Brockton: Planned or Accidental?

Driving west from Plymouth on route 14/27 on New Year’s Day, searching for the Fall River Expressway, we are compelled through the rotting downtown around the T station, bus depot, and juvenile court house.  In Brockton the trains are elevated on a stone viaduct that guarantees that you will never get run over.  As a result there are no lines of sight in the center of town, plenty of places to wait for passerbyes for muggings, throwing trash at passing cars, and defecating in public.  And the traffic cannot see around the stops, corners, and imposing blackened stone viaducts...imagine the Newcastle of Get Carter, the original with Michael Caine.

The MBTA and Commonwealth DOT have grand plans for Brockton and the roadways near Taunton, US 44, that they and other proponent of public works projects as a salve for unemployment like vertical housing structures cure social problems.  If you build it, put the shovel in the ground, you cannot be stopped.  This Robert Moses mentality has its inherent truth in the nature of such projects.  To say that it will stimulate the economy and keep the people from becoming restless is a misunderstanding of the work policies of Franklin Roosevelt.  Try stacking a court with judges, forcing millions into cheap labor, and making hillbillies brush their teeth, Obama.  If Michael Caine were President things would get done, the bloody door would get blown off.

Is Brockton in managed decline or managed growth?  Regional and Urban planners are often under the impression that growth can exists anywhere despite the economic and geographical realities.  Brockton was an accident, the industrial town that the city fathers envisioned and named after a canadian industrialist(an oxymoron), did not survive.  Brockton has been in decline for a century, although plateau may be more accurate in a technical definition.  Let Michael Caine, in a Charles Bronson way, bring Brockton back from the meta-ghetto to a new foxborough or newcastle instead of waiting for the half-assed throw money at it stimilus transportation/employment plan. 

Brockton: Hipster Colonies

In my last post I mentioned that there are no hipster colonies in Brockton.  The reader of this blog may ask what constitutes a hipster colony.  In my delusional understanding, a hipster colony is a neighborhood or community of pretentious pseudo-adults that are not natives to the urban centers where they have settled.  They stand out based on behavior and ignorance to their surroundings in regards to the realities of crime, culture, and environment.  The hipster, believing that they live in a society without class, violence, and racism, will leave their doors unlocked, go out all hours at night as they at home amid crackheads, gang-bangers and overeager cops, and instruct their neighbors to improve the community.  These colonies exist in places like New Orleans, see Treme or the Wire, for Baltimore.  David Simon's shows are a perfect reference here, think about it as is the Steve Zahn character in Treme.  Other places such as these exist in most American cities.

When urban crimes happen to these colonists, they always seem amazed that these things can happen in this day and age and plead ignorance.  There is no explanation beyond stupidity or arrogance.  The world is not how you envision it, it is how it is and has been...hard.  Hipsters do not think about these things, especially with Obama in office, he cured all social problems with his shatneresque diction.

Thankfully Brockton is not attractive to hipsters, who are busy turning once hard neighborhoods in Brooklyn into safe places deviod of their culture for one that values specialness, irony, plaid, and holden caulfield.   

Brockton: City of Champions

It is not hard to imagine the life of this city’s native son, Rocky Marciano, probably the toughest boxer to ever live and the one who was never defeated in the ring.  He defeated a 75 to 137 years old Joe Louis according to the barbershop in Coming to America.

Brockton has its champion of the Ring and is a champ when it comes to gerrymandering, its 9th Congressional district is a stunning achievement.  It is an archipelago of noncontigious spaces that would make a corrupt southern legislature blush.  I will not mention the party that it favors, but it is not a difficult guess who benefits from high-concentrated urban decline. 

Urban decline is not romantic in a place like Brockton, a place that time forgot.  There are no hipster colonies here, no one here chooses to live in poverty.  The factories are gone, likely away to cheaper labor, thanks NAFTA.  It is the real manifestation of my fictional Cranbury, Connecticut if Dickens, Conrad and Lovecraft teamed up on a project.  Think the Who, Led Zeppelin, and the Stones.  In New England the sad mill towns that immigrant labor fueled have become museums and the new nearly inescapable ghettoes.  None of this is said to be ironic in the hipster manner and insult those of us who want more out of life than self-indulgent smugness.

Brockton: The Flint, Michigan of Massachusetts

Brockton is the Flint, Michigan of Massachusetts.  Let’s get Tropical!  This is of course is in reference to the Will Ferrell basketball movie, Semi-Pro (2008) set in the 1970s where is he is the owner of a terrible ABA franchise.  He trades the club’s only washing machine for Woody Harrelson.  Never a good move.  The Flint of the High 70s is a city of industry, providing countless auto-parts to the land yachts of the Big Three car makers of nearby Detroit.  Whether the setting is homage to the hockey version of this film, SLAP SHOT, or merely a lovely coincidence is unclear. 

                Brockton is not known for its motoring history, but it is the city of champions.  The city is as about as unromantic as Flint or its neighbor Taunton, another island of industry in a sea of cranberry bogs and pilgrim towns.  Mini-ghettos that could stand in for Baltimore or Flint as mirrors or representations of certain aspects of modern urban barrios in post-industrial American cities.

I admit that this argument is flimsy at best and that the conclusion is unmet.  This is a blog and these rules of a persuasive essay, grammar, and punctuation need not apply.  I could write almost anything without consequences or ridicule, so I will.  This has become as meta as Ricky Gervais exploring the nature of humor, why are jokes funny.  He is single-handedly destroying comedy faster than Dane Cook could ever dream.

FAR WEST Afterlude

Well, I hope that we learned something in all this madness.  That our characters evolved and became fully rounded players in the cosmic game.  

After the fires died the black sooted Tower still remained standing above the city.  It was left as a reminder of what man can do and what man cannot.  A monument to our inescapable frailties, our venality and weaknesses;  To the characteristics that were ours no matter how hard we worked to repress our evil; For the artificial ethics and morality propagated by the academics and religions to give our lives a purpose beyond fucking and farming, and the golden nostalgia of days now long gone. 

            Maggie Bezzeg, enough of your didactic rantings!

            I am sorry, I tend to get worked up and have a difficult time bringing myself back down to reality.  This, I am the first to admit, is not a good quality for an FBI agent to possess.  I will try and control myself.  The story is nearly over and badly in need of a proper bookend.  Read on.  I promise that it will make sense in the end. 

            The black ziggurat could be seen from the jets that passed over en route to Montreal or across the ocean towards Europe and the world.  This great tangled phallus of charred brick and mortar rising high into the blue sky above the green trees, was in great contrast to the overtaxed road crews busy filling in the crater that was Taconic Street and gutting the empty buildings of the depressed Cranbury downtown for the copper before demolition. 

            The day the Tower fell was lost to the official records but it was the highest rated newscast in WQNP’s history, according to Peter Schneider, the producer departing to join his young career woman wife in Albany.  From the beginning of the implosion to the cloud of dust blinding the crowds disabling the city another day, the audience was transfixed.  In the dust cloud, the remains of the Tower came crashing down into rubble that would be not be mopped up before the winter snows arrived.  Audie was granted a furlough from prison to watch the Tower fade into darkness well as to attend the funerals of the civilian victims, the helicopter crew, and the shot police soldiers. 

            That was the gist of my husband’s last days in Cranbury.  He would convalesce at the state hospital in Farmington and serve his prison time without complaint as he devoted himself to his newfound faith. 

            He is still mine, unable to work, unable to travel, and unable to change his reputation or his future.  But he is alive.  And here comes the long-winded and heavy-handed existentialist part of the tale because after all every story must have a moral.  A lesson.  A purpose.  Why else would anyone read anything, for entertainment value or because it’s intellectually fascinating?  No, that would be absurd. 

            We love being manipulated to take heed of whatever life-altering message that the pretentious author happens to believe.  Thank you, L. Ron Hubbard, Mark Twain, and Joseph Smith.  Thanks for showing us what we are, blind monkeys lost in space, eager to accept any path home.    

            The point is that nothing could save the Cranbury Vale.  There was no hero of the day.  No delusional political campaign promise fulfilled.  No government stimulus package.  No welfare.  Nothing.  My husband’s sacrifice was meaningless.  The city was selected for extinction like the dinosaurs and the dodo bird.  Cranbury died while no one weeped but all came to cheer it on.  The population continued on the road to disincorporation, a triple X bond rating, and irrevocable bankruptcy.  This was oblivion—more than just becoming another vacant city of the rustbelt with Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, or Toledo.  A fate worse than death. 

           

In the days leading up to the demolition of the Victoria Tower, the remains of Robert Stegner were returned to the earth.  In the Litchfield piedmont, near the covered bridges of Cornwall, his ashes were scattered on a wet autumn eve.  His killer, Audie, in chains, watched the west wind take the ashes into those woolly green hills beneath the bare branches of a great oak tree. 

Who were laid in this ground
 Living, their enemies, dying their guests,
In honor of service and sacrifice
For the Strengthening of Hearts
This memorial is placed.

 These are just the erased words of the burned books and legends of history, of those before us who made us what we now are.  Shed no tears for the ghosts.  Who truly remembers history?  Who will remember our time a thousand years from now?  Who will remember my husband, but me, his wife? 

            No one.  No one will ever live to see the future.  No one escapes this life. 

FAR WEST Chapter Ten

NEW HAVEN



In the darkness of the predawn hours Maggie changed her jacket and formal dress in front of Audie handcuffed to the rear seat of the Crown Victoria.  She threw the dirty clothes over his face laughing as his hot breath oscillated the muslin rags up and down.  Maggie climbed into the car and kissed him lovingly; they groaned and fought for space among the suede seats of the FBI plated sedan.

            Maggie rose from the backseat and left the car to wash up and fix her matted hair for the  trial and the impromptu press conference afterwards.  The other agents, sick of their relationship, were impatient to remove Sergeant Bezzeg to Marion, Atlanta, or Leavenworth within the day. 

            By the time that she returned the clouds had opened up into a light drizzle that cooled the roads and suppressed the summer dusts from rising into the atmosphere.  The convoy departed with her car leading in the vanguard position.

            The five cars drove down Route 88 and took the Derby Pike over to Westville and continued on down Whalley Avenue through Yale’s ever expanding campus to the Green.  The blackness of the night made way for the hazed blue of early morning and quickly rose the red sun bleeding over the eastern horizon 

            As stern as Maggie had tried to appear, it was obvious subterfuge that failed to adequately hide her melancholy.  Her man, her ally, and her lover was on the verge of vanishing from her grasp into the penal system never to come out of captivity again.  This prospect neared fruition with each step they took closer to the courtroom.  She knew that it would not be a difficult estimation that Audie would be convicted on all counts varying from Rico statutes to the manslaughter of unarmed suspects.  He was a thug.

            The parade of marshals led the shackled Detective up the front steps of the New Haven Federal courthouse past the broadcasting vans of the local and regional news stations.  Inside the courthouse the gaslights of the lobby and halls reflected dull images on the polished surface of white and black marble.  The reporters, including a very tired and angry Rachel Cox, chased the Bezzegs and the assortment of prosecuting and defense lawyers into the restricted space of the courtroom.  Flashes of the cameras and the lights blinded the throng of government agents that moved along rapidly into the room that awaited their presence.  The oak doors swung open as they crashed through past the security guards and newspaper reporters taking cryptic notes on the physical appearance of the parties involved.

            Audie had his hands bandaged with gauze pads for the second-degree burns he suffered.  Dried purple blood suffused the skin on his neck and stained the zebra design on his soccer jersey.  He walked with a limp and a determined gait that contradicted the mood of the room drenched in dust and the intense morning light of late summer.

            Maggie brought her prisoner through the audience aisles past the benches to sit by his lonesome on the defence desk opposite the loaded prosecution.  Maggie uncuffed him from the seat behind him.  She crossed her legs, righted her skirt and adjusted her block letter identification badge hanging on the front pocket of her blazer.  Audie with his head turned, smiled eyeing his wife’s thighs, thinking about the last time they had been together. 

            “You know I haven’t seen you naked in two hours, no soft hands running up and down your thighs pulling at your pale skin.  Waiting for the purr you make that groan stirring through your marrow.”

            She tried to ignore the pheromones rising, and returned him a sinister smile that betrayed the tension.  “Shut up will you, this is the rest of your life, Audie.”

            “A hundred years gone.  I’d say this could be the worst day of your life.”

            “I’m starting to think my worst day was when I met you and got into this mess of yours.” 

            Maggie was interrupted as the masses on both sides for and against the former Lieutenant stood up promptly when the magistrate entered the crowded courtroom.

            “All rise for her honour, Judge Elina Weisz.”

            The Judge, was in her early sixties, with graying hair and had a wounded glare on her face.  Audie thought to himself she had just had a root canal or a bowel obstruction that lended her countenance extreme suffering and weakened stamina.  She cleared her throat and addressed the US Attorney, the prosecutor of Audie’s case. 

            “What are the charges against Lieutenant Bezzeg?”

            The nameless US Attorney smirked an upward glance to Judge Weisz and dove into the long laundry list of charges.  It took almost five minutes to read out the indictments.  He remained standing and gave the time over to Audie, who had chosen to represent himself.

            “How do you plead?”

            “Guilty on all twenty-three counts, your grace.”  Audie said lacking the gravitas expected of such a decisive admission. 

            The US Attorney spat out the water he was drinking all over his testimonials and the pressed Brooks Brothers suits of his counsel from the New Haven and New York offices.  Maggie Bezzeg grasped hold of Audie’s shoulder tightly.

            “Sidebar, your honor,” the US Attorney asked sitting uncomfortably in his wooden swivel chair.  He approached the bench and waited for Audie to arrive from his table. 

The US Attorney burst out suddenly, before Audie could reach the bench, “Sergeant Bezzeg does not know what he is doing, he made a deal with us to divulge information on the Cranbury Police and Mayor Ramsay.  This is a breach of our agreement.”

            Audie responded in kind without the indignant condescension.  “This supposed agreement was never put into writing nor was it ever recorded.  An implied plea deal is not a real plea as recognized in the courts.  Any imagined plea by the US Attorney is inadmissible because it’s a conversation and cannot remotely be considered as an agreement.”

            “I’m afraid that I will agree with the Lieutenant’s interpretation.  Is that all?” 

            She was visibly upset but felt compelled to agree with Detective Bezzeg and concur that this trial was unnecessary.  Bezzeg had saved the jobs of hundreds of county employees and city police officers from the threat of trial and imprisonment; he would have a lifetime incarcerated to savor his sacrificial goodwill.  And, yes, the entire city is corrupt and proud of it.

            Audie sat back down and listened to Maggie whisper into his ears—revealing her feelings about his ridiculous sacrifice for his home and people.  “You did the right thing, Audie.  I’m going to really miss you.”

            “You’re a worse liar than me, you know that Magpie.”

            She fought off the emotions, “I know.  I love a loser.” 

FAR WEST Chapter Nine

GOLGOTHA

Robert’s methamphetamine fed mind drifted off into reverie.  His waking narcodreams were often of his times teaching History and Literature at Wycliffe University, but were just as often lost in the montage of dead and extinct civilizations with special attention paid to the Roman Empire, the Mayans, and the Jerusalem of the Jews, Maccabees, and Zoroasters.

            Doctor Robert Stegner, until the recent closure of the University and the subsequent sale of the charter back to the British Sovereign, had been a full tenured Professor at Miskatonic College.  Miskatonic was one of the original colleges of Wycliffe established before the American War for Independence, well respected for its noted volumes of Latin and Hindi demonology books, religious texts, the papers of Milton, Cromwell, and Stowe, and original Arabic manuscripts in the library and its esteemed alumni in fields such as Philosophy, Theatre, Literature and more recently Atlantic History. 

            It had been a fitful job placement for Robert, who had the intellectual discipline and curiosity to devote his life to education, as it provided him many carnal opportunities with his female students and their mothers, if possible.  At Miskatonic, Robert met his future and former wife. 

            In the beginning, she was simply another sexual conquest to be notched in his hidden black notebooks he had used to catalogue the bagged students in some semblance of an accessible archive.  He was a real stickler for data, spreadsheets and organization.  She proved to be the shot in the arm that forced him to abandon his perverse dreams and accept the good and honourable society.   

            Audie struggled mightily to climb the Tower lugging the full weight of his pack with his heavy flak jacket and a large brown sledgehammer.  By the time he reached the landing beneath the metal access door he was out of breath, softly panting to himself.  He wiped the sweat off his hands onto his jeans and unsheathed his MP5 submachine gun from the back of his Kevlar vest.

            In a sudden jarring stroke of the hammer Audie sent the horizontal door flying upwards and open.  As it banged loudly in the confined space he pulled himself up by his arms into the belfry.  Flashes of brilliant white light were exchanged between the two as the teeming masses below watched on in unbroken fascination.

            The crowd had cocked their heads in near unison towards the exchange of fire emanating from the observation deck.  Rachel stared down at the road at her feet plaintively in a manner that mirrored Maggie save for the tears rolling down her face that revealed her real sentiments that she usually could keep hidden from the world. 

            The motley army of Cranbury Sheriffs, Police and County Firefighters looked up to the burning Tower in complete and unexpected silence.  This was an extraordinary sight to behold for the Tower had been part of the Vale for many generations without change or second thought for its place as meaningless landscape.  It was only a matter of time before it would return to the earth.

            Audie lay up against the far wall of the open air belfry busily checking his body for wounds, burns and all other possibly injuries.  When he finished his crude diagnostic exam, he brought his attentions to the dying man on the opposite wall beyond the gaping doorway in the floor that dropped hundreds of feet down to the shattered pieces of the broken television camera.

            The man writhed in pain. 

            His upper body was torn apart from the array of small entry and large exit wounds.  Audie had used ammunition of an explosive and illegal nature because he did not care of these consequences.  The man coughed out dark blood over his already blackened shirt, choking to death.  His eyes were covered in a thick layer of blood and severe acid burns from the muzzle flashes that now dominated his visual cortex’s last received images.  He would never know who had ended his earthly tenure—his surprise remained.

            “Sleep.”

            Audie said to the man unsure if he had yet to pass through the threshold to the other side.  This brief valediction was more for his own aide than that of the Shooter.  The moment passed as Audie threw off his vest as the heat of the chemicals smoldering grew more intense.  He dropped his pack to the ground and dropped down through the doorway to the small landing below the floor. 

            He raced blindly down the stairwell as he fumbled, tripped and hung on the rusted bars of the railings for the duration of his descent.  The vapors of various chemical reactions and the festering wounds he had not discovered on his body filled the Tower although he sensed nothing in this blurred and confused epinephrine state.

            Rachel and Ernie were permitted to film the growing conflagration, with a borrowed digital police camera, the final moments of the standoff under the close personal supervision of Commander Jaskilka. 

            The Mayor arrived to the operational headquarters with his outed Chamberlain to observe the unfolding events.  He had not changed out of his jogging suit and was openly ridiculed by his underlings for his silly appearance.  Rachel refused to speak to her father let alone give a single glance over to her future stepmother, who had failed to wipe all of the semen and curly black hairs off her mouth.

            Meanwhile, Maggie sat on the hood of the Major’s car ignoring the characters that had come to surround her in the flickering orange light and dark shadows of the wild conflagration consuming the high belfry of Victoria Tower.  The tears remained fixed on her cheeks as her beveined eyes continued to worry about the unknown futures that would arise the following morning.

            The world shook as the roof of tower erupted in a tremendous explosion.  The watchers retreated in their places as others ran for cover behind back alleys and dumpsters in desperate need to be emptied as their bowels were formerly.  Maggie was a stone.  Large portions of the roof were deposited in the rivulets of sewage, the clock and its gears landed in a chaotic range of scattered locations among the grave markers of the old Castle Cemetery, as for the bell it was never to be seen again.

            Out of the blanketing darkness Audie came stumbling across Taconic Street until he reached the inner perimeter where the firefighters had frantically established triage in the moments after the belfry was vaporized. They let it burn, unwilling to put out a fire that affected nothing of value.  Audie was brought to an ambulance to be patched up by the trauma nurse as her assistants tended to the burns that had accumulated around his neck and face.

            Maggie met her husband sitting upright on the stretcher and held his hands.  Her tears were gone as she kissed him lightly on his brow.  He whispered, “I believe.”