The Jelly Donut of Nothingness

Anyone over 30 knows that the human mind and soul carry around all the cravings you often don't even realize you still have (as any former smoker can tell you); those silent and unnourished (usually) embers remain with you always.

This happens in an especially big way when you leave your culture, with all its attendant ingrained traditional cravings, and go live for any major length of time in another culture, particularly one as radically different as Japan is.

There in that new culture, amidst a full spectrum of unrecognized indigenous cravings, you carry around your old cravings unawares, that eat away at your virtual vitals for decades, like termites at the finest woods, until one day as in my case some majestic tree topples in the jungle of your passions and lets in some light-- I know the metaphor has gone wild but that's the nature of craving-- and you realize for example, with startling intensity, that you haven't had a genuine jelly donut in 50 years...

By genuine jelly donut I don't mean the standard six-pack, machine-gunned jelly donuts you can probably still get in convenience stores in the US (in Japan, forget even that); I am referring, with head duly bowed, to the truly epiphanic jelly donut that Baker Bill used to fashion by hand in his ramshackle bakery in between his tipsy visits to the World's Fair bar and pizzeria across the street, and don't get me started on World's Fair pizzas, the way Eddie the pizza guy used to make them, back when I was a teenager... You see?

You see? Old cravings, popping up one by one wherever in the world I go, with the World's Fair pizzeria long gone and Baker Bill even longer gone, so even if I went back to my home town my cravings would be of no avail.

Fact is, cravings don't do much good, especially when satisfied, which is an excellent reason to leave them behind; but even so, I'd sure like to walk into Baker Bill's kitchen just one more time and fill up on jelly donuts, then wander across the street to the World's Fair, 25 cents for a slice a foot wide...

Fin de Cycle, Part Deux

Bob, you and I were coming out of a Saturday matinee at the Delaware Theater back in '52 (no doubt after seeing a film in which the good guys got the bad guys) when we discovered that my bike was no longer waiting faithfully in the alley beside the theater, as it always had in the past. I was, to put it mildly, devastated. In fact, it was a turning point in my young life, a moment in which recent events that had made no sense suddenly crystallized into a deep sense of loss. It was my High Noon; a moment of reckoning. I knew that I would never see my bike again, that life would never be the same. My bike had come to symbolize everything I wanted to hold onto, and couldn't.

I wasn't alone in my longing. The bicycle as an object of devotion can be traced back through the latter part of the twentieth century, in fact, in books such as Henry Miller's My Bike and Other Friends, or William Saroyan's The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, a work in which the author claims that he rode his bicycle so hard that he frequently broke chains, loosened spokes and twisted handlebars. Films such as The Bicycle Thief by director Vittorio De Sica, or Pee Wee's Big Adventure by Tim Burton, also explore this sometimes irrational attachment to bicycles. In De Sica's film, the bike is the pivotal element in a struggle for survival, even redemption, by someone living in the crushing poverty of post-WWII Italy. For Pee Wee, on the other hand, comfortably settled in a suburban paradise, the loss of his bike seems no less than the heartbreak of separation from his closest friend. He, in fact, desires his bike above all human relationships.

I have no recollection of what I did after losing my bike that day. I am sure we looked for it for a while, but my heart had already given up; the weight of recent events had made it impossible for me to go off on a heroic quest to recover it, as did the films' protagonists. My story would not have a happy ending, and I would have no father to bond with in the midst of tragedy; our family was in a downward spiral, and there would be no more bicycles.

Suffice it to say that that is where the adventures ended for me. I was cut loose, I had to walk home, and in fact, had to walk everywhere from that day on. A few months earlier, Dad had packed up his yellow and black '49 Mercury, sat behind the wheel for a few minutes crying, handed me a dollar bill and told me to be a good boy and mind my mother, then drove off into the sunset, not to be seen around those parts for many, many years. I suppose the blow didn't really hit me until my bike disappeared, when suddenly I realized that the most important things in my life were gone forever. It was now an undeniable truth that you could not depend on anything or anyone, and, as the wheel of life turned ever so slowly, it would be a long, long while before that lesson could be undone. It would not be long, however, before we left the Golden Age of youth and, destined for a time of testing, moved to the South End of Albany, with all of its stories, some far harsher, yet to be told.

Evidence of the impact of that event surfaced years later during the days when I was an artist living in Manhattan, painting giant pop images of bicycles, motorcycles, trucks - in fact, anything with wheels. This must have satisfied a subconscious longing for the freedom I once had, cruising down Mapleridge Avenue or the glorious Yellow Brick Road. But paint, however beguiling, was no substitute for the real thing. I still missed my bike.

Life as Part of a Bike

Yes, Mick, it must have been the artist in you that inspired you at that young age to be the first of us to hotrod your bike, take the fenders off, chop and channel and the like, a look that would one day (as with the Frisbee) be thanklessly co-opted and called the "mountain bike." Though not too young to be in love, we were much too young to patent. Anyway, for a while you had the fastest bike in that part of the east, as the drag races down Mapleridge Avenue quickly verified (Who was that fast rider?), and as commemorated by your virtual bronze plaque in the 505 Delaware Avenue Bikers' Hall of Fame (second floor, first bedroom on the left).

As for the bike in my own life, it just so happens that in my PureLandMountain post this morning I told of seguing into memories of my trusty scarlet Columbia with ivory pinstriping and then checked in here to find you reminiscing about your bike… (Are we really twins, and you just gestated an extra year and a half ?)

I soon stripped my own bike down to the elementals too, always seeking to maintain that rolling edge; then one day when bike-visiting our cousin Johnny Robinson, Pat Villani and I stopped on the way home at a relative of his who ran an auto reupholstering shop; in about ten minutes he had my ragged bike seat glowing in miraculously really genuine-looking leopardskin, and I didn't sit down on my bike for days to show it off, it was like Sheena herself riding double with me. More tales there too, but please continue...

Fin de Cycle

It was 1952, the year that Gary Cooper took back Hadleyville and left his badge in the dirt as he left town in High Noon. The theme song, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin', became a top ten hit, a foreshadow of things to come. In Washington, Senator Joseph McCarthy continued his crusade against the commies as a wave of anti-communist paranoia swept the country. Rock'n'Roll hadn't been invented yet, and the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, four games to three. I was ten years old, and the signs were everywhere.

The year started out ok from my perspective. I knew there was a lot going on above me in the strange world of tall people, but I was somehow able to fly below the radar, just out of shootin' range. I was doing well in school, pulling down straight A's. It helped that I had the one great teacher I would encounter during my long slog through grade school, Sister Marie Frances. She was so tiny her feet didn't reach the floor when she sat at her desk, but she was larger than life; bubbling over with energy and enthusiasm, and perhaps the greatest single factor in my later decision to become an artist. By the end of the school year, I was convinced I was the next Michelangelo.

I was also lovesick as a puppy over Mary Lane, a fetching blond who was practically the girl next door, and who, with her friends, would join us in nightly 'make out' parties on her front porch, where we polished up our kissing technique in games of Post Office and Spin the Bottle. What was great about it, aside from the journey into outer space, was the fact that you would get instant group critiques: whispering and laughter from the opposing team after a particularly sloppy or overly long effort, failure to breathe properly, liplock - that sort of thing. Humbling, but extremely helpful in later life.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, I was leading up to telling you about my bike; my closest friend, my trusted steed, my ticket to ride, my instant escape from all troubles. It was my way to reach the sky by flying down the yellow brick road at forty miles an hour, it was the rush of a bone-crushing ride down the capital steps at full speed, it was a bombing run down Mapleridge Avenue and a terror-filled flight through the woods. It was a way into big trouble, but it was also a lightning-fast escape. Out West, I hear, they hang men for even thinking of messing with another man's bike. As I would soon learn, however, it didn't amount to a hill of beans back East.






To be continued...

Here's To You, Mrs. Robinson

Bob, I have to correct something, just for the record. In an earlier post, The One True Church, I offhandedly remarked that Shirley Connell was my second great love; Dodo Einstein, Albert's daughter, being the first. Wrong.

My real first love was Mom, that beautiful movie star of a mother, whom I remember gazing up at, moonstruck, as a wee lad. All little boys fall in love with their mothers, I suppose, but she made it so easy.

This newspaper clipping shows her as a young, vivacious waitress, time and location unknown, echoing my earliest memories of her.

Inventing the Frisbee®

Ah, there is so much, so much... But in a comment, Mick, you mentioned the dump, that seminal source that later led to so many dumps, so here I go with the first rummage...

The major dump in our area was down off Morton Avenue, on the site where Cardinal McCloskey Memorial High School now stands (the original, brand-new CCMHS that I graduated from, built on Elm Street in about 1956, was torn down just a few years afterward to build Rockefeller's folly, the Albany Mall, which stands now in all its glory about where our various subsequent residences once did, with exception of the one I'm about to mention, on Hudson and South Swan); the dump was landfilling in one of the ravines that traversed the old layout of Albany. A more notorious ravine was the one we moved to in our tragic decline from the glories of Delaware Avenue to the desolate corner of Hudson and South Swan. That used to be the old execution grounds of early Albany: "Take 'em into the ravine and hang 'em…" A lot of nasty folks died ingloriously right about where our bedroom was, I reckon...

Ah yes: the dump, the early template of our eclecticism. That was where we could find old appliances worth a fortune today, old magazines that could ransom ten kings today, old comics I could have retired on years ago, old radios, earphones, batteries wires and sundry other items, you name them, for example the miraculously pristine statue of Saint Patrick I found and took home as a holy treasure. (What do indoctrinated kids know about the future? Those comics would have been way better than a plaster of paris idol that who knows where the hell it is today.) St. Pat was however absent his crookstaff, which God soon provided in the form of a deformed noodle that miraculously appeared in a bag of spaghetti in our pantry, strengthening my faith and proving that God also works through pasta, as Italians and Italian food lovers have always known.

That dump was also where Speed Harris and I invented the Frisbee®. Yes, it was in 1949 (the true birthdate of that world-renowned icon) that in the dump I found the lid® to an institutional mayonnaise jar® and Speed and I began skimming it back and forth to each other over longer and longer distances just to watch it hover magically as we walked home one quiet summer evening.

The lid made a nice noise, too, when we bounced it off the road in mid-flight, prototyping so many of those Frisbee® tricks, little suspecting that Walter Frederick Morrison, who "invented" theFrisbee in 1950 (note date proximity) and later successfully marketed it through Wham-o®, was driving slowly past at the time, seeking a way to make trillions of dollars with no credit whatsoever to me and Speed. Such is life. Speed and I were not consulted and had no idea that Morrison had purloined our device until the "technical marvel" of the Frisbee® came out. At the age of ten I didn't have a lawyer. (All the many other versions of the origins of the Frisbee® are mere spin, to conceal these facts.) Even now I still have to put the ® after the name. But least I experienced the miracle of spaghetti and got a statue of Saint Patrick, wherever the hell he is.

The One True Church

Fly the ocean in a silver plane,
See the jungle when it's wet with rain,
Just remember till you're home again,
You belong to me


True enough; you were for one brief, shining moment, a tadpole holier than moi. Even though my heart was often in the right place, my feet, for some reason, were often elsewhere. You would likely have found me as an eager young acolyte, basking in the empyreal glow of the Mighty Wurlitzer, wide-eyed and reverent before the tabernacle as the spinning wafer teased out a piece of paradise itself. Unlike over at St. James church, I could get to heaven on a buffalo nickle.

It was our true sanctuary in those days, the kind of place where holiness was measured by the hearts of its brethren. We never had to be coerced to attend services; we volunteered, often begged to attend; and if I'm not mistaken, we may have even occasionally had to be ushered out (had we been too devout, too penitent?). No surplice and starched collar here; we were received as God's children just as we were, and if anyone ever judged us, they always seemed to err on the side of the angels. Besides, their cross was a lot prettier; it had an eagle on it with arrows in its talons. It was the kind of cross a boy could brag about. You know what I'm talking about, Bob; the home of the bravest of souls, the Sheehy-Palmer VFW Post, #6776.

It was right next door; we could see it from our bedroom window. We would fall asleep to the sound of music and laughter, and then roll out of bed in the morning to load up our wagon with their deposit bottles before you could say 'banana split'. It was where we could play darts if we wanted to, which could be dangerous at times: I remember a dart sticking out of my wrist as I reached up to pull mine off the board. Was that you, by the way?

I believe the Post was named after Shirley Connell's brother, one of the brave souls who died in WWII. Shirley, who lived across the street, happened to be my second love (my first was Dodo Einstein, who worked the soda fountain at her father Albert's pharmacy; she used to ply me with root beer floats to win my heart; it worked). I remember sitting at her dining room table for hours tapping away at her gleaming black Royal typewriter, creating fantabulous stories over which she would then feign delight, melting my tender heart. I could never seem to win her away from her husband Tom, though.

Looking back, one can see that it must have been difficult for Dad, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, to return to the States and resume a normal life as though nothing had changed, after living through horrors we can only imagine. That is why we lived within spitting distance of the Post; his war buddies were the only people who understood, and the VFW Post was indeed their sanctuary, and became for us, our home close to home.