but you don't know his full story and it is massively bad), so he could meander around town on the many bike paths that line the area in an inter-connected web that's the envy of older cities, though the common practice of compulsive over-exercise to cover up a serious mental disorder as it is used out west is a whole other article entirely. Suffice to say that he was familiar with the lay of the land, as he'd lived in town for many years, spending his days driving through he streets that he didn't bike, as a Master Electrician with his own junior apprentice to school in the trade.

I guess he figured he'd had enough of the shit show we'd seen play out unfairly in society over the years, because he and I talked about the judicious use of "mixed residential" zoning laws that are the mark of enlightened urban planning in newer cities like Denver, escaping the common traps most older cities succumb to, like the bust-and-boom, up-and-down patterns that characterize the instant ghettos and gentrified private parks with silver key access that define New York City life. We'd seen our native cities go down fast that way, like he had with the council flats in England, and I did with the projects in the city. Urban planning had created instant ghettos that insured encircled and entrapped cycles of poverty that no one could escape from, let alone a terrorized impoverished people who'd descended from the cruel mistreatment of corrupt plantation owners from centuries past.

We had enough, and it was reflected through his band's song titles about injustices that I felt keenly in my life, too. Kent told me back at our place that as he was walking back to the cooler for a cold drink, he couldn't help but razz the wealthy owner into embarrassment. We'd seen him cruise up to his immigrant business in the 'hood with a brand new Benz curbside, strategically placed as it was right across the street from public housing that was clearly demarcated as such with bolted-on plaques across the front row of old brick townhomes, across the street from his ghetto liquor store. Who the fuck did he think he was? What right did he have to come here and pick off the "po' black folk" with instant access to the very poison that killed them and their brains, by walling himself behind a plastic partition like some pussy?

Kent and I had seen him roll up in his fancy car in our urban neighborhood with his clean little prep school boy, all nice and pressed in his fancy private school clothes, but what right did he have to set up shop across the street from the poorest folks in town? Huh? Kent said he just stood there towering over this little guy and his small prep school kid. They played the whole smiling " haha...no speaky engrish" game with him that they'd been taught by the very people they bought the place from, with one very important caveat left unwritten but certainly lived out loud for the whole block to see: American assimilation is possible in one quick generation, you just have to sell out the more beset "minority" beneath you on the totem pole, even though there's no fucking way any Chinese-American can be a fucking minority, when China and the Americas are this fucking big. 

Nice try, though. "Kunta-Kente"**, you're my straight-up superhero, man! Don't ever change, bro, no matter how hard they grind you down. You're beautiful to me, baby. "Papa" this! We did, you know that, right? We really did show that small town what living is all about, be it with this century's immigrants or the very next ones. Still have your passport with your little boy Visa photo? That shit's adorable, kid, even if you did have a rough go of coming and going whilst traveling back and forth from "The Motherland", because someone (ahem, you know who) fluffed your fucking birth date on your kiddie passport, to give you a ride every time you exited and entered the country of your own free will. Who would do that to their kid going into a new country, you know? We do! Don't change a thing, baby. You're perfect just the way G-d made you to be. Amen to you, brother. This one's for you and yours today, baby. We're all red on the inside: http://taylorseafood.co.uk/ and http://www.taylorfoods.co.uk/

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=welfare+burger

* http://www.onlythebible.com/Poems/Footprints-in-the-Sand-Poem.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunta_Kinte

The Third Eye (Blind)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_eye

Ever since my childhood bout with chickenpox (one that I don't remember), I've had a fairly visible scar on my forehead. My mom was worried about that, because I'm the only girl in my family, and she didn't want any physical evidence of sickness conflicting with my looks, which is the first real currency women are given in society. 

My market value as a marriageable mate is still very important (to her and to me), so she did what she could to keep a little toddler from scratching, including putting on those little mitts sometimes worn by newborns who scratch at night. Despite her vigilance, a few areas escaped her notice with my unconscious scratching: an area on my thigh, a little spot on the side of my face, and a big one almost dead center. Woe is me!

With time and the thickening of my skin, it's become almost invisible in most lights, excepting those occasions when it isn't. In my quest to normalize a semi-arid city out west, my then-boyfriend and I drove to a suburb of Denver that housed the one Asian section of that sprawling, modern (and almost characterless) city. He was still nursing serious internal hurts borne by an abusive mother and violent stepdad; abuses that included sexual molestation, as well as the usual beat-downs from a stressed-out, working class Brit trying to manage his émigré status, a new marriage with kids, and another country.

I was still licking my wounds from an aborted marriage, illegal as it was, due to my college friend's legal Unfit for Marriage status, so both of us were hurting from complaints not of our doing, but deeply effected by other people's collective traumas nonetheless. Because my ex didn't eat during his manic binge phases, I had greatly changed my lifestyle to accommodate his diseases, which left me in a serious deficit all around. I went a little wild with food on my own, eating and eating and never really feeling full. It was out of control, very uncommon for me, and really scary. I could see myself ballooning up daily.

I remember my mom visiting me in Littleton (right after the high school massacres that happened there), as I sat down to eat a 2nd heaping plate full of pancakes and sausage at the cheap kitchen table my dad and his wife bought quickly for the apartment I had to relocate to. My mom asked me what was going on, with the understanding that she already knew, because she did. I have always been a size 6 as an adult "Miss", but under the stress of earning a living and righting societal wrongs, I gave in to my new boyfriend's huge Scottish appetite. We ate at any restaurant we wanted to, revelling in our escapes from the incompetent horrors of other people's homes.

With this in mind, we sought out Colorado's version of "Chinatown" to look at exotic eastern goods and, of course, eat. He went into one shop to look around, while I stood on the pavilion sidewalk outside, smoking a cigarette, another teenage escape valve I still had in place. As I strolled around the storefronts, a gentleman dressed in the tourist garb of a "guru" stopped his robotic pamphlet distribution for "Ancient Eastern Readings" to open his mouth at me. I wasn't used to agape stares at the time, because weight gain and untanned skin is considered "ugly" out west, but this was more. He looked...scared.

After a quick recovery (like most immigrants learn), he began speaking to me in a language I didn't know, pointing at the middle of his forehead over and over again. My boyfriend was out of the shop he was in, and I was walking quickly away. "What did he want?", he asked me smiling, in the non-threatened, jocular way men who are 6' and 250lbs have with shorter, smaller, and darker men. "Oh," I laughed. I was constantly tired and hungry all the time, clear depressed signs both, and I knew it. Smoking had become a dull chore that made me feel sick, too. I hated my life; a life in a foreign land that felt stiff, colorless, dull, and flat, like an out-of-body experience, and I was acting out a role in someone else's boring movie.

"It's my chickenpox scar." Where? He didn't notice things like that about me, busy as he was staying alive and staying afloat, despite the dragging down qualities of his life, too. "See? It's right here. In the middle of my forehead." And just like that, he promptly forgot about it, because that's how little spiritual significance I had to a big blond, tan, western guy with a very large and showily dramatic depiction of "The Rapture" tattooed prominently on his forearm for all the world to see, because that's exactly how limiting the scope of America can feel to someone who is perpetually outside of the cultural norms.

He lasted ten days in the cushy second story of an extremely wealthy and well-appointed Park Slope townhouse that I secured for us, upon my return home. Ten days, before he bugged out to drive back home, to a dull place where generic red trucks for good ole boys are respected as having more value than the people who sleep next to you for years. Ten days. That's all I got to right his world for him, as my world turned upside down, once again. Ten friggin' days.

Little Cemetary

Meet "The Blauvelts"!

We live among the walking and the dead here in the Hudson Valley region, because the first Dutch settlers who bought the island of Manhattan for some wampum many moons ago to create the city of "New Amsterdam", also took the first opportunity they had to buy vast tracts of land upstate. In fact, Native Americans used the wetlands here on Pearl River's hilltop for a well, not just farming. Why would anyone want land that swamps out every year? Because it was easier to irrigate their European crops through flooding, that's why.

And that's exactly what many European settlers did: replicate their vast landowning system overseas to control property through agriculture and land resources. It's what's passed for Rockland County nobility over the years: that same sense of ownership and entitlement from controlling the land that marked the oppressive regimes of the corrupt European monarchies many of our ancestors rebelled against. How revolutionary of them to do so! Sigh....that's the rich white man.

And John P. Post! The British have not yet arrived.

And so it was that on one Monday morning in yoga, a nice German grandma had to let me know in conversation that one of her children is married to one of "The Blauvelt's", because as a first generation American, she's on much less solid ground than I am as a native, and she wanted me to know about her very important family connections. 

I name-dropped some rich German publishing credentials and European towns from my working past that she hadn't known first-hand as a German native, because she followed her sister over here as a teen to our now re-named "New of York", in honor of our country's next wave of wealthy landowners: the Brits.

Here lies a Mary Van W...something Dutch, and a Perry: Dutch and British!

Except for one very big and powerful distinction: I'm the publisher she follows, and I'm in yoga class with her instead of humping the grind that is the tri-state commute, a trial deemed by weaker souls than me to be so bad-ass, many outsiders write t.v. shows and movies about it. 

Enjoy your time here on our land of freedom; a land we fought for dearly and created, as it ever evolves and changes with the times, because that's what I call "The Royal Treatment".

Aha! A "Bogert" name-changer: much easier to trade with the Brits.

Here it sits on the sub-divivded remnants of their large land parcels.

Time, erosion, and neglect have removed many of their names anyway.

Goodbye, Ye Olde Blauvelts! Maybe someday one of their own will take care of this burial site, but not today. I'm sure they're hard at work at one of their very important desk jobs in the city.

Immigrant

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/

Each new generation thinks they have the roughest immigrant story ever. Mass murder? Pshaw! That's nothing! My Chinese Mom caught AIDS and died from your hospitals' bad blood transfusions! That's an actual true story by the way: a Asian bookkeeper I worked with years ago didn't want to believe that my family had any difficulties at all, because I'm "white". She kept repeating how I had a "rent controlled" apartment as an example of my so-called "white privilege", which wasn't actually true at all. I found the listing on Craigslist out of sheer economic need, and it was rent-stabilized when I lived there, which is entirely different than inheriting some fixed rate kind of deal. 

My people don't get those kinds of breaks handed to them, ever. But, true to her ignorance, she shut down when I tried to talk her through a tiny (and easily accessible) fraction of my actual family roots. I gave her a brief bit about my maternal New York story; a simple-to-follow story about Italian and Irish immigrants that's easily looked up online or at Ellis Island's interactive computer. Just type in "M-E-R-C-A-D-A-N-T-E" liked I did in five seconds, for my great-grandmother's passage to America. She sputtered and stumbled over that, but's typical for a generic office environment filled with strangers. I may be Ivy, but she sure as fuck isn't, except she doesn't know how many levels my people passed on the way up to get there, because she thinks she's had it tough, and she has. We all have. That's how you become an American. 

If she couldn't handle poor Italian farmers and the Irish potato famine, she sure as fuck can't handle the Acadian genocide, or the innate racism behind the hunting and mass destruction of Metis folk, which is anyone of European and Native American ancestry (GASP! "Mixed" races getting along peacefully!!), which pretty much covers my father's early American Dutch, English, and French Canadian ancestry. I felt bad for her, but not so bad that I didn't remember that my grandmother told me she cried every day for years walking home from school, because people shouted "Guinea!" in her face as a little girl, or that people spit at my grandfather for being a lowly "Mick", as every door in the city slammed itself shut in their faces, when they had to quit school as children of "The Depression" to work in factories to support their entire family.

http://cahiersdufootball.net/blogs/teenage-kicks/tag/no-irish-no-blacks-no-dogs/

It was so bad for my grandmother, that she changed her name from "Angelina" to "Ann", pretended to forget all of her native Bari tongue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_dialect), and removed her kiddie earrings that marked her a "dago"; my mother never got over the stigma behind baby Italian girls with earrings. And so, she has never pierced her ears. I had to go with my friend's British step-mom to the mall at 15, and get it done myself. Or the fact that my great-grandfather never found work again, after refrigeration closed down his job as an Iceman in the city (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade), forcing my brilliant grandmother to quit elementary school, which she also cried over for many years, because all she ever wanted was to be a teacher or nurse. That's how much she loved to learn. She also helped him to collect his route's fares by riding up and the dumbwaiters for their fares, as a little girl. But it worked out. She became the MANAGER at her factory job by 20, or something extraordinary like that. I know, because I've seen the old black and white photo of her all dressed up and standing over one of her employees, who sat in a chair beneath her for their work portrait. I'm not even getting to my grandfather's long ConEd experience, or his tours on Vaudeville to earn a buck or for his Brooklyn family, or my Dad's small-time hustles as a shoe shine boy and pool hall player.

I hope you fucking choke on one more true life story from me this weekend, Cindy, as you read these real words about my researched and verified American Immigrant background. It's not some fucking  joke I made up to make you feel bad about yourself, you fucking idiot. You worked against me every single day in that bullshit office, while I worked my ass off overtime (and without pay) to cover all of your fucking asses, because I was the only Designer/Production Artist/Art Director in that fucking company with any real skills to earn us money, so that your fucking family, and your teenage kid's illegitimate kid, could fucking eat, because you're a fucking tourist to me, shithead. Choke on it, and if you don't like our hard times here, or our real life coming-up tales of woe, go the fuck back to Communist China. I'm sure they'll work you hard to kill you off in some forced labor camp, because you're one in a billion to them, and as such, easily expendable. Go fucking choke on it, bitch. That's my fucking Lady Liberty in the harbor.

And a "Happy Mother's Day" to you, as well. Bitch.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2011/06/the-distance-to-the-past.html

for Ann

https://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/passenger

Small Town America: Halloweentown

A total home reno. Oh, the horror. Hi, Pete!

I live in an Irish town, and let me clarify once again: not "Irish-American", but an actual hamlet that's predominantly 1st generation "off the boat", as they used to say, though now it's straight off the flight at JFK to Pearl River to the massive supermarket, with an Irish Foods section that's mostly tea, canned beans, and biscuits. I know, because I've seen the jet lagged Paddy wandering the massive store aisles with the same look of shell shock that I have when confronted with American excess. I also get it when I travel, though it's going across the pond in the other direction, with more crystal and wool sweater shopping involved. We have a shop for that here in town, too.

Wonder Woman!

There's been a recent interest in the spooky and supernatural in pop culture, what with teenage vampires and Sleepy Hollows that go bump in the night. Truthfully, the Hudson Valley has always been perfect for Halloween, because this is where the very traditions we celebrate as Americans began. Happy Samhain, Celts.

Yeah! I'm Batman, and you're SuperGirl!

Welcome to Halloweentown:

http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/halloweentown/.