Dear Reader,
Please be aware that I am not slacking off in pursuing my guide to Milton Mayeroff’s On Caring. What is actually occurring is that I am working on this piece in a roundabout way. I have had to go back and listen to the music of the era to put my mind in the right place spiritually to conduct my ramblings. You might want to listen to these tunes first to get you in the mood of the time. Open a second window in the background and let ‘em play while you read on.
Over three months between June and Labor Day 1974 in a physical space that was at most 20 foot by 15 foot my world was changed, rearranged and reoriented. Four people occupied that space for those three months, Nan, Larry, Andy and me. We were the Kurly Kustard crew. Larry and Nan would shape my world for years to come. I didn’t know that in June of that year, but foreknowledge wouldn’t have changed the facts.
Before Labor Day came I would fall in love helplessly and hopelessly with Nan. On the other hand Larry would show me that the world was broader than I ever thought it could be. He would teach me that decency and personal integrity count, I admit now that these were lessons I learned only when the biggest part of our friendship was in the rear-view mirror.
In addition to our four bodies the Kurly Kustard operation also contained a soda fountain, an ice cream novelties cooler, a pretzel oven, a double sided soft serve machine and a slush puppy dispenser. There was a cash register too. If the electricity went out you could operate that puppy with a crank and on occasion I did.
The store façade was about three foot high on the board walk side but on the inside it was just two foot high with a raised floor behind the aluminum counter. As a result of this differential we were always looking down at our customers and bending over to serve them their desert treats. From 10:30 a.m. to about 11 p.m. or midnight we purveyed sweets, ice cream, pretzels, soda and other refreshing eats slightly stooped over. When you walked the back door and walked down the wooden steps to the beach level your feet hurt from the concrete floor and you back ached from being bent over all night long. Just stretching at midnight after a full shift outback and in the misty ocean air was a release.
Kurly Kustard did not have air conditioning. Although we were only a couple of hundred yards from the Atlantic the pretzel oven corner of the store would get up to 110 F for hours on end. When it was a busy night each time a row or two or three pretzels would drop out the machine they would sell. On those kinds of nights the person working pretzels lived in their own little replica of hell. Over the course of the night despite drinking endless soda from our personal cups, Heroin, Morphine, Marijuana and Cocaine (novelty items the boss was never able to see in his beach sundries store located next door) you lost pounds. By 10:30 p.m. your clothes were drenched in sweat. You prayed for a breeze to wend its way around the whirring custard machines, the containers of sprinkles and bubbling fudge dip and the oven itself. Cool air rarely got that far. If the heat got too much you walked into walk in cooler and literally chilled. You stayed there until you refreshed enough to get back in the mix.
To break the monotony of the machine noise, that omnipresent electrical metal rumble and hum, we had a cassette player to play tunes. It was not a Dolby noise reducing cassette player. It was what was scrounged up. My guess was that it came from Radio Shack, it was Larry’s. It had one speaker. The noise coming through that cone roughly approximated the sound from an A.M. radio played through the front speaker of a 1963 Ford Falcon. In 1974 we were so used to this sonic quality. We chipped in and book two tapes from the really overpriced record store on the main drag through town. (Hey it was the beach, EVERYTHING was overpriced).
Two of the three tapes we shared were by David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory. These were the ones we bought. He was what was hot and on the only radio station that mattered, WMMR. Our summer’s soundtrack was provided by David Bowie and another tape was an odd mixture of Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits II thrown together by Larry. It shouldn’t have fit it, but it did. The tapes played nonstop. The tape got worn, the tape stretched. The music warbled as we played ‘em at maximum volume through that Radio Shack tape machine. The slow distortion and destruction of the tunes didn’t really matter we knew all the words to every song. Our loud singing covered any defect in the source material with our own partially semi defective singing. Some favorites emerged. First and foremost was….
Life on Mars
It's a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling "No"
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause she's lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
Bowie was sui generis. Nobody and I mean nobody was like him at the time. The rock press was filled with speculation on his sexuality, bi-, gay or straight? We searched the lyrics for meanings overt and implicit. But that voice was so beyond what anyone else sounded like right at that moment. For my mind only Marc Boylan of T.Rex was pushing the same boundaries.
With a vocal styling that was camp, dead on and nihilistic all at once, Bowie enthralled us. His voice was so perfect for 1974 as we waited for Richard Nixon to resign. Like Bowie wrote in a song he handed off the Mott the Hoople we were all bored with that revolution stuff by then. We all just wanted to smoke pot and fuck. Nothing else, our hormones were so out of control it is amazing our button fly jeans didn’t just burst with a staccato ricocheting of their metal fasteners.
Kurly Kustard’s crew was an interesting mix. Larry was a co-op student at Drexel working in physics and hard theoretical science. I have hung out with physicists over the years and the joke was that they all wear oversized shoes so as not to fall through the fabric of the universe. I mean they know nothing is solid. But Larry wasn’t like that he was a down to earth guy. He was struggling with bug lust just like I was. He obviously was smarter than most but still he liked beer and pussy as much as the rest of us.
Andy was younger that Larry, Nan and I. He seemed to have a bit of a dark side. Seemingly he was headed to that place in life were the strange turns ugly. I can’t tell you for sure he didn’t end up a preacher of the Gospel but I wouldn’t bet on it. While the rest of us would smoke pot Andy would eat almost anything that came his way in pill form. All of the rest of us had tried acid once or twice and had pretty much said fuck this pill shit. We stuck with good old Columbian.
But there were days when Andy was so jittery, so shaky that you knew he was as Lou Reed put James Dean for a day just speeding away. But back then the credo was do you own thing as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else so we didn’t feel any need to intervene. We shook our heads a bit and figured his parent’s would bust him but we didn’t meddle.
Andy’s stories always had the edge that something was being left out. They got murky at points and you could only assume that something had happened there and the reality had gone really wrong or whatever had been done was beyond the pale of what any of the rest of us would have been involved in. The rest of us might be criminals because we bought and smoked weed but were didn’t steal or strong arm anyone.
Still Andy had his good qualities. Andy loved Bruce Springsteen. In 1974 he was quoting all the songs that would be on Born to Run two years before the album was even out. He would always be humming and singing a lyric from Jungleland.
Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge
Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain
The Rat pulls into town rolls up his pants
Together they take a stab at romance
And disappear down Flamingo Lane.
Larry, Andy and I we were all the products of working class dads and moms. We heard the stories about the hard times and struggle each meal when we said we weren’t going to eat scrapple, broccoli or kale. The depression stories got old. This was the 1970s the world was ours for the taking. It was America on the upsurge. We were punk assed kids expecting to do better.
Nan wasn’t like us she had grace that you didn’t find in the homes of South Jersey factory rats. We were scruffy. She was beautiful. We were all asses and elbows incompetent and she exuded cool. Our tongues tied at moments when she was funny and fired off that quick quip.
She was a beauty and proud of her sensuality. She wore amber aviator shades that just said “I am hot”. She wore tube tops promoting those perky puppies of hers. When she bent over to serve ice cream the Dad’s lingered a little too long at the window for the Mom’s liking. If you watched you could see the come on let’s go tug on the hand, the sleeve or the shoulder material. Nan’s cup was Heroin. Mine was Morphine. We were toxic together.
From the first day we worked together at Kurly Kustard there was some kind of connection between us. I may be wrong but I thought there was. We laughed at the same shit. We riffed about right and wrong and the injustices being inflicted on us by our evil overlord. When I looked at her she had a golden aura. Teen love/lust does stuff to your vision. Mostly it stuffs your head up your butt. Still, she was one of that less than a handful of women I ever really fell in love with, God’s honest truth. For me the time I tried to be in her life was disastrous, but it was a memory.
There were moments of absurdity at Kurly Kustard. For example there was this French Canadian dude that insisted on trying to pay me in Canadian funds. No bank in 1974 Ocean City would take the old Canadian one dollar bills with the Queen on ‘em. I refused when the folding foreign money was offered to accept it as currency. I stood my ground and demanded he pay me in American script.
Let us call this guy Jacques. Jacques had the Canadian currency in his right hand. When it clear I was not going to accept these bills he pulled out the America cash from his pocket with his left hand. That left mitt was the most deformed hand I had ever seen. It was Hunchback of Notre Dame deformed, twisted and gnarled and it was clear the sucker had gone through this exercise on purpose. He knew I wasn’t going to take the Canuck money and he wanted to make me deal with his weird two thumbed left hand. Arrgggh. Another life lesson learned. People will screw with your mind on purpose.
We had celebrities come by. I remember waiting on John Facenda the voice of NFL films. Man his voice was as deep when he ordered a coke as when he was describing the Packer’s greatest game. Other people were working at the stand the night Princess Grace came by. I never saw her but everyone who had been at the store made sure I knew they had. I saw Princess Stephanie but not Princess Grace and she was on the beach in a bathing suit. Nayh, Nayh, Nayh Nah.
As I have been writing this I have come back to one image again and again. In the pale blue light on a low volume boardwalk day Nan stands near the front counter. With her hair pulled back and with her hands on her hips she is looking at the late afternoon ocean. Her hair blows a little because it is a sea breeze coming in and she is smiling. A quiet moment standing there absorbing the remains of the day in almost a Buddha like stance she remains an iconic image, mistress of the beach world universe. I think what ultimately kept our connection alive for years after Kurly Kustand had ceased to even exist was an innate honesty. When you care honesty matters, (as always I have to have a segue into the analysis of On Caring).
The author spends a little time of this section laying some background down before he gets to the role of honesty in caring. He tries to make sure when we are considering honesty we are not focused on something that is not the honesty he is talking about.
“In caring honesty is trying to see truly”. Honesty is not imposing an image on the other of what you want them to be or what you dream they are inside. To be honest in caring means stripping away the illusions we impose and the other asserts as reality and see what is true “even when the facts are unpleasant”. The illusions that must fall include my illusions about who I really am and what my real motives are. The question must be repeatedly asked, do I really want the other to grow or do I want to manipulate the other for my own selfish needs? If I work at honesty in seeing the other and seeing why I am caring about this particular other when I make mistakes the error will be easier to correct.
You cannot be there for the other if you are not genuine and thus you cannot pretend to be something you are not. I may not be perfect but caring doesn’t require that I exist without imperfection and flaws, only that I continue to look inside and honestly perceive what my real motivations for the other and myself are.
Like everything in this little book the concept of honesty seems so intuitive, so easily understood. But to take the time to look inside yourself to see your actual motives is as hard a task as any I know. I think to do this we have to give ourselves space, a moment for a mental breath. Creating this space may require time or it might require us to silence our mind’s never ending make work thoughts. Maybe it will require both but I think the effort will be worth it.
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