Trying, in vain, to see across the great divide

REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK

By: John Tredrea
    "Karma Chameleon, you come and go, you come and go …" — Boy George.
    "Tears of rage, tears of grief/Why must I always be the thief?" — Bob Dylan
   This is a rambling story. I can’t tell it any other way.
   Nearly 30 years ago, I left New Jersey, sure I would never return, to live in downtown Boston.
   It could be tough to find a job in those days, especially if you were new in town and knew nobody, which was my situation. I tried driving a cab. Didn’t know the streets, and got held up at gunpoint. That was enough of that. Then, saved by the only Help Wanted sign I saw on any business window in Boston or Cambridge, I took a job as a counterman in a luncheonette a few blocks from Harvard Square, for about two bucks an hour.
   You can’t live much on that, and soon I wound up parking cars, for about four an hour, at Kenmore Square, a few blocks from Fenway Park. The money wasn’t bad, especially during baseball season, when we got a lot of overtime and filled the lot, making good tips, whenever the Red Sox played. They were always fighting the Yankees for the pennant then. Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Yaz, Pudge Fisk … oh, it was something.
   Aside from the ballgames and the Friday and Saturday night stints (boy, were they wild) for the disco and punk rock crowds in the Kenmore Square music clubs, the workday Monday through Friday was 10 hours long, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. I worked the lot, which held about 150 cars if you packed it solid, which we did, with a guy named Rob Botti. A wonderful fellow I haven’t seen since 1979, and I’ve often wondered what became of him. A typical workday was a mad rush for the first two hours, getting all the cars in, and a mad rush the last two, getting them all out. The time in between was pretty quiet. We called it baby-sitting the cars, most of which had keys in them.
   While baby-sitting, we’d sit in the lot’s shack, listen to rock and jazz on the radio, and talk while we looked at the cars through the barred windows. There wasn’t anything else to do.
   When you have 30 hours a week to talk, you can hit most of the available topics, it seems. One day, I don’t remember how or why, Nazism and the Holocaust came up for discussion. We agreed that it was impossible to understand how, under any circumstances, "something like that could have happened … I mean, how could people do that kind of stuff and think it was a good idea?"
   Trying to find out, we both started to read everything in this area we could find. Rob even read Hitler’s "Mein Kampf" in its entirety, and as you may know it is not a short book, nor short on bombast and horror.
   But overall it was fascinating, if often grueling and heartbreaking, reading — as were the conversations we had along the way. But we never did figure out "how those horrible things could have happened." How could we? From what I’ve seen, the best explanation for that paralysis of understanding came in 1957 from Norman Mailer, who wrote of Nazism: "It presented a mirror of the human condition that blinded anyone who looked into it."
   I don’t see how you could put it any better than that, but that’s Norman for you. And, of course, his statement is equally relevant to the events of Sept. 11.
   My wife and our youngest son and I were in New York three days before it happened, for an experience that forms a counterpoint I’ll never forget.
   Like a lot of folks around here, we have quite a few ties to New York. We know people who live there or work there. My brother-in-law works there, as a cameraman for Bloomberg News. He was sent to near the World Trade Center after the planes hit and before the buildings collapsed, and was very lucky to get out of there unhurt.
   For myself, every trip to New York is a sentimental journey, and this Sept. 8 seemed unusually rich in a nostalgia that now seems here to stay. I was born in Brooklyn and spent the first half of my childhood there, in the Greenpoint section, near the East River. After we moved out of town, we went back every weekend for years, to visit an aunt whose family stayed in Brooklyn until they too moved out, in the mid-60s, during the era when New York was becoming a much tougher town indeed. And, right up to Sept. 8, we’ve continued to visit the city often. It’s part of us. We’re part of it. We’ll go back soon.
   On Sept. 8 — it’s still only a few weeks ago, but of course it seems much longer — we sat outdoors, in perfect weather, for lunch in a restaurant in Bryant Park, which in the bad old days was mostly a wretched place where losers went to buy drugs. Sitting there, I couldn’t get over the difference between the Manhattan of that afternoon and that of, say, 1973, when it seemed like garbage was blowing all over the place and it seemed like every other person on the street was either a hooker, a dope fiend or a flimflam man who’d mug you if you didn’t buy into his line of con artistry as if it were some kind of religion.
   "Boy, this town has come a long way back!" I marveled to my wife and son. "Isn’t it great? All it takes is time and some luck and work, I guess …"
   Lunch finished, we went to a nearby photography center, to witness the exhibit — in its last day — that was the reason we had come to town.
   It was a huge collection of photographs, of refugees and migrants, taken by Sabastio Salgado, of whom I had never heard before this exhibit came to town. The photographs were taken all over the world during a span of about 20 years. How that guy accomplished what we saw that day is something I’ll never be able to understand. He went to the unluckiest, most dangerous places on earth and took pictures of people uprooted — usually by war. If not war, it was by famine or natural disaster. There were pictures from Mexico, Indonesia, the Amazon jungle, the Far East, the Middle East, the sub-Continent, Bosnia, all over Africa … the list goes on and on.
   I didn’t look at all the pictures. I bet no one else there did either. It was too painful, too overwhelming, too much of the mirror that blinded you when you looked into it.
   The one that hit me the hardest was of a Hong Kong "camp" for Vietnamese refugees. There was a long row of cages, each about the size you’d see for a midsize dog in a veterinarian’s office around here. The cages were stacked two high. The row of cages extended for a distance that looked about equal to two or three city blocks.
   There were young children in the cages. The cage in the foreground held more kids than I could count. Some of them were slumped on the floor, shadows in rags. Others had their fingers wrapped around the bars. They were screaming.
   The photographs were testimony that hell is no myth. There is hell on earth, and it is vast in its size, in its number of condemned inhabitants, and its effects. The misery of hell, where, of course, there are devils, must be one of the seeds fanaticism needs to grow to the strength witnessed Sept. 11. Or so it seems to me. But I can’t say for sure. Every time I try to see past that day and into its source, I’m blinded. There must be a prophecy somewhere in this turn of events. But what?
   Perhaps we’ll know when they’ve finished their course, or most of it. When and if that time comes, whether we’ll be willing to admit to ourselves what we surely know will be, as ever, a separate question.