JAKE JANNSEN - DRIVING WEDGES

274. JAKE JANNSEN - DRIVING WEDGES (nyc, 1968):

When you drive a wedge you’ve got to drive it deep and hard so as to split the material it is entering - like ideas or philosophy I always thought that perfectly summed up the idea of revolution and subversive stuff : in no way an arms-carrier mind you I often did my share of breaking down the barricades and was never one to shy away from pushing for forms of violence or theft so as to take back what was illicitly gained in the first place - and if you look back at any of the big names in American finance or history you really can find that originally the source of any fortunes always came from graft corruption or some other form of law-breaking : buying of votes influence peddling trading in illicit freight or sanctioned good or – for that matter – making money from the buying and selling of armaments and bullets to both sides of any quarrel and (seemingly) taking a stance which favored both sides depending on to whom you were talking - all those Cos Cob estate and Wall Street fortunes ? all a sham a travesty and the rest - lawyers guns arms and money booze women slaves and the remainder of all that bootleg ancient trade in factors too sensitive to mention let alone the killing and beheading of hundreds of thousands and more of native Americans – called ‘Indians’ here’ who maybe just happened to be ‘in the way’ of all those double-crossed promises and pretenses with which the big military brass and the sovereign rights of the All-Mighty American power types ran through them like a lance through butter – one elongated steady and constant fell swoop as it’s put – and I for myself was never one to believe too much in any of that old ‘American’ nation-building Manifest Destiny Enlightenment Founding Fathers crap even though I knew and saw that it was being pushed at every opportunity by whomever it was at any moment who stood to gain something from it - banks or car dealers or politicians or schools or liars and cheats of whatever persuasion there could be who hung around sales reps’ offices and commercial agencies suspended in a greedy suspension of dis-belief so as to believe any of the bullshit penny-ante crap they were being paid to peddle and if they had to use the unlimited glories and high ideals of the great American Republic then so be it they’d do it - by those means were bodies delivered when needed were huge tracts of land and forests ripped and shredded for more and more stupid highway conversions subdivisions and rows after rows of stores shops malls and fantasy-amusement sham artifice - each one somehow connected with a built-up completely false made-up and concocted storyline befitting what it was they were meant to sell : some smarmy shit-assed Walt Disney like co-option of dream and subconscious in whichever manner those concepts intersected with real-true-daily-American money-making PRODUCTION - life as a sham and nothing more : at the end of 23rd Street there was the old pillar-and-shed construction of a pier long abandoned and in there lived an old wiry guy named Jenck Jannsen – some old Dutch or Swede or some sort of ancient American type who refused to budge and just stayed hunkered down there for as long as he chose – he looked to be about a hundred already but probably was no more than a cool forty-five but I never cared because no matter what he looked like Lazarus fresh from the grave - WWII Army veteran part-time gravedigger collecting a tiny bit of government money from service rendered and age and time but other than that the best he could do was get some change from passers-by or an occasional small heist of one sort or the other and I’d spend many a late afternoons just sitting around there sometimes with him watching the skies darken and the old wet winds come up blowing and in those days all along that west side area was truck freight and cargo depots and ship lines and piers and wharves and the like – and all of them had with them their own population of roustabouts flamers cargo guys heavers builders sailors with the occasional trader or buyer and seller mixed in - they were of course the ones in the most jeopardy because they wee always easy touches or easy types into whose cars it was a simple task to break and then take whatever it was could be found - sometimes cash money or briefcases with goods and samples and the rest - and nothing ever came of it and they never really knew what happened anyway but every so often somebody would get lucky and find a lot of this or that - and other times of course it would go bad and somebody would take a beating or get stabbed or pummeled and arrested – whatever and however it went – and the taxi guys would come around with their cabs and fares and people inside were sometimes unconscious or zoned out or drugged silent or tripping and whatever came of them was their problem and it went from every extreme you could think of to the other – talking here sex theft debasement and even just dumping off - drugs were becoming more prevalent as were the stupid misfits and kids tramping in from wherever and they always had nothing but trouble coming to them - so that even this Jannsen guy even he would sometimes have to look the other way to not see something he’d rather not know about or be witness to and anyway that was how he spent most of this time that and drink anyway and any time I spent there was time spent just watching and learning things seeing how they were done and watching how the graceful dull mantle of Fall and Winter settled in on the great awkward plain of New York Manhattan City as it fell : one time were sitting around together and he told me of the story he’d heard from like a hundred years back when parts of this area were still marshweed and mud and how it was once then the most dangerous place to be and bloodhounds and cops would sweep through the reeds and the flats almost every day looking for one or another thug or Irish dead body or businessman millionaire who’d been cut to death and dumped in these marshes while the family mansion and the estate goods were all looted and ruined and the building gutted and the firemen who all went along with the charade and the Westside crazy gangs who did this stuff – all those weird names I could never get straight – and he said sometimes if you went diligently ‘bout yer’ task you could still here and there find evidences of the old days even if it was just a bone or two but ‘skulls was the prizes the real gold – they can getch’a seventy-five bucks sometimes’ and yeah well I believed him anyway but by then everything had been turned over anyway and filled in with the muck and oil of the modern day but I listened nevertheless – and this went on for some time and then one day he wasn’t there no more and then the next and the next and I never knew what happened but it was the dead of Winter and he probably could have met his own dead of Winter in his own way by then anyway and yeah – for a long while – the old shed just stood there standing and always reminding me of him.