The Origin of a Species and The Mixed Martial Arts

If a Levittown, New York cement stoop formed upon pre-fungicide infested potato fields could ever emit a sound, it most probably would be a “South of the border” purchased; “American Indian” rubber covered birch bark drum, with my repetitive beating to my vocal accompaniment of “Weee waaant ra-ain, we want rain, we want rain, weee waaant ra-ain”, for over two hours, circa 1961, when this cloudless day spontaneously concluded, the sky obscured and blackened, it fucking poured, big heavy ellipses of ploppy rain out of the above, to which the Betty Crocker mom came flowing out of the split bond, (Over-baked) brick home at 345 Holmes Street, Zoysia plug planted, corner plot (supposedly worth more) to exclaim in a full and false Germanic tone of Brooklyn’s version of English, with a low pitched quivering anger, while wearing matching red and white checkerboard apron, house dress and then not yet classic Aunt Jemima bandana, holding the recently un canned “Chicken A La King” encapsulated in aluminum cookery with the NASA innovation of “Bakelite” handles (polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride) on an elevated electric coil, three burner, “What have you done now J.P?” Accomplishments although simple, but not easy, can electrically percolate their way up into your body from a black, insulated line from the two prong female orifice, sometimes right across the two car garage, grass meridian, onto the green knoll of the neighbor’s sod and in front of the gray rubber surround, screen door, attached to a house wrapped in “insulated” aluminum siding with a five year warrantee and a five year old little girl, with big, tight ringlets of dark Afro-like hair of Sicilian decent, in a black dress, white knee socks and black saddle shoes, perched there to my left and captured on black and white film through a 110-B Polaroid kissing lips on lips with, well, me at age four. I can still smell the film.

My supposedly willful act of precipitation was spoken about constantly until her death, as were my many types of due course punishments, “We did it just for fun, because you were so cute when punished.” I was made to stand in a corner, facing the converging planes of oil base painted plaster on pre sheet rock when guests arrived because within a small amount of time, “You would just entertain yourself in the corner, singing or talking to yourself.”[15] Speaking to the invented/nonexistent was normal for an only child, dressed in little sailor suits or other dank, church going apparel, white shirt, bow tie, shorts and knee socks and black Buster Brown’s. Forward on to the Cub Scouts later bedecked in royal blue with merit badges attached, I might have walked on to the Arian brown behind the barn door, but hesitated. I never fit into a click. “What people don’t get about you is you leave something behind and go straight on to something else.”[16] This was an odd click of male individuals for “The preparation for life.” “The men who run the Boy Scouts have something in common with the men who run the Catholic Church and Penn State. When it comes to dealing with the sexual abuse of children, they’ve always chosen to protect their own institutions instead of protecting children.”[17]

We had a mutt dog briefly, unnamed and the front paw scratches remained inside the bathroom’s mahogany stained, poplar wood molding with four penny finishing nails and may still. Most green wood split with my father at the heft of the hammer. (His favorite tool) When my friend and student’s lower east side apartment was continually getting broken into he said, “Don’tcha think its about time you put a hammer in their head?”[18]

Inside the brick home, besides the off gassing, lime green carpet smell, was a surprising modern array of fifties groovy, very George Jetson’ furniture and early Eames with the new speckled white on blue enamel cookware. In fact the interior set of Jake Lamotta’s house in Pelham Parkway was similar in texture and feel with white amoebic thin set, stone laid in grey cement grout and butted up against one inch tall, lush pile cut on the contour of the “stones”. White, long and thin brick assembled by my father and a “Negro” laborer into a bar with a maple rail rap around and illuminated marbleized mirrored bottle display behind in the full basement. I recall my cousin ordering a concoction of alcohols pre-Long Island cool aid. Envision the cigarettes smoldering in deep, felt bottomed, crystal ashtrays nestled in natural “Naugahide” as robotic, perfumed housewives maneuvered to and fro to entertain the new middle class over cordials, as if on four wheel, white leather roller skates, not clip-ons. Doris Day caroled on the buzzing red, coiled tubes in glass surround to generate the sound of the day. Motorola motion. Around Thanksgiving venison sausage stuffing came inside from a local, Zorn’s turkey, born and briefly raised with about 40% saline, water retention until death by blade while inverted. At least the Japanese knew that to keep someone inverted required a small slit on both sides of the neck to reduce blood pressure and prolong the agony. All then reserved for the first brown robed Jesuit brothers. (I recently visited the site of the torture of dripping boiling water atop the heads of Christians in the north of Japan, now reserved for sulfured eggs.) The blue and white sign (with a blue turkey) on the painted white, sheet metal front barely contained the wind swept odors of the fecal soup, floating carcasses while in chilly brine. It was fowl. Pumpkin time.

I was later in life in the wet woods at 4:30 AM to lean against hundred foot sappy pines self-pinned in brief hibernation to await the obnoxious arrival of landing allosaurus’ with large, observant eyes and a wariness that has to be dealt with at the moment or there is no Thanksgiving dinner. Even the sap cannot run. Nothing escapes their scope. One arrow will be all you get. Just one squirrel will give you away. There is no scrutiny in the scrub like squirrels. I have had them stand on my shoulders eating acorns while the toms own the territory and parade in the new snow. Thanksgiving is how the natives saved the Europeans in the new world from starvation.

Now genealogy, predation and intensity just might or might not be inherited through a bigoted Protestant of Germanic heritage, green eyed mother, 5’5”, who prayed every night, maybe not for rain, although maybe if the church were on fire, the whole congregation may have been psychically united and prayed for precipitation, I guess it was just much easier and clearly more effective to call the local Fire Department (And in those days the uniformed ones with badges would steal all your valued belongings while in the act of “fighting” the blaze) AND the combination of a second generation, Italian American, 6’1”, 240 lb., dark-skinned, Neapolitan (Known to friends as The Black Panther until he (In the 1960s) found out who they actually were.) because his habit was to baby oil himself up and roast outside in the very limited New York august heat and Floridian winter to super saturate himself with alcohol on the inside, until resembling something, beyond modern Palm Beach orange, a hairy, (to which I am becoming) charismatic, generous, violent, tyrannical, homophobic, racist, alcoholic, charming and just plain scary person; these are my genetics. “He was afraid of nothing.”[19]

I as a lone child am the fore/end product and was the sole target. He was sharp and savvy although in his circles unaccustomed to perfectionism. It disgusted him. His wife, a woman that would lie and/or die for her husband because he saved her from eternal virginity and her controlling, sauerbraten roasting, potato pancake making mother and distant father, a willowy, billboard hanging, wanna be circus performer, W.W. I trench running hero, chlorine gassed and re-gassed, presumed dead by the Army for four years (M.I.A.) Considering 4-5 million soldiers were killed in four years of fighting in constant filth, cold, malnutrition, incessant bombing and “The emotional states of returning soldiers, and the overwhelming numbers of veterans in need of hospitalization or long term psychiatric care forever dismissed any notions of war as a glorious heroic endeavor.”[20] Constant stress takes its toll on the human psyche by not letting time off the nervous system, whether in war or years of abuse in the original home or foster setting. “The link (is) between the collective agenda of war and the legacy of individual despair.”[21]

Later in life, my grandfather was obsessed with Broadway, song sheets and Hollywood land, scissoring and pasting (Elmer’s) his way within a acutely slanted roof in Seaford, N.Y. attic “Office” of filed and cross referenced actors and their social endeavors and fashions of the day, in his ubiquitous black bowler. I craved the cut off shredded remainders for painted paper mache monsters. A perfect editor for the future People Magazine. “One time he was painting our house on Franklin Street and I remember a fire station siren went off and he ran with paint brush in hand and disappeared for three days to return in an altered state.”[22] A super hero of willowy build, considering the physicality of my grand fathers and grand uncles, I was an interesting offspring. He was way before his time, a job in show biz he wanted so badly that I willfully abandoned mid-stream. It is not fun to be crew. They broke cement blocks on his abdominals and mine also. My father claimed that mixing cement gave him is. “It was the hoe.”[23] This acrobatic, smallish target could still walk on his hands at sixty years old, sing and dance with light feet and the catalyst of a few pints and a dark whiskey. Anyone who has read anything of these frozen trenches he ran to and from and the deprivations and brutal, daily bombardment will understand his stock. These were men of action and belief of World War I; (The war to end all wars) “a death grapple”[24] experiencing gridlock and seemingly unending battle for the very temporary possession of one hundred yards of pock marked earth, taking and losing ground over and over again in the face of the German Machine gun that the British thought was not a “valuable weapon of potential”, nicknamed “The Devil’s paintbrush”, the Spandau, introduced in 1908, could fire 500 7.92mm rounds per minute, later replacing the water cooled jacket (that the Russian’s made an optional, snow cooled) by a perforated, air cooled barrel and utilized well aft and concealed by the pointed helmeted ones, that so impressed the Japanese elite/military with their then enviable engineering and structure. The Japanese genius’ made a 2/3 size U-boat from a loaner and plans during WWII.

The skies were longer a place to view nimbuses, it became a primordial terror inhabited once again by beasts that shed their leather wings and teeth for motors and rotors and ordinances. It was a fear, forgotten, yet imagined in found fossilized fodder. It became so credible again in 1903 on the dunes in North Carolina and changed war forever. Da Vinci would have shit himself. It was a castle siege without a castle, imparting all the known technology on your enemy with in the confines of trajectory and from a new bird’s eye view. A Nasca like vision superimposed on Europe.