Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Pointless Nostalgia

The Bootleg Circus

circus030The circus was coming to town. Some bootleg circus. I was only seven years old but I could spot a bootleg circus. A bootleg circus tries to fool you with names that sound vaguely like “Ringling Bros.” A bootleg circus sets up in the rocky, swampy field across the street from your future high school, behind the lot where the town kept its busted school buses and surplus road salt.

My dad was excited about the bootleg circus, way more than he was for most anything. He did not often express enthusiasm for anything. Especially not for something as corny as the circus. His default expressions stayed within the narrow range between sputtering anger and sarcasm. Even the things he liked were approached without much visible delight, with an unspoken acknowledgment that said I have seen this a million times before.

However, my dad would periodically latch onto something and decide we must do/see/hear it as a family. Every six months or so he’d declare I feel like having a steak. Whereupon we’d find ourselves at Loughran’s, an Irish pub like every other Irish pub you’ve ever seen except that it had prime rib and it was a 5 minute drive away. Once that desire was sated, he’d revert to his usual smirking ways until another six months had passed and the prime rib bug bit him again.

So it was with this bootleg circus. He proclaimed he wanted to see it, so we would. His level of excitement for such earnest entertainment was remarkable in itself. What made it even crazier was his enthusiasm was inspired by the bootleg circus’s featured performer: Tiny Tim.

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NYC, Pointless Nostalgia

Seizures

As the subway doors unlatch, someone shoves me in the back, hard. This is more than the usual L train jostle. It is especially aggressive even for the Union Square stop, where the “I’m ignoring your humanity to make my commute slightly easier” brush-by is standard operating procedure. This move must have sinister purpose behind it, I assume. And so I pivot from my 7:30 am perch on the overhead bar and turn to face my aggressor. I have nothing planned other than a dirty look. I do this all the time even though it’s a move with no upside whatsoever. At best, I will get to see the face of someone who regards me as little more than an insect. At worst, I will find myself in a fistfight.

When I turn, I see the man who shoved me. Shaved head, black windbreaker scuffed with sheetrock dust and eggshell paint. He has the lumbering gait of a drunk launching himself from one parking meter to the next on the long walk home. He may very well be drunk, for all I can tell. This wouldn’t be the first guy I’ve seen stewed to the gills at this early hour on the subway. Then he careens into a woman much smaller than him, his shoulder stooping to her height. It doesn’t look intentional. He’s fighting something, and losing. His knees buckle beneath him, and his head begins to twitch and jerk.

“He’s having a seizure!” a woman yells. It sounds like dialogue from a script that doesn’t trust its director to explain things visually. I almost laugh, and yet I understand the urge to yell out something the second it hits your brain at a weird moment like this one. The crowd parts around the man, and the sudden lack of bodies speeds his descent. However, he has enough control of his facilities to lower himself, first sitting, then prone as he continues to shake.

The train remains paused. Not to address the man’s condition, but to let out the large crowd of people who depart at Union Square. Some of those who remain stare, while others look away, embarrassed. No one is quite sure what to do. We’re all spooked, myself included. But I’m spooked for a different reason. This all feels too familiar to me.

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Pointless Nostalgia

Jean Shepherd: Strange Tales of New York

shep2I have often waxed at great length about my love of Jean Shepherd’s radio show, here and elsewhere. I’ve written about and shared many kinds of programs of his over the years: nostalgic, anti-nostalgic, childhood tales, army tales, philosophical meanderings, and various combinations of the above.

Another thing he did well on his shows—something I haven’t really touched on before—is his ability to convey a mood of eeriness, of creeping, unnameable terror. Around Halloween, he loved to dedicate shows to stories about the Jersey Devil (and occasionally its lesser known cousin, the Kentucky Devil). He did many other shows about the pull of the supernatural and the fear of ghosts. But more often, he would talk about the terror of the everyday, the weird, creepy things happening right under our noses.

For no good reason at all, I want to share one such show, which aired on April 14, 1970. It starts with Shep sharing a bone-chilling news story from New Orleans, where creepy things tend to happen with some regularity. But then he shifts into a tale from the days when he first moved to New York, and his somewhat desperate attempts to find friendship in a city that can make newcomers feel crushingly alone. The story starts out amusing, involving wild parties, random encounters, and lapsed drunken monks (really), but it quickly deteriorates into a sad and chilling arena. Shep closes out the show with another story, this one about helping a friend investigate an apartment he’s interested in renting. Finding a place to live in New York is terrifying enough, but this story goes beyond even the usual level of terror and into a special, weird place.

Though Shep’s stories in this show refer to things that happened in the 1950s and 1960s, there’s something eternally New York about these stories, a very New York brand of loneliness and sadness and squalor that few people wrote about then and even fewer write about now. I found it genuinely unnerving to listen to because it all felt so real to me, and I find it amazing he was able to convey this feeling with only his voice (although a creepy Stockhausen composition helped, I suppose).

Enjoy (if that’s the word). Just don’t listen to it with the lights off.

[audio:http://scratchbomb.com/media/1970-04-14-Strange-Tales-of-NY.mp3]