He doesn’t do the driving here, but you have to read this to get there
Here starts a framework of four long episodes (long, I say), available, starting now
The summer night is clear but strenuously muggy. The flesh is sweaty, gritty. Life is unfair. If you don’t love it, it will oppress you, because here that’s how it always is.
These are not the suburbs, but a continuation of one massive metropolitan area across the Hudson River and through its New Jersey vector, radiating exponentially for mile after congested mile and block after godforsaken block from neighborhood to nigh undifferentiated neighborhood, separated only by sudden changes in city name, in hellish proliferation of gargantuan intent – as though created to gratify The Beast.
A terrifying density of steel, flesh, and concrete, its non-stop emissions of gas, garbage, and grime meld with the natural effects of the local geography, formed of miles and miles of inlets, mighty inland waterways, bays, but especially awesome harbors, the first ones of the great American commerce, all of which trap the mid-Atlantic air here in a concrete jungle pressure cooker of dripping stygian humidity.
You can grab a handful of atmosphere and, squeezing, wring drops of exhaust-heavy water from it. Open your fist and note the sooty residue has already seeped into your palm lines, requiring, if you have the heart for it when you get home, hours of hot-water soaking and foam-soapy brush scrubbing – long and hard. Ha-ha!
Palisades of electric lights obliterate the stars, keeping the skies a throbbing humming florescent orange-pink, while air conditioners blast absolutely everywhere.
Many do this with their windows wide open, blaring late shows and rerun sitcoms from their TVs into the streets, oblivious of the massive energy wastage – and then they’ll complain about the bills…
… ‘Eeeyy, I no gonna pay dees sheet, man!’
But they pay – oh, they pay… for it is for the privilege of living in the greatest country in the world!
The greatest country in the world, I tell you!!!
For we are in the northern stretches of Hudson County, New Jersey: the smallest county in the-itself-diminutive Garden State, bundle-tied in great highway ribbons, but among the most densely populated and culturally diverse areas in the United States of America, and historic as hell…
… ‘Eeeyy, eez fokeen heestoreec, bro!!!’
***
In the balmy heat of this dripping night in the Summer of ‘15, obnoxiously idling astride several parking spaces at the 7-Eleven on the corner of Bergenline Avenue and 50th Street in the city of West New York is a 1971 two-door olive-colored and vinyl-topped Cadillac Eldorado; an 8-cylinder battle tank gas guzzler originating illegal car pollution the likes of which the Metropolitan and Greater Tri-State Area centered on New York City – the Greatest City in the World – has not known for the better part of 40 years.
It is the car of Anti Olifko’s upper middle-class father, who bought the shining heap to mark the birth of his son.
Seated in the front passenger seat of this car is Anti Olifko himself, who cannot drive, and who may be the Andrew Plumb exiled for many years in Kyiv, Ukraine, or an alternative parallel reality version of him – a Kyiv Commix doppelganger, or something like that.
In the driver’s seat alongside him is his longtime raggedy female companion he likes to refer to as ‘The Wife’, who revs the big engine from behind the wheel. Soot pours out of the exhaust, engulfing the 7-Eleven. The Wife revels in the power.
Anti Olifko cannot remember walking into his parents’ Connecticut home, past the backs of their silvery heads into the kitchen to get the Cadillac keys out of the drawer and then again walk past the backs of their heads, nodding off in front of the TV. Their minds dream achingly into visions of a dignified and illness-free retirement on a sailboat the old man keeps saying he’s going to buy, sailing back and forth, the old man expertly navigating the boat in a light breeze that never gets any stronger, on the bright, multi-hued and cloud-striated horizon of Long Island Sound, as the sun begins to set.
Somehow, though, Anti Olifko must have given The Wife the keys, and they must have gotten into the car and driven off – but when, and how? – otherwise, how would he be on Bergenline Avenue in West New York, just two blocks north of Union City in the northern reaches of Hudson County, New Jersey?
And how would he know exactly where he was, with the names of the cities and the streets intact – details of Jersey City, Weehawken, Hoboken, Union City, West New York, Guttenberg, and North Bergen – pouring out of his memory, the geography preserved to near perfection in his mind, even though he knows he had never been here?
Anti Olifko does not remember – not yet, at least – but I do.
For these are my memories and I am imparting them to him, according to my will; indeed, as much as I am placing Olifko anywhere I want him.
You see, these memories, they can’t be constructed from simply lifting geo info from the Internet. One, like I, has had to live here, walked and ridden and driven these streets many, many times, come to appreciate his origins here, his childhood and his growing up, even to love them, which would be to love himself (for, after all, if we don’t love ourselves, how can we expect others to love us?), to be able to tell, in a way that is convincing, genuine and real, everything I am about to tell you in this and the following several episodes of this adventure.
At the 7-Eleven, as the asphalt boat lurches in place, in what may be the greatest epiphany of his middle-aged life, Anti Olifko suddenly slaps a palm against the dashboard – the head and upper body bounce back and forth in rhythm.
In nervous reflex response, the scarecrow-marionette Wife convulses violently and accidentally floors the gas. Just imagine the miserable consequences if the car had been in gear instead of ‘Park’. Ha ha ha haaaaa…!!!
“Of course, of course,” Anti Olifko hollers, “I can’t write New York starting from the inside! I invite defeat from the word go. It’s too big! There’s too much of it! No one can do it, I tell ya, no one! It’s completely morphed stuff! It simply can’t be done!”
His voice cracks. The outbursts are emphatic, half-strangled because choked with emotion.
Counting her blessings as she recovers from shock, The Wife smiles at Olifko frighteningly broad-skull. Her teeth chatter from terror and from exhaustion and hunger-induced feverish cold. She shakes her floppy neon-radish head vigorously in fully expected devotion and support for her fierce and brilliant artist man. “I em zo provd off you, Anti – wery, wery…” she says. He is, after all, a Writer, and she knows this is the moment he is finally about to prove it.
It’s not for nothing she has inexplicably wound up behind the wheel of a ’71 Cadillac Eldorado, driving Anti Olifko around all day on a self-guiding historical tour of Hudson County, New Jersey.
‘Finally,’ she thinks to herself, despite her trembling: ‘Facking finelly…’
“Cannet ve zomting to get eat,” she then quoth, quietly pleading before Olifko.
“OF COURSE!!!” Olifko, however, is not responding to The Wife, but to the thoughts racing through his head.
[Narrator’s Note (as opposed to a Note from the Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board): Olifko has affected speech that’s natural; the lips twist and pucker, taking on the look and demeanor of an asshole, as the sounds and syllables come tumbling into the front of his mouth, finally exiting in exasperated lisps the way (and we all know this) some farts come out our asses in furtive hissing seeps. The eyebrows cross. He shakes his head back and forth in short rapid movements as he simultaneously lifts it and tilts it back (as he always does) to make his point. In his hyperventilating excitement he is nearly twitching.]
He suddenly realizes that without recording implements, even of the most primitive kind, he will not now be able to preserve the thoughts regarding his great work’s concept that his mind is so rapidly rattling off inside his head. For at the moment he lacks traditional notepad and pen, to say nothing of his laptop; there is no scrap of paper at hand, no pencil, for crying out loud; a stub – anything, for Pete’s sake, anything (NOTHING IN THE FUCKING GLOVE COMPARTMENT – SHIT… SHIT!!!)…
…“Give me your eyeliner!”
“U-at, U-at, my…”
“Damn it, I said give me your fucking eyeliner, your makeup, Maybelline, Max Factor… get me the fucking Avon Lady, for chrissakes – anything that can paint, draw… I can jot down some notes on the back of my hand! Anything, damn it – anything!!!”
“But, but” – The Wife is shivering – “I no khave-it makeup… I… I…”
“AAAHH!!! An epic, I tell you – my epic! Of New York! Manhattan! My Manhattan! And not in poetry, but in prose! Fuck you, Walt Whitman! Fuck you, Hart Crane! You two faggoty – ah… aaahh!!! It’s so clear to me now! All of the history, the start of the country – America begins! Brooklyn and the East River have nothing on Hudson County and the Jersey side of the island!
“Why, there’s Paulus Hook… and… and the fatal duel between Hamilton and Burr on the heights of Weehawken overlooking the Hudson shrouded in early morning mist, and… Liberty State Park, and… Hoboken’s incomparable waterfront, the train station and great old port terminal, the lion on the wall of the waiting hall promising ice water, the birth of baseball and the first ferry crossing! Damn… damn! How stupid I was! Why?! But now… fucking haaa!!!”
As Anti Olifko gloats in his unachieved literary triumph and dominion over The Wife, who is covering him in compliments through her chattering teeth, while softly reminding him how hungry she is so as not to stir up his wrath, he cannot remember how he got into Hudson County, New Jersey, as it seems that but a moment ago, he was, of all places in Kyiv, Uk –
“Nooo…, that’s ridiculous…”
Nevertheless, that odd feeling envelops him… it sinks into his consciousness the way his sweat sinks into his t-shirt.
Olifko’s eyebrows knit; he gets that old Lemko furrow between them – a particular genetic trait specific to a small, remote, all but isolated and nearly forgotten region of the Carpathians. His cheeks move up, the thin lips form a pinched upward curve and his small eyes close to wrinkled slits as he constructs that grimace of sarcasm and cynical disbelief over which he considers his mind superior. He raises his shoulders and rapidly shakes his head.
He reflects on his second-generation Ukrainian Diaspora background as a possible connection to the blurry picture. Somehow, he knows that city, Kyiv; knows it intimately, as though his roots were beckoning to him; and now he can’t say if he’d actually been there, lived there for the longest time, or if this is all just a waking dream, of which the impression left is so strong, it is actually convincing his mind of something that never was.
“I rejected all that stuff when I was a kid!” he angrily avers.
***
Anti Olifko’s mind again returns to its present moment in the big Cadillac parked obnoxiously across several spaces on a lot at the corner of Bergenline Avenue and 50th Street in West New York, the engine running, chugging heavy, 40-year-old exhaust at the 7-Eleven Olifko will momentarily enter to finally get some food – in this typically hot and muggy night on the New Jersey side of the immediate Greater Metropolitan Area.
Now reflecting on how The Wife has repeatedly but meekly pleaded with him for food, a sudden feeling of raw male animal power surges through Anti Olifko, as thoughts of himself as the Great Writer he’s about to become with the soaring prose epic of New York City he will write within the next two years coupled with his knowledge of The Wife’s frailty in hunger and complete dependence on him, and that only he it is who can feed her.
He laughs monstrously to himself in his mind. The leer breaking across his face cannot be restrained. His ego’s powerful abstractions combine to find purchase in the irrepressible throbbing of his id.
He thinks of pressing her head down to his crotch for a blowjob, so that he could laugh at his cruelty at her words that she’s hungry as he ‘feeds her’ – oh, the sweet, delicious irony – and now begins the familiar motion of the hand reaching out for the back of the head to bend it down, slowly – so as to give The Wife the necessary moment to understand what will presently be needed. Anti Olifko is about to growlingly rumble the words he so loves to repeat to The Wife in the moments he forces, such as these – ‘Yeeeees, that’s right… that’s right…’
… When a pair of aggressive Chicanos bursts out of the 7-Eleven and weave loudly toward the car, attracted to its strange out-of-place bulk and bigness. Both are heavyset, disarrayed, torn, greasy, scarred, ugly and frightening in their ugliness – one uglier than the other. Clearly, they are either drunk or drugged.
They peer into the salon – they are doped up, Olifko knows, much worse than drunk; scraggly face hair and distorted pockmarked slabs of dark and oily Mexican mug; vacant stoned black eyes swim in a depthless poison of space. And then one starts laughing, like some kind of evil spirit, a fiend, revealing broad broken spaced-apart teeth shaped differently from white people’s. He bangs a large hand on the blacktop vinyl, yelling:
“Eeey, dee fokeen Chihuahua beetch, she gonna sack ju deek, man!”
Worse, the other Chicano begins pounding the window of Olifko’s passenger-side door with the brown meat of his even larger fist:
“Een de beeg fokeen car, man – mos be som kindee fokeen Cadillac Rancho, bro…”
“Si-iii…”
“Si-iii…”
But they mysteriously dissolve in Hudson County’s heavy humid summer night air.
Coming soon – Episode 2… Watch for it in the next day or two in Kyiv Unedited portals near you…
Filed by JS, August 12, 2015