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HARBORFEST
“WU-TANG CLAN AIN’T NUTHIN’ TO FUCK WITH! WU-TANG CLAN AIN’T NUTHIN’ TO FUCK WITH!”
We were the loudest house on the block that second night of Harborfest. The girls had long since retired, and we were working off the effects of an entire day of drinking. I had just sopped the blood from Sean’s leg with my Zion National Park T-shirt after breaking a Labatt Blue bottle a bit too close to his corner of the porch. Jason was doubled over in laughter, Dave was cursing every woman passing by, Kevin and Joe were in a furious debate over the merits of Don Caballeros’ For Respect, and the boom box was tearing through a third repetition of Enter the 36 Chambers.
The neighbors were non-plussed.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP! IT’S FUCKING FOUR A.M.!”
“WU-TANG CLAN AIN’T NUTHIN’ TO FUCK WIT!” we chanted in unison.
Hours before I was stumbling around downtown Oswego on the cusp of unconsciousness, pulled to and fro by a mixture of cheap beer, dry manhattans, peer pressure and ego. West First Street had been entirely closed off, and thousands of revelers filled its asphalt length, pouring in and out of bars like the blood from Sean’s wound. After ditching the clan for a surreal encounter with an ex-girlfriend’s alcoholic new beau (he bought me a scotch, and then another), I rejoined the group in time to teach them the Gravity Dance, which consisted of me falling on the ground repeatedly.
“Salamone, you are fucking CRAZY!”
“Salamone, you are fucking NUTS!”
The band playing at the far end of the street had taken a break, and I dashed for the open mic. Addressing the crowd of tens of thousands, I bellowed:
“MY FRIEND JASON SUCKS A MEAN PENIS!”
Laughter, applause.
Later, on the porch, I burned myself with my own cigarette, pushing the cherry into my cheek and letting it hang there, sizzling. The guys only cheered me on. After hitting some more Blues off the balustrade, I stumbled up to the attic and passed out. I woke up that morning in pain and vomit, and neglected to clean up the pile as I sneaked out and went home, creeping through the broken glass and crushed beer cans we’d left in the neighbor’s lawn.
(note: The Manifest reserves the right to create juvenile juxtapositions)
THE BOOK TO SAVE THE WORLD
It was four months earlier that I had left my first real job out of college – designing air conditioning brochures and flashlight manuals for a small firm in Skaneateles– to “work on my writing.”
“Good luck,” said the boss.
“We’ll miss you,” said the secretary.
“I hope we see your books on Amazon,” said the production coordinator.
I had known I was to be a writer ever since the summer before my junior year of college when three bulldozers knocked down the woods in the neighborhood I grew up in.
The woods behind the church were our favorite adventure zone as kids: we’d sledded down its dangerous cliffs, hauled bikes out of its creek, played bloody murder and capture the flag along its shadow-dappled paths. One day, the church decided to the sell the property to a local developer. In spite of the dozens of thirty-year-old split levels for sale throughout the neighborhood, a sidewinding cul-de-sac was constructed in the space between the church and the elementary school. Elderly maples and oaks and paper birches were shoved aside to make way for a dozen or so identical plots of gravel, colonized by green power boxes.
As the construction proceeded apace, my father raised a stir in the church council – “why are we destroying such beautiful trees?”— only to be met by blank stares. The Right-to-Life faction had won over the pastor, and funds gained by the sale of land were diverted to the construction of a cement anti-abortion monument, complete with a brass Jesus the local punks would steal in a matter of weeks.
That summer, I was reading Home From Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler, a devastating critique of suburban development. One day I took a break and went on a walk to the woods. Rain had washed piles of mud from the denuded plots and clogged the creek. A few houses had already been erected, graceless gray boxes fronted by massive garages, mere way-stations for consumption-mobiles, all of it hideous and depressing.
Shortly before dinner, I sat down at my father’s desk in the basement and wrote about the new development. I wrote about the anger it induced in me, about the short-sightedness of the planners, of the sheer lack of appreciation the neighborhood had for natural beauty.
How could people be so dumb? I wondered.
Idiots will NOT take over the world uncontested! I vowed.
As I continued probing the question, something in me clicked. I was no longer doing the writing, it was being written through me. I wrote through my mother’s calls for dinner. I wrote through dessert, through The Simpsons, through the nightly news, Survivor, and two episodes of Seinfeld, my hand fighting to keep up with my racing brain. I was going to write a book—I could feel it!—as long as I could just focus and write. It was hard work, but it felt right and exact, like I was an Ortofon precision DJ needle finding its groove on an old copy of Run DMC’s “Ring the Bells.”
Flash forward to the day I quit my first real job. I had money in the bank and understanding parents: I could’ve holed up my grandfather’s house or the local library for a couple months, filling legal pad after legal pad with the penetrating prose of purpose, and published my first book at the tender of age of twenty-three, but I didn’t. I took the money and went traveling, the final refuge of every college grad in search of himself.
Before I even left the house, I knew the whole thing would be a waste of time. I felt a tremendous pressure above my head and all around my body, like something trying to push its way from some invisible realm through my body and out into the open, something POWERFUL, something IMPORTANT, something to ward off the impending DISASTER the bigoted and the ignorant and the real estate-minded were working towards like blind miners probing a volcano.
I knew I would not be happy if I didn’t start writing this Book to Save the World right then and there, but I put it off.
This is not to say I didn’t have a good time. If you’re going to avoid your higher purpose in life, you may as well do it right: take the Green Tortoise.
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