Archie Chamberlain: Upstater

That’s bullshit. Fear of the outside world my ass. I’ve been all over the place. I’ve gone hiking in the Adirondacks. I’ve been to like rock concerts in downtown Rochester (some refer to it as Crotchfester). I’ve been out west—all the way past Buffalo, almost to Erie, PA. I used to make out with a girl in the moonlit cemetery of Johnson City, that huge hillside graveyard that seems to go on and on for acres. On Westscott Street in Syracuse, I’ve had rocks thrown at me by roaming street thugs as I wandered around, searching for pot dealers. “You on the wrong muthafuckin street, muthafucka!” Near the harbor of Oswego, I’ve seen drunks strip down bare-ass and do a kind of high-wire act, tip-toeing down a bridge’s thin railing, teetering and wobbling along 50 feet above the water without falling in. Not long ago Moissinac and I got drunk on expensive tumblers of whiskey in the lounge of Binghamton’s Marriott, and after the Marriott we proceeded to explore the titty bars of Binghamton, where the mean age of the dancing ladies is forty-two years of age.

I’ve had many adventures. I’ve walked down the gorges of Ithaca, past the signs that had been posted reading FURTHER ACCESS OFF LIMITS – WALKWAYS UNDER CONSTRUCTION and I scrambled over the crumbling concrete staircases, the precipices without railings. I also went and saw Garrison Keillor wheeze out his live radio broadcast from Cornell’s campus, and suffered through all his references to the Odyssey. I’ve attended weddings in Cicero and clambakes in Unadilla and listened to the epic profanity given voice in the kitchens of Utica’s Italian restaurants. I’ve been chased away from Solvay Reservoir by cops as wheezing as Garrison Keillor. I’ve been to Troy. How’s that for fear of the outside world? I’ve walked across the frozen surface of Skaneateles Lake, examining all the waterfront mansions along its western shore from the up-close, rare and fleeting vantage point that disappears with every spring thaw. I’ve hitchhiked to a Barnes & Noble in Albany to hear William Kennedy read from his latest novel about a burning hotel. I’ve counted the little shattered crack-vials strewn around the bus station in Elmira. I’ve pitched tents in Trumansburg, Sherman, Gilboa, Sterling, Paul Smiths, Fredonia and felt the chill descend around a thousand peed-on bonfires. I know Route 17 like the back of my hand. I’ve read the fierce anti-Cuomo/anti-Pataki graffiti spray painted on billboards along the Thruway as it passes through the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation.

In the wee hours of the morning at Alfred University, I’ve stood on the balcony overlooking the infernal glass-blowing studio, watching coked-up art students pacing to and fro blowing glass all morning to a grimy hip hop beat, turning out custom-made swirled glass bongs and pipes and chillums by the hundreds, to be resold for a tidy profit. And then saw the same glistening merchandise beng sold from padded display cases at Phish concerts in Rome, Weedsport, Canandaigua, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Likewise I have witnessed and could chart for you the cat-and-mouse game between nitrous balloon dealers and cops at the same Phish concerts, the surveillance and countersurveillance and constant moving of tanks just a hair’s breadth in front of the law.

I could recite the lyrics to every folk song ever written about the Erie Canal, because in elementary school I’ve sat in auditoriums with grouped classes and heard them sung to me countless times whenever the Official NYS Troubadour came around with bills to pay and gigs to sign. I am one of only a handful of people my age who could tell you the geographic difference between Oswego, Otsego, Otego, and Owego.

I attended college for a few disastrous years in Dexby, deep in lake effect country where the best learning takes place. I majored in Superiority/Inferiority Studies with a minor concentration in Pointless Gestures, topics I still have some vestigial interest in, in spite of my recent withdrawal from college. I lived in a strange apartment abutting the north side of Dexby College’s triangular campus. I split the rent with an education major from Buffalo named Sam Martello. Sam Martello was a Renaissance man; his summer job was working for an electronics firm in Buffalo designing non-violent video games. He played the sax in numerous college bands and had a nice little harem of moist panting women in the audience at any given time, in spite of the tragic premature balding which he hid under a Cleveland Indians cap). Perhaps it was the fact that he never failed to treat these women with a gently diverting respect that still managed to communicate sexual interest, a social move I could never seem to mimic just right. Sam and I could compete to see who could stand upright on the wobbly logs that lines our driveway longest. Sam would never become inebriated or classlessly rude to anyone at all the house parties I saw him at. He made his presence at parties scarce and was thus very much sought for, wheread my presence was always slavishly guaranteed and therefore became devalued currency like the Weimar deutschmark, an item of little importance or value.

Sam Martello quoted Shakespeare with a mock-Olivier accent. He knew how to make wine. Like Parsifal I was summoned out to Dexby’s Walmart, to find and purchase a large Rubbermaid garbage can one day. Sam had left early that morning, went missing, no one knew where, and later returned to the apartment, staggered in the door stooped like a Tibetan penitent, under immense green canvas hocket-sized dufflebags bursting with loads of stolen grapes. He’d wandered through the vineyards of western New York, gleaning the unused and unwanted cuttings of grapes: Vitis labrusca, pest- and winter-resistant, but still “foxy” inferior East Coast fruit. Which we took turns mashing with our feet, an activity I’d only seen on I Love Lucy reruns. But there Sam Martello marched, in the Rubbermaid, corduroy pants rolled up, blasting Coltrane’s “Ascension,” pouring on the yeast: the guerilla vintner.

“This batch will be parting gift,” he told me as I sat on the couch, which we’d found on the side of the road at semester’s beginning.

“Parting gift for who?”

“For our class graduating in June.”

We concealed the still in his bedroom, where all semester long the strange intestinal glass valve he’d fixed to its top would flatulate at curious intervals. How I’ll always love our Marx Brothers misdirections, whenever the old battleaxe landlady came around without warning to show off the place to prospective tenants for next year, both wide-eyed female Sam Martello worshippers…and a sudden borborygmic fermentation-bubble would erupt beneath Sam’s curiously tall laundry pile.

But while Sam and the rest of the graduating class all marched to campus each day and earned their credits, I instead smoked ganja through impromptu dented soda cans, smoking aluminum brain damage, spent my hours watching a beam of sunlight strike the twirling LP of the Jakob Boehme Jam Band’s last album on Sam’s turntable, saw the light refract onto the wall: an optically bent, elliptical vortex of shifting fire, a sundial, a grooved clock, showing how late it had become for me.

At June’s final party, where they emptied Sam’s dark green bottles, I moved through the branching rooms, asking without shame to drink the dregs. Hoping before fate scattered us to our civilian New York fates to leech off some last portion of his and their immortality.

Better to have someone else pour your drink for you, some impartial third party. In an election between a sober person and his drunken incarnation (the third party being the bartender) the sober would lose.

I’m laying on the floor of Moissinac’s cabin with a ring of brown beer bottles empty around me. Something has just kicked in, an injury, an old injury, a wound I can only tap into from time to time, a terrible shortcoming. A burning. A sensory activity only dispensed by the cellular court of the physical cells giving into their intoxication. We need the toxicity of foreign parliamentarians in the court of our brain cells in order to achieve true deliberation, looking for the lost things.

I am not imagining my passions, I am not shaking my head in vain. The “stream of consciousness” is coming up next. I put little floating models of boats on the stream of consciousness, watch them float toward the tunnel going beneath Sandbank Road that I used to fear being sucked into as a child, the creek that went through our backyard before I crashed and burned in my higher education and we moved back to Auburn to go back into the safety of the rural fold. My family is from here but I am not. I am the trespassing native returned to my ancestral stronghold that is no more, I know in my drunken moments. I can’t find a way to belong there in the suburbs of Syracuse or in the rural paradise here in Delaware County. I didn’t grow up here, I grew up in Elbridge, named after Elbridge Gerry. Who gave his name to “gerrymandering,” which means to manipulate the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favor one party or class. He was on the Mayflower, another trespassing native. He also gave his name to Gerry Days which was the fair that came each summer to the field across the road from my house in Elbridge, I could see the pink neon spokes of the Ferris wheel all night long from my bedroom window, humidity fell to chill, moths obsessed over lights, country music from the fair dopplered across the hills…

I grew up somewhere, but it doesn’t exist. What does anybody know about New York? This is why those people seeking New York’s history in university libraries and mall bookstores seem most possessed. How I hate and love the swift reticulum of your mundane little history, the shatterings going elsewhere: your Washington Irvings, your Sewards, your Underground Railroads, your magnificent prisons, your titanic State Fair, your fragmented, sad Canal, your mountains, your Anti-Rent Wars with their figures in KKK-like masks painted on one wall inside the Auburn Post Office. We only become aware of what New York is, when we see foreign license plates cruising down our streets—New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, it used to fill me with ungovernable feelings of threat to see those license plates.

Alfred where I mingled with art students trying to master rust. Baldwinsville where the only girls who would date us came from. Syracuse where I worked a summer job pointing a red laser at stars at the planetarium. Trumansburg where I got robbed for camping fees by sinister boomers running a music festival and none of my fellow campers paid me back, they just got fucked up. Lilydale which has the largest concentration of mediums and soothsayers anywhere in the USA, the streets crawling with black cats. Jamestown where I chased a van full of Amish who were supposed to take me with them, it was an informal bus, I was supposed to go see my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. Weedsport Racetrack where Guns ‘n’ Roses said the most savage audience was. Galway where my first high school girlfriend moved, hours away from Elbridge, I went to visit stupidly thinking it could survive, she jerked me off in a forest and told me to date someone else. Paul Smiths where I smoked the purple urple at forestry school with alt lumberjacks and -jills, why couldn’t it always be like that, we were in the Black Lodge. Sterling where I went to Renaissance Faire with my family and was fascinated with the actors who would not break character, the beer wenches with liquid breasts poured into a bustle, the search for the hidden key to the realm. Andes where I took life drawing classes, drawing a chubby naked woman named Pinky, I based a painting on her, other models were heavily tattooed yoga students who could stay still for hours. Walton where I was born and lived near a cemetery, I was afraid of the basement because it had handprints of black paint all over.

Moissinac has no toilet just a hole in the ground to piss into and that’s where I’m throwing up as all these place-names pour through my head in a Proustian tsunami, a Proust-blast. My sadness, the sadness of my friends, the sadness of my experience, is an upstate sadness. That doesn’t care what your license reads, or where you are originally from. I feel I can sympathize with the Welshman or Scot who wants to pull away from the kingdom. I have a fierce nationalism but for my region. I’m an upstate separatist. I will march to Albany with a terrorist white hood over my head, hold all the dairy industry hostage, and give speeches to a camera al-Qaeda-style declaring the independence of upstate New York, “in excelsior,” from the vast shadow cast by the largest, most popular city on planet Earth. Insubordination to the Apple.

The only people that will ever matter to me will be from New York State. Because I love some abstract idea called New York State. I saw the “I Love NY” signs everywhere and decided to align myself with New York, in order to be loved, second-hand. To you it is merely a license plate, an immense statue of a French lady wearing a spiky crown. It’s a metropolis everybody on Earth has heard of and seen a picture of.

If somebody south of Yonkers wants to run for office upstate, if my employer and the father of my girlfriend wants to win the prize of upstate New York he will have to follow the associative trails of every memory of every place I’ve ever been in this state, and campaign hard in each one, in each regret, in each dream.