NO NOBLER CAUSE THAN THIS ONE

167. NO NOBLER CAUSE THAN THIS ONE (nyc, 1968)

Sometimes I juggled spit and other times I merely stayed with air but either way I have plenty of memories of those days which I try over and over to clarify now from a distance (haze cleared/way open) and there really was a time when these sorts of characters existed just under the night-radar of old New York quickly waning and that old undercurrent of mischief intelligence craftiness philosophy and neo-morality is pretty much and seemingly gone now but in the days I speak of it was always there - as I said - just 'under' the reality of the common day - for it was in its way brighter and more brilliant and dazzling (as an undercurrent) than was anything else you'd see - the usual gruel of business and deals and boredom and money and toil and task ALL of this other stuff this GRANDER world was there but OUT OF REACH unless you first knew of it and sought it out (or sometimes were just 'invited' in : and Frontini it was who said as I now recall that 'Life' was lived in the thirteenth grade and to him all life after high school's compulsory schooling was the 'thirteenth grade' from which you 'move forward you go on - after all them years of learning the shit they teach you and feeling the cold steely hand of their controls all over you - you finish with it get it done and move on to the thirteenth grade' and he'd say stuff like that as he sauntered along - with his limp - and with some ascertained logic or reason making him go on thinking it was right and proper right then - at that moment - to bring that idea forth (he was funny about picking times and places to 'go' with information) and then it was only later once when I was reading about Sacco and Vanzetti somewhere that I came across a neat old Italian saying which suddenly like lightning fit right in place : 'he who travels with a lame man learns to limp' : and that always amazed me even if it actually referred to Sacco and Vanzetti's time with the Gruppo Autonomo and their anarchist activities but it seemed to hit me at just the right time to fit in even better with the entire character of Branco Frontini from Elizabeth Street in my life : he was a cool Italian character low and slick with black hair very shiny and a skin color near olive and over the years I've seen his character be attempted in a hundred portrayals but never attained and it sometimes seems as if every Italian movie-character done up to show a 'type' attempts him but gets him wrong and maybe so because he was a one-off for certain and he lived four floors up along a little creaky staircase which led to a door which entered his apartment - brown like some gravy and dimly lit with an old metal ceiling and a curving large window and not much else - a half-room for sleeping and a big room for sitting and everything else and a sink and stove pressed over to a corner also near a small toilet room - all small and cramped and mysterious and old but he kept it well and only ever paid like 60 bucks a month back then for it all ('all' as he would say with pride) and he never kept much there some coffee and bread maybe some sandwiches and the like but for most everything else he was outside anyway - real food drink and stuff - and all this room ever was was a place to stay when necessary and a place to say one had when needed - actually a grand and wise set-up causing very little burden or drain and he seemed happy enough for that and it was never a wreck or anything either and he lived there within the mad qualifiers of an elementary religion which included lots of old-line Italian family stuff God and candles and people with names like Brindisi or Giacomo or Beltrando and Maria and which worked for him and how I ever hooked up with him I can't actually recall but it was from the westside piers that it began and from there it just went on and there were lots of other people too - some much more 'modern' than Frontini ever would be - and others I just knew peripherally and still others I just kept away from through reputation or witness (I just KNEW they were bad and didn't need the trouble) but still I knew I could always be represented by Frontini if I had to be.
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It was always like a TV oriented towards home and a surprising upper deck from which to view or that's what it seemed and the Vietnam War and its draft were raging and much of that became a subtext beneath so much of what went on - both in the streets and not - as young men and teens and boys (like myself) almost seemed to define and section things off only as they related primarily or secondarily to what the 'draft' would do to whatever plans were afoot - lottery numbers draft picks mandatory appearances for call-ups and physicals and the crafty strategy of deferments and school terms and all the rest and it was a constant undertow which seemed to pull back on any possible forward motion ('be the first one on your block to have you boy home in a box') : the caged ideal of all one's concepts became caught up in strategies and ploys which referred to the draft and the war and even to walk down Broadway sometimes seemed like the ordeal of a time held captive to war and its extremes : catcalls thugs and construction workers (who for some reason felt THEY had a right to be there and YOU didn't - they assumed of course you should be in Vietnam or if not then at the least SUPPORTING the war) - which first-off WASN'T a war (no one really knew what to call it) and which secondly bore no reality of its own but was instead a manufactured artifact of either side of the verbal conflict on the homefront and everyone (it felt if you believed all the country-stories) was getting married before they shipped out or mothballing their hot cars or turning them over to dad or little brother for the duration - all cute Life and Look magazine stories worth nothing in fact but some weird propaganda value but even in NYC most of this couldn't be avoided - it was everywhere like some filth or neglect in the gutters and curbs on each block and if you ever met one of those magazine people you'd want to puke anyway - they were always clean and perfect and simple starlets of some midwestern fantasy-world where everyone somehow drove station wagons or hot cars and all the girls stayed cute forever and any Danny Donny Dimmy went happily off to war (right after the last local football scrimmage at the high school field) and I never got onto par with any of that and never figured its Glen Campbell rightness out - never wanted to either - I instead always seemed to carry about something other - a hero worship I'd guess it could be called - for artistic dissidents and outcasts with a fierce determination to follow their examples and continue their quests and I lived too (and still do) with a maniacal fear of oppression by faceless institutions - 'outsiders the individualists the people who have a messianic view of themselves and are able to stick with their vision despite all odds - the people that can stick with that they're the ones that are really going to make a difference in the world and they will always be a small number.'