RUDIMENTS 57.

RUDIMENTS, pt. 57

Making Cars

Who remembers 'pusillanimous pussyfooters?

Who remembers, for that matter, Spiro Agnew,

Nixon's first Vice President, thrown out and

convicted for bribery and evasion as Mayor of

Baltimore or whatever in Maryland he was?

(I'm deliberately being imprecise and have so

little interest in him that I'm not going back to

check info and correct). The guy was crooked

hack. His being sacrificed was, in a way,

supposed to placate the haters and save Nixon's

butt -  it didn't. Spiro Agnew. Chosen from

nowhere. To get the Greek vote? Nixon again;

there was a big, revolutionary crisis going

on at the time (1967) in Greece, and Richard

Nixon really was policy-mad enough to count

and try and garner every little packet of votes

he could. Thus, the unknown Greek. When things

began getting hot politically, Agnew was sent

out to begin challenging and making fun of the

leftist, anti-Vietnam, youth wing, and the press.

Making fun of them. 'Pusillanimous Pussyfooters.'

'Nattering Nabobs of Negativism.' That's only two

 -  there were more. Agnew just mouthed all that

stuff; he didn't write it. I don't think he was that

smart. It was all done by this other oddball

crank named William Safire, later, after

Nixon's downfall, a big-deal weekly, and

more, columnist for the NYTimes. Sort of

their token right-wing guy. It wasn't and he

wasn't, but it went on for years.

-

Around the time of Nixon in office, I remember

standing out in front of the old bank building on

Main Street, and each morning (I worked in the

building  -  not then a bank  -  where we did the

legal printing I mentioned and then took off for

places like Philadelphia, Camden and Trenton,

for my mad, crazy appellate deliveries, mentioned

a few chapters back). Each morning at about the

same time each day this chubby guy would pull

up in his '64 Pontiac, and he'd get out and go into

Driscoll's or whatever it was (can't remember now)

and buy a New York Times (it was one of those

newsstand, notions, and sundries stores), get back

in his car, and drive off. Some sort of office job

somewhere, apparently. That used to drive me

crazy, just watching his routine, looking at him

each day. I'd try to understand the workings of

such a person and attempt to figure how someone

could just appear to be so boring and regular

about everyday life. The guy just never had a

stick of anything out of place, or different. If

he lived alone and did it all himself, he was

surely robotic. If he had some over-riding

wife who both watched and guaranteed all

that, I guess he was better off. though I didn't

know. Looking back now, I can smile at

myself, of course, too  -  for being a rather

smug lunkhead, inasmuch as I myself wasn't

doing anything much different, except for the

career aspect. I was biding time screwing

around with a time-wasting job trying to

figure things out. It all lasted but a little while.

I was trying to make a buck or ten, to be able

to again high-tail it out of town, and soon. 

For all I knew this guy was twenty times 

better than me, and he probably was  -  with 

some promise and real money to himself, 

a regular outlook, friends and a job. No

contest; I had a few bad stories, smelling

mostly of sassafras and oil. I knew I'd get 

started, I just didn't know when and how. 

When I told my friend Bill, a guy I worked 

with, that I was about to take off, split, 

for Pennsylvania, he came to me the next 

day and said, 'Watch out, the shit's gonn'a 

hit the fan.' I had no clue what the phrase 

meant, believe that, and hadn't really heard 

it before. Turned out, all it meant was that 

he'd been kind enough to spill the beans

about what I intended to do. Boom! in a 

few days, I was on my way. The owner 

there, Ron, he didn't know it, but there 

was nothing at all haphazard about what 

I'd done. I'd planned it for a while, even 

had made two forays out to the far-deep of

Pennsylvania, withdrawn my dough, found

the wrecked old farmland and house and barn

I wanted, and had purchased some 12 acres

and a grand old house, with neglected barn,

outbuildings, streams, wells, and springs too.

The closing was about a week off, so I just

said my best sayonara, and was gone.

-

Little did Agnew, or Nixon for that matter,

know, but I was hiding out right under their

noses. Ever since before, still when LBJ

was pissing in the White house sinks, I had

snaked my way through the NY City morass

of war resistance. Stealing things, disrupting

things, blowing up an office here and there,

throwing animal blood around in one, and

then, of course the stupid out-of-control gang

and their bomb-factories and the rest took

over. Dead bodies, lower east-side hippies,

also dead. Crime infested wonderlands of

snout, snatch, and snooker. Everybody had

split up, and we'd all taken off, invisible. I've

never heard from anybody again. That giant

Mexican guy from Colorado, always bragging

about have pushed his wife out of a speeding

car on a steep Colorado mountain pass  -

'Carlos the Idiot,' I'd named him. he was

gone. Andy Bonomo was  -  as they used to

say in the local bars  -  off like a new bride's

pajamas. The trail left behind was there, I

guess, but the gutters were cleaned and

emptied of trash. There was suddenly no

one around, including me. Most people used

to say, (all that Naked City stuff), that you

could be invisible nowhere better than right,

smack dab in the lost middle of New York

City. Maybe that was true, but I wasn't about

to test it, figuring the tall canyons of trees

and upchucked mountains could better hide

me. I ended up near an old Indian mountaintop

lookout called Mt. Pisgah.

-

There's nothing like uncertainty to  make

certain the mind, to center it and focus it on the

task at hand. A perfect deliberation in every

act, trying to focus to be sure that nothing goes

amiss. Concentrated light like a laser beam. I

didn't know much about what I'd be doing, really,

but living rough and in the country quickly

becomes a pretty easy task, the mind and body

just know and settle in. I guess maybe, as a

Human, some of it's just tribal and genetic.

I found it all came pretty natural and before

long I was just another yokel in the forested

farmlands of Nowhereville, USA.

-

All this Nixon and Agnew stuff really

amounted to nothing any longer. I was

completely cut off from the contacts that

kept me up n that stuff -  newspapers, radio,

TV. I lost most all touch. It wasn't until, one

afternoon, when I was way up in Hubbardton,

Vermont, in some field somewhere, that I

heard about Nixon's resignation. I sorta'

felt I'd resigned too.