With a Little Help From My Paisans
A Love Letter to The Town
In 2006 I witnessed a miracle.
At 2:00 pm on a Friday afternoon twelve high school seniors, apostles in cardigans and chukka boots hawked out of the west door of their all-boy’s Catholic high school. They ran through the brother’s house garden, Holy Mother Mary grotto, across the football field.
The target?
Dominck Verardi’s stupid Honda Civic.
For four years of high school, Verardi maintained perfect attendance. He worked on the yearbook club. He was in intramural bowling. He resembled a young George Costanza. If you flipped a classmate’s book-bag, threw a nine-volt battery through a chem-lab window, if you had really good drugs in the locker room bathroom or kicked a basketball into a glass framed legacy jersey in the gymnasium hall – you could rely ever faithfully on Dominick standing in the darkness rubbing his hands together fast enough to spark forest fires over Fresh Kills.
Dominick Verardi was Stasi. He glowed in the dark. He’d trade his mother and his best friend for a trophy and another honors patch on his sweater. It didn’t matter if it was his business or not. He would always sell you out.
The boys barreled closer to the Honda parked under swaying garden trees on a side street. They were a mix of every high school tribe. Boys who beat each other four years ago joined hand in hand encircling Dominick’s car. Jocks, nerds, burnouts, theater-fags, underachievers, overachievers, wiseguys, young men who maybe hated each other four years ago all gripped the rat’s car altogether. The weight was metallic and dusted with motor oil and pavement dirt on their hands.
“Bro, lift!”, they grit to each other.
Together they carried Dominick’s car into the middle of the street, the combined strength of true brothers. Say what you will about Catholic education, but the Lasallian brothers raised young men to work together and unite against existential evil.
Dominick’s car blocked traffic for a half hour before he got out of class. Not a single one of the boys said a word to anyone after.
If there’s one lesson the boys understood it was loyalty – nurtured in the Lasallian tradition. They were the salt of the earth. True guinea trash – the whole lot of us. Whether any of us liked it or not.
Hylics will eat your blood plasma
I remember standing in an art gallery in 2013 talking to a vampish NYU graduate in a broad black Carmen Sandiego hat with silver claw rings and a chain dagger hanging from her ear. She was from Normal, Illinois;
“Staten Island is not really part of New York City.”
No one has more galaxy brained opinions about what is and is not a qualifying borough of the City of New York than people from Michigan. Wisconsin is a close second. They also share a very apt trait with Dominick Verardi – existential evil. For the ease of discussion we will refer to them going forward as, Hylics. Hylics, in the Nag Hammadi Codex, represent humanity as totally material bound. Their eyes are a fire started from grubby hand rubbing, glaring from out the darkness, mouth agape, blood full of fresh xenoestrogens. These are the kinds of people that pack bookshelves full of books they never read. These are the people that have opinions about which are the best venues. These are people that are upwardly mobile. Upwardly mobile through 30k annual salaries at Refinery29, making up the rest with father’s monthly stimulus check. They don’t need to sharpen knives behind their backs to stab you with – they outsource it. The automatic network will do it for them while they drink the fire right out of their own palms. There are many variations but the same underlying motivation is there for them -
“I need blood”
Which translates adequately for Hylics to:
“I need the photon wave particle of your eye to strike my body and shift the uncertainty of my position in space. I need to be seen, seen by you, seen by all.”
Hang out in NYC. Find an arts scene and you’ll meet an endless stream of these people. They’re passionate about things. They have opinions. They’re not quiet about them, because what they’re passionate about is themselves. Not all Hylics are transplants, and some locals certainly are Hylics. This isn’t a broad argument against the misfit toys that move to NYC to “make it” performing Artaudian standup trauma rape poetry readings on theremin. This is rather a general heuristic about extremely boring people who will waste your time.
Grow up in the outer boroughs and your body is prepared like Aztec Flower War captives -specifically for the ritual ceremony of having to look at these people. You’ll have to listen to them speak. You’ll have to read their cool alt-lit zine.
Looking back I can identify with the experience of a kid growing up in the South Bronx seeing the Manhattan skyline daily. The buildings reach upward like a hundred Pyramids of the Feather Serpent. You’re primed as a blood sacrifice to the altar of total boredom in the presence of Hylics. You gaze across the water in adolescent vertigo to see a glittering city of what will be more than what could be. Similar experience, different coastline.
Aspirational materialism. Don’t worry, you’ll get over it. We all have a need for roots.
“Someday I’ll live there.”
Glass apartment in the sky, you’ll shop at Kim’s video, have real conversations, be around real cultured men and women at your level and not the overweight parents of the neighborhood kids. No more Vinnie Volpe Joe Pucciarelli Carmella Donatella O’Leary McDoyle Finkelstein Kominski with tiny throat hole cigarette crucifix and John Travolta teeth.
René Girard would’ve seen Satan falling like cathexis on my childhood retard brain. No, my retard soul.
Desire according to Girard is mimetic. People desire what other people desire. People want what they think other people have. Nothing about your adolescent desires is original. We all learn the same lessons. Some at 18 others at 81.
The lesson I learned hard was there were better people, more honest people on my block at home than I found in a whole decade of befriending and living around worldly cultured Manhattan transplants. The Hylics are not just untrustworthy – they deeply hate themselves in a way only unconscious beings without viable internal monologues would.
This thing of ours
Simone Weil writes in The Need for Roots: The Needs of the Soul :
“The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.”1
For Weil, to attend to the needs of the soul, to articulate and uphold the obligations one has to others, one’s obligations must be unconditional.
“The fact that a human being possesses an eternal destiny imposes only one obligation: respect.”2
The obligations are, the need for roots – that is relationship not established for reciprocity or the enriching of the self, but rather for the enriching of family, clan, of humanity itself.
The need for roots is the bond of say, twelve young men carrying a lying fanuc’s shitty Honda into the street. Girard might also call this scapegoating the outcast. Dominick certainly didn’t make it hard.
Which is the realization most of us make as we grow older. Clichés stacked on clichés. Yes your familial bonds matter. Yes cultures founded on the acquisition of gold stars and status markers are sick with cultural rot. Yes lying tattletales need to have their shitty Hondas dragged out into the street.
You will never be able to trust a Hylic. The archetypal Hylic is Pavlik Morozov. The thirteen-year -old boy who in 1918 sold his father out to the Soviet GKU for a gold star, a pre 2022 twitter bluecheck. Morozov’s father was executed at a forced labour camp as a result of his son’s exemplary tattletale behavior. Morozov’s other relatives did the respectful thing and murdered the boy instead of dragging his car out into the street.
Growing up in the outer boroughs I witnessed impossible miracles, most of them involved people that ended up on the wrong side of natural selection’s IQ distribution displaying acts of complete selflessness, honor, and loyalty. Something I can’t say of the creatures I repeatedly suffered the indignation of overdosing next to at Manhattan rooftop parties.
When your entire philosophy revolves around proving something to others as a rootless cosmopolitan bug person, you’re not and never will be a true paisan.
Weil, Simone “The Need For Roots” p3 1952 Routledge & Kegan Paul
Weil, Simone “The Need For Roots” p5 1952 Routledge & Kegan Paul