My Town - Bibblings| David Scribner's journal for thought, ideas, commentary, images, fiction observed and imagined

My Town

By David Scribner

Welcome to the first edition of "Bibblings," a weekly collection of observations, rants, ramblings, queries and meditations upon life in the picturesque hills of Western Massachusetts. If it has a remote resemblance to a column that once appeared in print in the local press, written by the paper's editor whose name is forbidden to be mentioned any more in its pages, so be it. More on that situation in a later chapter.

Most days, I work out of Digital Blend, a coffee shop on the main drag in my home town of Pittsfield. If you have a comment or query you'd like to contribute to this scribbling, stop by, or if it's too risky to be seen talking to me, write out your comments and give them to DB's owner, Alison Fezzie (see photo below). No questions asked. On Monday, coffee is a buck a cup. Out of town? Send an e-mail to bibblings@scribbyworld.com

Some of you may not be familiar with this region or with the fading factory city of Pittsfield, once the high voltage capital of the nation, so let me tell you a little bit about this rural backwater known as the Berkshires and the city at the center of it, my home town, whose population by and large is still uncertain about what Herman Melville was up to a century and a half ago down at a spread on the southeastern side of town where he conceived the great American epic of passionate, suicidal obsession with dominance of the natural world.

I am looking out upon the city's main thoroughfare, called North Street, dominated by banks at one end, by social service agencies and flop houses at the other. It was once the busy center of community life before the town was deserted decades ago by the richest corporation on earth, General Electric. Every Thursday night, when the GE issued paychecks - people call the 250-acre crumbling manufacturing complex "the GE," signifying respect and a sense of permanence ... the bars were crowded and the stores stayed open late. Hardly anyone at that time realized that the insulating oil used in the manufacture of GE transformers, whose development and distribution kept food on the table for thousands, oil that soaked workers' clothing and seeped into basements was a carcinogen. Nor would they have believed how the managers at the GE were conniving to conceal how that contamination had been allowed to spread throughout the community, saturating yards and playgrounds and parks.

Pittsfield endured a fate typical of a city dependent upon rapacious and fickle industry, then moving on, so typical, in fact, that marketing surveys have decreed my town to be terminally average ... that is, American. Before the latest retail miracle ... an electrostatic mop or flavored instant coffee or fluorescent nail polish ... hits the shelves at Wal-Mart ... all to be made in overseas sweatshops, of course, despite what the label says ... it is test marketed here. But you'll find my town - and its circumstances -- to be anything but average, in the sense implied by the courtesans of commerce; you'll find them to be just like those in your town.

In my town, for instance, the town square's an oval, eroded at its original corners by traffic circling endlessly, day and night, like toys caught in a bathtub drain. No decent highway department can tolerate circles for long, so they're going to pave over the park next year to make a giant four-way intersection. Good for business, they say; don't want anything unique in my town. They can then put the town Christmas tree in the back of a new pickup, park it in front of a bank, and charge the truck dealer for the display. That's Yankee ingenuity. Privatizing the human spirit.

Before the park became well-rounded, back in the days when the city was an outpost in the wilderness, it was a graveyard. Soon, too many had died and the graveyard in the center of life became filled up. The town fathers decided to move what they could salvage from the graves to a larger plot. They called that land the Common.

It turns out, though, they didn't remove all the bodies; some bones remained, in and out of coffins, as the city discovered some years later as its downtown grew and they excavated for the police station and City Hall built over the forgotten burial grounds ... which may account for some of the strange things that happen. I'm probably sitting over a few unrecovered corpses right now as I write this; the police station is a few steps away. Be that as it may, the old central graveyard became the site of the country's first agricultural fair ... before cars they paved over fertile ground.

Before long, The Common wasn't large enough, either. Unlucky planning, that. Once again, they hauled out the coffins. This time, they carted them to a farm on the western side of town, situated in a floodplain. They put up a stone arch and called it the city cemetery.

In my town, the lake's on fire. In my town, the ground is poison. In my town, the river's in surgery. My town is home to the walking dead.

Down the street by the YMCA, down by the Boys and Girls Club, where drug dealers hang out and make their exchanges as parents escort their kids to swimming lessons; down by the Melville building where street people crash upstairs and across the street from two tattoo emporiums is Jean's Cleaners. It's next to the senior center, remodeled out of a defunct movie theater called The Capitol. The young woman behind the counter is Brooke, blonde and cheerful with lively eyes that squint through her glasses when she makes up the laundry order. She has rings on all her fingers. When I dropped off a few shirts and pants the other day, I noticed she was cockier than usual. I asked why.

"I'm leaving town December 1," she declared. "I'm going to Las Vegas; I going to be a poker dealer. I'm going to school for it and I want to get into the ExCalibur, the biggest casino on the strip.

"I've lived 21 years in Pittsfield, and there are no opportunities here. I've never been to Las Vegas, but when I see the people here, growing old with nothing, I said to myself I'm not going to let that happen to me. I'm going somewhere where I can earn money to go to college and buy a house."

In my town, the movie theaters closed up, shut down. Once, there were seven. Now, they're at the mall, next town over. There's some talk about converting a once elegant, four-story rundown building with its tessellated exterior ... it's right across the street ... into a cinema center, but it looks like most of the money for entertainment is going into restoring an old theater building on the south end of town ... the Colonial. That's where the rich folks want to be, not rubbing elbows with ordinary folks.

The Colonial was a white elephant when it was built in 1903, and it still is, but it regained some luster after the First Lady came by a few years back to designate it a historic American treasure. It will take the treasury to run it ... the public treasury. Private money isn't touching it. The white elephant is pork in disguise.

When and if the Colonial does open, looks like tickets to events will be beyond the means of the average Pittsfield bloke, who's working two jobs at minimum wage to keep house and home together. But crisp white shirts and bow ties, pearls and sleek silk of the puffed up power brokers and their consorts will look just fine in the Colonial's box seats and restored plaster rococo dÈcor. They'll smile to themselves, tap their canes, and nod to their neighbors when they read their names in each program as donors and board members. Puttin' on the Ritz in Pittsfield. And during the intermission in the lobby they'll sip glasses of champagne served by waiters and waitresses who'd rather see a movie.

In my town, a jeweler got the boot. Across from the coffee shop, Dino Zabian's moving his "Dino's Fine Jewelers" off North Street. He'd had enough of parking tickets, so says word on the street. He'd park his Cadillac in front of his store in the 90-minute spaces, leave it there all day, and ignore the tickets. Finally, they put a Denver boot on his Caddy, so he's packing up. I sympathize. I know all about the Denver boot.

In my town, there's plenty of trash and free pickup each Friday morning, but there's a lot of regulations about what does and does not qualify as waste. Old chairs? Gone. But hedge trimmings ... forget it, the garbologists aren't allowed to consider it, under the inviolable rules of refuse removal. They're fastidious.

And that's their weakness. If you're desperate to get rid of yard debris, here's a tip that works: cover the branches, twigs, leaves, your ex, or whatever you want those side-riding cowboys to take - and don't they just love to throw your garbage bin in the middle of the road, when they've had their way with it? - cover that stuff, I say, with a frosting of dirty disposable diapers. No self-respecting trashman will paw through it to see what's underneath. Spongy diapers? No way. Where are my rubber gloves? Hurry up, Andy, dump that thing. Let's move on.

Believe me, it works like a charm. In my town, in yours.

Next week: News you won't find in the newspaper. Send your queries and comments to bibblings@scribbyworld.com, or stop by Digital Blend. For more irreverence, go to www.bimbopolitics.com, where Jacuzzi holds court.