We All Live In A Yellow Submarine: The USS Albacore, Portsmouth, NH

My uncle Paul was cool as hell. He liked history, fast cars, and cherry pipe tobacco. He lived in Atlanta, but drove up to Philadelphia to visit my family almost once a month, bringing my cousin Alan and usually some explosives. Every time he came to visit us, we always toured a different historical landmark. Living in Pennsylvania, you could not go anywhere without passing a navy blue historical marker for a battlefield or house that George Washington peed in once, so we always had plenty of places to go. One of his favorite sites was the USS New Jersey in Camden, just across the river from Philly. We toured the battleship several times, and each time, as soon as I stepped on the bridge, I felt like a sailor.

Most normal kids would have found that stuff irretrievably dull and whined until their uncle bought them McDonald’s and put Nickelodeon on, but I was fascinated. I liked the way things looked in history — the machinery, the art, the clothing — it was all so elegant looking, unlike our stupid box TV and all the clothes at Limited Too (which I still wanted anyway.)

Paul passed away around Thanksgiving in 2011. He made plans with my mom to come up for the holiday and cancelled at the last minute because he had not been feeling well. A few days later, at the end of a waitressing shift, I got the call. It was an impossible loss.

As Alex and I made our way up to Maine, we visited Portsmouth, New Hampshire, planning to explore some shops and absorb one of our last coastal experiences before heading inland. We ate breakfast at an adorable restaurant called The Friendly Toast, decorated in the sort of quirky kitsch you can only find on EBay and staffed by women who look exclusively like Rosie the Riveter.

After wandering the streets, exploring a few shops, we decided to head back to the hotel. On our way out of town, I saw the submarine and cried. I missed Paul, and there is probably no activity on Earth besides watching 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or driving around in search of black ice to slide on that would have reminded me of him more. I wanted to see it because of its history but also because of the presumed closeness to someone I had lost that I hoped it would give me, no different than smelling someones perfume years after they are dead.

Reveled for its innovations in underwater engineering, particularly in regards to speed, the USS Albacore earned status as a National Historic Landmark in 1989, when it retired to a small park outside of Portsmouth.

The gentleman taking tickets was a sweet, elderly Navy veteran who said nothing about my swollen, red eyes and smeared makeup.

“Why did you decide to stop and see the Albacore?” he asked.

I was honest, sharing more of myself than I am normally comfortable with. I get like that when I am either uncomfortable or feel unexpectedly connected to another individual. This was the latter.

He instructed us to push the red buttons perched throughout the vessel, each playing a brief recorded history of the submarine and accounts from men who served on the ship. We gawked at the cramped living quarters, four bunks stacked closely with only two feet between each bed. We each crawled into separated bunks to test their size and the threshold of our claustrophobia, joking about the frequency of bumped heads. The air smelled like rubber and steel.

The narrow hallway lead to control panels, the crew’s quarters, and a bathroom so small we wondered how anyone could ever get clean. When we got to the mess hall, we let our imaginations go loose, picturing young Navy officers playing pinochle and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. The submarine was nearly perfectly intact, complete with the original engine and periscope. It felt like the end of Titanic, when old Rose imagines she is back on the ship, except we had never been there before. 

I sat behind the main control panel, examining all the buttons, and pretended to fire a torpedo into enemy waters. I thought about Paul. He would have loved this, and he would have gotten to all of the little red buttons first.

U-Mass: In and Around Amherst, MA

College towns make up an interesting segment of America's landscape. To speak about them generally, they typically meld big-city culture with small-town charm. Throughout the year, they have their token parades, street festivals, and cultural happenings, a chance to see the best each has to offer. While they are all essentially cut from the same cloth, to say all college towns are the same is something of a cheap dismissal. Each one has its own unique features, setting one apart from the next.

Throughout our trip thus far, we have already stopped by, visited, and stayed in college towns. In a traditionally blue state, the college town is a dark navy speck, with its ever-changing population of young people who ensure that nothing gets stale. In red states, they are vital oases of culture in places that would otherwise be devoid of ethnic restaurants, head shops, and art-house cinemas.

Amherst is the quintessential New England college town, home to Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the flagship campus for the University of Massachusetts. We landed in Amherst on an alumni weekend for Amherst College. Being in the middle of summer, when college towns are sleepy, populated by locals celebrating their elbow room and students trudging through summer courses, Amherst was surprisingly bustling. It was a delight to see visiting alum amid all the young faces, all frequenting the same restaurants, coffeehouses, and book shops.

In Amherst, we toured The Homestead and The Evergreens, residences of America’s first great female author and poet, Emily Dickinson. The Evergreens, built for Emily’s brother Austin, and his wife Susan, was the epicenter of the social world in Amherst during the latter half of the 19th century. The Homestead, directly next door, was Emily’s hideaway, her nook, from where she created her life’s work. Alex even used her poem "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" in his freshman literature class.

The Evergreens remains in its original state, with the original wallpaper, the original furniture, and the original artwork all intact. Austin Dickinson was quite the art collector, and the house holds dozens of works, including many that are not on display due to a lack of space. The Evergreens even has that musty old house smell, which made us both smile to think we were breathing the same air as Emily Dickinson. 

The Homestead, while appearing untouched from outside, is a vintage eggshell with the yolk scooped out. The house, completely renovated, looks more like a carefully curated dollhouse than one of a woman whose troubled existence yielded some of America's best and most enduring poetic works. With its recessed lighting and surprising lack of both furniture and artwork, the house started off disappointingly.

Being an alumni weekend, tours of both homes, which normally cost $12 a person, were free. In retrospect, had the museum cost anything more than nothing, we probably would have opted out, especially after seeing the renovations done to The Homestead. We enjoy touring historical locations, but not when it seems like most of that history has been bulldozed and revisited by Better Homes and Gardens.

The saving grace came when we were in Emily's bedroom and the docent showed us her desk. With the excitement of a religious fanatic at a holy site, Alex said, "This is the desk?!" Indeed it was. It was at that desk that Dickinson wrote her life's work of poetry, her meditations on loneliness, death, the afterlife, and the building angst of an increasingly violent society. For us two, as writers, to be in the presence of such an important artifact as Emily Dickinson's desk, it was one of those moments that is hard to put into words.

We stopped for Vietnamese food at a restaurant on the main commercial street. Our waiter was a friendly travel fanatic and when we told him we were on our way up to Maine, he grabbed his iPad and showed us pictures of him dangling from a boulder, a thousand feet in the air, and suggested we check it out. We told him our thrill level was a little more “grueling hike” than “Fear Factor,” and he recommended a trail that would cause less shitting of the pants. He also recommended that while in the area, we visit what we believe is the single greatest used bookstore on Earth.

Grey Matter Books in nearby Hadley is more of a cavern than a traditional bookstore, being a massive basement with ceiling-high stacks of books on every subject imaginable. We arrived twenty minutes before closing, rapidly scouring shelves for a few keepsakes and settling on six very different reads, ranging from Hunter S. Thompson's Generation of Swine to the writings of Kirpal Singh. 

The guy working the register decided to keep the store open so we could browse for a few more minutes. We got to talking about our travels, and as it turns out, he had also done a cross-country trip, but via motorcycle. As we talked, we shared stories about some of our favorite places (turns out he loved New Orleans, too) while also getting suggestions from him about sites to see out West. It was a meeting of kindred spirits, something we have experienced before meeting fellow drummers, journalists, Kinks fans, and Left-wingers, where strangers immediately become best friends. With an encouragement to keep on trucking serving as our benediction, we paid for our books and were back on the road.

Perfect Circle: Modern Apizza, New Haven, CT

Every region claims bragging rights over the best pizza in the nation. Sorry, Chicago, it is not you. Anything I have to wait 50 minutes for and eat with a fork and knife is not pizza. It is a greasy glob of congestive heart failure.

New Haven-style apizza originated at Frank Pepe’s Pizzaria in the Wooster Square neighborhood of New Haven in 1925. Closely related to a Neapolitan pizza, New Haven’s version is a thin, slightly acidic crust, topped with nothing more than homemade tomato sauce and pecorino romano cheese, served slightly burnt. To the novice, the blackened crust is cause for complaint. To pizza connoisseurs, New Haven-style apizza (by the way, they call it apizza, and not just pizza, due to its differences from the standard pie) is a challenging delight for the senses, mixing sour crust with creamy cheese and salty toppings.

Modern Apizza is a standard-looking pizzeria, with quintessential wooden booths and amber-tinted plastic cups. In the kitchen, a scorching, gas-fueled kiln is spitting out gourmet pies with an array of toppings — clams casino with bacon and peppers, garden fresh eggplant, and the slightly terrifying sounding Italian Bomb, plastered with bacon, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, onion, peppers, and garlic.

We picked New Haven’s signature pie, a white pizza topped with littleneck clams. The pizza, sauced with a simple combination of olive oil and garlic, accompanied by lemon wedges, seemed like something you might get at a seafood restaurant rather than a pizzeria. The charred edges of the pizza add an extra dimension of flavor, juxtaposed against a tart crust that is remarkably soft inside. Its pleasantly bitter flavor is perfect for seafood toppings, especially when sprinkled with lemon juice. We also sampled the crabmeat pie, served similarly to the white clam version, only with nuggets of fresh, salty crab instead.

The pizza wars will probably never end, with each segment of the country claiming to have the best. (Since I’m on a roll here, it is also not you, St. Louis. Provel cheese tastes like Chef Boyardee-flavored vomit.) With New Haven-style apizza being such a localized specialty, it may never get the widespread acclaim of its cousin from just across the Long Island Sound, with “Brooklyn style” pizza joints seemingly everywhere. In some ways, it is hard to imagine intentionally burnt crust becoming a thing in the land of casseroles and cookouts, but for our money, New Haven apizza deserves more than just honorable mention. It certainly beats the hell out of California-style pizza, where things that previously belonged nowhere near pizza are now considered legit toppings.

Ok, regional pot shots aside, New Haven-style apizza, and specifically Modern Apizza, is a one-of-a-kind pizza experience that combines fresh ingredients with a unique crust. In our broad culinary adventures, it ranks as a dish that takes other pies down a peg, and one we think the entire country should have a piece of.

Beautiful, Dirty, Rich: Newport, RI

I have met my share of disgustingly wealthy people, throwing catered Super Bowl parties in their in-home theaters, sending their kids to junior year in a BMW, and allowing their wives to inject themselves with more plastic than a recycling plant. They followed me from their mothership on the east coast to college in Indiana, where they were frequently overheard screaming at “daddy” on the phone and “doing brunch”. The people who owned the newspaper I worked for were so stupidly rich that an anonymous fellow employee once told me she overheard Lady Macbeth order a swath of mirrors to surround her indoor pool. Like crystal-studded roaches, they are fucking everywhere.

When the Tumblr page Rich Kids of Instagram popped up on the internet, filled with images of the lifestyles of the rich and wish-they-were famous youth of the world, viewers straddled between disgust and envy. Their memetic delusion, while clearly derived from popular culture and their parents’ own behavior, gauges how few steps society has taken to shedding the facade of great wealth. Sure, I’m going to laugh at the 17-year-old douche bag, posing in front of his new Mercedes because he totaled the last one drunk driving, but hell, if this little prick deserves a new car, why don’t the rest of us?

Because we clearly don’t feel bad enough about ourselves, Newport, Rhode Island, the rich person’s playground of yesteryear, is open for public viewing. We took the Cliff Walk behind a group of teenage girls carrying Polar Pops, which highlighted homes that blur the line between functional abode and asshole insanity. With the wash of sea spray against your face, forced to examine your own pedigree, you realize how low on the socioeconomic food chain you really are and the entire alternate strata of human species designed specifically to keep you there. The caste system is alive and well, and living in Newport.

The largest coastal home in Newport, The Breakers, would cost nearly $331 million if built today. Constructed for major American industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the 70-room mansion is the peak of Gilded age architecture, reflecting trends of the British aristocracy and the American wealthy’s desire for that lifestyle.

In Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s book The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, the authors compare the time of splendor to nothing more than serious social problems, thinly coated in gold. While the divide between the haves and the have-nots may have widened since the time when the Vanderbilt’s called Newport home, the essence is the same.

As we rounded a corner on the half-mile trail, between two luxurious mansions was an old school. Etched into the brick wall on the side of the building was the W.B. Yeats quote “But I, being poor, have only my dreams.” It was so perfect I wanted to hug the smug genius who scrawled it. Walkers paused to stare at the graffiti, some aware of its profound nature and simple irony. The teenage girls dropped their Polar Pops to take a picture on their phones.

The homes really are beautiful architecturally, which makes for an even more confusing experience. Lined up in a row, against cliffs that drop straight into the Atlantic, with no other homes in site, you feel a little less like you’re in present time, always a welcome feeling.

As per the old adage “You can’t take it with you,” Vanderbilt only lived in the home for a year before his early death at age 55. Now, for a small fee, the home is open for the public to enjoy — a sight that, had the tycoon witnessed, may have hastened his death. The visage of these monstrously large Gilded Age homes makes for an interesting site. On the one hand, the architecture is majestic, and yet neither of us could shake the image of these mansions being stormed by a mob armed with torches and pitchforks.

“Castles made of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.”

                                                        - Jimi Hendrix

If There's A Hell, We're All Gonna Go - Thoughts On Oak Creek, WI, One Year Later

Since 2009, I have been a friend and ally of the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights group based in Manhattan. Last year, I trained with a group of eleven other individuals as part of the Coalition's Advocate Academy in our nation's capital. I am proud to call the Sikh community my friends. The Advocates were asked to possibly write a follow-up from last year's shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. After several days of deep thought, and with Alexa's endorsement of my message, we jointly decided to publish this here first.

With the anniversary of any tragic event, it gives us an opportunity to ruminate. In the case of last year’s shooting at a Sikh gurdwara (temple) in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, my immediate thoughts go to the deceased. There were six of them, five men and one woman, all of whom had done nothing more than wake up on a Sunday morning and attend worship services.

My second thoughts are my own experience in learning the news. Alexa and I had spent the weekend painting our new apartment, away from television and without Internet. That Monday – the day after the shooting – I went to grab my morning coffee down the street from my office in Tribeca. It was there that I saw the newspapers, all featuring Sikh men and women in tears, with headlines reading “TRAGEDY IN OAK CREEK” and “SHOOTING AT SIKH TEMPLE LEAVES SIX DEAD.” I could not believe my eyes.

As a volunteer advocate for the New York-based Sikh Coalition, I knew I would have to get in touch with my contacts right away. As a human being, though, my head began to spin. I fought back tears, both of sadness and of rage, and my whole body felt cold. When I arrived at my office, I was barely able to work that day. My supervisor knew of my involvement with the Coalition and was gracious in letting me spend my morning taking phone calls and getting in touch with my friends at the Coalition.

For many Americans, with this story pushed into the national spotlight – right on the heels of the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado – this was their introduction to Sikhs and Sikhism. The news outlets dumbed it down: Sikhism is its own religion, but because of their beards and turbans, they are occasionally mistaken for Muslims. Depending on the source of this news, they may or may not have gone on to explicitly state that violence against any religious group is wrong. Most did not.

The shooter was found to have connections to white supremacy organizations (he even played in one of those crappy Neo-Nazi punk bands), with a military history and the usual stream of people – after the fact, of course – who came out of the woodwork to say he had always been “just a little odd,” a “loner,” who never even made eye contact with his neighbors. What the media ultimately chalked the Oak Creek shooting up to was a case of mistaken identity. He had set out that morning hoping to kill some Muslims.

He took his own life at the scene, a final act of cowardice that absolved him from having a (very) public trial, from having to explain his motivations, or from even learning that his victims were not Muslims.

Let’s stop for just a second so I can state something – with emphasis – that I do not feel enough news anchors, reporters, bloggers, and Tweeters made known: unless somebody presents you with a direct and immediate threat, you have NO RIGHT as a human being to harm, maim, or kill them. Furthermore, killing anyone, anywhere, because they are different from you in some way, is morally reprehensible.

If this asshole had perpetrated violence at a mosque, instead killing six Muslims – five men, one woman – I hope that there would still have been the same level of outrage. We do not know, and it is my sincere hope that we will never know. The fact that he wrongly identified Sikhs as Muslims speaks loudly to his own ignorance.

So, one year later, what have we learned? My initial thought, looking at the present state of the world, was that we have learned nothing. Coming from a background in media and journalism, it pained me to see Oak Creek fade away from mainstream news coverage, following the so-called “ten day rule” of a news story, with focus returning on the orange-haired nightmare from Aurora. As I drove around this week, wondering what we have learned, I found myself contemplating this a lot: nothing. We have learned nothing.

It was only after a day or two that I came to an even bleaker conclusion: as bad as it was to think we as a society had learned nothing, we have actually gotten worse. The gun debate, which had been resurrected following Aurora, only got more heated, with both sides of the argument becoming more polarized. The rhetoric bordered on extremism – again, from both sides. After a perfunctory statement of condolences from President Obama, calling Sikhs “a part of our broader American family,” (emphasis mine) his wife visited Oak Creek while he was out electioneering.

Not even two weeks after the Oak Creek shooting, a member of that same sangat (congregation) was shot and killed during a late-night robbery. In his case, he just happened to be the man on the other side of a cash register, but the news sickened me just the same. There was something so inherently disgusting about this – a man who survived a shooting at his temple, only to be gunned down two weeks later – that I began thinking our society was terminally ill. With the Sandy Hook massacre four months later, the initial blame on the Boston Bombing getting foisted upon any brown-skinned fellow within a mile of the blast, and the lack of action from our elected leaders to do anything – literally ANYTHING – about regulating (not banning, not outlawing, mere regulation we are talking here) the sale of firearms, my suspicions were confirmed again and again.

What did we learn from Oak Creek? We learned that not even houses of worship are safe anymore. We had learned just weeks earlier that movie theaters weren’t safe. In mid-December, a man in Portland opened fire in a shopping mall. Days later, the unthinkable – the product that, before it became reality, would only have been in the thoughts of a truly sick individual – happened in Newtown, Connecticut. The shooter ended lives of teachers, the principal, teacher’s aides, and twenty first graders. Just typing that still puts a grapefruit-sized lump in my throat.

A year later, our society has grown more fearful, and as a consequence, more quick to violence. The entire case surrounding George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin was shrouded by the fact that Zimmerman acted out of fear, fear motivated at least in some part by race. There will be a lot left to speculation, as one of the parties involved never got a chance to tell his story, but the fact that Zimmerman walked – no charges for murder, no manslaughter, not even a note in his permanent record – sets a scary precedent. The day judgment came down, I declared that murder was now legal in Florida. Sarcasm aside, the “stand your ground” law being a viable defense in court for shooting someone armed with only a pack of Skittles makes this ruling one of the most shameful decisions since Dred Scott.

We have learned that nowhere is safe, so we should go ahead and stockpile our own private arsenal until Congress says we can’t, and continue to shoot first and ask questions later. Besides, if you live in Florida, you might not even have to answer for it.

In lieu of a conclusion, I will end with an extended quote from Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 song, “(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Gonna Go.” It is a timeless message, one warning and urging people to change their course (he even gets a line in about pollution) or suffer the consequences:

“Sisters, brothers and the whities,

Blacks and the crackers,

Stone-stoned junkie,

Police and their backers,

They're all political actors.

Smoke, the pill and the dope,

Educated fools from uneducated schools,

Pimping people is the rule,

Polluted water in the pool.

And everybody's saying don't worry,

They say don't worry,

They say don't worry,

They say don't worry,

But they don't know,

There can be no show

If there's a hell below,

We're all gonna go!

Lord, what we gonna do

If everything I say is true?

This ain't no way it ought to be.

If only all the mass could see,

But everybody keeps saying don't worry.”

It Came in the Night: Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, NY

As a kid, I liked to scare the crap out of myself. I stayed up late watching Are You Afraid of the Dark  between slotted fingers, clutching a pack of Gushers for protection. I devoured every eerie Goosebumps novel and bought every volume of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Even as an adult, the chapter about the girl who gets a mysterious bite on her face which births hundreds of baby spiders still makes me want to take a shower. It all gave me nightmares, but the feeling of utter terror is the biggest rush one could get at eight years old, so I kept up the habit.

As we plotted our journey into upstate New York, I wanted to go to Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, birthplace of America’s most famous ghost story. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was a favorite of mine as a young fan of horror-fiction. I owned a more “kid friendly” illustrated version, which depicted a pink-cheeked Katrina Van Tassel and her polarized suitors, the meat-necked Brom Bones and the lithe and unfortunately superstitious schoolteacher Ichabod Crane. A copy of the Disney adaptation, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, made its way into my rotation of frequently watched films, to the delight of my mother, who was sick of watching The Little Mermaid for the thousandth time.

It is a story that everyone knows - Ichabod Crane competes with local neanderthal Brom Bones for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel. At a party, while gathered in the parlor for a night of storytelling, Ichabod hears the legend of the Headless Horseman, a gentleman who had the misfortune of losing his head to a rogue cannonball during the War of 1812. In the spirit of wooing miss Van Tassel, Crane searches for the night rider, only to meet the “ghost” and have the fertilizer scared out of him. While the Disney version has a frightened Crane fleeing Sleepy Hollow, other versions end with Ichabod Crane being found dead the following morning. The reader is left to speculate whether Crane met his end at the hands of Brom, or possibly at the hands of the real Headless Horseman. 

The story is one of the earliest pieces of American folklore that is still read and appreciated today, and Tarrytown couldn’t be prouder. Its scribe, Washington Irving, was a life-long resident of the area. There are restaurants, statues, and street signs dedicated to the story, letting visitors known which concrete monument marks the “site” of the meeting between Mister Crane and the Headless Horseman.

Despite being only 15 miles from the Bronx, and all of 27 miles away from Times Square in Manhattan, Tarrytown is devoid of the bustle and endless motion that emanates from the City. The town, like nearly all of the rest of Westchester County in New York, retains its 18th-Century old-world charm.

We walked down the highway to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Washington Irving is buried in a small plot with his entire family. Nearby, his postmortem neighbors include Louisa May Alcott and Brooke Astor. I thanked him for Sleepy Hollow, a keystone in my early descent into the literary world, and endless nights of checking inside my closet and under my bed.