A Shout from Annisquam

Like many newcomers, I didn’t at first appreciate the extent of our town’s geographic divisions.  To my mind, the City of Gloucester was its downtown core, bounded by the harbor and the holy trinity of island landmarks: to the west, the Fisherman’s Memorial; to the east, the Crow’s Nest; and to the north, Market Basket, that fluorescent-lit carnival of bottled waters and bargain rotisserie chickens.

But in time I realized that the city’s 40 square miles include a number of distinct enclaves.  Not just proud little neighborhoods like Fort Square and Portuguese Hill.  But also Magnolia, Lanesville, and Eastern Point, far-flung tracts with their own post offices, Main Streets, and packs of depraved coyotes.

This winter, after ten years of renting apartments in the shadow of City Hall, my wife and I moved to another Gloucester outpost, Annisquam, a few scant miles away.  Lying on the west side of the island, Annisquam is itself divided into two rocky lobes of land, framed by its namesake river and Ipswich Bay.  From a gull’s eye view, these symmetrical halves could be mistaken for lungs, or—if you’re feeling childish—a granite rump, with slender Lobster Cove delivering, with each high tide, a chilly saltwater enema.

[Bracing, anytime of year]

When we told our downtown friends the news of our impending move, they responded in ways typically reserved for a cancer diagnosis.  After all, our relationships had grown from proximity—and from a shared delight in the subtle charms of our streets, like the plaintive cry of seagulls in the morning.  Also, the plaintive cry of seagulls in the afternoon.  And on nights before trash pickup, a cry that is less plaintive, and more like that of an advancing Viking horde.

“My God,” one friend said.  “Annisquam.  Isn’t there anything they can do?”

Alas, our case was hopeless.  Our landlord, a genial but aging lawyer, was giving us the boot, tired of replacing rotting shingles and eager to cash in on rising home prices. So, after solemnly pledging to remain in Gloucester, my wife and I began to study Craigslist and Zillow with religious intensity.  This being January, we found the rental market somewhat bleak.

“Here’s a new listing,” my wife said one morning, her head bent over her iPhone.  “Cozy, 80-square foot abandoned cellar hole in Dogtown.  Open concept.  Period architectural details include walls of precariously stacked, sharp-ass rocks.  $1500/month.”

[With permission from Zillow]

So when, suddenly, there was this little 2-bedroom in Annisquam, we pounced.

As the move drew near, our friends’ initial sympathy curdled into mild reproach.  Most of them are longtime homeowners, and they seemed to blame us for bringing this possibly fatal relocation on ourselves.  As though being a cash-poor renter was a dangerous lifestyle choice, akin to smoking clove cigarettes or playing jacks with slugs of uranium.

This shift in tone opened the door to their gripes about the 3-mile overland journey between downtown and the Annisquam hinterlands.

“Can we find food along the way,” asked one friend.  “Or should we plan to eat the weakest member of our party?”

Others were keen to highlight the class distinctions between the gritty downtown scene and our new genteel village, home to Annisquam Yacht Club and just a single business enterprise: a farm-to-table restaurant that serves spring water in fine glass thimbles.

The night before our move, one of these friendly Marxists stopped by.  Along with some help taping boxes, he offered this provocative line of questioning:

“You probably won’t miss the empty nip bottles strewn over the sidewalks, will you, Adam?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Or the fishy aroma, when the wind is just right?”

“Not really.”

“Or,” he continued, “the bone-deep authenticity of immigrants and working people?”

This friend may be a dick, but he has a point.  Rather than tireless Sicilians, Annisquam has long attracted well-heeled New Yorkers looking to park their generational wealth on a breezy lot with unobstructed views of the water.  Our own small, worn home looks out-of-place there.  Until one sees that it was once an outbuilding on a grand nearby estate, perhaps the shed where some Rockefeller kept his collection of hunting dogs or top hats.

On the day we signed our new lease, my wife and I decided to walk the surrounding streets, curious about the vibe of the neighborhood.  It was the first week of February, but the weather was unseasonably mild.  So it was notable that, in an hour’s worth of wandering, we encountered no other pedestrians.  Indeed, the only people we glimpsed were behind the wheels of Super-Duty Fords and white vans emblazoned with commercial logos: “Jerry Enos Painting Company,” “Roy Spittle Electric.”  It seemed the owners of the handsome manors we passed were busy occupying other homes, somewhere a thousand miles south of here.  So they had thoughtfully arranged for these men—thick of mustache and good with their hands—to keep them company, to caress their sides with coats of fresh paint, lest they feel lonely or second-rate.

When moving day finally arrived, it was three such men we hired to schlep our boxes to Annisquam.  They arrived bright and early on a Saturday morning, crammed into the cab of a battle-scarred truck, the flagship of a local moving company that I will decline to name, for reasons that will soon become evident.

Each man was notable in his own way.  There was Walt, an outgoing older fellow who never stepped foot in either apartment and handled our belongings only long enough to assess their resale value.  Calling himself the “brains of the operation,” he preferred to sun himself like a cat on the ledge of the truck’s cavernous interior, while critiquing the other men’s efforts.  “You’re sure doing that the hard way,” he said, stretching, as his partners staggered under the weight of an old steel sleeper sofa.

One of those partners, Al, was built like a two-car garage.  The other, Tim, was at least twenty years younger, but he was moving slowly and gingerly.  After depositing a load, Tim would wince, remove a gray baseball cap, and wipe his brow.  Later, I noticed him using one hand to carry a heavy suitcase, while the other clutched at his gut.

“You…doing okay?” I said.

Tim mopped his face.  “Ya,” he said, “It’s just that…I’ve got this.”

Without further prelude, he lifted his sweatshirt to reveal his belly—hairless, pale, and flat, aside from what appeared to be a baby’s fist punching through his navel, as if the tot were frozen in the act of escape.

“Wasn’t so big this morning,” Tim observed.

Perhaps it’s not as dire as a waiter with amnesia, or a janitor with Norovirus.  But in terms of occupational limitations, a mover stricken with an umbilical hernia isn’t so far behind.

[Also problematic]

“Lemme take that,” I said, reaching for the suitcase.

It’s unlikely that a passerby on the street would have mistaken me for a professional mover, what with my tasseled loafers and child’s dimensions.  Certainly, I was not in the same class as Al, who could tuck an upholstered chair in the crook of his arm like a sack of groceries.  So I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Walt began to rag on my efforts too from the comfort of his sunny perch.  “Distressed furniture,” he said, nodding at a wooden end table I’d fumbled and dinged against a door frame.  “It’s very trendy these days.”

For a moment, I felt a twinge of shame: how could I be so careless?  Until I realized that I owned that table.  Moreover, I was paying to carry it down three flights of stairs, to the tune of $225/hour.  Had it been my fancy to, say, smash the table with a small tomahawk, then set fire to it, and roast weenies over the smoking embers, well—for that kind of money—it would have been my prerogative.

I didn’t mention this to anyone, especially not to Tim, who was gamely lifting what he could: lampshades and decorative throw pillows.  Instead, I continued to serve as a temp for this ragtag local business, sweating and absorbing Walt’s ridicule alongside men twice my size.  Despite the irony of an inverse hourly wage, there was something about the whole situation that seemed right.

I understood this feeling better when we all caravanned to the new apartment in a clattering truck and a pair of Hondas.  Snaking along the coastline, we passed over the causeway that marks the start of Annisquam.  And with that, my wife and I didn’t just leave downtown Gloucester.  We quit the domain of these men, calloused and liberally tattooed, whom we had the privilege to hire, on a Saturday, to labor like common draft animals.  Perhaps joining their crew was my farewell penitence.  But also it reminded me how hard we have to work to overcome our divisions for even just a moment.

Unloading the truck went much quicker.  And soon we were standing on our covered porch, admiring the view of the Annisquam River in the slanting winter light.  Walt too emerged from the truck, looking tan and rested.  He produced a pack of Winstons, which he passed around to the other guys.

Al hadn’t said more than a few words all day.  But suddenly, with the work complete and a cigarette in hand, he became downright chatty.  “When summer gets here,” he said, “you can find me right over there.”  He pointed toward Wingaersheek Beach, which, at low tide, sat across a blue channel of water just a hundred yards wide.  “Lawn chair, fishing pole, cooler of beer.”

According to Google, I’d have to drive 20 minutes and 8.5 miles to join Al at Wingaersheek.  And standing there, surrounded by cigarette smoke and lonely, million-dollar homes, I knew I probably wouldn’t.  But it was nice to know he would be close enough that I could wander down to the water’s edge, cup my hands to my mouth, and shout hello.

Where the hell is our Clam?

“Hey, who turned out the lights? Anyone here? Knock knock…”

So, you may be wondering where Your Faithful Clam has gone. Truth is, we’re all pretty much still here but Real Life has gotten in the way of our trademark mix of snark, righteous indignation, and beautiful uses of pop culture references. So for the moment, they’ve left me – junior editor and Actual Elected Official Josh – with the keys.

Where are they right now? Well, Jim is in the middle of a massive client project that his small marketing company is managing. I saw him once, furtively wandering into a pho joint in Beverly (because Gloucester needs a good Vietnamese restaurant too, amirite). He looked haunted, as if he was on the verge of being a mammoth success and earning enough cheddar on this job to buy a brand new Subaru with ALL THE THINGS. He’s also kinda burned out from the damned Democratic primaries and is joining me on Team Cthulhu now.

KT moved (twice) and took on a new full-time job in the insurance biz. She now lives close enough to Official Clam Dirndl Wearer and Beer Goddess Brooke Welty that they’re quickly going from good friends to “it’s really maybe a little creepy at this point”. She’s working through post-divorce life and has an awesome boyfriend. She’s sick of the primaries too.

As for the rest of the Clamtributors? Adam headed off to Greenland in the hopes of experiencing an actual winter before climate change turns New England into Morocco. Len went to work for me in real life and had his creativity stifled. Anna is moving up to one of the identical cake decorating war shows, seeing what spunk and attitude can do to make a MB sheet cake spectacular. Jeremy was unable to be elected President in Massachusetts and has resumed warping the minds of America’s youth. And Steven has begun a retail business to see if every product can be sold with a 17% markup. Because we really like that arbitrary number here at The Clam, and it works so well for taxes.

Me? I’m just busy trying to keep the lights on here for the moment. We do have some terrific content coming up in the coming weeks, just not as fast as we’d all like to. Greatness takes time, y’all.

Cold: Why I Won’t Be Celebrating Spring Just Yet

sneeze-04Daylight savings may have docked an hour from their sleep, but the Gloucesterites who thronged Stacy Boulevard on Sunday were in fine spirits. Cousins hugged; neighbors shook hands; even perfect strangers leaned in close to chirpily observe, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” It was as though the entire city had survived a harrowing plane flight together—one where oxygen masks deploy and grown men whimper—and now, dazed and giddy, the passengers were congratulating one another on their luck.

In this case, the danger averted was meteorological, rather than aeronautical. Notwithstanding a blustery weekend or two, Gloucester has landed safely in mid-March with a fraction of its average snowfall—and its first 70-degree day already in the books. But the city’s collective sigh of relief assumes that snow and ice are the worst, most treacherous features of winter.

As a germophobe of the highest order, I know better. And, frankly, I found the scene on the Boulevard appalling. Was I the only one who spent the morning over coffee, a Danish, and the CDC’s weekly influenza map? Did no else realize skin-to-skin contact is the surest transmission route for the human coronavirus? In my mind, the city’s touchy-feely celebrations were not only premature, but also likely to prolong our misery.

usmap09[My web browser’s home page]

Because what the winter of 2016 lacked in ice, it has made up for in communicable disease. My next-door neighbor—a man generally too busy being handsome and talented to get sick—was recently stricken with pneumonia. His skin now hangs pale and slack over prominent cheekbones, and he hasn’t the energy to continue carving that marble bust of his daughter for her sixth birthday. On Friday another local friend woke up, yawned painfully, and discovered that his entire household had contracted strep throat. Since then, he has also learned:

  1. Harvard Pilgrim does not offer a ‘fourth one’s free’ deal on prescriptions of amoxicillin.
  2. Rather than keeping up with precise dosing schedules, it’s simpler just to distribute pills around the house in glass candy dishes.

As a schoolteacher, I’m on the front lines of every cold and flu season. Lacking immunity and the faintest regard for hygiene, children are the hardest-hit among us. This winter, I’ve found myself discussing poetry with half-empty classrooms. I exhausted my annual allotment of Kleenex boxes in February. And although I haven’t kept precise epidemiological records, I’ve noticed a surge in the volume of mucus left behind on my desktops, stranded and quivering like beached jellyfish. This is bad news for the rest of us, the caregivers and parents, who must herd damp tissues and administer rectal thermometers.

cimg0220-1[Worse for desks than your standard penis doodle]

I haven’t always been so fearful of viruses and bacteria. As a toddler, I lolled in every available sandbox, snacking on whatever bits and bobs I could grasp between my thumb and forefinger. As a teen, I rarely turned down a sip from a communal Budweiser. But things changed in February of 2002, during my junior year at Dartmouth College, when an epidemic of bacterial conjunctivitis swept campus. This wasn’t your garden variety pink eye. Victims of this particular strain discovered their condition as soon as they awakened, terrifyingly conscious but unable to open their eyes without the aid of a flat-head screwdriver. For the next three to five days, they shambled around campus in rarely-worn eyeglasses, their scarlet eyelids issuing a fluid as viscous and yellow as pine sap. Classmates recoiled, and friends treated them with the same compassion they might offer a smallpox blanket. As painful as the inflammation was, we students generally agreed that—aesthetically—it was better to suffer a bilateral case. Those with a single afflicted eye took on the lurid, asymmetric appearance of certain Picasso portraits.

06379b2ed6130eb556b92acfdd2dd992[Nothing a little bacitracin can’t handle]

After a few weeks, the outbreak got so bad that it drew the attention of the national media and the Centers for Disease Control, whose agents descended upon tiny Hanover to swab our eyelids with Q-tips. Long lines formed at the doors of cafeterias, where stern women in lab coats demonstrated proper hand-washing technique. Desperate, we complied, which meant preparing to handle a peanut butter sandwich as though it were the still-beating heart of a transplant patient. Yet their efforts accomplished little. The pink eye abated only when spring break intervened and we all left campus.

The following winter, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated the total number of cases in Dartmouth’s Great Pink Eye Epidemic: over 1000, on a campus with a population smaller than Rockport’s. Of this 1000, I personally accounted for no fewer than five, with each bout flaring up a few days apart. After my third case, I refused to leave my dorm room except for three obligations: attending class, going to work, and restocking my mini-fridge with Magic Hat. “Most likely,” my doctor told me over the phone, “you’re re-infecting yourself.” I pondered this, imagining how I must have absently rubbed an eye with some contaminated item. For a moment, I considered wearing an upside-down lampshade, like a sad, post-surgical terrier. After the fifth case, I was prepared to light a torch and treat all my worldly possessions to the full Velveteen Rabbit.

velveteen[You’re dead to me.]

Since then, my germophobia has settled into a way of life. It rarely keeps me from doing things and going places, but I do confess to taking elaborate precautions and maintaining a vigilance that would make Louis Pasteur proud. Most of all, I continue to make a point of washing up before handling anything I’ll eat raw. If I so much as open the refrigerator after peeling an orange, I’ll scrub my hands once again. Because I do a great deal of eating, my hands remain forever chapped and red, as though they’re ladles I use to serve boiling pots of chili.

Shopping for food is sometimes a vexing experience. If I’m in the produce department and I overhear a teenaged employee sneeze, I’ll promptly decamp for another store. I’m unable to take the risk that, at some point during her shift, a tissue was out of reach—and she improvised with the broad leaf of my Swiss chard. Not long ago, I had a remarkable experience at a grocery store that will remain nameless. Ready to check out, I had unloaded my basket onto the conveyor belt and stood in line, pretending to ignore the headlines on the cover of Us Weekly. The cashier was a young fellow whose beefy thumb pierced the cellophane covering the final item in the order ahead of mine: a value pack of Perdue boneless chicken breasts. When the cashier lifted and tilted the Styrofoam, it left behind a glistening slug’s trail. Briefly, the boy and I made eye contact. He looked down at his fingertips, from which dangled strands of chicken slime, like bunting at a party whose guest of honor is diarrhea. The cashier looked back up at me. Then, to no one in particular, he called out: “Can I get a squirt of Purell?” I stood there, paralyzed, calculating the monetary value of my groceries and the likelihood they’d have to be discarded. At length, the boy shrugged and merely wiped his hands on the shirt stretched taut across his belly. Then he asked: “How are you today, sir?”

Often, I marvel at others’ apparent appetite for germs. Recently, I was standing in line at my favorite fishmonger, and I noticed a shallow bowl of those pastel ‘conversation hearts’ on the counter. It was well after Valentine’s Day, long enough for the candy to have accumulated the uric tang of ripe haddock, not to mention an array of microbes. Yet here was a well-dressed woman rooting through them with manicured fingers. “Be Mine?” Nope. “Kiss Me?” Nuh-uh. “True Love.” Pass. “Hep A?” Yes, please! If she lived, I assumed her next meal would be a burrito at an area Chipotle, where, while she waited, she’d lick the length of the stainless steel prep surface.

[Again? Guess I’ll have to stop by my local cruise ship.]

It’s easy for me to spot my fellow germophobes, and I’m always on the look-out for new techniques. For instance, there is the fit older woman at the MAC, who drapes a plastic bag over the spot where her delicate neck meets the squat bar. And it’s never been a mystery to me why paper towels often collect in a mound beside the doors of public restrooms. These are hiking cairns for germophobes. We grasp the handle, drop the towel, and mark our passage—finding validation in the knowledge that others have deemed the space just as squalid as we have.

Whether it’s my habits or my schoolteacher’s superhuman immune system, I don’t get sick much anymore. But when I do, the viruses—spurned and thwarted for so long—really make themselves at home. It’s like the video footage of ordinary Libyans who, after decades of tyranny, streamed into the travertine palaces of Muammar Gaddafi, overturning vases and relieving themselves on his Oriental rugs. In fact, I’m just getting over my first cold in ages, which for ten days rendered me a feverish, hacking mess. I was at my lowest on the day of the Massachusetts primary, but I managed to crawl out of bed and hobble to my polling station just up the block. On my way out, I spotted a small group holding signs for Donald Trump. And so I performed my second civic duty of the day: stopping by for introductions and long, moist handshakes.

But when it comes to exposing others to my germs, I normally try to follow the Golden Rule. So while I’ve ended my self-imposed quarantine from my wife, it’ll take some time to go over every inch of our apartment with a sponge and a 2% bleach solution. Perhaps when I’m done, the weekly flu statistics will have declined—and I’ll be ready to join the end-of-winter celebrations. I’ll be the one smiling and waving my chapped hands, all from a safe, sanitary distance.