On Becoming Tina

PART ONE

Humans are only one of the many colonies that inhabit the Earth. I bet ants think they are hot shit too.

On a summery Fall day, when the sun hung low and the leaf dust picked up easily in the breeze, I walked along the winding empty road leading from the Casino to the TV Station. These are old boots, the buckle on one side waves awkwardly after being ripped from rage and the other boot is too tight on my broken toe nail. I meander along with a mask in hand contemplating the fore-bearers of this road that divided the crumbling walls of a massive steel factory. I tried to follow the ghosts of workers’ past in the narrow footholds of the rusted ladder rungs. There must have been a man who’s entire job was to climb up into the sun and then back down again. He must have carried the daily hope for a safe landing, as there was never a guarantee that he wouldn’t be going home that night. His wife was at home, in her 50 cent dress and quitter wool socks stuffed loyally into her five year old worn down leather tie-up boots boiling chicken bones for broth and formula for the new baby. The new baby was the 8th born to Ania and Jacek, the 5th to be born alive and the fourth to make it to two months.

They had left Poland in 1896 with the hope of escaping the troubles brewing from the working poor and what was left of the Polish aristocracy. They, like many other Polish-born Americans equated the proposed freedoms of a new country, at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, to be a safer bet than remaining in the uncertainty of their re-developing country. As devout Catholics, moving to Bethlehem, PA, a city named after the birthplace of Christ, held all of the hopes for a better life for themselves and children.

They had come from generations of farmers and farmlands that no longer had stability. You could just smell that violence was rising from the peasants to the disagreements in the territorial and fluctuating government. Ania’s mother, father, and brother were dead from disease. Her only sister was working in a brothel in Warsaw. Jacek’s family emigrated years later, bringing Ania a gift, boots made special by her uncle, a shopkeeper in Galicia.

It’s about a twenty minute walk from the Casino to the TV Station and in twenty minutes, my ghost-walk reset my priorities. I was no longer complaining about my buckle or my stupid toe, I was on topic and on a mission. I was going to tell the public what I know about The Green Party of Pennsylvania, a relatively newer political party rising from the dust of the working class, from the very ground I was walking.

Kicking through the metal bits of bony human toll, fenced off hammered-bent steel pipes that looked like gigantic manmade trees yet lead to the furnaces, the railroad, the boxcars, and the graveyard, I got a sense of humility. What do I know about the blood and sweat of suffering long hours in extremes of weather to pay for the necessities?

I can only relate to the physical toll from various jobs I have had. In particular, I worked for my Uncle in the Summer of 1993 and again in the Summer of 1994. My life-work balance at 18 was at best, shifty.

It was difficult to manage a robust social life with drinking friends and waking up still half-loaded and high at 6 AM to the blaring sun of the old hotel/farmhouse my grandmother and step-grandfather had left to their youngest sons. I’d roll up the blankets I used as my bed, threw them next to my guitar to find some clothing I didn’t mind destroying for the art of painting houses. I didn’t mind destroying most of my three outfits for art and the art of living, or for Punk Rock for that matter. With a cup of coffee and cigarette in hand, I inhaled the softness of the country watching the morning dew drip back into the ground. Was there anyway to get out of today? I placed my paper painter’s cap on to cover my green mohawk-styled hair and climbed into the truck bed of that old Ford, already regretting choices I had made. I had recently dropped out of Art School. My family’s disappointment in me was offset by the fact that I had almost died.

I had gone to Art School long enough to learn to pay more attention to lines of everything. In particular, as a house painter, it was the architecture. Following the bead of paint over the hand carved molding or lattice helped me develop a sense of pause, patience, and forgiveness. The heat of the Summer day would cook up and I would find myself dripping sweat into the paint pans, so yes, my sweat is trapped somewhere in the details of those old houses on Main Street, Pennsburg, PA.

Hearing the sound of my own breathing over the chirping birds and distant sound of barking dogs in backyards, the circumstances of how this home was built came to be questioned. They were row houses erected in the early 1900’s, PA German built, PA German maintained. They were wider than the rows I had seen from factory towns.

I wonder now what additional money these people had over the tenements of cities. These home dwellers had generations of American born possibilities and the space to build wider. They had acquired some wealth and standards. Their great-great grandparents were farmers, they were the siblings left out of property divisions, but they still had one thing in common, rightful claims to land ownership.

The German farmer’s who came to PA in 17th-18th Century were brought together by common goals of survival and perpetuation. Their children married their neighbors at the churches that sprung up in these central locations. A General Store, a hotel on old route 29, a Grade School, a doctor, and a Sheriff were all that a town needed to grow.

Back when Hans married Olga a union of wealth was made. Their land holds afforded a rugged farm life, but it meant they would never go hungry, they could always hunt and fish. It meant they never went without shelter, they had trees they could chop down to build, and dusty old deeds dating back to William Penn. Hans and Olga had 10 children, 7 of them survived infancy.

What they acquired was then handed to their offspring and the wealth combined and grew. Time and Industrialization began and later young Johann (only son of Hans and Olga) and Gertie decided to put their money in the bank, it was less certain. The modern ways of predatory banking and capitalist theft, with the promise of idealistic and opportunistic politicians hypnotizing them with the possibilities of a less rugged life turned their natural resources to a commodity.

They struck a deal with the Bank to borrow money to build a modern house on Johann’s rightful portion the farmland that included indoor plumbing. His sisters did not have any rights to this land. Most of them married other neighbors.

According to the bank manager, it would only take ten years to pay back the debt and they would have a home worth the envy of their peers. Johann and Gertie’s lives were put into the Free Market as a gamble to increase the possibilities of success for their own children.They even gave their children English names to offer a better chance at progress, denouncing generations of namesakes in doing so. Gertie died giving birth to their fourth child at 24.

Eight years into the loan, Johann began to drink heavily. Their oldest child Margaret, 7, was pulled from Grade School to manage the household. When her father wasn’t sick from booze, he worked the farm, but his yield never matched their debt. He found his new home away from the sadness of his home in a bar where he pissed away what little he earned. On one particular night, the pastor of their church arrived with his wife to talk with Johann about his troubles. They were worried about Margaret and the other children, as they had stopped attending Sunday school. The pride that Johann held onto was greater than his will to survive and he threw the them out at gun point. This set off a chain of tragic events. Johann tucked the children into their beds. He himself, settled into his chair with his pipe. Drinking his fill of malted liquor by the fireside, he fell asleep as the contents of his pipe lit the braided rug Gertie had woven from the clothing of her dead mother who had passed four years prior from Consumption. The smoke soon filled the home and woke baby Joseph, which woke Elizabeth, who woke up Margaret and Charles. Margaret, too young, had gathered her siblings to walk to their grandparents as the smoke and flames filled the winter sky. The crisp frozen grass crunched under their little bare feet. Johann died in the fire that demolished his home that night at the age of 27.

The children arrived at main house to find that their grandfather was ill from age in bed and her grandmother hearing voices of demons who, she said, made her forget things. With the help of the pastor, they were sent to live with their spinster Aunt in Philadelphia.

Aunt Ingrid was 34 and made her living as a typist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She lived in a proper apartment for unmarried women near Rittenhouse Square. She had long since become accustomed to living in the city primarily among other working women of respectable employment.

Upon their arrival, it was obvious to all that her housing was too confined and not child friendly so Ingrid decided it was best to move them back to Pennsburg. She wrote a letter to her old school friend Otto of whom she learned was building new homes on Main Street. Her hopes were for a corner house with French Lattice work enveloping the front and back porches. The added cost was deducted from the settlement of her brother’s home.

In the aftermath of the fire, the debt to the bank had been transferred to their parent’s estate. Which meant that a lien on the farm was placed in lieu of payment. This additional loan gave the family an opportunity to afford the costs of raising the children left in destitute. Ingrid received a monthly allowance to oversee and of course to pay the extra for the lattice work on the new home.

This was not the life that Ingrid had been building in the City. She was not particularly fond of children. Cold, distant, bitter, and often abusive she often reminded the children of the burden that was placed on her by her selfish brother and family. Her own dreams unrealized, she sought every opportunity to torture in revenge by withholding food, forcing labor, and beat them with a maple stick she claimed from the front yard. She excused her harshness as a program to teach them the discipline she felt her brother lacked.

However cruel Ingrid was, she was also insistent on education. Margaret went back to grade school accompanying her siblings as they grew. They went on to learn to read and write, which was progress and something their grandparents had not had an opportunity to do. They also became townies, which was deemed as a level higher than their mud-caked farmer family. They wore shoes every day and had the crispest clothes to wear to Church every Sunday.

It was with great town pride and patriotism when Charles and his friends signed up for military duty in May 1917. The entire world was at war.

While I worked my paint brush around the the curls of Otto’s lattice work, my sweat infused in the layers of paint and paint chips, I ruminated on what had become of Margaret. I was convinced that she never sought marriage or had children, in fact, I believe that she became a Suffragette. Following her Aunt’s foot steps, moved to Philadelphia a year prior to WW1. While Charles ended up coming back from Germany blown to bits in a government issued coffin, Joseph went to University, and Elizabeth married Otto’s youngest son Fritz and he worked at the bank.

I made six dollars an hour, under the table. Also, under the table were the bills that were extracted like my portion of rent, food, cigarettes came off the top. I don’t remember ever having more than twenty dollars in my hand at any time, but if I did, it went straight to the Pottstown Diner for those grilled cheese sandwiches and lemon-filled Tastykakes from the Turkey Hill in Barto.

At that point, the most cash I ever had at one time was $700. It was the money left over from student loans months before in Washington DC. I bought a Pentax K100 for school and a pair of 20-holed green Doc Marten boots at a punk shop in Georgetown.